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Philosophy Forums Philosophy
3621

if we are to understand what it means to give human existence,
a context, then we must have all the evidence needed to make such a
interpretation…

to give us the “meaning” of life, then we must have the starting point, the
“map” we take and the ending point… thus, are we religious in nature?
if we are to make human existence be religious in nature, then we must
know all the facts necessary to make that determination…
so is there a god? and if we accept Nietzsche saying, “god is dead and we
have killed him” then no, we cannot interpret human beings as being
religious in nature… we have killed god… that is about as anti-religious
as it gets…

so is man scientific in nature? that depends how we interpret it, doesn’t it?

putting human existence into context by making interpretations about what it
means to be human, seems to be the way things go…

so the question of interpretations come from what aspect of human existence
do we think covers the broadest range of the human experience… so, do
we think about or interpret the human experience from the standpoint
of history or from economics or from a scientific standpoint or from
a philosophical standpoint? or do we try to interpret the human experience
from a little bit of all of those disciplines…now I tend to (which I didn’t see
until it was pointed out to me, I tend to work philosophy from a psychology
standpoint…which I guess it true… I have studied psychology especially in
regards to Freud to Jung to Reich… very little psychology that has happened
within the last 70 years, that I have studied…

the question of “what does it mean to be human” can occur from a
psychological side or a mental side or a physical side… or it can come
from one of the disciplines like history or economics, for example…

so how do we interpret the human condition, experience?

Kropotkin

3622

so how do we interpret the human condition?

how do we make use of what it means to be human?

we use stories…history is a story, economics is a story,
biology is a story and of course, philosophy is a story…
and we understand what it means to be human by the stories
of history and philosophy and economics…

and what of my story? I am and always have been an “outsider”
I have never really fitted into society or the state or groups…
for a wide variety of reasons, I do not fit into the narrative that
society likes to tell about its members…

and philosophy could be said to be outsiders looking back into the inside of
society…

in my long life, I have been disconnected, alienated from the society…
I see existence from the outside of the normal path of human society…
I am at odds with society because I cannot understand/see what is the
point of society as is constructed… to spend one’s life working for a mere
pittance makes no sense to me… I became an anarchist, in part, because the
traditional understanding of the relationship between the one and the state,
made no sense to me…why should I exist within society/the state when
it doesn’t benefit the individual member? why do we work for 40 plus years
if we don’t get anything from it? If I don’t get something of value from
our current system of existence, capitalism/democracy/ Christianity,
our current ism’s, then why should I participate in them?

in other words, I see no nourishment for the human being in our current
political, social, economic, religious or philosophical systems…

our bodies aren’t being fed, neither are our souls, my basic human needs
are not being met in our current systems’… ism’s…

I was educated to be a worker… to be a slave worker in a system that
couldn’t care less if I lived or died…when I should have been educated
to be human… as you should have been educated to engaged in
what it means to be human… not to spend our lives working for nothing…

the best analogy of human existence right now, is the beehive or the ant colony…
we are just workers in a vast hive of other workers… putting a vast amount
of energy, time, money and effort into building, but what we are building must
have some value of some sort, instead of what is happening right now which
is to build for the sake of building…and what is being built is not relevant
or important…building for the sake of building… mindless activity for
the sake of mindless activity…and that is the story I see today in America…

building for the mindless sake of building… with no thought or engagement
with, is that mindless building even necessary? does that mindless building
even help us get to some worth while goal? does this building help us
in some fashion to become better people? or to simply fill someone’s
pocketbook?

we shy away or don’t even ask these sort of questions because it might lead
us to some understanding that we have been wasting our time… in this mindless
building for the sake of building something…it has no point, no goal,
no objective outside of getting someone else wealthy… we waste our lives
getting other people pocketbook filled… is that a good use of my time?

so what story can I work with that will allow us human beings to
achieve some sort of understanding that we have for over two
centuries, engaged in building for the sake of building and we have
done nothing to improve what it means to be human…because
we now hold that the human condition is about mindless building because
that makes it look like we have done something with our time for the last
two centuries and in fact, we have don’t jack shit for two centuries…
except mindless building meant only to improve someone’s else
pocketbook… not to improve the human condition…

so, what story do I tell?

