a new understanding of today, time and space.

butler and Shaftesbury were opposed to Hobbes idea that the beginning
of philosophy is in man’s self interest… self love and egotism is the
beginning of philosophy for Hobbes… we act in our own self interest
but, but this is more of a theoretical idea instead of a practical idea…
for we have plenty of examples including ourselves as parents and our
parents having to sacrifice for us and we for our children…
we see examples of people acting in the best interest of others
instead of themselves from the Priest? or perhaps it was a Rabbi,
not sure, anyway of volunteering to take the place of a person to
be killed in the death camps of Nazi Germany…to task of
helping others even to the point of our determent…
plain old human kindness to others is one example of
how self love, self egotism is not the only path for human beings…

we must place self love, egotism and self sacrifice and love of others
as part of, part of the human experience…not as the whole thing…

at different times in our lives, in our experiences, in our daily life,
we must act upon and know the difference between self egotism
and the acting upon the self sacrifice and love of others…

we are social creatures and this shows when we act for others,
instead of our own personal interest…

this self sacrifice and self love is also a part of, part of being
human…it is in our experiences and our personal knowledge
that determines if we understand the difference between the times
we must act selfishly and the times we must act for the betterment
of others…the times, the experience at the time, the moment determines
if we need to be selfish or altruist and we need to become more
aware of that difference when it is time to be selfish or altruistic…

as we are social creatures, we need to become more altruistic
because we can only succeed if our pack, our species, our group succeeds…
we cannot succeed alone and altruism is one path for our group, our
social group of human beings to succeed…

Kropotkin

the above post shows us the failure of believing that
one reason is the driving reason for our beliefs/ thoughts/behavior…
for example, I pointed out Hobbes and his belief that we are driving
primarily by egotism…we make all our calculations based on
our egotism, what is best for me? the Buddha thought that
the basis of life was suffering and the Declaration of Independence
was about “life, liberty and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS” with the
pursuit of happiness being the goal everyone thinks of…
I spend my days pursuing MY happiness and screw everyone else…
the Greeks thought that it was knowledge that drove people…
and the medieval man thought it was the pursuit of god that drove
people…

the failure here is not the idea’s but the idea that it is ONE sole reason
that drives us… we are a complicated bunch and what motivates us
is different for each of us, but also what motivates us changes, not only
over the years but over the year, month and yes, even the day…

situational ethics is not just for breakfast anymore…

we change depending on our situation…and what drives us changes
depending on the situation…we might be driven by knowledge or suffering
or egotism or love or our happiness, again depending…the thing about
being human is we cannot react to every situation the same…
we must respond differently to every situation…

so to understand the animal called a human being…
we must understand that there is no one driving force
in our lives like suffering or the search for knowledge or
the pursuit of happiness… but we are a mixture of each
depending upon the situation…

Kropotkin

in reading such writers as Hobbes and Butler, they often use the word,
nature, as in “human nature” and the overall idea of “nature”…
As in, man is a part of nature, but that leaves us with this idea of
nature and what is nature?

as it is good to start somewhere, I am going to start with a definition of
nature…

Nature: 1. the essential quality of a thing; essence 2.inherent tendencies of a person
3. kind; type. 4. (a)the physical universe. (b) {sometimes N-}the power, force etc.
that seems to regulate this. 5. the primitive state of humans 6. natural scenery…
by nature naturally; inherently…

so human nature is, perhaps, the essential quality of a thing; its essence…
or perhaps it is the inherent tendencies of a person?
this definition doesn’t really seem to answer our question…
as to what is nature?

perhaps as a thought experiment, we can call nature, a system…
we are inherently a system that lives within a system that exists within
another system and so on and so forth… there doesn’t seem to be an end
to the number of systems we can belong to… we can be classified as a
biological system and part of the natural system and different
parts within each…

so depending on how you classify human beings, we can be in a number
of different type of systems…or we can be part of any number types of
natures…

however to classify human beings the same way as say the solar system
in regards as to having or being the same type of system, can lead us astray…

we operate differently, as a system then the solar system operates…
and yet, we come from the same matter as the solar system, we are composed
of the same matter as the solar system…these differences complicates
our understanding of what is nature/systems…

we exists as a system which means we are within nature, our bodily functions
are nature, as we come from a long, billions of years old, line of biological
creature’s… the one cell amoeba of two billion years ago is the father of
all life on planet earth and every biological creature since comes from
that one cell amoeba… and that is part of our nature and the nature of
all life on earth… part of the essential aspect of biological life on earth…

so we can say that, nature for all life comes from this long ago
one cell amoeba… our essence…we are biological, not metaphysical…
this is our nature…and yet we exist as all life has existed within an
environment, another aspect of nature, with system upon system
being the land, sky, sea, air, plant life, animal life, all acting and interacting
upon each other… systems engaging with each other… this is nature…
and we are just another system engaging with other systems like the land,
sea, sky, air, plant life…etc. this is nature…a complex interwoven,
interdependent cycle of systems acting upon other systems… and this
is also nature…nature is our lungs breathing and our heart beating
and our blood circulating and our muscles and sinews and all that
makes up the human animal…

if you try to isolate nature into component parts, you fail to see
the essential aspect of nature which is connection between the various
systems, which is nature…nature is our essential operating system…
of which is also part of our essential operating systems of land, sea
and sky, air, so on and so forth…nature is within us and outside of
us…

