Follow Churchill’s advice in the midst of strughle:
K: as I have made quite clear, I don’t do video’s… tell me what he said…
Kropotkin
K , its not about what he said in context, it’ s just that he was able to rise to the occasion, with the PM on the audience
The prime minister pacified the theater of the absurd phony war until it became a real one, becoming the new centre not to walk away.
I am not ignoring you Meno, but today I have other fish to fry…
philosophy is considered “method”, a technique one uses to
discover the “truth”… whatever that “truth” might be…
and part of the tools of the philosophical method is logic,
rationality, reason, falsifiability, demarcation, Verificationism,
among other techniques to ascertain what is the “truth”…
the rejection/attack upon on one such period where these tools/ methods
were used was the rejection/attack upon the Enlightenment period…
so we know that the motto of the enlightenment was “Sapere aude”
dare to know… so how do we go about “knowing” these things?
why philosophy and its tools were one way, science and its methods
were another way, religion and its methods were another such way to
gain such knowledge/truths…
but notice that the focus of these three possibilities are different,
science wants to know the how, how does something word,
religion is the way god makes things work,
and in philosophy, we work with the why things work without any reference
to the metaphysical, beyond the physical…
so we return to the philosophical…
so within philosophical world, we have schools…
existentialism, continental philosophy, analytical philosophy,
Marxism, Logical positivism, hedonism, as examples of methods of
an attempts to reach the truth…
K said:
“I am not ignoring you Meno, but today I have other fish to fry”
me no says:
“thanks, no worries”
Peter Kropotkin:
philosophy is considered “method”, a technique one uses to
discover the “truth”… whatever that “truth” might be…
and part of the tools of the philosophical method is logic,
rationality, reason, falsifiability, demarcation, Verificationism,
among other techniques to ascertain what is the “truth”…
the rejection/attack upon on one such period where these tools/ methods
were used was the rejection/attack upon the Enlightenment period…
so we know that the motto of the enlightenment was “Sapere aude”
dare to know… so how do we go about “knowing” these things?
why philosophy and its tools were one way, science and its methods
were another way, religion and its methods were another such way to
gain such knowledge/truths…
but notice that the focus of these three possibilities are different,
science wants to know the how, how does something word,
religion is the way god makes things work,
and in philosophy, we work with the why things work without any reference
to the metaphysical, beyond the physical…
so we return to the philosophical…
so within philosophical world, we have schools…
existentialism, continental philosophy, analytical philosophy,
Marxism, Logical positivism, hedonism, as examples of methods of
an attempts to reach the truth…
apologies, I had to take some phone calls from various sisters and a brother…
so, we have the philosophical, which has been around for over
2,500 years and what exactly has been accomplished?
Not much, we are still engaged in the same problems that the ancient Greeks
were engaged with…“what is justice?” “what is the good?”
“what is the difference between right and wrong?”
there is a reason that ethical problems still exists…
that still, after, 2,500 years, we still don’t understand ethics
and what it means to be ethical…we still don’t have a grasp on right or wrong…
I am reading “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” in which is the interesting thought
that Wittgenstein thought wasn’t about language games that we think of
today, but that W. was actually about what is ethical and moral…
he was an ethical writer… morals… he, W. thought the most important
writer of the 19th century was Kierkegaard… and much of W. thought
was engaged with K…
perhaps part of the problem we have with the “ethical” is the fact that
we cannot use our various tools like logic and rationality on ethics…
Justice which is another way of saying “ethical” is to be flexible
and not fixed… for when justice is applied as an absolute…
if you commit X crime, you must be punished by X punishment…
regardless of the situation or circumstances of your actions… is when justice
becomes unjust… when justice is applied without any consideration of
the situation or circumstances, it becomes tyranny or injustice…
but that leaves us with a second question…is the ethical also about
the legal… in other words, is the law ethical? Is the law about right or
wrong or is the law simply about seeking punishment?