Kropotkin

3623

up to the, say French Revolution, 1790…we held
pretty universal beliefs… we held that the power of the universe derives
from God to the popes, to the monarchs and on down…
we also held universal moral/ethical derived from the bible,
in the west anyway…we held that philosophy was the search for knowledge
as every philosopher from Descartes to Kant, worked out what knowledge
was, what was its scope and limits…the universe as we knew it, was
a pretty cohesive place…Science told us that the universe was nothing
more then a clock… which god once he wound up the universe, left it alone…
given the facts at hand, each of these theories seem to be reasonable…
there was an order, a structure, a rhyme and reason to the universe…given
that there were universal, transcendental theories which neatly explained
everything… the political, the social, the religious, the philosophical…
all were explained by universal theories that place humanity and individuals
into a easily understood context…

and then by the next century, 1900, virtually every single universal theory
had been punctured or was in tatters… recall that Nietzsche said “god was dead
and we have killed him” roughly around 1880, give or take a few years…the
theory of evolution had destroyed our understanding of the human being…
there was no universal ethical theory we could refer to given these two
theories…our understanding of the physicals forces were in tatters due
to the new theories that had come about… and in physics, we had new
theories in thermodynamics and a new theory of electromagnetism…
along with new theories about atoms, chemistry and radiation…
each new theory push the the old comfortable universal theories out the door…

our view of the universe and our place within that universe had dramatically
changed…we found ourselves without any type of universal theories that explained
who we were and what was our place in the universe…of course the new theories
weren’t just in the hard sciences, but in philosophy, mathematics, social theory,
economics, history to name a few…by 1900, there was not any type of
universal theory of any kind to explain the universe or our place in the universe…

and from 1900 to today, we have tried to recreate universal theories
in science, the Grand Unification Theory for one… but in places like
philosophy, there didn’t seem to be any type of Grand Unification Theory
available to philosophers… Philosophy broke up into smaller groups
of theories to try to explain a small share of the universe…
we have quite of few smaller theories like logical positivism,
analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, post structuralism,
to name a few 20 century schools of philosophy…they came about
because there was no longer any type of universal theory of philosophy
that explain everything…

and we have new theories of economics that tried to be universal,
Marxism for example, but they proved to be unsuccessful in the
creation of a universal, historical, philosophical, ethical, economical,
theory of the universe…and we have the rise of capitalistic theory which
also tried to create a universal theory of humans and that too failed…

the history of the 20th century can be call “an attempt to create some sort
of universal theory of existence” and they would not have been needed
if the old theories were still in use or valid… we only need new theories
if the old theories have failed… and the old universal theories of existence
be it political, philosophical, scientific, economic or social were dead…

and we have spent the last 120 years trying to create/ recreate the old universal
theories of existence… theories that explain via universal law/rules what it
means to be human… and we have failed, so far, to create any new
universal theories of existence and that can be considered a theory
of the history of the 20/21st century… an attempt to create/recreate
universal theories of existence in philosophy, ethics/morality, science,
mathematics, economics, physics and social sciences…

do we continue this path of attempting to create a new universal
theory of math, science, history, physics, philosophy… etc, etc…
or do we go a new way and accept that a new universal theory of
existence may not be possible and we learn to love
our current theories which are bits and pieces of some sort
of a universal theory, be it science, physics, philosophy, ethics…

Kropoktin…

3624

to carry on the last post, we have no universal theory to cover our
disciplines, for example, in psychology, we have not one theory, but
7 theories or as they call them, perspectives.

they are:

  1. the psychodynamic perspective
    2.the behavioral perspective
  2. the cognitive perspective
  3. the biological perspective
    5.the cross-cultural perspective
  4. the evolutionary perspective
  5. the humanistic perspective…

so name a discipline that has a unified,
universal theory? evolution has a couple of different variations to it…
as does biology as does history as does every single other discipline…

that is what defines the modern age? we don’t have a single unified,
universal theory of any discipline…

which means in every single discipline, we have a “ad hoc” situation
in every single discipline…temporary solutions to every single
discipline we know…

in other words, there is no solid ground for any theory we hold,
be it political, scientific, economic or philosophical…
we are truly the first lost generation in history with no firm
ground for the beliefs we hold…

hence the alienation and disconnect from from society and the state
and ever ourselves…there is no theory to
hold us to the ground or be able to fix us to any theory we might have…

so what does this mean for us ?

we are truly rootless or fixed into any type of theory…

so what ties us to reality?

Kropotkin

3625

so the question becomes, how come we cannot create a universal,
transcendental theory of everything?

