a Philosophical story

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

If there is one constant in the history of human beings, we
can say it is this, that human beings tell stories…
From the west, we have stories like “The Iilad” and “The Bible” and from the east,
we have stories like the “The Mahabharata” and we have all kinds of stores we tell,
stories like “Faust” “King Arthur” “Lord of the Rings” for example…

We engage with stories in different formats, like in Movies, TV, Radio,
songs… The Eagles song, “Hotel California” is just another story…

In fact, I would say that human beings communicate almost exclusively by
stories…My wife will ask me when I come home, “Dear, how was your day?”
and I will answer with a story about how my day was… It was slow or as usual,
shorthanded, or some jerk was rude as hell to me…

When the occasion arises and someone asks me, “Where did you grow up?”
and I can tell the story of my life…I mix up my stories though, as with Goethe,
I can “pump” up my life story with incidents or possibilities that may or may not have
happened…for example, I have told the story about million times about how my
mother grew up on a farm in Wisconsin… but that in fact, isn’t true… but I believed
that story about my mother… somewhere along the line, I changed her story to fit
my own preconceived notions about her childhood…

One of my favorite writers is Goethe… Now Goethe wrote an autobiography
which he called “Dichtung und Wahrheit.” or in English, “Poetry and Truth”
in which Goethe didn’t stick to the “facts” of his childhood, but to the
formation and education of the personality of the poet… And to that end,
Goethe autobiography is a mixture of Poetry and truth… and that is my story…
I have mixed up the stories I like with the truth of my life…
I have been creative with the story of my life… is my story of my life,
truth or fiction? the Fact is, it doesn’t matter because it is my story…
and as with any “Author” I can adapt or change or fix my story as I see fit,
but in reality, my story is still just my story… and as with all people,
I try to be the hero in my story…for that is what we do in stories,
we rewrite our history to become something else… I have an high IQ,
so in my stories, my intelligence is part of my story… I play the hero
by being smart in my stories… our own stories play to what we think or
imagine ourselves to be… so in the stores you write about yourself,
how do you imagine yourself as in being the hero of your story?

so in the next few posts, I shall be writing a story…
now one may ask, is this story you are about to tell, is it
fiction/poetry or is it truth/fact? I say, does it really matter?

Kropotkin

2

I shall be using my own story to pain this picture,
I could have easily made up a story or found another person’s life
to tell this story, but as an author, I make choices… as to the who, what,
when, where, why and how of my story…

My own particular story began in 1959, the day I was born, but in fact,
my own story began earlier… when my mom was 4 months pregnant with me,
my older sister pass to my mom, German Measles… so that whatever was
developing at the time, would be affected and perhaps even destroyed…

and already, we have a difference in stories, for in my story, the doctors
suggested that my mom get an abortion because of the distinct possibility of
birth defects and possibly being still born…my mom refused and went ahead with
the pregnancy… I was born months later with relatively little damage considering…
hearing loss and loss of small muscle dexterity…now in my mom’s story, she was
never given the option of an abortion…so, from the very beginning of my story
about myself, lies the possibility of freedom…my mom choose not to have an abortion…
she made a choice… and that is why I like my version of that story over my mom’s
version… because of choices that were possible…

I was born with no choice in the matter of my hearing loss…I had no freedom in
that… my hearing loss was severe enough for my parents to consider sending me
to the school for the deaf…instead I was mainstreamed… sent to schools without
any real help… outside of many, many years of speech therapy…
so for me, school was pretty a sink or swim situation… I mostly sank…
I was, for lack of a better term, a problem child… and I was a problem child
until I discovered sports… baseball to be exact…

now to return to my own story… did I ever reflect on my situation?
no… it never dawned on me… but we have writers, existentialists who
say upon birth, we are, as Sartre would say, “condemned to be free”…
but does that awareness occur to me at any point in my childhood?
no, not at all… I am not doomed or condemned in any way… I am simply
living out my life as a child… being a child… I might ask, why is the sky blue?
but I don’t ever ask, why am I condemned to be free?
we don’t actually entertain those types of questions until we are older…
at some point, in Junior high or perhaps more likely high school, we might ask,
I exists, why? the reason I can ask this question at this time, is because
I am ready to ask that question… we cannot ask questions we are no ready for…

my high school years were typical, I ran track and cross country
and barely passed my classes…I don’t think I talked to a single girl in
high school… for a wide variety of reasons…but it didn’t occur to me
to ask why? and I think that is the point of youth… we don’t ask the why of
our existence… why am I here? that question wouldn’t have occurred to me
until after high school…when I begin my readings of philosophy…

we might be born into a world where we have no choices or we are
condemned or we are born into freedom… but we are not aware of that…
that recognition comes later, much later… which is kinda the point…
we cannot ask questions or understand answers until we are ready to
hear or understand them…sometimes, in our life, we are never ready
for certain questions or answers… and thus we miss what others might have
taken for granted in terms of questions asked or answers found…

more later

Kropotkin

3

now one might say, but Kropotkin, you are wrong, about everything…
and where does this come from? From us having different stories inside
of us… stories that quite often come from our childhood indoctrinations…
beliefs in country, god, our souls, the rightness of whiteness… each of these
is a story… given by others which we have blindly accepted without
any critical evaluation… America is the greatest country on earth…
America is “exceptional” are two such stories indoctrinated into us…

the number of stories we might believe in can be quite large…
or rather small…and based upon our birth, upbringing, education,
religious training, scientific training and our own readings and thinking,
we might have vastly different stories from each other and from what the society/state
tells us…

