I have often wrote about this question of who we are and what
are our possibilities…but I haven’t address a major point of
being human……
The other day I was at work and a couple I had known for a long while
came in and while speaking to them, I managed to completely and totally
insult them. It was a horrifying experience that should shame and
embarrass my family for generations to come, 6 or 7 generations at least…
Since then, I have wondered about the house beating myself up over this
completely idiotic and incredibly stupid thing I said…My wife has notice
and has commented on how I am talking to myself more these days…
well yeah, I made a complete and total ass out of myself in front of
multiple people and this very nice couple who didn’t deserve any of it…
The question is not what happens when we make a total ass out of ourselves
but the question becomes, what is next? How do I mentally recover from
this… we humans, this is part of being human… making complete and total
asses ourselves… the difference between me and most people is, I do it on a
regular basis…
So they say that confession is good for the soul and I can see how confessing the
idiotic words of mine would be good for the soul, but I doubt this couple
will ever talk to me again and frankly I don’t think they will or should for that
matter………
So I confess my sins but it is not enough to confess one’s soul, we must learn
from our actions…we must come with our flaws to some new
understanding of who we are… and we are flawed creatures…
and that too is part of being human… making a complete and total
ass out of yourself is part of being human…but how do we jib this
with how philosophy has been done for 2500 years? Philosophers
don’t talk about what it really means to be human, they ask themselves
what is the extent of knowledge or how can we deconstruct this sentence
or paragraph and while that may be interesting, it doesn’t speak to the
real question of being human, how we fuck up and how we regret our
fuck up and how do we recover from our fuck up’s………… that is truly
our human mission…… it isn’t just about the pursuit of “life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness” that drives us, but the redemption from being
flawed human beings…This is a rather strong selling point of religion and
it addresses this point beautifully…we confess our sins and then
we are forgiven by the point man for the lord… and yet, we are still
flawed beings… being forgiven isn’t enough for us…… we must find our
way to become better human beings………
we confess our sins… and we can think of other examples of
where confession does the soul good… the entire basis of Freud
“talking cure” is to confess to the psychoanalyst……… relieve
your burdens in the “modern” way… without all that religious context…….
we also have the confessions of philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,
who also have confess their sins, their “modern” sins to us…….
So how do we transmute our sins, our making complete asses out of
ourselves into an understanding of who we are and what are out possibilities?
How do we overcome ourselves? By accepting or by knowing we will
continue to make asses out of ourselves, for that is being human…
we cannot change that but we can become more forgiving of our innate
instinct to fuck up…….
in the end, all this is to somehow rationalize or relieve myself of
my burden, my weight of asshood from my soul…………
but the real trick is more then just relieving my burden of idiocy from
my soul, I must somehow turn this into something more then feeling
the burden on my soul… I must engage with this in some positive manner…
in some manner that will allow me to come out of this a better person,
a more compassionate person, a person that doesn’t routinely makes
an ass out of myself………….
we must get more from philosophy then the limits of knowledge or
an understanding of the original/first cause of the universe or
how we must read text… philosophy must dare to tread where
psychology now reigns supreme……. for the answer lies in some
fashion where philosophy and psychology combine into a new
understanding of what it means to be human…….it is not enough to
wonder what are the limits of knowledge when we could be asking ourselves
as to why it is important to understand what are the limits to knowledge?
The quest to understand ourselves is as much psychology as it is philosophy……
for we are not just about the limits of rationality that makes us human but
about the parts of us that make asses out of ourselves on a daily basis………
the truth is we can never find out who we truly are unless we engage
in philosophical psychology…… we must understand who we are in terms
of the rational and in terms of the emotional………. we must unite our
search for what it means to be human with a new emphasis on both
our rational and our emotional side……………
as for me, the burden on my soul is rather large and I hope to someday,
find out why, why must I make an ass out of myself?
this is just another step along my path to discover my own
humanness within me……… to become human, more fully human
is to accept this need for asshood that I quite often undertake…
My name is Kropotkin and I can be an ass… it doesn’t make it right,
just understandable………and part of being human is understanding that
I can be an ass as well as loving or kind or nice or………
Kropotkin