This question of existence varies and changes with the person
asking it… a person who lived 35,000 years ago has different
questions about existence then someone who lived in the
Greek city of Athens around 425 BC and someone who lived
during the medieval age understanding of existence is far
different then my understanding of existence in this year of 2019…
the question of existence is different in the stone age then it is
now because the environment is different. The stone age person question
of existence was about survival… the question of existence was far more
basic then the questions of existence I face now…The stone age man
was directly involved in the procurement of the substance that keep them
alive… if he wanted to eat, he had to hunt and kill the animal that
would have fed him…his mate would have gone out and hunted for
berries or other things needed to eat…the question of existence
was directly in front of them… engage like an animal or die…
but think about the limitations of these stone age people……
their limitations are contained by their environment……
they had limited choices in what they could do…….
basically being a hunter was the choice for
men… how many other roles could men play?
As ART was just beginning, that was becoming a possibility
for people to engage in……. it wasn’t all about the search
for food to eat…another possibility existed… the creation of Art…
this hunter gatherer environment lasted for hundreds of thousands of years…
we traveled with the animals we used for food so we could survive…
humans lead a nomadic existence…civilization simply wasn’t possible
until humans could stay in one place and still survive… not until
humans began the agriculture society could human beings could engage
with civilization as we know it……
in the stone age, the possibilities were limited… one could become a hunter,
one could be the one who made the tools needed by the hunters, one
could be the one who cooked and cleaned and keep the camp where they
lived organized…the very possibilities for being human were limited…
think about the possibilities of the Greek human being circa, 425 BC…
What choices were available for human beings? they were far greater
then the stone age man… you could be a stone mason or a priest or
a warrior or a playwright or a politician or a philosopher or a farmer… one of the
many possibilities that existed for the Greek person who lived around 425 BC…
in the Greek world existed far more possibilities for human beings to act upon
then existed in the stone age world… the Medieval world had less possibilities…
the possibilities that existed for someone in the medieval world were warrior
and priest and farmer… because in the medieval world, the possibilities of
the city were far less then in the Greek world because the cities were fairly
small… it is estimated that around 1328 AD, Paris for example had roughly 200,000 people…
and the numbers of people for Paris say, around 800 AD would have been much smaller…
The growth in the city created greater possibilities for human beings…
In 1328 Paris, Humans can be builders and priest and stone cutters and
the thousand different possibilities that existed in 1328 Paris
think of today… how many possibilities exist for us? there are quite
literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for us today from writer to
warrior to waiter to welder to washroom attendant……… and that is the W’s…
but is our existence defined by what we do? does being a warrior, a soldier,
define my existence, define who I am?
I am born and I, hopefully, will exists for 70 plus years… does being
a soldier define that life I hope to lead? It seems to me that we define
who we are by our choices…I will live for 70 years and the choices I make
over those 70 years, defines who I am…and among those choices we make
that define us, is our choice of values……. we are indoctrinated in childhood
to hold certain values which family/society wishes to pass on to the next
generation, but are those values worth passing on?
inherent in our possibilities is our possibility for choices…
but those choices we make, must make sense given the
environment we find ourselves in…as our environment
changes, our choices change and the possibilities of choices
change…… if I find myself in a country that is at war, my choices
must adapt to the fact that the country is at war…….
If my environment is violent and chaotic, then my choices
must reflect that fact…if I lived in the stone age period,
given the limited nature of choices, I have very little choice as
to the nature of my existence…as to what possibilities existed for me…
given the nature of the current existence we find ourselves in today,
we have only certain possibilities available to us…the environment
dictates to us our possibilities……….
if the question of human existence is to explore the possibilities available
to us, then we must create the greatest number of choices that is available
to us……. but as I have noted before, we are limited by forces beyond
our control to be able to create the greatest number of choices possible…
we cannot escape the forces, both natural and manmade, the forces
of gravity and the force of evolution are two such forces that limited
our choices… we cannot go beyond our genetic programming
to be able to breath like fish under water or to fly like birds in the air…
we are limited in this fashion…we are also limited by the
manmade possibilities, the forces of man’s choice…
the ism’s and ideologies that control our lives, limit our choices…
these questions of existence, what am I to do? what should I believe in?
what should I hope for? what values should I hold? what can I live for, die for?
all these choices, possibilities are limited by the environment…
what am I to do for the 70 years of my existence?
but for me the question changes… I have roughly 15 years of existence left
to me… what should I do in the next 15 years of my existence?
and as important as to what should I do, I must ask, why? why should
I pick this possibility over other possibilities? every day is a multitude of choices,
of possibilities, I can choose not to go to work at 12:30… and risk getting fired
and having a very, very, very unhappy wife…it is a possibility not to go to work,
but the results aren’t that desirable…so what possibilities exist for me,
both today and over the next 15 years? that is the question.
Kropotkin