in light of our understanding or our ability to define ourselves lies
Aristotle or Kant’s categories…
so Aristotle used his idea of categories as a tool in which we can
define ourselves or understand ourselves in light of the chosen
categories…so in other words, we define ourselves in light
of the chosen categories…
the Aristotle categories are:
Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, state,
action, passion…and we define ourselves within those categories…
I exist as a possiblity within those given categories of quality or place or date
or passion or state…
the categories are a means of understanding or defining ourselves…
we see ourselves in terms of those categories…
Kant also had categories in which we must identify or understand
or define ourselves within…
his categories are:
Quantity: unity, plurality, totality…
quality: reality, negation, limitation…
relation:
inherence, substance/ which is substance and accident…
causality and depence/which is cause and effect…
community: reciprocity
Modality: possibility, existence, necessity…
For Kant, we understand ourselves, define ourselves in terms of
these categories… but the list seems to be very limited and the list
doesn’t really give us all our possibilities, our choices…
for example, where would ART exist in this list? where does the
existential question of, why am I here, belong on Kant’s list?
or what values should I choose, where does that belong in Kant’s list?
In fact, the Kantian/Kropotkin questions of “what should I hope for?”
or “what should I believe in”? or “what value/values should I hold”?
or “what should we expend our energy upon”? where do they fit
in Kant’s categories?
I cannot define myself using Kant’s or Aristotle categories because
the categories themselves fail to encompass what it means to be human
or to be able to define what it means to be human…
in fact, the very idea of the ancient idea of how one defines themself
is rather limited… take the medieval idea of defining ourselves in terms
of our relationship to the state/church or to where we stand in relations
to god…we cannot understand ourselves in light of a limited
viewpoints such as “what is my relationship to the Catholic church”?
it is part of, but not the entire “method” of understanding or defining
ourselves……. no matter how broad of a category one might create to
define or understand ourselves, we somehow manage to expand beyond
that category… I am more then the sum of my parts and that is
the unspoken trouble child of understanding or defining who I am…
No matter how large a set I create to define a human being,
there is some aspect of being human that lies outside of that set…
and that makes understanding or defining what is a human being
so hard………. we can never properly establish a set large enough
to encompass everything it means to be human… for example,
ART… it is just another means in which we understand or define what it
means to be human…but ART as with any set, is unable to create a set large
enough to be able to allow us to understand or define what it means to be human…
so what does it mean to be human?
or how are we to understand or define what it means to be human?
Kropotkin