Philosophy/psychology/political science...

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I have stated time, after time, after time
that there is no difference between various
disciplines such as philosophy or psychology or
political science… they are just different aspects
of the same thing… philosophers who
are also psychological philosophers include
Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Hume, Kierkegaard
and of course Nietzsche and Sartre…

we can also see philosophers who engaged in political science
is basically the list of all philosophers from Plato on…

so we can see the three aspects, of philosophy and psychology
and political science having existed since the beginning of
philosophy, over 2500 years now…

over the years on ILP some have cried foul over my own use
of psychological aspects of existence… but frankly,
I stand well within the philosophically tradition when I do…

perhaps, perhaps, we can think of the three, philosophy,
psychology and political theory as being three sides of
the exact same thing…for all three can go from the one,
to the few to the many to all… we can talk about the
individual in terms of philosophy or psychology or political
science or we can talk about the entire state or all people
in terms of philosophy or psychology or political science…

take the specific topic of morality/ethics… we can discuss
morality or ethics in terms of philosophy or psychology or
political science…and in fact I for one, would declare
that this specific point of morality/ethics has been
both our individual and collective problem since the
French revolution… every major philosopher since
1850 has engaged with morality/ethics as one of their
major investigation points… from Kierkegaard to
Nietzsche to Heidegger to Sartre and even including
Wittgenstein, who referred to his works as being moral
documents… and himself as being a moral philosopher…
(recall that after WW1, Wittgenstein was tempted to
become a Catholic priest)

The question of moral/ethics hasn’t changed or move direction,
we just don’t pay attention to it… it still exists and haunting us
today… what it means to be moral might be THE outstanding
question of our time…and to understand what it means to
be moral means we must engage in philosophy and psychology
and political science as one, not as separate entities…

now some believe that morality/ethics is a matter of common sense,
and in their very next breath, demand a new American civil war to
achieve some grievous of theirs… how does calling for a new civil
war also achieve being moral/ being ethical?

the reason people can call for wildly different agendas that
often conflict with each other is because people refuse
to engage in some sort of process of self-examination of their
values and beliefs…the Socratic process of 1. know thyself
and 2. the unexamined life isn’t worth living…
these people with wildly changing and dramatic
agendas can do so only if they never engage
in some sort of a reevaluation of values…
what values do they actually hold and what values
that they hold are actually indoctrinations from
their childhood?

this is an engagement with both a philosophical and psychological
understanding of their values and beliefs…

but it takes courage to hold an honest reevaluation of
ones values and beliefs, and few have that sort of courage…

and where does political science stand in the midst of
philosophy and psychology?

It is the understanding of how my individual self
connects with and is part of the collective whole…
we can connect on several levels…on the philosophical
level, the psychological level and on a political level…
how I treat you morally/ethically can be done
philosophically, psychologically or politically…
or some combination of the three…

I think we need to treat philosophy, psychology and
political science as three sides of the same coin…
to connect to one is to connect with the other two…

Kropotkin

2

we can see the problem of human beings coming from
the clear fragmentation of human beings after the various
revolutions over the last 500 years… the scientific revolution
over the last 500 years has, as one example, taken away the
unity of human beings that was there since the fall of Rome…
if there is an argument to be made for the Medieval period,
it would be that we human beings were whole, philosophically,
psychologically and politically…the fragmentation of human beings
occurred after the end of the Medieval period… which is why, in part,
the conservative loves the Middle ages… it was the last time we
were whole, both individually and collectively…

and then came the various revolutions that shattered us into
fragments… the scientific, the political, the philosophical,
the social and the Industrial… each of these revolutions conspired
to shatter the unity of human beings into fragments…

look at the ART of the Western world after 1880 and you can see,
literally see the fragmentation of human beings in its ART…
from paintings to plays to literature to sculptors…
in every single artistic field, the fragmentation of human beings
is quite evident and obvious…

the question of the last two hundred years has been one of,
how do we overcome this fracturing of our souls?
and this overcoming can be done by philosophical
or psychological or political means…or some combination of
these three…

this question of fragmentation is also a moral/ethical question…
for in part, it is why we no longer have a unified, universal
moral/ethical theory of being…upon what do we base ethics/moral
theories on if “god is dead?”

the history of 20 and 21st century philosophy can be written as
a story of recovering our ethical/moral standards, once we understood
that “god is dead”… the question of the last 200 years of philosophy,
psychology and political science has been, the question of how do
we overcome this fragmentation of our soul, by the various
revolutions over the last 500 years?