I suspect, but can’t prove that is it because we are not fixed, set in place…
every day, I am becoming… as you change everyday and society changes everyday,
how can theories be set, fixed if they are theories about people and ideas that
change or become something different every day, if they are always in the
state of becoming something different everyday?

this becoming challenges and defeats any attempts to create a fixed, set
theory of reality…if psychological I am in the state of changing, becoming,
then how can we create a fixed theory of psychology?

reality is changing every day, how do we create a theory that can keep up
with its ever changing nature? as of right now, every theory is a theory of
this second, this moment, and then because of the changing nature of reality,
that theory is no longer valid… with each passing second, that theory becomes
more irrelevant…I can posit a theory of Kropotkin, as of right now, right here,
but as I change with every passing second, that theory becomes irrelevant…
that theory speaks of Kropotkin as he was, not as he is…he is always in a state
of becoming… then the question is, becoming what?

and therein we might be able to work out some theory of existence if, if
we don’t work out where we are today, because that will change in the next minute,
but we can work out a theory of where we want to be… the theories we work
out must be of what is to come… we work out what our goals can and should be,
and we work toward those goals… that becomes our theories of existence…

we look to the future and see where we want to be, not where we are because
where we are has already changed in the last second…the theory of the reality
becomes the theory of where we want to be…what goals should we try for,
what should we become, not, where are we now? the goal of existence is not
where are we now, but where should we be in the future…we should become what?

the who, what, when, where, how and why…of the future… that is where our theories
need to be… focused on where we are going, not where we have been or where we are,
because those theories are of the past and present and we are always moving, changing,
becoming… and that becoming turns those theories of past and present into relics of
what was…and we need to focus on what will be and how do we get there…

and when we get there, we then move onto the next goal, the next focus of our
becoming… we are always becoming… let our theories reflect that becoming…

we change and our theories must reflect that change and the only theories flexible
enough to adapt to the every changing theories are the theories of “what is our goal”…
what is it we are trying to do? not where we are or where we have been, but what is
the future…

Kropotkin

3626

what can the absolute mean when we are always in the state
of becoming? if we are always in the state of becoming, there can
be no absolute… how do you hit a target that is always moving?

by aiming at the end place of that target…

any set theory of reality must fail because reality is always moving, changing,
becoming…

Kropotkin

3627

the question is “What is man?” we have become a problem to ourselves…

and why is that? Because we have lost any universal, transcendental theories
of existence… we cannot identify ourselves via any universal theory we might have…

in other words, we cannot place ourselves in terms of ism’s… Catholicism,
Hinduism, Buddhism…capitalism, communism… because they are not
universal theories of existence… they are, at best, “ad hoc” understandings
of the world… temporary solutions to the problem of human existence…

they are not, or are no longer universal theories of existence… recall our Nietzsche,
“God is dead and we have killed him”…which suggest that theories like this, have
lifespans… most of them rather short lifespans because they exists only while the
crisis the theories are created to fix, only last a short time…short term solutions
to short term problems… Ad hoc…

the problem of America during the 1880’s and 1890’s was the issue between gold
and silver… short term problem with a short term solution and neither one
matters today…ad hoc problems with ad hoc solutions…

so what is man? until we can answer this question as a universal solution,
we cannot understand what is man… we will still continue to be a problem
to ourselves…alienated and disconnected from society, each other and ourselves…

Kropotkin

3628

we are educating people to become workers instead
of educating people to become better people,
and that has made all the difference in the world…
that difference is in part, why we are alienated from
the world, the state, each other and from ourselves…

if we educated people to become human beings,
we all would be a lot better off…

Kropotkin

3629

what is the English root word of virtue?

go back far enough and we reach the word “Arete”
which is the Greek word for excellence…and if you think about it,
isn’t virtue really about achieving excellence?

who among you strive to be virtuous or excellent?

that is not what drives the Modern world today… the baubles
of existence drives the world… the world teaches the false
idols of money, fame, power, titles… who cares about that which
you can carry to one’s grave?.. and that is virtue or excellence…

you can lose your money, and you can lose your job/title and you can lose
fame and you can lose power… but you can never lose virtue or excellence…
you can even lose your faith in god and no longer believe… but excellence/virtue
are there for life…to strive for virtue/excellence can easily be the goal of one’s
lifetime…

I try to achieve virtue/excellence in the small acts of existence…
when someone hands me too much money, I give the extra back,
I aim for honesty… I take blame when blame is mine… Kropotkin,
you were wrong about this… and I take immediate responsibility for
being wrong…it isn’t in the big acts of virtue, but in the everyday,
when no one is looking acts of virtue/excellence I try to achieve…
to do the “right” thing even if no one is looking… that is how I
try to achieve virtue/excellence every single day…do I always succeed?
no, but the work comes in trying every single day to achieve excellence/virtue…

my goal isn’t to become wealthy or famous or have a title or weald power,
my goal is to achieve virtue/excellence… the hardest goal of all…