Kropotkin

Hobbes was the first British empiricist which meant that
he thought that we receive our knowledge through the senses…
that there were no innate idea’s from which we received
information about the world, we received our knowledge through
the senses, vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and from these senses
we understand the world…but he was skeptical and by that he meant
the ancient idea whereas our senses are unreliable and not to be trusted…
so what does the modern age do that the ancient age was unable to do?

the modern age creates tools that aid in our senses ability to gather knowledge…
we have tools that aid in our vision, telescopes and microscopes and
aids for our hearing like radio telescopes…
we use such aids for our own personal use like glasses and hearing aids…
as I use both, I can tell this, the act of using tools like this is they distort…
for example, my hearing “hears” a noise and then it interprets it,
these tools we use to aid us, stand between us and the event they
are used for…I don’t hear noise directly, I hear the hearing aid
understanding of the noise…to state it slightly differently,
the hearing aid mediates between the noise and me…
tools are like that, they mediate between the event and
the person using the tool…
now one might think the difference is slight, but is it?
once again, in my experience, we have to think about human communication…
communication is not just the words said, but HOW the words are said…
you can have one sentence mean different things by how you say that sentence…

for example, take the sentence, you agree with me…
can be taken several different ways depending on the inflection
of the voice and the context of the sentence…

you agree with me? can be a straight forward question…

you agree with me? you dam well agree with me or I am firing your happy ass…

you agree with me? agree with me so we can convince the boss of this idea…
the target is the third party, not the two having the conversation…

and I am sure there are other ways this sentence can be used…

so what does this have to do with hearing aids?
I can hear the words, you agree with me? but I don’t often
hear the subtlety in the way the sentence is asked…
and sometimes the question asked is about the subtlety in
the question…sometimes the hearing aid won’t catch the
subtlety in a question, the inflection in the question and so
I misunderstand what is really being asked… do you agree with me?
oftentimes is not about whether you agree or disagree but is about something
else and that something else is hidden in the subtle way a question is asked…

the use of tool to expand our senses means we aren’t getting the sense results
directly from the source to the senses, but that the tool used mediates between
the event and the senses… we are one step away from direct experience of the event
we are trying to experience… so understand that the use of tools, to understand
experiences are not direct understanding of that experience, the tool mediates
between the event in question and the senses…

is this true of all tools? I would say yes, we don’t pound in the nail with our hands,
we use a hammer and that hammer mediates between the nail and our hands…
is this true of the tool we call “logic”? Once again, I would say yes…
we use logic to mediate between the event in question, say, math
and our senses… we experience math differently because we use
logic to understand the math… we experience math second hand, as it were,
the logic mediates between the math and our senses…

but what does this mean? what does the understanding, that when we use
tools that we then don’t experience the event directly but we experience
it second hand through the use of the tool…

I am not sure…

Kropotkin

the second thought I had last night was this, modernity as we know
it, is what?

we exist in a far different world then say, Hobbes… who lived before
this notion of modernity… how is modernity different then what
Hobbes felt…

there was a cohesion to Hobbes world that doesn’t exist in our world…
the cohesion was not in technology or the political sphere, but
in the cohesion of the information he received…the information flow
that he received is vastly different then we have now…and much
more cohesive then what we have now…
the knowledge that flowed to Hobbes was from the church, religion,
the state, be a good citizen or else, and from the university, in which
the information was in the form of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism
or in Scholasticism…which combine in some form, the two, either
Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism…think of Aristotelianism as a school,
and Neoplatonism as a school and Scholasticism as a school,
the number of such schools were basically three… almost all information
was coming to Hobbes from these three schools…and recall that
Scholasticism was in some parts, a combination of Aristotelianism or
Neoplatonism… so in effect, you had two schools…