I think I know the answer but what if your answer is different?
the law has become more about what will make the DA able to
be able to run for office, better conviction rates as oppose to the
actual act of justice.
justice has become political as oppose to seeking the truth…
is the law about it engagement with its fixation on obeying the law or
is it about the principles behind the law?
are questions about the ethical different then questions about the law/justice?
we have seen right wingers like UR and observe whine about specific acts done
by the left, conspiracies about stealing elections…but it is quite clear that
neither one has spent a quarter of a second thinking about what is justice and
what is eithical…what is right and wrong? they have never explored nor do
they ever intend to explore this question of what is justice and what is the relationship
between justice and the law…they have their habits and prejudices and biases
and superstitions from which they base their ideas of justice or right or wrong…
perhaps therein lies the problem, people think about justice and right and wrong
based on their own biases and prejudices/indoctrinations instead of thinking about
what is just and what is right based upon some philosophical or scientific thinking…
note, that I did not say the religious, because the religious is based upon
bias, superstitions, prejudice and indoctrinations, not on tools like
logic or reason or rationality…
what is justice and right/wrong is different based upon whether the method/tool
used is religion or if the tool is the law or if the tool/method is philosophical…
depending on where you start, you could wind up with three vastly different
understanding of justice/right or wrong depending upon whether one uses
the law, religion or the philosophical…
so one of the questions of method depends upon where one starts, if one starts
with the philosophical or if one starts with the law or if one starts with
the religious…justice can look vastly different for the exact same event…
for example, we see an event, an example of a broken law or an unjust act,
and depending upon if we use the scientific method, the philosophical method
or the religious method or the legal method/tool, will change the nature of
whither an event is just or right/wrong…
if we use science, then an action may be fixed because we as human beings
are fixed… we are set by our evolution to act in a certain way and we
cannot, cannot change our response… so, we do allow the defense of
insanity to explain our legal actions… I was driven insane by seeing my wife
with another man and so I killed them both… and the killer has a reasonable
chance of escaping punishment via this defense… human is driven by
jealousy and that jealousy comes from our evolutionary history… and one
cannot fight evolutionary history…
but from a religious background, one cannot find any such recourse as an
insanity plea… thou shall not kill… there aren’t any such escapes in
that commandment…thou shall not kill…unless is provoked by
another man being with your wife… then hay, its all good…
so if we were to judge people based on religious commandments, the
rules, the ethical/ right and wrong, would be pretty clear… what is right
is what god commands and what is wrong is what god says is wrong…
the religious ethical is different then the legal or scientific or the philosophical
ethical…
but how do we understand right and wrong philosophically?
that was the entire point of Nietzsche… how does on justify
morality/ethics when there is no religious intent… no belief in god…
let us think about this some more…
Kropotkin
America and the American society strives for wealth and power and titles
and fame… so when conservatives attack a project that will help people
rise out of poverty, the right will ask, who will pay for it? as if money,
the sheer fact of money is somehow more important then people’s lives…
if you oppose something because it might “cost” too much, you
have turn money into a fetish in which that fetish becomes more important
then anything else, including people… we cannot raise taxes will improve
people’s life because those who pay taxes and that should be everyone, especially
the wealthy, they would be impacted by the loss of money by taxes… as if taxes
is more important then people’s life…and for a conservative, money is more important
then people’s life…try to pass any law and the very first thing any conservative will
ask, how much will it cost? who is going to pay for it? as if that is the only question
and answer relevant for every single question and answer… the single highest priority
for a conservative is the money spent, not the lives saved…
that is pretty close to being a psychopath where you don’t value lives for
themselves, you value lives for how much they might cost me in taxes…
and yet, the conservative claims to be pro-live when they attempt to control
the lives of the minorities by preventing abortion… which has nothing to do
with lives but with the control over lives of those who (in the mind of the conservative)
should be in slavery, working for us, the white masters…
if you value money/taxes over people’s live, you aren’t pro-life, you are pro-money…
and the being able to control those pesky minorities, that is just bonus points to the racists
conservative…
if someone says, we need to improve people’s lives by raising the minimum wage
or by increasing social security or increasing the WIC program, and you object
because it might raise your taxes, then you are not pro-life…you have put money,
your money as being more important then people’s life and that isn’t being pro-life…
that is being pro-wealth, pro-money…not pro-life…
so the pursuit of the baubles of existence doesn’t lead to any sort of
principles or values… the pursuit of wealth is just that, the pursuit of wealth
and values such as the improvement of people’s life is judge in terms of
the pursuit of money… in other words, we will not improve people’s life
because it would “costs” to much…money ahead of lives…
if your priority is to ask, who will pay for it and how much does it cost?