Kropotkin

3630

this morning I begin to read Buber, “I and thou” translated by Kaufmann…

I wonder what I will learn…

Kropotkin

3631

the first great lesson: we are, humans, all about the relationships…
I and thou… is the relationship between one person, me and another person, you…

and that lesson has been forgotten… we encourage relationships with
the material world, with money, fame, power, titles… but with other people?
no, no we don’t do that…to text a friend is a relationship mediated by technology…
we don’t see the friend, we can’t hear the friend, we can’t smell or touch the friend,
the technology stands between us and our friend…and a relationship that is
mediated by something else isn’t a relationship… and what about god?

if we go to church to have a relationship with god, then the relationship is
mediated by the church… the church and the preacher and the request for
money, all of that stands between a relationship between me and god…

to hold a relationship requires access to, immediacy to the other party…

as as been said, long distance relationships rarely ever work because to hold to,
to maintain that relationship requires access to, immediacy to the other person…
and a relationship to god also requires us to have access to, immediacy to god…
and that in organized religion, the church, be it Catholicism or Judaism or
protestant or any eastern religion, if the church mediates between the
person and god, that is a long distance relationship…

so to have a true relationship with god, requires access to, immediacy to god…
to allow the church to stand between god and ourselves is to have the church
mediate between us…

and the same can be said about our relationship with people in this modern world,
where we are mediated between others by technology, science, distance, isms
and ideologies…

to have a relationship with another person requires us to have access to, immediacy
to the other person…a relationship separated by time, distance, technology,
science, and ism’s is a relationship that is mediated by those things…it stands
between two people…

if you hold to the US vs THEM mentality, then you are separating yourself from
others by the “vs” and that “vs” could be ism’s, nationality, race, creed, sexual
orientation, sex and there is a long list of “vs” that allow us to distance ourselves
from others… we allow such things to stand between us and the others,
we are mediated from others by race, creed, sexual orientation, nationality…etc, etc…
and all of that “vs” is inside of our heads…

paint a picture of two people talking… show me where in that picture where lies
race, creed, sexual orientation, nationality… those are mental concepts that
don’t exists in the real world, but we allow them to mediated or separate us from
each other…but the concept of nationality isn’t visible, real, or can be pointed
out in any picture of two people talking…

in our existence, we allow mental concepts like nationalism and race and creeds
and sexual orientation to stand between us an other people…

so what mental concepts is standing between you and other people?

what mental concepts are standing between the relationships you have
with god, freedom, hope, love and justice?

Kropotkin

3632

I am reading a book, I am also listening to music…
as is my habit… but both actions are not mediated by anything,
nothing stands between my reading and nothing stands between my
music…I have direct access to, an immediacy to both…
I can feel the music within my soul… soft, gentle, with rhythm…
the music touches my soul, it has an immediacy to me…

I am reading… I can touch the book, I can understand the words,
the words directly impact my thoughts and my soul…

I am having/in a relationship with both the music and the book I am reading…

If I relay that information to you, if I explain the book, the music to you,
I am standing between you and the music, the book, I am mediating them,
in between you and the music/book… if you have immediate access
to the books/music I am listening to/reading, then I am no longer in between,
mediating between us…

and so this access to, includes our experiences… I have access to, been exposed
to experiences you may not have or may never be able to have… my hearing loss
for example, my experiences with the my hearing loss is immediate to me, I
experience it every single day… whereas for you, you might never experience it,
and thus at best, your understanding of a hearing loss is second hand, what you know
about hearing loss is mediated through me…you cannot experience it first hand
thus you can guess at what it means to be hearing impaired but you can never really
know because you haven’t experienced it…

much of life is felt/known through second hand experiences… it is mediated through others…
and we can imagine what it is, but until we immediately experience it, we cannot know
for sure what that experience is really like…you cannot know what a hearing loss is…

thus the problem with such media as books, music, movies, TV… it is second hand
experiences which it mediates to others via the medium…and we think we know, but
until we actual experience it, we are second hand participants to the event/experience…

the thing to note is that most of what we know, what we feel as reality is really just
second hand experience brought to us, mediated by others… I can’t know what it is
like to go to the moon, but others who have done so, can share their experience,
but that is second hand experience and should be treated as such…