the point of modern revolution was that our information coming to us
in the form of science was challenging these two schools because
the information we were receiving was different then the two schools
had taught… we see from Kepler that the sun was the center of the universe
but the two schools didn’t teach that… how does one put information into
a school of knowledge if the information contradicts the information of the
school? If the knowledge of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism is wrong,
and you only have two schools of thought, where would you put this new information?
You have to create a new school of thought that can understand and accept
the new information…so the era between Kepler and Newton was an attempt
to create a new school of thought that better understood the universe then
Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism…today we think of Aristotelianism and
Neoplatonism as philosophical systems, but they were also physical
descriptions of the world… if you wanted to understand how the physical
universe work, how the sun and earth and planets and stars acted,
you studied Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism in the middle ages and into
the age of Hobbes, this was true…but modern science
changed the way we understood how the universe worked
but we have to store that knowledge into some unified system
in which to understand it and to teach it…
so from Kepler to Newton was the search for a new school
that was needed to explain the new understanding of the universe…
So Hobbes answer was Empiricism, we understand and interpret
the universe through our senses and we reason from
the information gained from our senses to create a new
understanding of how the universe worked…

but what in gods name does this have to do with Modernity?
Everything…

the schools that arose from our new understanding of the universe,
empiricism and the enlightenment idea’s, which was a theory of thought,
and also such idea’s as the beginning of classical liberalism, all flowed
from the new knowledge that came from science… and not from the
study of the old forms of knowledge, Aristotelianism or Neoplaonism
or Scholasticism because they had a flawed understanding of
how the universe worked…

so these new schools flowed nicely until roughly, 1900
and then came the beginning of modernity… but why?

what happened in 1900? ah, Mr. Einstein happened…
and in 1905 published 4 papers which radically changed our
understanding of how the universe worked…
and that new understanding didn’t fit into any of the old
paradigms of empiricism or the enlightenment theories
or classical liberalism… so we once again, just as the Europe of
the years between Kepler and Newton, didn’t have a school able
to understand or to teach the new understanding of the universe,
we don’t have a school of thought in which to teach the new
understanding of the universe…that is the role that the thinkers
from Descartes to Leibniz played, creating the new systems of thought
that accommodated the new understanding of how the universe worked…
the 100 years from Descartes to Leibniz created the new systems that
existed until 1900, roughly 300 years… then Einstein happened…
but who were the creators of the new thinking? Ah, we begin
to understand the creation of modernity… Nietzsche was the first,
and perhaps the only one, who tried to explain the new world order,
the new understanding of how the world worked… he saw, as no one
has seen, that the new understanding of the universe, meant systems building
like the one that Hegel and Kant tried, no longer works…the new understanding
of the world meant that we cannot understand how the universe worked
via building a system, because we began to understand that a system
cannot hold all the information necessary to properly understand the
information we had gathered…we cannot build a system to understand
the information we have gathered because no system we built,
would be able to have all the information we need to understand
how the universe worked…so if you can’t build a system like
Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism or Scholasticism that allows one
to understand and teach that system, how do you now understand
or teach it?
and this fundamental understanding is the creation of what we
call modernity…we don’t have schools of thought like Aristotelianism
because no school of thought is possible given the new understanding
of the universe…so we have this flow of information, this massive
flow of information and we have no way to logically place it into
a school of thought or any type of system in which we can then
use to understand or teach…we have no way to place the
new information into context in which we can understand it…
we have 8 million people living in New York…
that is not information we can place into some system
because it can’t be placed into a system and thus we
have such random facts, which by their very nature are changeable,
and we can’t really do anything with them…we can’t place them
into some school of thought like Empiricism that would put that
information into context, because we have no such school of thought…
and thus we have modernity… which is the inability to create
a logical system of context in which to understand idea’s or facts…
and thus the need of philosophy to create such a logical context or
system in which to understand idea’s or facts…
we need philosophy now, more then ever because this
state of modernity will continue to exist until we create this
context or school of thought in which we can then begin to
understand and teach…

Kropotkin

When reading everyone from Descartes to Leibniz, you see that
they are all searching for certainty… certainty of knowledge, certainty
of information… they all assume the certainty of god, but that is
an assumption…

but what is really needed is not certainty for there is no such thing…
we can’t be certain about anything, but I say, so what!!!
what does it matter that we can’t be certain about something or anything…
the real search is not for certainty because we will never find that,
no the real search isn’t even for knowledge because knowledge/facts
change all the time…8 million people live in New York city, but that
information changes all the time, and we can never be certain about the
actual number because it changes all the time…

no, the search is for the understanding of relationships between us and
the universe and the relationship between us and that tree over there
and our relationship between me and you… the real search is for
the understanding of relationships in the universe…
what is our relationship to this tree or the state or to justice…
those are the real questions to ask…

not to engage in attempting to create certainty with god/religion or
to the state/US or our certainty of understanding with ism’s or ideologies…
no, those false searches cannot lead us to certainty because we can never
be certain about anything, but we can, can understand our relationships
with the state, religion or isms’ and ideologies…to have certainty
is vastly overrated, but to have an understanding of our relationships
with others and those items previously listed such as god and the state,
that is what should drive us, not a futile search for something that
can never happen, like a search for certainty…
we must stick to that which can exists and not search for that
which doesn’t exists, like certainty…

Kropotkin

how are we to live?

