Philosophy Now Forum

In thinking about the modern world, we can learn
from fiction as easily as we can from non-fiction....
a case in point is the "closet drama" by Goethe..
Faust....

the ''play" begins with Faust and his problem...

as he puts it

''I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine too,
and worst of all, theology
with keen endeavor, through and through-
and here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot''

Here we have a highly educated man.. one who is supreme
in every field he has studied... and yet, he is dissatisfied
with his existence... and he admits to wanting to commit
suicide... and what breaks this thought is the bells of Easter...
and he is willing to give it one more chance....

at that point, a spirit appears.. offering up a real possibility,
and asking what Faust wants...and Faust declares for love...
and picks out a specific girl.. named Margret or Gretchen...
(note that I am abbreviating the play to get to the relevant parts)
later Gretchen gets pregnant and dies in jail... Faust isn't
that broken up about that.. she dies, oh well....

and second act, which is rarely ever read and even less preformed,
is about Faust finding out something that gives his life ''meaning"
the building or overcoming of the sea to create new land for human
beings... but the building he hears is actually his grave being dug..
and in the end, he is, for no real apparent reason, allowed
to go to heaven..

now this readers digest version of Faust in no way, does justice
to the play...we are just skimming the top in order to
see the problems facing Faust and by extension,
facing us....

the search in the play Faust is the search for meaning...
this is a man who knows everything and yet feels
dissatisfied... Goethe is making the point that knowledge
doesn't give us automatic answers into the meaning of existence....
one can know all there is to know about philosophy and still
feel unhappy and dissatisfied...and the same goes for
biology and history and economics and science and politics...
the acquisition of knowledge isn't going to lead us to the
meaning of life.... and one of the things that Goethe makes
clear is that Faust knows theology.. hence he knows all
about religions and he still lacks meaning in his life....
this is important to note...to seek faith and guidance
with god, is for Faust, is a failure..
and he leads him no closer to finding meaning than
any of the other disciplines that Faust has studied....

and the point of Goethe is clear, that we cannot find the
meaning of life, of existence by "Knowing" things...
knowledge itself does not lead to having meaning in our life...

and so, Faust/Goethe tries love as a meaning for existence...
and that ends badly for Faust...and part of the reason lies
in, but Goethe doesn't really speak about because it
is taken for granted, that Gretchen and Faust come from
different social classes... Gretchen is a beautiful but a
simple lower-class girl.... while Faust comes from the upper class,
but again, it is taken for granted and not spelled out...
hence the reason that the two suffered different fates...
Faust walked away and Gretchen goes to jail where she dies...
strictly from the class differences between the two....

in the next book/act, Faust tries to find meaning
in the modern day belief in building a better world...
he becomes blind and unable to see what is being done,
but he hears massive construction being done,
clearing out the sea for land... basically like the Dutch model...
but this is simple his grave being dug....

Goethe has no more faith in this modern way of finding meaning
than he does for the act of knowledge as being a means to meaning....
for when Goethe lived, the Industrial Revolution was
just starting to hit Germany... and he knew it... and he
had a real distain for this new way of existence.. of finding
meaning in the building of the modern world.. with its factories
and mass production and mass housing and well, mass everything...

one of the interesting things about Faust that he doesn't actually
answer the question, how does one find meaning in existence?
but it was clearly a question for Goethe....

Now we turn to Kant... Kant was 25 years older than Goethe,
but Kant didn't become famous until several years after Goethe
became world famous...and as Goethe was intellectually
interested in everything, philosophy was a point of interest to Goethe...
and Goethe knew of the Kantian questions, "what am I to do?"
"What can I know?" "What can I hope for?"
and clearly Goethe answer the Kantian questions with his
play, Faust... "what can I know?" and Goethe answer was
''does it really matter what we know?" we cannot find
our answers in seeking out knowledge...what is the meaning of,
the point of existence... it was not in the pursuit of knowledge....
at least according to Goethe....

