Now I happen to like reading biographies… this particular one
I am reading has a special place in my heart and mind…
If I were to list the people who have profoundly affected my thinking,
among those who I would have to list is Walter Kaufman…
and that is the biography I am reading, Walter Kaufmann by Corngold…
I have just about everything Kaufmann wrote and translated…
including his masterpiece about Nietzsche…which has influenced
my life in ways I can’t even suggest…
the first question I reached in this book, is based on the fact that Kaufmann
was driven by religious questions, of which he saw philosophy as part of
that quest to answer religious questions
so the first question is this:
"What do religions do to people-how they affect
human existence?‘’
so Kaufman seeks religious answers by philosophical
text/understanding… whereas I am the other way,
how to reach philosophical answers by religious
text/understanding…
as I am always about “what it means to be human?” what
does the religious tell us about us as human beings?
what can religions tell us about the “human condition?”.
But Kropotkin, you are an atheist…what can you know about
this religious impulse?
that is true but what is also true is that I hold the “best” questions we
can ask ourselves are the Kantian questions, “What am I to do?”
“What can I know?” “What can I hope for?” and of course the religious
question, “What should we believe in?”
(Don’t make the mistake of thinking of these question as isolated, distinct
questions… the answer to the question, “What am I to do?” is quite clearly
is part of the answer to “what should we believe in?”… in other words,
what we believe in, drives what we are suppose to do and if I believe in
god, then that should, should drive my actions… I oppose, for a whole
range of reasons, the religious beliefs… but for now, right now, we
could use the religious beliefs in our lives)
the entire question of the religious is really about the value/point of
the religious feeling… why does the religious feeling have any value or
meaning for us?
I think its value for us lies in the fact that we human beings, get focused,
very, very focused on the day to day of our lives… we get up, get showered,
go to work or go to school, pick up little Jon from school,
we spend the day working out the logistics of our day… the
who, what, where, when, how and why? but we don’t engage in
the overall question which is, what is the point of all of this?
what is the meaning of existence? the Kantian questions are important
because they force us to raise our eyes from the usual small details of our
lives which take us so much space…
at least with religious questions, we are forced to see a wider picture
of what it means to be human… and that also the value of the
philosophical questions we ask… sometimes we get so focused on
these small details of the day to day existence we forget that
we are part of a large, very large organizations… we human beings
are small parts of large organizations like the political, the historical,
the political, religious… and these organizations are implied by the actions
we take every day, we go to church, we vote, we shop, we work… all of these
actions take place in the midst of the question of what it means to be human?
our day to day lives are broken down into small pieces of actions,
we are atomized… turned into small atoms that function separately
from each other…the religious questions can return us to seeing ourselves
as being part of each others lives… I am part of the whole, but you wouldn’t
know it from my day to day life…
I have stated elsewhere around here, that ART is an attempt to connect
to our world and each other… but isn’t that also what religions do,
and philosophy does? connect our individual selves with each other?
to form a whole, instead of a lot of individual atoms who seem to
never connect with each other…
ART is a way to connect as is the religious impulse…
the question, “What am I to do?” is really at heart, a question of
how do I connect with society, the state, the culture and each other…
the religious impulse is really at heart, an attempt to connect to something
bigger then we are, but I hold that there is nothing bigger then we are because
we are already part of everything…biological, philosophically, emotionally…
because I am human, I am already connected to nature, to the world, to the
universe, both the living and the not living part of the universe…
we seek something that we already have… a connection to what was, what is
and what will be…I am connected to the earth because we were born of the
earth, I am a child of the earth…I am connected to the earth
as I have the minerals of the earth in my body, and I have the same
gene connection with many animals, cow, dogs, fruit fly’s for example…
in our day to day lives, we forget how connected we are to everything…
we are born of the stars… our very bodies were created with the stuff
that stars are made of… and that is the value of the religious…
it reminds us that we are connected, to each other and to the planet earth…
the modern task is to reconnect ourselves with each other and to the
biological lives that we share with all forms of life…
we are not isolated, separated biological life forms, we are
part of that diversity that is life… we are part of the planet earth,
we are part of the solar system and we are part of the universe…
we have lost that connection to who we are…
the modern question is, how do I reconnect?
indeed, is there any other question for us right now?
I don’t think so…
Kropotkin