Part of the human answer is in politics and political ideologies
such as democracy and monarchy and fascism… as they are all
part and parcel of the answer of, how are we to live…

as we have had so many different political answers to the question
of how we are to live, clearly there hasn’t been one answer that has
been able to solve all the problems presented by human existence…

the question of how I AM TO LIVE is clearly tied
into the question of how WE ARE TO LIVE…

Marx AND Adam Smith thought man was an economic being…
Plato thought man was an political being…
and most philosophers thought man was a moral being…
So what are we? Are we economic beings or political beings or
are we moral beings?

part of the confusion lies in the fact, that we are part economic, part
political, part moral and how do we understand what each aspect means
to each of us and to us collectively…how does one create a theory of
“how one is to live” when each of us is part of those three things, economic,
political and moral…therein lies the confusion… we really can’t build
or create a theory of man until we decide what we are… are we political
or are we economic or are we moral?

the question of who we are lies front and center at the morass of
our world today…the religious believe we are moral and act upon it
thus we have the religious wars of today and the businesses and government
acting as if we are economic beings and the political attempts to mediate between
these two plus more…

the complication from not understanding if we are moral or economic or political
has created, in no small part, the mess we have today…

for if we look into history and see past civilizations and cultures,
they, the Greeks or Egyptians for example, knew, absolutely knew who
they were… and the Medieval man had a very clear notion of
who they were and what there place in society was…
it wasn’t even a question to the person of the medieval age…

even into the age of Enlightenment, people still had a very clear
understanding of who they were… the idea’s of the Enlightenment,
of progress and reason and denial of religion, were all based on a set
ideal of who we were and who we were trying to be…

and all that changed with the 20th century, with modernity…
we no longer have any sense of, who a human being is…
Marx attempted to create an idea of who we are and the Nazi’s
did the same and we have Darwin saying something else
and Nietzsche saying something else…and they are all right and
they are all wrong…but in what parts are they right and in what parts
are they wrong is the very stuff of our investigations into who we are
and how are we to live…

if man is a political being, then we can live in a certain way and
if we are an economic being, then we can live in another way
and if we are moral beings, then we can live in another way…

once, Goethe wrote that he had “two souls in my breast”…
two souls, god, I wish it was that simple… we are a many soul beings,
we human beings…think of all the virtues we human being can be,
both good and bad and we, each of us, is every one of those possible virtues
and we exhibit those virtues every single day…
every virtue is another possibility for us… another
course of action…The Greeks believed in arête, which was
excellence and the Greeks practices that possibility every single
chance they had… in warfare and in playwriting and in speeches
and in philosophy and they held competitions in an attempt
to discover their arête, their excellence…we have no such
similar thing…and I suspect we are the worse for it…

so how are we to live really depends on who we are
and we moderns, we have no idea who we are or what
is possible for the human being…and that is the real
nature of modernity… we don’t know who we are and
how we are to live…

Kropotkin

if you think about it, the vast number of religions, of
religious ways we can think about ourselves, the number
of religious answers to the question of who we are and how
are we to live is vast… we have hundreds, in fact thousands
of religions… and each of them with a different idea of
who we are and what are the possibilities of being human…

the very fact we have so many different religions, so many different
possibilities is bad for us because it says, we have no idea of who this
human creature, this human being is and so, we have many, many
different answers in the form of many different religions…

if we begun to truly understand who we are and what are our possibilities
that we won’t need or want so many different religions… if we knew
who we were, we wouldn’t have so many different religions…
maybe 5 religions at most… but we are confused and that confusion
spills into the many different religions as well as our many different
political ideologies and our many different economic systems that
we humans have had over the last million years…

once we become clear as to the real nature of the human being,
we shall not need so many different political ideologies and so many
different economic systems… one system will be fine because we will
know who we are and that knowledge makes all the difference in the world…

if you want simplicity in your world… find out who you are and what
is your place in the universe… that will bring you simplicity and
peace of mind and then, then help answer the general human question that
is present within all of us, who are we and how are we to live…

Kropotkin

I spent most of yesterday going over this thread and rereading
my posts in it and I find in this thread, I have covered most of
traditional philosophy…I hope to continue this…

there are two schools of thought… one says we have innate idea’s,
the other says we get all knowledge from the senses. Plato believes in
innate idea’s with his eternal forms and Hobbes and Locke and Hume believe
in empiricism which is we gain knowledge from our senses…

one idea is Tabula rasa… the mind is a blank slate without rules for processing data,
and that date is added and rules for processing are formed solely by sensory experiences…

so far so good, nothing new here…we react to events from the sensory knowledge
we have gained… this sensory knowledge can be from any source that is within
our sensory perception, seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch… we learn from those
sensory experiences…but what if we have a feedback loop of sorts…