I have loved… that is first hand experience… and I know what it is like to love…
but maybe you haven’t loved…so I might relate my experience, but for you it
will be a second hand experience until you have experienced love…
and once you have loved, you will think about it differently, far differently…

we spend too much time thinking about the second hand experiences and not
enough about our first hand experiences… experiencing god second hand in a
church is not a first hand experience… it is a second hand experience and should be
treated as such… until you experience god first hand, god immediately felt
and experience, you cannot know what it means to experience god…

god mediated is music or books second hand described or mediated…

this is why we are so confused about such concepts as freedom, justice, equality,
community… because we mistake the second hand experience as reality, when
we can only know these concepts first hand… thus the slave can understand what
slavery means because it is a first hand experience, not a second hand experience
that we all know of…

so learn to understand what is a first hand, immediate experience
and what is a second hand, mediated experience is and know the difference…

Kropotkin

3633

I have written about the “ad hoc” nature of our existence…
that there is no overall theory of everything, not even in
the disciplines of history or economics or social studies
or physics or biology or philosophy…

another way to seek this overall theory of existence is the drive
to the eternal…seeking what is eternal in human beings, idea’s,
theories, religions, but can we even see anything that is eternal?

god is dead, remember, and we have no overall theory of existence…
and nationalism and other such things have no eternal aspects…is love
eternal? nope…so what exactly is eternal? nothing as far as can tell…

to seek the eternal is to seek a theory of everything…so if there is no eternal,
there is no search for the theory of everything…
and we have our disconnection and alienation of human beings from society,
the state, their culture, each other and being disconnected/alienated from ourselves…

so how do we bring back connection/ relationship between the individual and the
state/society/culture/ each other and ourselves?

If the problem of alienation arises from our “ad hoc” theories of everything,
then how do we “overcome” this “ad hoc” nature of all our theories?

I have brought two answers to bear, one is a focus on the values we hold…
if we hold onto values like love, hope, justice, freedom, diversity, openness…
just to name a few values we could focus on instead of holding “ad hoc” theories
of existence, we hold on to values… and it is within those values that we
understand the nature of existence…our judgements, our actions, our
perception of the universe is through these values… I see the universe through
the values of love or hope or justice… how we connect to the universe, to
our fellow man, to the state, to the culture is by the values we choose, be it love
or hope or peace or justice…

the second possibility is by the goals we choose… we understand existence by
the goals we aim for…I want to know how I can exists as myself, as an individual
and how I can be part of the society, the us…how do we fit into society/the state/
the culture is one of the major questions of the modern era…it may be said to be
the major question of the modern era…Kierkegaard works about the individual,
was the opening shot in the war/battle between the individual and the state…

and we have come no closer to an answer then K did…

what is the relationship between the state/society and the individual?

it is more then a political question or a social question or a economic question,
it is all three and much more…Marxism tried to answer this question by
putting human beings as a small, insignificant aspect of the much larger
substructure of economics that dominated everything…

communism does the same thing as the isms as capitalism and catholicism, and
buddhism does… if there some overall plan of god, then there is no room
for man…we become bit players in some overarching plan of another…
even if it is god’s plan…I reject this diminution of the human being…

individual beings even the lowest among us can still have value and worth…
because of the possibilities inherent within all of us… but we must
struggle to reach our possibilities…and that too means we must achieve and then overcome
our daily needs both bodily and psychological…we cannot achieve our possibilities
if we are engaged in a daily fight for basic human needs of food, water, shelter,
health care and education…

in seeking our individual possibilities, we become greater then just one individual…
that is why the society must, must give all energy to meeting the individual needs,
all of us, our need for food, water, shelter… etc, etc…

and then, we can reach for what is possible for us… so we can spend our mornings
meeting our society needs, doing our jobs for example, and then in the afternoon,
we spend it seeking what is possible for us… this is basically what Marx wrote…
give society several hours so we can meet our bodily needs and then we take
several hours on our own to seek and reach that which is possible for us…

this division then allows us to be part of society, and also allows us
to seek our individual self… we are part of society and we are ourselves…
the best of both worlds… we no longer seek the bauble of existence,
we simply fulfill our social obligations and then we engage in a search for
what is our possibilities…maybe 4 or 5 hours for each, society’s need,
and then our possibilities…

given our modern technology, I see this as very doable…as of right now,
we only give lip service to those who wish to engage in what is possible for themselves,
but we force them to either starve or they must engage with society to the point
of not being able to seek their possibilities…our current system of 40 hour, 5 day
work week, 50 weeks of the year just isn’t able to allow enough time or energy for
someone to make an engagement with their possibilities…it takes time and leisure
for someone to properly engage with their possibilities…instead of the current war
between society and the individual, they work together to achieve their respective
goals…and they can achieve their goals only if they work together…

there is an underlying collective intelligence that exists within society…
we make collective decisions often without any public consultations…
for example, an election is a collective decision made by all of us…
and we make such decisions, collective decisions as in the almost
universal move to make marijuana legal in all 50 states…
that was a collective decision made individually by each state…
as was the decriminalization of homosexuality…

universal decisions made individually…
and then carried out universally…

but once again, decisions made “ad hoc” without any sense of a universal plan,
or theory…it just feels right or sounds right…as is true with our sense of
justice or fairness…it just feels right…but with no plan as such…