then you are someone engaged in the baubles of existence… money,
fame, titles, power… and that is your priority, not being about
people and their lives…
if you ask, why should I reduce my standard of living to help others, then
you are not pro-life…or why should I pay more taxes to help others, then you are not
pro-life…you hold other values and not the values of being pro-life
Kropotkin
people, often those on the right, talk about “spiritual values” and they wonder
why we don’t hold onto “spiritual values” today?
and yet these same people quite often pursue the baubles of existence,
and they deny, devalue human beings by making money being more
then people… when they ask defend their taxes from being spent on
helping other people, that is making money more important then people…
and thus the entire idea of being “spiritual” dies in this endless pursuit
of the baubles of existence, money, fame, power, titles…
how are we to even entertain the idea of being spiritual if we
are focused on gaining wealth or seeking fame or trying to get titles?
to be spiritual, one must focus on being spiritual… not on money or fame
or titles or power, but on the spiritual side of existence…
if you goal is to be promoted, then you are not being focused on being
spiritual… so what is your focus on? what are you pursuing?
is it a focus on the political? that ain’t spiritual… is your focus on
the lives of celebrities? that ain’t spiritual… is your focus on
what Spinoza thought? that ain’t spiritual…
so what does the word spiritual actually mean?
Spiritual: relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as
opposed to material or physical things. focus on the nonmaterial
aspects of existence… what does it mean to be human, is far more spiritual
then a pursuit of wealth or fame or…
seeking the nonmaterial is what is spiritual, not the pursuit of anything
material…
Kropotkin
it has been said, that philosophy is epistemology…
the study of knowledge…so in every aspect of philosophy is
the seeking of knowledge…so the various area’s of philosophy,
ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, logic, existentialism are forms of
seeking knowledge…we are seeking to know, have knowledge of
ethics, have knowledge of aesthetics, have knowledge of logic…
the next point is of understanding of events… now for example,
we experience an apple falling from a tree…our senses make note
of the fact that an apple fell from the tree…we see the apple falling,
we hear the apple hitting the ground, we might smell the apple as it breaks
apart or we might taste the apple… any one of our senses or all, can be used to
try to gain knowledge about some sort of event…
we can understand that apple in any number of ways… as an apple falling from a tree,
or we can hold that god caused that apple to fall, or we hold that an apple falling from
a tree is a sign of something is about to happen, something bad or something good…
we can hold a wide variety of causal idea’s about that apple falling…
we look at it historically, biologically, socially, politically, scientifically,
we have a wide ranging ways to work an event like an apple falling from a tree…
the question becomes what method are we going to use to understand or explain
an event like an apple falling?
Kropotkin
what I called “events” are really experiences… so how do we
talk about, understand, communicate experiences?
how would I classify an experience? I can think about it historically,
scientifically, philosophically, religiously, socially, politically?
there are easily a dozen ways to understand and classify an experience…
remember that apple falling to the ground… how do we understand
and classify that experience?
Newton took that event and made it into or made it a symbol of a
scientific law that encompasses all of existence…
that falling apple become a scientific law that exists everywhere…
for me, that falling apple is just an apple… one might consider it
a sign from god a fruit falling to the ground for me to eat it…
one might consider it to be fate, one might consider that falling
apple to be a symbol for a dying state or culture…
you can classify that falling apple in dozens if not hundreds of ways…
so what method would you use to understand or classify that falling apple?
logic, existentialism, science, religion, faith, historically, mathematically,
any one of these can be used to understand and classify that falling apple…
so what method would you use?