we have our sensory perceptions we have built up over the years and through
them we have some sense of the world… this theory is a inside out looking at
the universe…we gain knowledge from our senses and then we look at the world…
but what if we react to events outside of ourselves which creates the sensory
perception’s… for example, it is the events outside of us that creates the
sensory perception’s…for example, I walk into a table… by walking into the
table I learn that the table is hard and will hurt if I walk into it… the event of
walking into the table “teaches” me a sensory perception…sensory perception is
active, not passive… watch a young child, maybe one or two years old…
they will grab everything… that is how they “understand” outside events,
by experiencing them… the event of grabbing something, say a ball for example,
is a learning experience… they learn about round or color or textures when grabbing
a ball, grabbing a tennis ball is a different event then grabbing a baseball and is a different
event then grabbing a golf ball, the experience itself will become new sensory experiences
for the baby…from a child’s standpoint, there is no real difference between
a golf ball and a grape… they can’t tell the difference until either being told
or they experience it for themselves…the physical act of grabbing the golf ball
creates new sensory information… thus it takes two to tangle… you need both
the event AND the sensory knowledge…if there are no outside events, there
is nothing to get sensory knowledge about…there is an interaction going on
between outside events and sensory knowledge…a dance as it were…
one needs the other…as there is not innate understanding of the world,
we gain knowledge of the world through our senses and then we use that
limited sensory knowledge to gain more knowledge of the world through
interactions with events which increases our sensory knowledge which allows
us further understanding of outside events which increases our sensory knowledge
and that dance back and forth between outside events and our senses creates
our knowledge of the universe…a limitation of senses limits our understanding
of events which limits our knowledge of the universe… I can’t hear high pitch
noises like Violins and flutes and certain telephones and some women’s voices…
as I cannot experience those noises, those outside events, I have limited knowledge
about them… to increase my knowledge/understanding of those high pitch noises,
I wear a hearing aid which increases my sense of hearing… I can experience
the event of high pitch noises with my hearing aid but without it, I cannot…
I couldn’t even imagine what high pitch noises sounded like until I wore a hearing aid
because I can’t experienced it without a hearing aid… the event creates
new knowledge, new understanding of the universe… as long as I can experience
it in some fashion through my senses…quite often when checking at the store,
I will vaguely hear something but because I can’t place it because of my hearing,
I don’t know/understand what that noise could be… it might be a phone or a balloon
popping or coins going into the coinstar machine…until I am able to
create some understanding or to say it another way, a connection between
that noise and what is the cause of that noise. I cannot understand or
grasp that noise until I understand the event that created the noise…

it is not enough to sensory experience an event, one must
connect in some fashion with the event to be able to have
knowledge about it…it is about creating a relationship between
the noise and the event that allows me to understand or experience
the event… it is an active process between the event and the sensory
understanding of the event…an event occurs and I must use my senses
to be able to have knowledge about or understand that event…
and my past sensory knowledge aids me in my understanding
of current or even future events…if someone is about to pop
a balloon, I have experience that in the past and so I know what
that will sound like and I can react accordingly…my previous
sensory experiences helps me to understand current events like
a balloon popping or about to be popped…this back and forth
between events and our senses is what helps create
us as human beings because we are, in part, not much more then
the accumulation of prior or past events…those events help create
the person we are today and our senses however limited they are,
help shape who we are by the information we receive from our senses…

Kropotkin

in light of the previous post, we understand such concepts
as justice and equality in terms of our sensory experiences…
I have experience injustice and inequality and so I have experienced it
through my senses… I have also read about injustice and inequality
so, I can compare my experiences of injustice and inequality with others…
this comparison allows me to further understand injustice and inequality…
then I can compare other events of injustice and inequality in terms
of my event and thus I can better understand such concepts…this is
the rational, active understanding of the universe… by understanding
experiences, mine and others, I can gain a better understanding of
the universe…

so we have added comparison to sensory experiences that helps us
to better understand the world we live in…

if I compare events that are considered unjust, I can get a better
understanding of what is injustice…

once again, it is through outside events that we gain an understanding
of our universe… the role of the rational mind is in comparing
those events…but the mind isn’t passive, it is active…
from these events of injustice, I can make a judgment about
the nature of injustice…so some combination of sensory
events and active rational comparison, for example, we can
gain understanding of the universe… there are other tools
with which we can understanding of the universe beyond
comparison, such as logic and math and geometry and science which
also use examples from which we use our senses to gather knowledge
of the universe…

we have a sensory perception such as hearing something and we
can use our tools of comparison or logic or math or science
to gain knowledge of that event…we have a large variety
of tools in which to understand sensory knowledge…
we see the sun rising and setting… what tool would you use
to gather information about the sun rising or setting?