One such uncritical story is the superiority of whites, or men or straights,
or age… and again depending on our own critical evaluation of those
stories, we might agree with or disagree with any such story of the superiority of anyone
over anyone…

In my story, I hold to the declaration of Independence, where for me anyway,
the key line is this:

“That all men are created equal”

Part of my story is the equality of all to all…I see equality being part of
the law, of the political, between human beings and economically…
in all aspects of existence, I hold that “all men/people are created equal”
and this story is an integral part of who I am and what stories I believe in…

another may come up with a different story… but have they actually examined
their story to see what it means if it is true or false…in other words, have
people truly reevaluated what it means to be equal or to be unequal…
for each belief leads to vastly different consequences… and different
agenda’s…our stories lead us to far different actions… because I hold to
the equality of all, my actions and believes are geared toward this “fact”…
everything I do, is done with this particular story in mind…if one holds to
the inequality of people, then they can justify bigotry, prejudice, hatred,
inequality, toward those to whom people believe to be unequal…
the stories we tell, can offer us clues to our actual beliefs, even
if we profess other beliefs…a good example of this is UR… he proclaims
himself to be a Christian and yet his words are anything but Christian…
and so, what are we to believe, his words against his professed beliefs…

that is to say, UR holds to certain stories, at least publicly, but privately
he holds vastly different beliefs, vastly different stories…

I don’t have to reconcile those very different stories/beliefs, he does…

so, what stories do you tell, at least publicly, that are vastly different
then the stories you tell yourself privately?

what Socrates said as a maxim, is to “know thyself”
and “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”
both of these maxims are simply a call for us to examine our stories
and what they mean to us as human beings… to examine what stories
we tell ourselves and what stories we tell each other…

more later

Kropotkin

4

I call myself Liberal and another may call themselves conservative…
but they are both, stories…the liberal story involves people having
choice, freedoms, possibilities… the conservative story involves
people not having freedoms, choice, possibilities…for example,
the conservative holds to the Machiavellian idea that we human beings
are set in our nature, that we cannot change our “goodness” or “evilness”
no matter what happens…when one believes in a set nature, they have certain
set beliefs that flow from this story of a set nature…for example, it is conservatives
that drive the narrative that those who are “evil” are unable to change their ways
and thus, must be imprisoned or killed…the conservative doesn’t believe in
that change is possible within people… but an examination of the world around
us shows us that change is not only possible but demanded by our very
existence… I am not who I was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago… the aging process
has changed my understanding of the story of human existence… I have witness
change, both in myself and in others… so I hold that for many, prison is
not necessary because people are capable of change… to put people into jail
because of drug laws is ludicrous…and not very productive in any way, shape or form…

but my story is different than many other stories we tell ourselves…

but the interesting thing about stories, is that we can and do tell ourselves
different stories as we age and grow “wiser”…my stories today are markedly changed
from the stories I told myself 10 or 20 years ago…

one of the changes in my own story has been the change in
the focus of the Buddha… which is suffering… the Buddha called
suffering the problem of existence… how do we escape suffering was
the question the Buddha was engaged in…and because of his time and place,
the stories of his time were an engagement with the concept of reincarnation…
that we are born and reborn, for all time… and how do we escape this
concept of reincarnation which is suffering carried out over a long time
over human beings…but his story of reincarnation is just an assumption…
there are no actual facts to support the idea of reincarnation… it is
another story we tell ourselves to make us feel better about ourselves…
ok, I fucked up this life, but I can change and improve it in my next
reincarnation… this is no different than what the Cristian tells themselves
about how in the next life, I will see justice and I will see the wicked burn…
just another story… told by both…

the Buddha makes another assumption as well, that suffering is something to
be avoided…and what does he call suffering? growing old, disease, and finally
death… but I cannot avoid any of these things… I will grow old, actually I am already
old, and I cannot avoid disease and I certainly cannot avoid death…
what the Buddha called a curse, I call the natural order of things…
part of the ticket that we get in existing…I don’t need to go out of my way to
avoid suffering or to seek suffering, I can just accept that I am going to suffer,
that is part of existence…and move on… I don’t need to dwell on it or make it
the focal point of my existence… it is a fact and something I cannot change,
so I just need to deal with it…

existence happens…and we have no choice… so why sweat about something
we have no choice over?

and this needs to become part of our philosophical story…

existence happens…so deal with what we do have a choice
over… and this maybe, maybe the point of philosophy…
to learn what our choices are and within those choices,
make choices…so what does this mean?

Kropotkin

5

some of our more intense stories revolve around
another aspect of suffering… that of death…

we can hold to philosophical stories about death, we can hold theological
stories about death, we can hold romantic stories about death and we can
be honest about death… death is going to happen… it is just another price
of admission thing like suffering and pain and disease and old age…

death is about as universal as we can get…
it has been said that philosophy is a way to prepare
for death… all of philosophy is simply a method to get us
ready to die…but personally, I hold that philosophy is better suited
to prepare us for life, not death… for in life, we have choices,
possibilities, freedoms not offered to us by death…ruminations
on something that will happen to us regardless of what do, doesn’t
seem to be useful or worth anything… I will die…
so there doesn’t seem to be a point of worrying or thinking about
it…what we should be focused on are the things that we have a choice
about… and that would be life and our possibilities within life…

so what should we work out
as possibilities within life?

Kropotkin