Kropotkin
ok, next…we have experiences… and we have some method to explain
or understand that experience…
but are experiences facts?
are facts experiences?
because we use facts to explain experiences… the apple fell from the tree because…
and that because is facts…we can say, gravity, god, historical, political, psychological,
we can explain the apple falling from the tree with a number of facts…
but how do we get our facts?.. we get them though the gaining of knowledge…
knowledge provides us with facts…it has been said that all philosophy is,
is epistemology…the understanding of knowledge, the limits, the scope of,
the methods of knowledge… epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified
belief from opinion…
how do we know what we know and why?
Kropotkin
and we finally reach this point…given the facts, how do we
explain what morality is or what ethics is? what facts would we use
to explain what is the meaning of life?
the questions that drive us to philosophy, such as what is the meaning of life
or what is the “Moral” thing to do or what is good? are questions that lie outside
of facts…
so how would I understand the meaning of life from the fact, that
the earth is 93 million miles from the sun…or the average number of times
a human heart beats is anywhere from 60-100… ok, and how do we
discover or find our create the meaning of life from this fact or how do
we find the meaning of life from the fact of the number of heartbeats…
we are used to facts as being the arbiter of existence…
but how do we use facts to understand the meaning of existence?
and what facts would we use to understand the meaning of existence?
if we cannot use facts to explain or understand existence, then what can we use?
Kropotkin
I have often suggested that we can find meaning, as in the meaning of life
from the values we choose… if we chose, love for example, then we use
that value from which we judge all experiences and all events…
and that choice of love, then determines our actions and beliefs…
but the question arises, from what facts that we have, that will allow
us to choose a value, a value like love for example…what facts will
allow us to choose love as our value of existence?
I am right handed… can I choose a value based on that fact?
I don’t think so… my average heartbeat is 65 beats per minute,
can I choose that fact to base my values upon?
the solar system has 8 planets in it… can we choose that fact to
decide upon a morality or an ethics?
so why would we allow the theory of relativity or the theory of motion
by Newton to work out some theory of morality or ethics?
as did over a hundred years of philosophy… in which Locke for example,
based his theories upon motion… so in fact, can we use a system of facts
such as science facts to determine an ethical or a moral theory?
and what facts lie in a religious theory that holds that there is a god
and he exists somewhere and in the end times, he will hold all of us
accountable… I don’t see any facts in the religious so in theory,
I could base an ethical or moral theory on a religion…
but I can’t accept, for a wide variety of reasons, an idea that there
is a god who has condemned human beings for all time because of a choice
made several thousand years ago by one person?
I can’t accept the idea of a god on faith… so, on what basis can we
create or rationalize a theory of ethics or of morality that isn’t dependent
on a religious ideal…
and suddenly we are back at Nietzsche… who was trying to create a morality without
the use of a religion… remember “god is dead”…
and what does that mean in terms of an ethical or a moral theory?
and we can’t use facts… now what?
Kropotkin
let us think about ethics and morality in terms of another word we
have investigated… transcendental… which means universal, necessary…
so what ethics/morality is transcendental? what form of being ethical is
universal and/or necessary?
if I am kind to my fellow human being, is that being transcendental?
universal/ necessary…conversely what part of my being violent or
nasty to my fellow human being is transcendental? universal or necessary?