Science would be the best tool as science has created a
well documented and well understood theory of why the
sun seems to rise and set…we have a sensory experience
and we must use our rational thought to best understand
that experience and we must use our rational thought to
find/seek the best tool we need to understand that sensory
experience…

it is as we grow more experience with experiences, we
discover that the number of tools we have to understand those
experiences grow…once again, the dance between events/ experiences
and our sensory tools, sight and so on, continues…

Kropotkin

let us take an example of some event…

we are sitting in a car somewhere and out of the corner of my
eye, I see a moving yellow shadow… now my experiences
might suggest that the moving yellow shadow is a lion…
but and this is important… we might react to the shadow
in a fight or flight reaction… we flee but we don’t know
exactly what we are fleeing from… we react from instinct,
not from any knowledge or experience of that yellow shadow…
we are animals and like all animals, we are instilled with a billion
years of instinct… not rational, not experienced reaction to events…

now many people/philosophers believe we go toward pleasure and avoid
pain… but doesn’t this idea of pleasure and pain come from instinct…
for example, sex and wanting sex is not a rational thought, but an instinctual
reaction…billions of years of nature programed the sexual urge into animals,
of which we are one such branch… pleasure of sex is from instinct and not
any rational thought… we don’t need to think about or have a rational
thought about sex to want sex… we simply desire it… we want that pleasure
even though intellectual it might not be the best idea… pleasure and pain
are instinctual events… the rationalist or philosopher believe we should
be rational about sex and we should engaged in rational thinking about sex…
but sex itself is instinct, that pleasure is instinct and it is only with a great
deal of thought or self control that we control our sexual instinct…

the drive toward pleasure or away from pain is driven by instinct…
we reach out and grab something… it might be a pillow or it might
be a nail, if it is a pillow, we might continue to grab it, pleasure,
but if it is a nail, we instinctually move away from it… rational thought
has nothing to do with this…

this idea of instinct is missing from thinkers such as Hobbes,
Locke, Hume… they take pleasure and pain as rational experiences,
whereas pleasure and pain are instinctual experiences…
the trick we must learn is to turn instinctual experiences into
rational experiences… we must overcome our instincts…
thus turning an instinctual experience into a rational experience…
and this is the call of philosophers since Socrates…without
using the words instincts…this is what they are saying…
pleasure and pain are simply instincts at work and
philosophy and society and the law and religion all
say that we must rationalize our instincts, instead of
reacting instinctually, we must use rational thought
for our behavior instead of instinct and we must
use rational thought in pursuit of pleasure and pain instead
of instinct…this is how we overcome instinct… with
rational thought… we overcome and this is in part what
Nietzsche means when he refers to overcoming…
becoming who you are…

pleasure and pain are instinctual experiences which we must
overcome by rational thought…

Kropotkin

the way we understand the universe is by experience…
and not by innate idea’s…

let us try this:

a spaceship lands and we see an alien being walk out of it…
we can visually see the alien being having two legs… we
have experience with that, so we can understand that,
the alien has two arms, once again we have experience that…
but to understand the other aspects of the alien,
we would have to dissect him/her/it, test the blood of the alien,
see if they have lungs, spleen, heart, liver, we would have to experience
the alien to understand who, what, when, where, how and why about the alien…
what if the alien was zinc based, not copper based, we have no experience with
that, we wouldn’t know how that worked until we experimented with that sort
of thing, until we experienced that zinc in their bodies… the scientific process by
its very nature, forces us to experience nature to understand it…we cannot fully understand
something if which we cannot experience something… we can guess and speculate,
but we cannot know… like death, we can say a great deal about death, but until
we personally experience it, we cannot know it or truly understand it…
we must experience something to know it or to understand it…

recall that we are made of the same stuff that stars are, we can
understand a great deal because we are made of the same stuff as
the universe and this fact alone, gives us some understanding of
the universe, because we have experienced within ourselves or
within matter easily within reach…

so, does this also mean we can know/understand time and space, yes…
because we are part of the universe and time and space exist within
the universe, and time and space exists within us and around us, we
can, by our experience of it, know and understand time and space…

we can know and understand concepts that exist in the universe because
we in some fashion, are part of those concepts because we both exist in
and experience space and matter…

thus we can explain how we know/understand concepts like justice
and math and geometry… in some fashion, they exist in
the universe around us and as we too, exist in the universe around us,
they are as we are, part of the universe…experience explains
how we can know matters that seem to be outside the range of experience…

if we share the same matter, star stuff for example,
because our matter is the same we share something with everything
that is made up of star matter, even if that something is billions of light years away,
we still share the experience of having the same material within our bodies…

we can potentially know/understand everything if we can experience
it on some level…

Kropotkin

In a bar waiting for the World Series to
start.