I attempt to reach the eternal in me and in the universe and I fail…
why? because I am not eternal or fixed or set or universal… I am the very
personification of “ad hoc”…everything about me is temporary, designed
to meet the moment at hand, to understand the current situation, but not
go beyond that…

to seek the eternal is to seek something outside of me and what actually
exists outside of me? if Kant is right and we organize the universe based on
patterns set in our mind, then there is nothing outside of us…if Kant is right…

so what is eternal? what is universal?

god, freedom and immortality?

what do you say?

Kropotkin

3634

let us approach this from another direction:

much of the “mystic” thought centers on the union with god,
the assimilation of man into the “higher” levels…

much of Marxism/communism lies here… we are to assimilate into
the higher levels which is the substructure of economics which dominate
the world, according to Marxism… to assimilate human beings into the great force
that is dialectical materialism that is the governing force of marxism…
we adapt to the social forces that dominate our lives, we change to meet the
needs of the dialectical materialism, not it changes for us… we change for it…

and this is true of capitalism and Buddhism and catholicism or any ism that
you must assimilate into, become part of to “achieve” success…

to achieve heaven or to become a saint, one must sacrifice one individual self to
the greater force of that ism…to assimilate into something… not to be one’s own
self…to become eternal, one must assimilate into, not be oneself, but to sacrifice
oneself into the eternal…I reject this…

to hold onto that which is me, and to bring that into the completion of
my search for what is possible for me, I am willing to destroy the eternal,
the forever… to keep me into what is possible for me…

but I am willing to meet the eternal half way… to be able to be me
and still be part of the whole… some sort of compromise must be possible…
I am willing to be part of the whole if, if I can continue to seek what is possible
for me without being hindered or be obstructed by rules and regulations designed
to force me into accepting the path of society at the cost of becoming who I am…
I am willing to become part of the whole if, if I can continue to seek what is
possible for and then to attempt to achieve that possibility…

as this all sounds very vague, I shall try to “bring it down to earth”

I hold that one possibility for me, is to become a philosopher…
and I hold that my soul/body desires to be a philosopher…
but I lack the money to spend my days and night seeking that possibility…
I am forced to work and thus my ability to seek what is possible for me,
is reduced, lessened…society has forced me into working for it, at the cost
of my ability to seek what is possible for me… I am part of the machine,
with no ability to escape that dehumanization that is the machine of society…
for short, we call that capitalism…it is a economic system designed to
strip us of our dignity and it dehumanizes us and return we get worthless
baubles of existence… a comfortable couch or a “cool” car… so the fuck what?

I have sold myself into slavery to spend 40 plus years to achieve a retirement
that will last, at best, 10 years… what a terrible deal…
a lifetime of work, pain and agony just to have 10 years of retirement…
which will be spend in illness and misery… no thank you…

let us begin the search for a deal which brings us a better bargain…

reject the current system… one that puts us into slavery for capitalism
and dehumanizes us and brutalizes us by making us nothing better then machines…
I work in a factory lite… I am nothing better then the scale that I use to weigh
the produce… just another machine which is easily discarded when I have no
more use…when I stop making a profit for the company, the company has no more
use for me… I am expendable and discarded without a second thought…

I am just another tool to use and discard… or to say another way,
I am assimilated into the system, as part of the system, and discarded
when I lack any value…my individual self has no value or use in modern
capitalism…

I am supposed to become one with the system… a system that doesn’t see me
as an individual, or of any individual value… only as a cog in the machine do
I have any value in capitalism…to be assimilated this way is to become
dehumanized, worthless as a human being, devalued to just a cog in the machine…
a cog that can be discarded at any time or moment…

this type of assimilation as a human being into capitalism destroys that which
makes me a human being…for capitalism has no use for the values which make
me human… capitalism has no use for love or justice or freedom or hope or
honesty or peace… the only value that matters in capitalism is profits…
everything else is expendable to that value… so why should I spend 40 years
of my life working for a system that dehumanizes and devalues me, as a human being?

to become one with capitalism is to destroy everything about me that makes
me, me…assimilation to capitalism will lead to my own destruction…
so, why would I want to assimilate to an ism like capitalism?

the search for the eternal doesn’t mean we have to seek such destructive
ism’s as capitalism, communism, catholicism, buddhism?

ism’s that deny us as human beings…and makes us part of an eternal system
that makes us cogs in the machine…

until we create an ism which allow us to keep our humanity and self as is,
we cannot accept or allow any type of assimilation into a ism that
denies who we are as human beings…

which means we need to work out or create a new type of ism, one that allows
us to remain human while being able to be part of the system/ism that is current
in society…

as of right now, there is no system that will allow us to be ourselves and still
be a part of a larger system… an eternal as it were…we have no ism that isn’t
part of the systematic destruction of what it means to be human…

Kropotkin

3635

I just have to say, I like the way you finished with this.