“God is dead” and now what does it mean to be human?

thus we can include the religious into our mix of philosophy,
psychology and political science… so we have 4 different types
of disciplines, all trying to answer the question, what does it mean to
be human, now that “god is dead?”

what is being moral/ethical, given there is no one standard we can
use psychologically, socially, philosophically, politically and religiously?

what does it mean to be human if there is no standard/universal
understanding of what it means to be human?

Kropotkin

3

to say human beings are fragmented… what exactly has
fragmented? the thing that has fragmented is being…
that is why being is part of the 20th/21st century thing…
and how does this work?

I ask you, who are you? and you might say, a father, a worker,
a bank teller, a man, a democrat, a Catholic… but each of these
things is part and only part of our being… and I would guess not
the important part of who we are…when asked, Kropotkin,
who are you? and I say, a checker in a grocery store… is that
really that important? Is how I make money, an important aspect
of who I am? Nah, not in the least…and being a man, is that important?
It can be if, If I emphasis it, but in reality an accidental aspect
of me, cannot really be that important…it is part, but it isn’t
my being…being can be thought of a being in the center of
a onion… we peel away aspects of the onion, as we peel aspects
of being and what do we discover at the center? Who we are…

ask me… Kropotkin, are you an atheist? and I say yes,
does that really tell you anything about my “being”…
does being an Atheist really tell you anything important about
me, No… because I could change to become a believer,
thus being an atheist is a temporary aspect of being Kropotkin…

Kropotkin, are you an American? yes, but that doesn’t tell you
anything important about who I am… for I could move to China
and change to becoming a citizen of China… or France or Egypt…
these people who hold that nationalism is the most important
aspect of being are wrong…because I can change my nationality
as easily as filling out a form… and what about my sexual orientation?
is my being tied into my sexual orientation? Not all all… for sexual
orientation is fluid… for I can be gay, straight, binary or non-sexual…
on different days or even on the same days…we are not bound
to our sexual orientation any more then we are bound to
our nationality or our religion or to what football team I root for…
and I am not bound to even my sex… for I can change my sex…

and my ‘‘being’’ thus isn’t bound to my nationality, sexual orientation,
my religion or even my sex…so that still leaves us this question
of what exactly was fragmented during the various revolutions
of the last 500 years? and the response is still being…
but then what exactly is “being?”

once this question is answered, we might be on our way to
uniting our soul, our being into one…

so the question of the 21st century is the oldest question in
philosophy… that of being… that of ontology…
dealing with the nature of being…

Kropotkin

4

it has been said, that anxiety is one of the fundamental
aspects of being… this goes back to Kierkegaard and his writings…
it is said that anxiety ‘’…is a rather an ontological characteristic of man,
rooted in his very existence as such’’ (1)
but the this implies that anxiety is common, universal whereas
in fact, I can’t hold to this idea that anxiety is universal/common
to everyone because that clearly isn’t true…our coming death,
is rarely if ever thought about… especially when young… as I am now
old, yes, I do think about my upcoming demise, but it doesn’t cause
anxiety in myself because I recognize that death is as a fundamental
part of life as growing old or getting diseases or suffering from the pangs
of existence… the loss of others, (a good friend lost his father yesterday)
or of loss of love or the loss of whatever… for much of the “pangs
of existence” comes from the loss of something…

but once again, we not feel anxiety from these inevitable
losses that will come to everyone life… I too have lost, friends,
a father, a grandmother, and soon my own mother… I am sad, but
not anxious… because that is part of the “ticket” to life, loss,
disease, suffering and finally death… I can feel anxious or I can
just accept its coming and its coming to me…I am currently suffering
from my ankle surgery, a form of disease, and I don’t feel anxious as
much as total boredom from being unable to stand or walk…
at this point, it is possible that I may never be able to walk again,
but I don’t worry about it, become anxious about it, because it is
outside of my control… I can’t do anything about it… just like disease
or loss or death… I simple have to acknowledge the possibility
and move on…

we can control what we are anxious about, anxiety doesn’t need to
be in our lives… we can overcome it… thus I don’t believe that
anxiety is part of our being… part of our ontology…

but if anxiety isn’t part of our being, our ontology,
then what is being? and we are back again to this point…

so what is being?