The value of my discussion of experience and
there not being innate values is this, from this
we can eliminate god as there is no evidence
For god and we remove the possibility of
an innate god…

This can be a starting point for a philosophy.
As we have to begin somewhere…

We only include what we can experience
in regards to some philosophy we have.
We cannot in good conscience include any
metaphysical notions as they exist outside
of experience… must we banish all metaphysical
Notions? As many as we can…

Enlightenment… I finally finished reading the biography of Hobbes and
I’m ready to begin looking into the Enlightenment…

The Enlightenment… the beginning of the modern world… here, we finally
see the where the modern world began… we see our notion of progress and
of government and of the statement… “the of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”
the declaration of Independence is a Enlightenment document…
Written by men who have studied and participated in all facets
of the Enlightenment… Franklin and Jefferson for example…

Our political structure was created with Enlightenment ideals…

and you cannot understand those who followed without some
understanding of Enlightenment idea’s like Marx and Hegel, these are
children of the Enlightenment…

the enlightenment was a struggle against what they saw as the
tyranny of authority… to be free of the figures of authority
was part of their goal… and authority included the church…

this has been called the “Age of Reason” and that meant,
you followed reason instead of authority…

the enlightenment was not an event but was a process…
it was about method, not the goal… and it not only included
its proponents but those who argued against certain, certain
enlightenment ideals and idea’s… The most famous was of course,
Rousseau…who opposed certain aspects of the enlightenment but
was a child of other aspects of enlightenment…Rousseau
basic complaint against the enlightenment was that, to follow the
enlightenment meant you followed artificial and became
artificial… apart from and away from “Nature” or “Natural”

his goal was to turn man back to being part of or be himself, of nature…
which suggest that Rousseau felt that aspects of the enlightenment
turn people away from his natural self… the goal is to be human
and Rousseau felt that aspects of the enlightenment turned, separated
people from their natural or human aspects…

it is not enough to study who is for something, you must study
those who is against something to really understand an age, an
ideal or aspect of who we are… this idea of returning to our
authentic self returns in the 20th century with Existentialism…

I expect to spend the next several months on the Enlightenment
and I hope to better understand who we are by knowing where we have
been…

PS, a late edit, the constitution of the U.S is also an Enlightenment
document… and perhaps this is why we are no longer comfortable
with either documents is because they, as enlightenment documents,
no longer fit in our new age…for who can accept the enlightenment ideals
of say, progress, after the 20th century of World wars and internment camps
and 9/11… the events of the last 100 years may have, MAY HAVE,
made many of the beliefs of the enlightenment very hard to accept in
or believe in…we are facing a new environment and we must create
a belief system that enables us to comprehend this new environment
and be able to have actions in this new environment…

Kropotkin

as I am going to jump the gun here and go to the end
of the enlightenment thinkers which is Kant…

As is well known, is that Kant tried to “save” philosophy
from Hume radical empiricism… Kant himself is an
empiricist, he does believe that we gain information
from experience but that the information gained
from experience is not grounded in experience but
grounded in something else… which he calls
in “a priori” a precondition to, or prior to experience…

for example, he creates categories, which he refers to them,
as “pure” categories because they are Pure, not given in experience,
before experience…one example is the category of Quantity,
in which he says has three parts, unity, plurality, totality…
he says, the category and the three parts are “a priori” a precondition
to or prior to experience…but Kant is WRONG…

in fact, unity and plurality and totality are part of experience…
take unity, one, we can experience one…children experience one
all the time, take one stick… unity…now children may not know
what a stick is and we adults patiently explain what a stick is,
one is a product of experience, not a idea of being a precondition,
we cannot know in advance or prior to experience, what one stick is…

take plurality, many sticks, I take one stick and put on the ground
and say to a child, one stick, I then take many sticks and put them on
the ground and say, many sticks…once again, prior to experience
a child cannot know what many sticks are… it is a product of
experience that allows a child to know what “many” sticks are…

now take totality, all, it is said we cannot know totality or infinite
number of sticks… but we can know from experience…

I can as experience has been shown to me, to count sticks,
one stick, two sticks, three sticks…1 + 1= 2 which is a short
hand method of one stick and one stick equals two sticks…

but infinity? how do we get to infinity by experience?

take this progression, 5, 10, 15, what would be the next number?
I count my toes to 5, I count my other toes to 10, I count my
left hand to 15, I count my right hand to…20… I can figure
out what is the next step in that progression without any recourse to
an “a prior” or any precondition steps…and what of infinity…
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10… after counting a while, I realize that
I will never reach the end of counting, my experience has shown
me that there is not an end to the numbers, I call that infinity, or in Kant’s
language, totality…I can reach the idea of infinity without recourse to
any thought of “a prior” or any precondition steps…

experience has shown me that I cannot reach the end of finite steps,
I create a word showing that idea of not being able to reach the end
of finite steps with the word, infinite…