3636

K: thank you… but with any philosophy, part of the solution requires us to
state the problem first, and once the problem is stated, then we can seek or
look for a solution… part of the current problem in both America and the world,
is a failure to understand what the cost of the current ism’s mean to us, individually
and collectively…we simple can’t see that our alienation and disconnection to
society/the state/ each other and to ourselves lies, in the nihilism of our modern
ism’s which is to say, our ism’s like capitalism and communism and buddhism
and catholicism…causes the nihilism we see in the world today…
how do we overcome this? first, by becoming aware of… and that is the point
we are in now, becoming aware of the nihilism of capitalism and communism
and buddhism… etc, etc…

very few people are aware of the problem, and that is my starting point,
making people aware of the problem…and then I, if I should live long enough,
or some others, more likely, will find a solution to our negative and destructive
ism’s that dominate the world today…

so becoming aware of the problem… most people live in denial that there is a problem…
and that must change if we are to overcome our current nihilism/ism’s of the world…

Kropotkin

3637

how are we to “become” one if we are to answer to
the ism’s of reality that demand that we are not unless we
are part of the ism… in other words, we are forced to reject who
we are to become part of the machine, the ism’s that dominate the current
world… if I am to accept, say nationalism, as my ism, then I have to
reject or demote that which is me… I must deny who I am, to become
part of the ism “nationalism”…I cannot be me and still hold to nationalism
as an ism… it is one or the other, not both at the same time…

the only ism large enough, broad enough to cover what I am individually
and collectively is the ism of “human being”… any other ism simply doesn’t
extend far enough to include that which is me and that which is the state/society/
culture/ ism’s…so what does it mean to be man?.. to be a human being?

until I find an answer inclusive enough to include “all” human beings, I am back
at the starting point of not having a universal, transcendent theory of everything…

perhaps this is where we can find our universal theory of everything, what is a human being?

start there and then reach out to discover various ism’s and ideologies in terms of
our answer to the question, what is a human being?

the various ism’s of religion, the state, society, culture are simply too small to
answer the question, what is a human being? we must seek a far greater answer to
to the question, what is a human being, we must expand our understanding to seek out
every possibility of existence/of being human…

we are thinking too small… and until we expand and extend our understanding
of what it means to be human, we cannot find an answer…

so don’t narrow your search, expand your search… think of our collective
nature, and decide what in that collective nature makes us human beings?

what do we have collectively and individually, that makes us human?

what is the commonality of existence that make us human?

Kropotkin

3638

In my philosophical work, it is not always possible to state the problem first because sometimes it is the problem that I have to find first(at the same time I know I need to find a solution because something is broken) - this is also the case with some of my engineering work. The cause of the problem becomes my focal point - here we speak of dependencies(sometimes circular in nature).

It looks to me that we have to piece all of the parts of the problem together before we can state the problem.

3639

I have often stated that I am not interested in finding out the limits
of language as some are and I am not interested in finding out
the limits of knowledge…others have done that far better then I could ever
do, so I don’t engage in those philosophical questions…

but with that said, what do I engage with?

the range and limits of what it means to be human…I seek the possibilities
that exists within each of our lives and then try to connect what it means to be
human with the collective, all of us… as a human, how do I fit into society?
as we have no overall universal theory of being human or how we are to fit into
society, every theory right now is “ad hoc”, temporary, to fit the situation at hand…

human existence doesn’t seem to have some fixed, permanent basis… human existence
seems to be “ad hoc” dealing with the current situation at hand…with no such
overall theory or a universal understanding of what it means to be human…
every man for him or her self at this point in regards in understanding their place
in the universe…

what is reality? it seems to be different for you as it is for me and is it for everyone…

as my reality is different from your reality, as is different from everyone else
on planet earth…what theory could possible bridge the gap between me
and everyone else on earth? what universal understanding can bridge the gap
between me and you?