If I run over someone with my car, is that moral? and what facts would I have
to prove or disprove my statements?
point out some event/experience, walking a little old lady across
the street… is that being moral? and more importantly, is that universal or
even necessary?
so being moral/ethical isn’t some fact or something that I can prove…
morals and ethics are a collective decision made by a two or more people
in regards to how they are going to act toward each other…
and that decision is based upon… ? you tell me…
but morality and ethics is a collective decision based on some
rules that are not based on facts or are universal/necessary…
morality/ethics isn’t transcendental… so Kant seems to be wrong…
so what it looks like is that morals/morality/ethics is an arbitrary choice made
between any number of people, two or three people or millions or even billions
of people…
we have an unspoken, collective decision as to how we act toward each other…
a decision that isn’t based upon facts or on some universal idea…
we might think that we live with and inside of the “law” but as we have already
decided that the law and morality/ethics have nothing to do with each other…
for example, slavery was legal and the fact that women were the property of men
and that slaves counted for 3/5 of a human being was legal…and that was legal,
but was that moral/ethical?
and how do we decide?
Kropotkin
and we have what I have termed as “Existential questions of existence”
questions that we are born into… “What am I to do?” “What should I hope for?”
“What values should we hold?” “what should I put my energy into?”
and of course each of these individual questions can be converted into
collective questions, “what are we to do?” " what values should we hold to?"
“What should we hope for?”
I would suggest that these are in fact ethical/moral questions because
we cannot answer these existential questions with facts, my arm is 18 inches long
or the earth is 93 million miles from the sun…and we cannot answer these questions
in regards to the transcendental, universal/necessary answers because there doesn’t seem
to be any such beast as transcendental morals or ethics…
how am I to approach this question of “What should we/I hope for?”
what method would I use or what tool would I use to answer this question?
one such possibility might be, might be… we collectively answer the
question of “what should we hope for?” with two or more people…
as we answer our moral and ethical questions…we collectively
answer these profound questions…but Kropotkin, how? what method
or tool shall we use to answer these questions? and that is the question…
what tool or method shall we use?
Kropotkin
we spend our days as human beings seeking that which we need,
both in the physical sense, the biological needs of food, water, shelter,
education and health care for example and while we certainly need those
biological needs, we also have psychological needs of love, belonging,
esteem, safety/security needs…so we are seeking a lot as a human being,
both biologically and psychologically…if we spend our time seeking out
just these things, we would be no better then a animal…just trying to
fulfill our needs but nothing more…
I hold that to be human, fully human we must also engage in the questions
beyond/outside of the pursuit of our bodily and psychological needs…
the Kantian questions which raise questions that lie outside of our basic
pursuit of the biological and psychological needs…for example,
“What am I to hope for?” that is a question that lies outside of our pursuit
of our basic needs…“what am I to do?”… that question also lies outside of
our daily pursuit of meeting our needs…as does the question, “what am I going to
spend my energy on?” of course all of these are also collective questions,
“what are we to do?” and “what should we hope for?” “what should we spend our energy on?”
we have to go beyond just meeting our basic biological and psychological needs…
for that is what animals do… they meet their basic needs and then call it a day…
we are human and we cannot just call it a day when we have meet our basic needs…
for we have questions that must be answered… is there a god? for some people,
they have a need for the knowledge that there is a god, and for others, like myself,
I have no need for that need…for me, the universe makes much more sense
without a god, then with a god…
I have questions about being human that lie above and beyond meeting
my basic biological and psychological needs… it is those questions that
we must find time for…
in this highly scientific and technological world, we must find room for, find time
for questions that exists for us in this technological world… what does it mean to
be human when I can be enhanced with technology… am I still human? or am I
part machine? does my hearing aid further enable my own humanity or does it
mean I am part machine because I so depend on my hearing aid to hear?
I can’t hear without my hearing aid… the only solution for my hearing loss is
technology… insurance doesn’t pay for hearing aids, so any hearing device I get,
I must work for… but what if the price of that much needed technology is beyond my
ability to pay for? I am denied the ability to hear because I am poor…
without hearing, one cannot function in the world because of how much
being human requires, demands communication between people…
and the loss of hearing denies the ability to communicate…
and communication is a fundamental need of being human… we seek
the psychological needs of human existence and those needs depend on
communication…the need for love and the need for esteem and the need
to belong and the safety/security needs are all needs that become reality when
we can communicate with each other… if I can’t hear, finding love become so
much harder and if I can’t hear, how do I find a job that will allow me to
gain my physical needs of food, water, shelter, education, health care?
how do I work out my questions of existence if I am spending my day just
trying to get or seek out my basic needs, both physical and psychological?
