I have been trying to connect the dots on this whole
head/intellect vs the heart/emotions/psychology… thing……
We have the head, the intellect which sets the table for
all things intellectual… when we doubt, we doubt from the head…
when we practice skepticism, that is the head for skepticism is
the intellectual aspect of us…From all accounts I have read,
German idealism had two missions, one was to escape the idea
that the skepticism of the Enlightenment lead one to either
nihilism which is skepticism carred to its logical place or
one was lead to atheism… which was no better…
The argument has been made that the entire argument
of the German idealists from Kant to Hegel was an attempt
to avoid these two dangerous positions, nihilism or atheism…
so the head in its skeptism could lead a person to either
nihilism or atheism…
Now that would be true if, if we simply account for us as being
only thinking creatures… but we are not, we are emotional,
feeling, psychological creatures…
we might intellectually dismiss such things as love or hate
or to reduce the world by intellectual arguments into
nihilism or atheism… but the heart, the emotional part
of us will say yes to love when the head says no……
quite often the heart opposes the head…this conflict between
the intellectual and the emotional has been noted since time began…
if a person in conflict between the head and the heart, you cannot say
that person is complete or whole or even fully human………
to be complete or whole or even fully human, the head and the heart
must be going in one direction……
that is the path to being completely human, when the head and the heart
are traveling in one direction with one goal………when we find ourselves
in conflict within ourselves or when we find ourselves out of sorts or
incomplete, the problem is that the head/intellect is in conflict with
the emotional/psychology part of us……….
When we become alienated from ourselves it is because the head
and heart are in conflict……… once we solve this conflict, one way
or the other, we begin to become one, not two… remember
Goethe’s quote, “alas, two souls reside in my breast”
alas, we have conflicts between the head and the heart and sometimes
conflict between the emotions, recall the closeness that exists
between hate and love……. we cannot love that which cannot potentially
become hate………if we are indifferent to something, we cannot love it
nor can we hate it…….
but let us get into specifics… my heart may want something that
is out of bounds, taboo in some fashion and my head may agree with
this taboo… but the heart wants what it wants……. this conflict
is between the head and the heart and anybody having this conflict
cannot, cannot be united and thus whole… they are incomplete,
partial because the head and the heart exists in two different places…
there is no unity between the head and the heart and thus we are alienated
from ourselves……
The goal is to become more human and the path to that lies
with the unification of the mind/head and the heart……
two different aspects of us must be traveling in the same direction,
toward the same goal if we are to understand ourselves as being whole,
complete, in control… to be human…………
how do we connect the head and the heart?
that is where psychology can come in… how do we unite
two different and contrary aspect of ourselves? how do we
unite the head and the heart?
philosophy is the head and psychology is the heart……
and we must unite the two into having the same direction
and the same goal… or we will have conflict within ourselves…….
and this is why German idealism failed… because it failed to make
as it primary mission the attempt to unite the head and the heart…
it came close but close isn’t good enough……… we must unite the head and
the heart if we are to become human, truly human……. that means we
must begin to understand the forces that exists within us… for me, that means to
understand the forces that “makes” me be a complete and total ass at times…
to understand the emotional side of me that has steered me wrong many,
many times before… or perhaps I was lead on the wrong path because my
intellectual side and my emotional side are not united, not working as one…
with different goals and different agenda’s…….
I must engage with myself on an emotional, psychology path
to understand myself…I must try to unite myself mentally and
emotionally…whereas I have thought it was society that
created this alienation in me, perhaps it was my disconnection
between my emotional side and my intellectual side………
and then how do I connect my newly united two side/aspects of
the being known as Kropotkin with society?
I may be 59 and physically toward the end of my journey,
but I am not done with my journey at all…I am at the start
of the journey to connect the intellectually side of me with
the emotional side of me… connect the philosophy with
the psychological side of me……….
the road as always begins first with the understanding that there
is a problem… then you must understand the exact nature of the problem,
then and only then can you overcome the problem… for we have
another situation where we first begin to know thyself, then we
overcome ourselves and then finally, we become who we are…
and this is by uniting the intellectual side of me and the emotional
side of me…uniting psychology with philosophy………
Kropotkin