we have the same needs of food, water, shelter, health care, education…
and we have the same psychological needs of love, belonging, esteem,
safety/security…that is something we have in common…our biological
and psychological needs…I was born at one point in time as you were born
in one point in time and we are, each of us born in different places…

so we cannot connect from having the same beginning because our
beginnings are very different and our ending, our deaths will be vastly
different in space and time…

I don’t see a universal, overall theory that might even connect just the two of us,
you and me…

but perhaps with the use of imagination, we might find some connection that
will unite us into some overall, universal theory of existence? maybe…

Kropotkin

3640

in thinking about this thing we call philosophy, it is quite often
a search for the limits of something… for example, epistemology,
the theory of knowledge is the search for the limits of knowledge,
the methods, the validity and the scope of knowledge…

so let us look at each separate parts of philosophy…

so Aesthetics, would the searching for the limits of beauty, ART, taste,
and the creation of personal kinds of truths… the methods, the validity
and the scope of Aesthetics… that sounds about right…

Ethics, would be the search for the limits of value and morality…
the methods, the validity and the scope of ethics/morality…

logic, would the search for the limits of valid inference and
reasoning… the methods, the validity and the scope of logic…
again, sound about right…

Metaphysic, would be the limits of the fundamental nature of
being and the world that encompasses it… the methods, the validity
and the scope of Metaphysics…again, sound about right…

Political philosophy, is the search for the limits of political philosophy,
the methods, the validity and the scope of political philosophy…
again, works for me…

and god knows that there are all kinds of little subsets of philosophy…
philosophy of religion and philosophy of science and the various
theories of mind theories… and the philosophy of languages…

and in each of those theories, we are looking at the limits of them,
the methods, the validity and the scope of the various subsets of
philosophy…

so let us pick one at random, Deconstruction: an approach to
understanding the relationship between text and meaning…
what are the limits to Deconstruction, what are the methods,
the validity and the scope of Deconstruction? and once again,
our little maxim seems to work…

and now we return to the ethics/morality portion of the program…

so, we have ethics/morality, so what are the sources of ethics/morality, the limits of
ethics/morality, the methods of ethics/morality, the validity and the scope
of ethics/morality?

we can begin by noting that each civilization, each nation and each state,
has had a different idea, basis and understanding of what was ethical
and what was moral? for example, the Greeks, specifically Athens, but not limited
to Athens, the basis of ethical/moral understanding was in the concept of Arete…
which we might think of as excellence…the moral man, the ethical man
was the epitome of excellence…we think of excellence as being one thing,
and being moral as another, but that was a distinction that the Greeks never made…
it was the same thing to them…

you could almost spot the fracture in Greek society when the split occurred
between the two, excellence and moral… and I would say around 400 bc.
would be where it began…both Socrates and Plato would have agreed with
the statement that they were the same thing, excellence and moral…
but you don’t see that after them…even Aristotle started to drift away from
that idea…

and you compare the Greek idea of the ethical with the Roman,
and you can see the difference…their social codes were derived from
another idea which was “mos maiorum” which is ancestral custom,
or “the way of the ancestor” it was time-honoured principles,
behavioural models and and social practices that affected private,
political and military life in ancient Rome…the ancients knew best would
be the best way to describe this ethical and moral theory…
which was different then the Greek model which would be the ethical
as excellence…which would be different then the ethical model
of the middle ages which was religious in nature…follow the biblical
theories of what was right and wrong, which is a different emphasis
then the Greeks or the Romans…

and to be clear, this is not an in depth, in the weeds attempt to
lay out the various aspects of the difference between those three
types of ethics… just broad strokes…the heart of each those ethical
theories lays in a different area…the concept of ethics as being excellent,
the theory of ethics as being laid down by one’s ancestors and the religious
aspect of ethics in the middle ages…

and we look at ethics/morality today and it doesn’t seem to have anything to
do with excellence or the path of the ancestors or any type of religious aspect…

in our society today, we hold what would be called situational ethics, the situation
dictates the ethics applied…but there is no overall, universal, transcendental/necessary
application rule/rules/laws that seems to dictate our ethical/moral behavior…

and all three, the Greeks, the Romans and anyone from middle ages, would
be aghast at our real lack of moral guidance in today’s society…

for all three had a strong sense of what was right and what was wrong,
but we have lost, (never found) that sense of what was right and what was wrong…

and by no means am I even pretending to know what the ethical/moral status of
the eastern nations, China, Japan, India would be, but I would guess that they
are vast difference from the past theories then there are in the present theories…

and there does seem to be some profound difference in the method of
working out ethical/moral theories…and they are in the way we achieve
and work out ethical/moral behavior/theories and I would call one way,
the internal theory and the other way, the external theory…
and that will be the focus of my next post…

Kropotkin