And the question, "what am I to do?" was answered, in part,
by Faust in terms of seeking and finding love and then
the modern answer by building a new infrastructure for
our society/state... again, Goethe rejected this.....
and the final question, "what can I hope for?"...
is inherent within the very society or state that Goethe
lived in... there was no movement in the society... one who was
poor and of a lower class, stayed poor and stayed in the lower class...
there wasn't the social mobility that is one of the trademarks
of the modern world... so any hopes that one might have depended
greatly on what class one was born into.... the idea of social mobility
that is common in America didn't actually arrive in Germany until
after WW2.... the military class, by and large, was formed
by the Prussian Junkers class within Germany... the different
classes performed different functions within the German society/state....
and this was assumed by Goethe... so the question of "what can I hope
for?" was also a question of what class you were in...again,
assumed by Goethe....

but this points out an important factor in our understanding
of the Kantian questions.... the fact is that our "class" defines
the measure of the possibilities available to us...
that a person born into the monied class will have
more possibilities available to them...the question of
"what am I to do?" has more availability to a person born
in the wealthy class, then one born in the middle or working
class....

and so the questions of Faust and of Kant, depend on
what class you were born into...so the question,
"what is the meaning of life?" the question of Faust...
can be understood as "what are the possibilities available
to me, given my class?"

a poor person, born in a poor class is less likely to become
a professor of philosophy, then a middle class or a rich person....
and why is that? Because the years it takes to go to college
and then onto grad school, are ever more a problem for
a middle class or working class person.... it takes money,
and lots of it to go to school.. and the longer one goes
to school, the more money one needs.... that is a fact of life...

so we are left with the original question, what is ''the meaning of life?"
and Faust/Goethe never really answered that question in Faust....
and perhaps that question can never really be answered, but,
but it might become answerable if we leave our
assumptions aside and begin anew...

"what is the meaning of life?" can become answerable if
we no longer assume that the answers can come from
the usual suspects we bring around for this question...
money, fame, power, titles, material possessions....
if we remove these things from our usual list
of the "meaning of existence", what is left?

I have floated a couple of possibilities....
one, that we seek out the best in us...
we become who we are in terms of what is
possible for us individually...because of my own
individual results, I am unable to find meaning in
being martial aspects of existence.. I cannot become
a soldier due to my hearing and I cannot find meaning
in most professions, again due to my hearing loss...
so, most people find meaning in their jobs or careers..
but realistically, how many people actually find satisfaction
within their jobs or careers? Not as many as it claimed....

seeking out meaning, to understand what is the point of existence,
is to reach outside of the usual suspects.. of career, of money
of titles, of material possessions.... but where does that leave us?
to seek out meaning in love? Yes, that is certainly a possibility,
a better possibility than seeking meaning or purpose in a job
or a career... to seek out meaning in the understanding of
''what it means to be human?'' that certainly has some
potential in terms of finding meaning and purpose in existence...
that meaning or purpose doesn't exists within our job or
our career...

to seek out what is possible for us.. for me, what is possible has
changed over the years because I am no longer young...
I am not going to become a great many things due to my being
old...my possibilities have become limited due to my age....
so what is possible for me, is different than what is possible for you....
simple because my current situation is different than yours...

but as I have stated before, I can find my meaning, my purpose
in what few possibilities that still exists for me, and one of those
possibilities is to become the best philosopher I can become....
to seek out greatness.. I would rather fail reaching for the stars
then succeed in tying my shoelaces or in becoming wealthy....
every day for me is another chance, another possibility to
reach greatness in being a philosopher....and I work very hard
at trying to reach that possibility.... and most likely I will fail
in my attempts to become a great philosopher... but that is ok...
the point in finding meaning and purpose will often be in
the seeking out, not in the achieving.... so I find my own
meaning and purpose in the attempting to become,
my attempt to be a great philosopher... not necessarily in
the achieving of that goal....

perhaps I have found meaning and purpose.. and where is your path
to achieving meaning and purpose?

Kropotkin

in finding out our meaning and purpose,
we can, perhaps, find them in
seeking out the possibilities available to us
it is not possible for me to be a great mathematician,
I just don't have what it takes... nor can I become
a great runner or an doctor or a anything that
requires me to spend years in school for, I am too
old for that... but I can become, to find my
meaning and purpose in the possibilities
available to me...
I don't have to seek out something that I am not interested in,
nor able to do anymore...and the possibilities that we
have, are different for every single person... what
is possible for you, may not be possible for me...
and what is possible for me, may not be possible for you....
we each have different possibilities available to us...
and meaning and purpose can be found in seeking out our
possibilities...

the problem for Faust lies in the fact he has assumed
that meaning and purpose can be found in the seeking out
of knowledge like the law or medicine... or theology...
it is not what we know, but how we use it that matters....
what knowledge actually has value for us to use.. to become
something that we want to become....the road to becoming
human lies in understanding the choices we have isn't the choices
we think we have... it isn't enough to become rich or famous
or have power, no, the choices we have is to become our
possibilities... to become human, fully human... is to overcome
our childhood indoctrinations and education...

that tell us to seek out the lowest common denominator..
to be rich, to be famous, to have material possessions....
those are the lowest common denominators we have in
this existence....and Faust wanted more and I want more
and you should want more too.....

what we should be seeking is the real question in our lives...
the real question is "what do we become?" ''what path do we take to
this becoming?"

