so what this all means is this…
how we feel about our environment will tell us what
our political and social philosophy will be…
our engagement with our environment will help us decide
what our goals ought to be as far as our understanding
of what is needed in the world…
so when you read a philosopher, what are they confessing to?
when you read Hobbes, you see and he tells you, that all his
efforts stem from his being afraid all his life… the goals he
pursues comes from his lifelong engagement with being afraid…
so when a politician wants certain laws to be passed,
that tells us about their thoughts and feelings about
about their environment…
a politician who demands that everyone have guns, is a person
who is fearful and is afraid of their environment…
and I for one, would trace our current fearful atmosphere
within America to 9/11 and to the climate for the several years
thereafter…
so how does one work on their fears and phobias?
I would confront them as I did with my own fear
and phobia…I had a serious fear of heights for many
years… I attacked it by doing things that challenges my fears…
I took up rock climbing and I challenged myself to doing things
that challenged my fears… I didn’t let my fear of heights
prevent me from going to the top of buildings and looking down…
for example, the space needle in Seattle… I went up it and
then at the top, despite my fears, I look down at the ground below…
it made me nervous as hell, but I did it…the only way to confront
our fears and everyone has some fears… you wouldn’t be human if
you didn’t have some sort of fears… for fear is an evolutionary
devise meant to protect us from doing really stupid things…
and once again, we turn to our old friend, the three paths to become
human…first, we engage with our knowing ourselves…Socrates
ideal of “know thyself” and then we engagement with an reevaluation
of our values… then we overcome… if we follow this path, we see
that we must first know ourselves and the reason for our fears…
mine fear stems from when I was kid and I really had no fear…
and I had many stitches to prove that… until one day, I tried to
do a somersault off a high diving board and landed straight on my back…
which hurt like hell… and that pain, over years would lead me to
having a fear of heights, not of diving boards, but of the cause of my
pain which was, in my eyes, the height of the diving board…
once I knew the reason, know thyself, the reason for my fear of heights,
I could work to overcome my fears…to this day, heights makes me nervous
but it doesn’t paralyze me like it did before…
I overcame…
so, what fears do you have and why do you have those particular fears?
can you or have you overcome those fears?
and what does all this mean for our philosophy, both political
and our regular philosophy?
Kropotkin