Kant believes that space and time are not experienced, but
are “a prior” or a precondition to our experience, but we
exist within and part of time and space… we experience time
and space every single day of our lives and we are taught
what time and space means as an experience…
this is not “a prior” or an precondition, but essential
to our understanding of the universe…as an experience,

a child experiences time and space, but has to be taught
what that means, they don’t intuitively know or understand what
time and space mean, we learn from experience what time and space
means and from what people tell us about time and space…

the entire notion of their being categories that are “a prior”
to or a precondition to experience fails in the light of the fact,
that the categories themselves are only understandable in
terms of experiences…we can only know these categories
in light of experiences, not before the experiences or prior
to experiences… the categories that Kant listed are
categories of quantity, quality, modality and relation…
and each of these can only be understood in terms
of experiences and not as “a prior” or as a precondition
to experiences…

I shall have plenty to say as I experience, which is to say
be able to explain the Enlightenment…

Kropotkin

and comes the $64,000 dollar question…

what do my questions of, who are we and
what are we to do, how are we to live,
have to do with philosophical technical questions like,
how does Hume’s critique of innate idea’s have baring
on Kant’s idea “a priori”?

It is technical questions like Kant’s “a priori” that leaves
us lost in the tree’s, being unable to see the larger picture,
the forest…

for philosophy to be successful, means we have to avoid
getting lost in the underbrush of technical questions of philosophy,
like Kant’s “a priori”…and the deconstruction of sentences
and paragraphs and books…

we have to remain true to the idea of philosophy…
and that idea is simple, how are we to understand life,
the universe and all that jazz, because with understanding
comes a knowledge, a philosophical underpinning of how
we are to act and to be…

Knowledge without action is impotent
and action without knowledge is blind…

don’t be a blind, dickless man…

Kropotkin

the question is asked, who are we?

and the answer is?..

listen to Kant and we are beings who experience and have
internal categories which tell us what the experience means…

listen to Hume and we are beings who experience but and this is important,
our facilities for understanding those experiences are so flawed that
we cannot correctly understand those experiences…

listen to Kropotkin and we are beings who experience and our facilities
for understanding those experiences are flawed but, but our own intellect
and our understanding of not only our experiences but other human beings
experiences allow us to understand our experiences…

if I have a mystical experience, I can look into history and see others
who have had mystical experiences and by their accounts and understanding,
of their mystical experience, I can better understand my own mystical experience…

we learn from each other…and this learning often covers the areas that
is uncovered by our shortcomings in our experiences…

now one of the next failure we have is a cause and effect one…
congress and the IQ45 is all over this “opioid crisis”
but the problem is the “opioid crisis” is not the cause of,
but the symptom…what is causing the “opioid crisis”?

it is not the availability of opioids that is the problem but
what is causing people to seek the opioids that is the problem…
the drugs themselves are not the cause of the problem, but
the symptoms of the problems…

we have a cause and effect problem, we have lost the ability or understanding
of what is cause and what is effect…

I suspect and may not be able to prove, but I think that Kant
has a cause and effect misunderstanding, I could be very wrong,
but I intend to pursue this …

Kropotkin

Who are we?

Humans beings who experience…

now the question becomes, how do we
understand those experiences…

are those experiences mediated through categories in the mind or
do we understand experiences in terms of other experiences?

what is the role of reason in regards to sorting out or understanding
experiences?

the question of being human is simple,
how do we understand experiences?

what technique would we use to understand or sort
our experiences?

our experiences can be active, such as the child reaching out and grabbing something,
or our experiences can be passive, things/experiences that happen to us, like
the dog attacking us and biting us… we did nothing but the experience happened
to us…

some experiences we have to really go out of our way for, such
as our experience of looking through a telescope to see/experience
our galaxy or other galaxies…the experiences don’t have to be active
but we can use our senses which is how we gather information about experiences,
we can use our senses to seek out new experiences…the active or passive part lies
sometimes within us and sometimes outside of us…

we spend our entire lives engaged in understanding our experiences
and what those experiences mean to us personally, socially, culturally,
societally…

being human is about experiences and understanding what they mean…
there is really nothing more about being human then understanding
what experiences are…

that is in a nutshell is all there is to being a human being…
asking ourselves what experiences mean to us…

Kropotkin

part of the “techniques” for understanding experiences,
both collective and individual experiences, are
science and philosophy and religion and economics
and poli sci and all the other academic field of studies…

they are simply means to understand experiences…

Kropotkin

K: or said another way, what is the central question of philosophy?
how do I understand this experience?
and the central question of science is, how do I understand this experience?
and the central question of physics is, how do I understand this experience?

and we put those “experiences” we are trying to understand into
categories that can be understood as philosophy or science or religion…
depending on how we categorize something, it could be philosophy or
science or religion…

we are trying to make sense of sensory experiences of life
by understanding them as philosophy or science or religion…

the experience happens first and then we try to make sense of it,
in some fashion…

Kropotkin