  1. Existence… a new dimension in psychiatry and psychology
    edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger…
    my particular copy was published in 1958…

Kropotkin

5

another aspect of human ontology, or being is guilt (1) above
I would hold that guilt is a greater part of being/the ontology
of being than anxiety… if there was a “primary” aspect of
existence, I would argue that it is guilt, far more then
anxiety… (now an interesting aspect of modern guilt,
is the conservative dismissal of guilt… the modern
conservative has called for a civil war, a race war,
death to all liberals and yet, has not felt any type of
guilt about that…I must ask, why not? Why not feelings about
guilt, about calling for the death of other human beings?
I accidental kicked the cat yesterday and I am still feeling guilty
about it… but why no guilt about calling for the deaths of other
human beings? we could suggest that this “loss” is a fundamental
loss for conservatives and thus their inability to fully understand
what their calls for deaths and civil war will cost us, and themselves…

Kropotkin

6

One might even ask, can a conservative feel guilt?
I wonder… I am speculating but I suspect that part of not
feeling any guilt derives from the conservative belief
that they somehow deserve to be treated special…
that they are not obligated to obey the rules others
have to obey… for example, to attempt to overthrow
the legal government of the United States there was no guilt
involved until it was time to face the court system,
and then all the sudden, the ones that tried to overthrow
the government felt a great deal of guilt, basically because
they were caught, not because of their actions…

as a father, I can say that children quite often feel guilt,
but not because of the actions, but because they were caught…
I suspect the same forces are at work here… the conservative
feels guilt not because of their actions of attempting to overthrow
the government, but because they were caught doing so…

in that attempt to overthrow the government, their only regret is
that they failed… not in the action, but in their failure…
and that shows us the loss of feeling guilty of their actions
by the conservative… they are fragmented from feeling guilt,
they have lost the ability to feel guilty about their actions…
they are clearly not whole beings if they feel no guilt
about their actions…

Kropotkin

7

I was wondering if the Nazi’s ever apologized for any of their
actions and I came across this…

EVERYTHINGNEWS
MAY 4, 2016:51 AMUPDATED 6 YEARS AGO
Commentary: Long overdue, a Nazi finally says sorry
By Andrew Nagorski, Commentary

5 MIN READ

Seventy years after the Nuremberg trials, something truly extraordinary happened in a German courtroom last week. Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard who will go down in history as one of the last of Hitler’s perpetrators to be charged for his role in the Third Reich, offered an apology.

Defendant Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz death camp, sits in a courtroom before the continuation of his trial in Detmold, Germany, April 28, 2016. REUTERS/Bernd Thissen/Pool
Hanning declared he was “sincerely sorry” and “ashamed” that he had belonged to a criminal organization that committed mass murder and countless atrocities, and that he had never done anything to prevent such actions.

In today’s world, that hardly sounds like a startling admission. But it is almost unprecedented for those who have been charged with carrying out the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes since the end of World War Two. To say this is a case of too little too late is a vast understatement. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the significance of Hanning’s remarks.

They matter particularly because there are only a dwindling number of Nazi war criminals still alive. For the Nazi hunters – the government investigators and prosecutors along with the freelance operatives who have tracked and exposed the perpetrators – this magnifies the role of these remaining court cases. They offer a last chance for confronting not just the legal but the moral issues that the perpetrators have so consistently tried to dodge in the past. And for providing the also rapidly dwindling number of Holocaust survivors the chance to face their tormenters.

Right from the beginning, most Nazi war criminals never apologized for anything. At age 27, Benjamin Ferencz was the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special squads that conducted mass killings of Jews, Gypsies and other civilian “enemies” on the Eastern Front before the killings shifted to the gas chambers in the camps. As Ferencz told me during an interview for my book The Nazi Hunters, he still vividly recalls the protestations of Otto Ohlendorf, one of those condemned to death, that he was only doing his duty. After his sentencing, Ohlendorf told him: “The Jews in America will suffer for this.”

