After several days of work, I finally have a day off… thank fucking god…
so I was reading about Niels Bohr this morning on Wiki…and one comment
was made that got made me to thinking…one such quote was this:
" There is no quantum world. This is only an abstract physical description."
the second quote is this:
"According to Faye “Bohr thought of the atom as real. Atoms are neither
heuristic nor logical constructions”
and as I do, I wondered about how these sentences impacted or influences
philosophy. In science we have two “realities” one is the theoretical,
mathematical vision of what reality is…for example, we had theoretical,
mathematical understanding of black holes long before we ever found a
black hole in real life…the theory of black holes is actually found in the math of
Einstein E=Mc2…the discovery of an actual black hole occurred decades later…
we can have an theoretical understanding of something… such as atoms…
but we might not have ever seen an atom in real life… so we have two
understandings… the theory and the reality…
so let us think about this in philosophy or aspects of philosophy…
Marx who was the clearest and the single best critic of capitalism,
believed that the final goal of the various economic structures,
from hunter-gatherer to Mercantilism to capitalism was the final state,
the worker state…where there was no elites or capitalists who stole
the profits/efforts from the worker… and in doing so, became fabulously
wealthy… to remove these leaches, as Marx understood them,
his final goal was the creation of a worker state…or in more Marxian
language:
" the dictatorship of the proletariat is a state of affairs in which
the proletariat holds political power"
where the proletarians are wage earners… the workers…where the rules,
standards, laws are all based upon the workers desires and needs, not
the Bourgeoisie, or the capitalist class which currently owns everything
right now…
so Marx was trying to get to the point where the workers, the wage earners
who actually did the work in the state and society, were the ones who profited
from that work…and not the Bourgeoisie who simple steal that profit
from the work/effort of the proletarians…
his solution was the creation of the worker state… but this theoretical
idea is nice sounding in theory, but let us look at the reality of it…
as I have described it elsewhere in some thread or another, that the concept of
work, as in creating and producing something isn’t really the dignified act
that has been portrayed by a nostalgic look into the past…
the idea of the “craftsman” who took pride and dignity in his work, misses
the reality of work… the point of work is to put food on the table…animals
hunt, we work. it is the same basic process…to put the necessities on
the table…
the problem I have is this, the very fact is we are no different then animals
if our goal or point of existence is to simply garner our necessities of life,
either by hunting, as man in the form of the hunter-gatherer did for a million years,
or by the current economic system of capitalism… means we are just like animals…
spending our days hunting/working to gain the necessities of life…
to work is to be an animal… if all work is meant to do which is put
food on the table and clothe us or house us…to work isn’t the highest possibility
of human existence… it is the lowest… equal to animals spending their days hunting…
I have often written about the journey that we are on, going from animal to
human/animal to finally becoming human, fully human…
if we are engaged in work as our means of existence, then we are engaged
in the animal aspect of existence… to rise above being an animal,
we must become more then just a worker, just spending our days
gathering the means of existence… and nothing more…
so, from that standpoint, a worker state that is envisioned by Marx
is the lowest form of existence possible for human beings…he is saying
that the worker state is the final stage of human existence and I say,
it is the first stage of existence and we have much further to go…
to achieve our final possibilities as human beings…as we can see by
the current events, capitalism has failed, and I shall go into that in
my next post or so…
So Marx had a theory about the final state of human existence but
if we take it seriously, we can see it can’t possibly be the final state
of existence because it doesn’t allow us to reach our human possibilities…
it only allows us to be animal, but not human… so what is our
point of existence?
just to be like animals and seek out our daily necessities in our daily
work? no, that is the lowest and meanest possibility of human existence…
we are human beings… with possibilities we haven’t even begun to explore yet…
for a truly excellent definition of human beings is this:
Human: to explore what is possible for us to achieve and then go beyond that…
to be human is the journey from animal, as we were, to animal/human as we are,
to becoming human, as we will become…
and work is just another step along the way in our journey into the discovery
of what it means to be human…to seek our possibilities and then act upon them…
that is what it means to be human… not to work to gain our daily necessities, but
to overcome that animal need and become more human and then, and then
go beyond that… to explore what it means to become more then human…
Kropotkin