Kropotkin

now one suggestion of mine, stolen from
the ancients, is that we find meaning and purpose
in using a value, such as love or justice, as a way of life...
we hold to a certain value... as THE value of our existence...
and that value can change, be different with each and every
single person... I may choose, love or justice, another may choose
peace or mercy or care... and another may choose moderation
or creativity.... the choose is almost unlimited... as to which
value we decide to use as a "way of life"
and I find my own meaning/purpose in holding to that value,
as a way of life... with every possibility, I seek out justice as
my value... I hold to justice as a means to discover what
is right in life.... and sometimes my choices, don't allow
me to use justice as means, a way of life, and that is ok too....
what is the goal of a society/state? to seek out justice/equality for
all... what is my individual goal in the society/state? to seek out
justice and equality... what am I looking for? justice/equality for all...
with most questions, most questions, the answer can be found in
the value I choose to use as my guiding light, my lodestar...
and every question I face, I use the value of justice to understand
that question and to answer that question.... but hay, that is me...
you might use another value by which you use to guide, be a lodestar
to your own life.....we find meaning and purpose in the values we
pick to orientate our lives... the values we use to make sense of existence....
is this just? if not, what can we do to make this just? and that is
the value of having a guiding light, a value of which we use
to pinpoint what it means to be human....

to be human means to be and have justice.. both individually
and collectively.... but hay, as I said, we can use another value
that might be more conducive to your own value system.....

Faust could have used a value, as a way of life and still have solved
his problem...in what value do we find the meaning and purpose
of life? beauty, balance, compassion, community, fun, growth, honesty,
to name just a few values upon we can build our rock of meaning
and purpose....

so, upon what rock/value will you build your meaning
and purpose on?

Kropotkin

so to the question, what does it mean to be human?
one answers, with, "to pursue one chosen value unto death"
becomes a valid and honest answer.... I am human because
I choose to seek justice or I am human because I choose
to seek out, as my primary value, love or hope or charity....
or whatever value I have chosen.... to seek out and
become... to say, I seek out justice is to say, I am justice..
and that is perfectly acceptable... but we can choose another
value.. that of good and evil.... to seek out what it means
to be good and then engage with that value unto death...
I am good, and thus I say, I am seeking out the good in existence.....
thus morals, the seeking of the ethical becomes the goal,
the purpose of existence.... and as always, any value that
is meant for the one, for me, is expandable to the community,
to the many.... I can expand any value to include all of us,
to be of the community... I seek love.. that can be expanded to include
all of us in seeking out love..... or to seek out justice or to seek
out being moral/ethical..... we can take a value meant for one and
convert it into a value meant for all of us.....

so what value can be used by all of us? love, justice, hope,
honesty, charity, morals/ethics.. are all values that can be
expanded into its use by the society, by all of us.....
I seek justice... we seek justice..... and the show goes on....

so what personal value can be expanded to include all of us,
that successfully allow us to become more human? to journey
from animal to animal/human to finally becoming fully human....
what value allows us this journey or movement?
the positive values, not the negative values..... thus values
that allow us growth, are values we should be engaging in,
not negative values such as hate, or anger or lust or greed...
there is no point to these values because they don't allow us
any growth or expansion to become fully human....anger,
hate, violence, lust, greed, take us back to being animal..
and that is the wrong path into the future...we must go
foreword to become our possibilities... seeking out negative
values do not advance us toward our possibilities...
and that is why we seek to be good and not evil...
for that seeking of good, is a path unto becoming
more human.... the animal in us is toward the hate or
evil within us... the human in us is becoming
good or seeking justice or becoming love.....

Kropotkin

Forgive me for interrupting, Kropotkin, but the main thing about Faust, and just about the only thing I know about the story, Is his pact with the Devil, yet you have made no mention of it at all, or have I missed it? I may have done, as I confess to not reading every single word of your post. Anyway, isn't that what the story revolves around?

now one of the questions of Faust and repeated
to this day, is this question of education....

and it boils down to this: what is the point, or purpose
of education? What are we trying to do with the idea
of education? are we trying to get people to see the value
of becoming human or are we trying to creating as they
did for hundreds of years, gentleman... or is the purpose
of education to turn it citizens into workers, producers
and consumers...until we get clear as to the point of
education, education in America will continue to be fucked up....