Even one of the most notorious architects of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, organizer of the mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, portrayed himself as a mere functionary who had no animosity towards his victims. He told the Israeli police investigator who questioned him after the Mossad abducted him from Argentina in 1960: “I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I’ve never killed a Jew. And I’ve never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.” That gave him “a certain peace of mind,” he added, although he was under no illusions about his ultimate fate. He was the only top Nazi to be tried and hanged by the Israelis.

For Germany’s most famous Nazi hunter, the behavior of those relatively few mass murderers who were ever held to account for their crimes was exasperating for another reason. Fritz Bauer, a German prosecutor from a secular Jewish family who had spent most of the Nazi era in exile, returned after the war determined to make his countrymen face up to the horrors committed in their name. To that end, he orchestrated the Frankfurt trial of 22 former Auschwitz personnel in the 1960s – not the big bosses, but the people who had tortured and killed prisoners on a daily basis

During a trial that featured a procession of survivors who testified in agonizing detail about their ordeals, Bauer vented his frustration. In an interview, he pointed out that the prosecution had been waiting “for one of the defendants…to address the witnesses who had survived and had their whole families annihilated with one humane word…it would have cleared the air.” That never happened.

Ferencz, now 96, pointed out that right after the war, this refusal to admit guilt or show any compassion to the victims was widespread. “I never had a German come up to me and say I’m sorry all the time I was in Germany,” he told me. “That was my biggest disappointment; nobody, including my mass murderers, ever said I’m sorry. That was the mentality.”

Germany has come a very long way since then. The Holocaust and other wartime atrocities are routinely taught in schools; as a whole, the country now has a commendable record of facing the darkest chapter in its history and seeking to atone for it. That is in large part the product of the efforts of Nazi hunters like Ferencz, Bauer and others who pushed for such trials, not allowing the past to be buried along with its victims. But those who were most directly involved in the machinery of death were largely immune to any appeals to conscience.

Jesus famously said when he was crucified: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The Nazi criminals knew all too well what they were doing. It is only now that at least one of them is admitting as much.

K: so we see what the Nazi’s and conservatives have in common,
neither one ever apologizes for their actions…and if you don’t feel
guilt, there is nothing to apologize for… because
the conservative in calling for race wars and attempting to overthrow
the legitimate government, don’t feel sorry for their actions…
they don’t feel guilt… all the way until they are caught…
and then and only then do they feel guilt…

Kropotkin

8

we are alienated from the world and ourselves…
that is the beginning of understanding the modern world…

that alienation is demonstrated every single day with gun violence
that kills people… we are disconnected from the world
and from each other… again, if we were connected
to each other in a real sense, would there be as much
violence as there is in the world? I don’t think so…

So what has caused the disconnect and alienation from
the world and each other and ourselves?

we are clearly disconnected from the world/nature…
the ones who love nature and spend time in nature,
they aren’t the ones who engage in gun violence…

and everyone who is engaged in, which means just about everyone,
is engaged in those ism’s and ideologies that disconnected us from
each other and ourselves… capitalism is a fine tool to disconnect
us from each other… for what is the emphasis of capitalism?

To make money… not to be honest, not to be happy, not to be in love,
but to hold to an impersonal goal of making money… if our goal is to
make money, then the other guy, must be the enemy… the ones
who are trying to also make money is the enemy too… for it is clear,
that there is only so much money to be made… the zero sum game
leaves us disconnected and alienated from each other…
the vivid choice of being a winner or being a loser…
with no other options available…
and in part, therein lies our alienation, our disconnect from
each other because everyone who makes money is taking money
away from us, thus is our enemy…we are alienated from people
because everyone else is taking something that we want… money…

but you want to bring people together and end the alienation
and the disconnect we feel from ourselves and each other?
you must end a world where capitalism is the only ism in town…
the zero sum game of capitalism, is in great part, the reason
for our disconnect and alienation from ourselves and each other…

you want to end gun violence? you must reduce or end capitalism
in America… for in a large part, it is the zero sum game of
capitalism that has brought about the rise of gun violence,
the belief that life has no value if the only thing worth
pursuing is money/profits, before people… then life
has no value… if we worship money before people,
then people feel, correctly, that they have no value…
why not kill, if life has no value other than to produce money…
life means nothing if its only value is to make money…
and the money we spend our lives making, doesn’t even
go to us, we get a small fraction of that money…
the money goes to the corporation… and their motto is
“In money we trust” which is another way of saying,