I hold that to be human, fully human we must be able to work out questions that
lie outside of just mere existence, of spending our days seeking out the basic
needs… living that life of just seeking out our biological needs is what animals
do… human beings must seek further… we are not and cannot be content just
by the gaining of our biological and psychological needs… we are more then that…
the questions of human existence lie in the greater questions of “what are we to do?”
and “what are we to hope for?” and “what should we spend our energy on?”
it is not just basic survival that drives us but to answer fundamental questions
of existence, human existence that drives us…
“Why am I/ we here?” what is the point of human existence if it is only to
seek out the bodily and psychological needs? we must be more then just
seeking out our physical and psychological needs… we have questions that
only us human beings can ask and answer…
Kropotkin
an interesting quote from Nietzsche:
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth then
lies”
and the three types of man will think to themselves:
the first, the largest group will deny this…
the second group will admit this, but don’t know why
and the third group, the smallest by far, will admit AND know why…
Kropotkin
let us look at psychology… we have theories about the general situation of
human beings…and we have individual, one on one theories about a given person…
we do not, as yet, have a comprehensive overall theory of psychiatry…
Freud was one such attempt to explain all human behavior in terms of
a specific factor or two… and Freud has been pretty much
rejected by most people in the field of psychology…
so do we have a opposing theory of psychiatry that explains
most if not all of our behaviors? we have recently, a theory called
“the unified theory of psychology” and I suspect that its arrival is not
universally accepted…
in psychology, we have 7 major perspectives in modern psychology…
the psychodynamic perspective…
the behavioral perspective
the cognitive perspective
the biological perspective
the cross-culture perspective
the evolutionary perspective
the humanistic perspective
so we have plenty of theories of what makes us human…
and given the number of theories, we can assume that no one theory
has capture the field…
the question is “why do you do what you do?”
I suspect that our actions are a response to our actual and our perceive needs…
we think we need something and so we act… our behavior is lead by our
needs… I need love… and so I seek love, usually in all the wrong places…
but our needs are not always so obvious, we have needs that are unconscious,
invisible to us, but known to our unconscious mind…
now Freud postulated that the needs that drive us is the sexual needs,
and there is certainly grounds for that belief… but our sexual needs
are just one group of needs that has to jostle for supremacy in the midst of many
diverse needs… and it is the diverse needs, all seeking attention and
seeking to be filled that creates conflict within us…we need love and hope
and esteem and safety/security and food, water, shelter, education, health care
and all of those needs are trying to be met…which needs am I goin to met is
one of the key questions of human existence…for we cannot, cannot met all our needs…
and much of the conflicts we have, is that our needs are not being met…
I have a need for security/safety and what if that need was being stopped by
others… I would feel angry if my needs weren’t being met because it was being
stymied by others… hence much of the anger of the world lies here…
needs denied means people will become angry or hostile or bitter or whatever
emotions they feel… and why we might use this approach to explain the rise
of trumpista’s… they are angry and bitter that their needs aren’t being met,
and so they turn to IQ45…he of course failed them… he is a failure…
they, the conservative turns away from liberalism because they feel that
within liberalism their needs will not get fulfilled…
we act and do based upon our needs and if our needs are being fulfilled or not…
that is one possible overall explanation of who we are…
Kropotkin
Why are you undermining your own ex-president by calling him IQ45? When I told wendy to take Biden seriously, I meant the same about every other American official you old hippie. You think a nation that is at war with itself can thrive? You people are heading for an abrupt awakening.
Its like with Roman Ceasars…you might hate them, they might be reverting the Republic to barbarism, they might be mad…but they carry the Republic with their office and if on nothing else, on this token a salutation is owed and allegiance is due. Not to the individual, but to the Republic through the individual. You get it?