now one thing education is avoiding, at all cost, to train its
young to think... god forbid we have citizens who might
be free to think about what it means to be human....
or free to wonder about the actual point of or the purpose
of existence....

this question of education has been a question since
the early days of the Greeks... and the Greeks answer to
education was to educate the young in arete.. which is excellence...
to become excellence in being a warrior was the original goal
and that arete, excellence became expanded into all
areas of life.. from writing plays to philosophical endeavor to
athletic competitions.. every activity done my man, could
be done with excellence... and that was the Greek idea of
education...

and what about the Medieval period? that education was
about seeking god and becoming "good" in order to
be saved...

and then came the Renaissance which had a different understanding
of what being educated meant... and then with each new generation,
a new idea about what it meant to be educated came about....

and today, what does it mean to be educated in your mind?
is that seeking out excellence or seeking out becoming one
with god or is it to be a better worker, consumer or producer?

I think a new idea needs to come about in which we
think about education in terms of seeking out
our potential, our possibilities... to become more human..
to understand the life is a journey, not an destination....
and what is being educated mean to you?

Kropotkin

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 7:58 pm Forgive me for interrupting, Kropotkin, but the main thing about Faust, and just about the only thing I know about the story, Is his pact with the Devil, yet you have made no mention of it at all, or have I missed it? I may have done, as I confess to not reading every single word of your post. Anyway, isn't that what the story revolves around?

K: the pact you refer to is the pact with Mephisto, who has made
another pact with god... that Faust sells his soul to achieve
some desired goal.. which is actually well within Faust
possibility... mind you, Mephisto, has made Faust a much
younger man in order to woe Gretchen...implying that
only youth can attract youth... but love is blind..
not caring much if one is old or young....the heart
wants what the heart wants....

but Faust misses the entire point of existence in that love,
while certainly part of the point of, the meaning of existence,
it isn't everything... to find his meaning or purpose of existence
is to find the value in which he then spends his live pursuing....
as pursuing love is one such possibility, others possibilities do exists...

think of the pact as the starting point, not the main point....
and the main point is this... what is the meaning
and purpose of life? in which Faust seeks that in seeking love
with Gretchen....

Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:12 pm

think of the pact as the starting point, not the main point....
and the main point is this... what is the meaning
and purpose of life? in which Faust seeks that in seeking love
with Gretchen....

Kropotkin

But isn't how you achieve your goals in your search for meaning as important, if not more so, than what you strive to achieve. In which case the pact would be relevant, and very significant.

part of, indeed perhaps all of education, is the
learning of the morals/ethics of a society/state.....
and in this too, has been part of western philosophy
since the days of Plato.... indeed, Socrates spends an inordinate
amount of time thinking about the soul and how to create
a "good" soul....one who follows (and understands)
what it means to be moral/ethical....

ask that question today, and everyone looks at you like you are a
madman... thus enter stage left, Kropotkin.. and asking,
what does it mean to be ethical, or to be moral.....
and just as importantly, why do we desire the good over the evil?

what does it mean to be moral? what does it mean to be an ethical person?
and who has asked that question since Nietzsche?

Socrates felt that the soul was first and foremost, about
what it meant to be good.... we seek out the good because
it is good for the soul....whereas being evil is bad for the soul,
it weakens and destroys the soul... let us take Socrates at
his word and hold to the belief that only by being good,
can we have a soul worth having....

and how do we know this? by the thought that we
engage in our own "know thyself"... in doing so, we
see that our real value is in having a soul that is
doing, engaging in goodness....if we don't have a soul
having some engagement with being good, what is the point of
existence?

the soul thrives in being good, and shrinks in being evil...
those who are evil, have a soul not worth having....
and that was the message of Socrates... tend to the soul
and the rest will take care of itself..... and the entire question
of having a soul is this question of good vs evil.... which is
better to have? and the answer is clearly good....
I am a better human being when I engage in being good,
and when I am engaged in being evil, my soul becomes
small and weak... nothing to write home about...
but in being good, you can brag away to the world at large....

so this problem of good and evil, is one of the main problems
of Faust...and of life.....

Kropotkin

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:30 pm

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:12 pm

think of the pact as the starting point, not the main point....
and the main point is this... what is the meaning
and purpose of life? in which Faust seeks that in seeking love
with Gretchen....

Kropotkin

But isn't how you achieve your goals in your search for meaning as important, if not more so, than what you strive to achieve. In which case the pact would be relevant, and very significant.