“In lives we don’t care”

it is easy to engage in violence if my life only has value
in the production of money via a lifetime of work/ slavery…
for my life has no value because it can only create wealth
by working as a slave… it has no monetary value outside of working…

life has no value…and thus we can now see the alienation
and disconnect we see in the 20th and 21st century…

bringing back god or bringing back prayer in school won’t end
the gun violence in America… only by bringing value into
people’s lives will end the gun violence…by making people’s
life have more value than just as workers, producers or
consumers… that reduces people’s lives to being not much
more than machines… and thus we have violence and we will
continue to have gun violence in America until we return the
one thing that people need, which is to know their lives have
more value than just being a worker, producer or consumer…
more value than being the slave that creates wealth for others…
once we have become more than that, the gun violence will
begin to end…

Kropotkin

9

for those who argue for the death cult of capitalism,
I show by my own personal experience that in my store for example,
if someone dies, and it has happened several times, the store makes
no mention of it, no notice that your fellow employee has died,
but if the store or the company makes a 2% increase in sales,
they plaster it all over the breakroom… which shows us the
real focus of that store/company… that you are expendable is
said constantly to its employees… I had one boss say to me,
I can replace you and hire two people for what I am paying you,
thus making it clear that I am very expendable… and that sends
a message to anyone in the corporate world, you are expendable
to us… and if we are expendable in our work world, we are trained/
taught that we only have value as workers, producers, consumers…
thus if we have no job, we have no value within society…
and you wonder how come we are alienated and disconnected
from our world and each other… if we have no value outside of
working, and work doesn’t even value us, what value do we have then?

it becomes easy to shoot someone else because if I have no value,
then clearly no one has value in the capitalistic world because
everyone is expendable in capitalism…and they tell you that…
so shooting someone becomes no big deal under capitalism…
we are all expendable anyway…and money has capitalism
focus, making money, not being alive or being human…
that costs money, remember the highest cost in business is
in labor costs, and business resents that and tries to reduce
labor cost, as all costs… to the point of bringing in
self-service machines into the grocery stores…
in an attempt to replace checkers… go to a self-checkout
machine and you support replacing human beings with
machines… but many say, so what? what does it matter to me?
and thus showing us your own indifference to others, to other
human beings, to viewing people as expendable… you
believe the same as the corporation… and thus you support
gun violence… because it is from the alienation and disconnect
we feel being a means to an end, we are simply objects to
make money and have no other value… that is the disconnect
and alienation people feel in this world and thus allowing
violence, especially gun violence…

Kropotkin

10

In thinking about existence, I am engaged
in the book “existence” (1) above…
and while reading about space, and space
and time play a role in existence and our
understanding of existence…

and I was thinking about the “modern times”
and its relationship to space… and I got to thinking
about ART… think about a painting, we can use the
Mona Lisa for example because everyone knows what
the Mona Lisa looks like… think about the picture itself…
we have the lady in question in the foreground… close
to us as it were and behind her lays the background,
the distance as it were… we see a wilderness scene
in the Mona Lisa background… and almost all pictures
before 1880, had some sense of space… a foreground
and a background… now look at a painting, say
Picasso’s Guernica done in 1937… see the ‘‘space’’ within
that picture… we have a foreground, but not really a background…
in the picture itself, the picture has a black background…
the picture colors are grey, black and white…
and this sense of not having a background is kinda common
in “modern day” paintings… and within certain paintings,
Vincent Van Gogh for example, we have all background
and think about the painting by Evard Munch, “The scream”
it is really about the background… the actual person screaming is
set back in the picture… with the background…
and think about a Klimt painting or a Chagall painting…
“Klimt in a light blue smock” or in Chagall “I and the Village”
they really isn’t a foreground or a background…
it is all the same place…

and to some extent, this is how the modern world “see’s”
reality…not a foreground or a background but at one
level… and this is not only ART but this is philosophy,
and psychology and political science and religion…

think about the modern understanding of space…

Kropotkin