K: in reducing the impact of the pact, I follow in the footsteps of
Walter Kaufmann.. who in his introduction to his translation of Faust,
doesn't really even go into the pact itself...it is about Faust and his
adventures....and the pact is just a means to get the story some
importance....

Kropotkin

after some thought, I have decided to post
this here instead of creating a new thread....

one of the key points of Faust is he dismissing of
knowledge...that knowledge hasn't led him to
any great advantage... in fact, if anything,
it has caused a good deal of trouble in his life....
and the bible itself, the bible too, dismisses knowledge
outside of the knowledge of god....
and more than once, Paul dismisses knowledge all
together...only have faith, he says...

and then we have the curious case of Socrates...
who says he is the wisest man in Athens due to his
lack of knowledge.. he is wise because he knows
he knows nothing...which he opposes to those who
think they have some sort of knowledge, but in fact,
don't have any knowledge....and he specifically brings up
boats pilots who have certain knowledge, but that specific knowledge,
isn't an all-inclusive that covers all knowledge...

a doctor might have the knowledge to fix a broken arm, but
where he goes wrong is in thinking that because he has specific knowledge,
it doesn't allow him to know how to fly a plane for example....
specific knowledge doesn't carry over to other spheres of knowledge...
so, we should keep, as the kids might say today, we should keep in
our own lanes... and know that specific knowledge doesn't carry
over to other spheres of knowledge....

What is the point of philosophy? to gain specific knowledge that
is called being "wise"

Wisdom: the quality of having experience, knowledge,
and good judgement; the quality of being wise....

and sometimes, one has to make a whole lot of bad decisions
to learn how to make good ones... experience is a very competent
teacher... to be considered to be wise, one has to learn how to
make good judgement, and not bad ones...
and sometimes, one has to make judgements/decisions,
without a lot of information/knowledge... learning to be wise,
making a decision, often happens with a lack of knowledge...

one example is the decision by Truman to drop the Atomic bomb
on Japan... he clearly lacked the technical know-how to judge
the bomb on scientific grounds... so he made his judgement
based on political considerations or based on some numbers about
the number of Americans who would die if they had to invade Japan....
among them would have been two of my uncles who were scheduled
to be part of the invasion force of Japan....

so, we have Socrates saying he is wise because he knows he
knows nothing... so, is wisdom a lack of knowledge? or is
wisdom a certain type of knowledge? has wisdom any
connection at all to knowledge?

All of this is hard to say....but it does leave us with a question,
is the point of philosophy really the gaining of knowledge?

One is left to wonder....

Kropotkin

A novel interpretation - for me that is, Kropotkin - and we get these mysterious signals from what could be considered outerspace and how does it all pan out in the end? An act frowned upon by (most) lovers of wisdom, an act that has been penalized in ways that amount to deliberate sabotage i.e. bearing all the marks of malice ne plus ultra. Sigh. Someone was right and by the grace of almighty I've forgotten who that person is ... was (?).

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Thu Jun 15, 2023 12:22 am so, we have Socrates saying he is wise because he knows he
knows nothing... so, is wisdom a lack of knowledge?

Well, he didn't say he was wise - though he implies it all the time. If you read Plato's version of Socrates to me it seems obvious that Plato thinks he knows stuff. I think we can take it with a dash of salt. It's hyperbole. We could make it less hyperbolic and say that an awareness that one lacks knowledge, might be wrong, has things to learn is going to be part of the make up of a wise person.

Also that's just one kind of wisdom.

Some people turn what I am claiming is wise above into a rule one must follow at all times. Always be uncertain. Always question. Well, you can't parent your children well, for example, if you are always questioning yourself. Kid's hand is on fire, not a time to wax philosophical about epistemology. Just one tiny example.

or is
wisdom a certain type of knowledge? has wisdom any
connection at all to knowledge?

I think wisdom is at a more metalevel. How to apply what you know? How to stand in relation to what you think you know? How to check yourself? I think wisdom has much more to do with what to do in situ, given what we know, what we think is true, what might be true, what we think is false, given the circumstances and also interpersonally? It's about our relation to ourselves and others.

I think there's an artificial boundary between those two ideas, but a useful one. But generally and with contradictions knowledge is having information about stuff. Wisdom is what to do and certain attitudes about what is and what is happening in situ.

A number of times I wanted to bring 'heuristics' into a definition of wisdom, but balked, not finding a way that satisfied me.

I read Faust a long time ago. I think it was the Kaufman version. My understanding at the time was that Faust made a bargain with Mephisto and that this bargain was indeed an important part of the story. Of course, Mephisto is not just any being in the world. Mephisto is a being that represents all that must be opposed.

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