Philosophy Now Forum

here I am trying to put philosophy into historical context...

but to do so, one needs to know some important aspects of
history.. we are not covering all history, just some of the
important parts...

the first thing to note is that human beings are on a journey....
not so much individually, but collectively.... the key to understanding
human beings comes from Darwin.. we were once apes...
and that is a fact... that we come from animals... but what
is the main difference between animals and humans? we are
aware.. (there is that word again) we have consciousness...
awareness of our coming death and that we are simple replacements
for prior life.... in other words... the species is what is important,
not the individual... there has been literarily billions of human
beings before me...and if we are lucky, there will be billions
more after me... and what is one human being in the midst
of billions of human beings past, present and hopefully
future...you may as well select a grain of sand and designate
that grain of sand as the most important grain of sand ever....

let us think about the past first.... as noted, that human
beings spent our first million years as hunter-gather...
and everything we are today, was forged in that
million years....that we are social creatures.. and the most
common human gathering is the small group setting..
that we only survived by sticking together and working together
within that small group of people.. as we didn't have the physical
tools of many other animals, we had to outthink and outwork
other animals...I believe that the concept of outworking
the other species is vastly underrated.. ( a whole lot of
people think that most people are lazy good for nothings,
but the truth is that most people are uncomfortable
when they have nothing to do... most people get fidgety
when faced with a couple of days of doing nothing)..

that is one of the traits we inherited from our ancestors
from the hunter-gatherer years...human beings are
genetically built to do things rather than sit around doing
nothing... to be human is in fact one who is doing something...
one of the traits that get people into more trouble than any
other trait is boredom....it is our work ethic that has made
the world around us...

now think of the world during those millions of years
the hunter-gatherer world... we followed the food....that
is exactly what we did in those million years....
as with all animals, when the animals moved, so did we....
this is a vastly important aspect of human existence....
at some point thousands of years ago, we learned
some things that helped us go from animal to animal/human...
we discovered how to make fire, we discovered how to
domesticate animals...especially dogs... and just about
10,000 years ago or so, we had a new vision of existence...
instead of following the food, we remain stationary and bring
the food to us....the creation of the city... but think about this....
we had a million years of moving about, of following the food,
this new vision, this new example of what it means to be human
has changed who we are...

so we now ask, why was morals/ethics created? to keep the peace
between people engaged with a small number of people...
in other words, if we have a small number of people, being
and doing, how do we keep the peace between them?

think of human dynamics within a small group of people
if one of those people hurt or even killed another, think
of the fracture that would have occurred within a group of people..
certain rules are established to keep the peace within a small
group of people... and those rules make sense given the small
size of everyday life... thus we have ''thou shall not steal"
think of a group of people, maybe 30 families, perhaps 100
or 150 people and someone steals from another family...
that would cause chaos and possibly destroy the peace
within the families...fighting might break out and
completely destroy everything this small group
of people have been working for, for possibly decades...

the creation of the law, of theology, of philosophy, of government, of
morals and ethics, politics.. all of these came from these years
before and during the move from hunter-gather society into
city living.. from life moving with the animals/food to
bring the food into the city...

everything that makes us human today, came from those million
years of being in a hunter-gatherer society and then when we brought
the food to us in cities.... we are the creation of those years...
our thinking, our morals, our work ethic, our social nature,
our very laws, come from the environment we once lived
in and currently live in....from being hunter-gatherers to
living in a city....

and in thinking about our journey, our collective journey
from animal to animal/human to finally becoming fully human...
from being animal to becoming part animal, part human to
eliminating our animal nature and becoming fully human...
and this becoming from animal/human is to use instinct less
and less, to rely on thinking and logic and rationality..
that is part of the path to becoming fully human....
we do not reject or eliminate emotions or feelings, or
as some have called it, intuition.... we simple understand
the role those important aspects of being human play...
that is the human journey....to go from instinct
to making conscious decisions about the important matters
to us.... but certain aspects of being human lay outside of
rationality or logic.. love has nothing to do with
being a rational, logical person...and love plays
a vital role in our being human... in the first year of life,
infants without love.. die... that is how necessary love is,
we can die without it... life without love is pretty dam
horrible...in many cases, love is what makes life bearable,
and worth suffering through...as it is true today, it
was true during all those years of belonging to
a hunter-gatherer society.... in fact, we might say without
any fear of contradiction, that being human is about the
relationships we have during our life... from family, to
the one you marry and have children with, to friends,
to work relationships that we have.... it is our relationships
that make us human....our connections to others....
that maybe the one constant we have with our hunter-gatherer ancestors,
that we have built our lives with relationships with others...
and relationships are not rational or logical, they are acts
of being that are outside of being rational/logical...

and in many ways, we have taking apart those relationships
with modern technology.... we no longer have the physical
contact with people that human beings have had since
the beginning of time... we can communicate with people
without ever seeing them... we have phones, and cell phones
and email and text messaging and Facebook and other social
media...but an important part of being human is that
physical contact that we have with each other...
it is a proven fact that people who are in isolation from
one another, either from the recent Covid years, to
being in solitary confinement in prison, have greater
physical and mental/emotional problems... long term
problems..... and that plays into the modern world
problems.... by either design or by accident, we have
isolated people from each other... by cell phone or by
our text messages, by the use of our computers to
TV sets.....all of which has created isolation from
each other... to the determent of our mental, emotional
and physical health...but what is one possible solution to
this social isolation we have?

the solution also connects back to us being social creatures...
and to our collective journey...from animal to animal/human
to becoming fully human...

what might that be?
next, same bat time, same bat station....

Kropotkin

the goal of philosophy is to find meaning in the universe...
an animal can only find meaning in the present...
by seeking out their needs and drives....
seeking out food, water, shelter..
that is all an animal does... to fulfil their present needs...
with no thought to the past or the future...

and that is exactly what a human being did for the millions
of years of being animal...when human beings could think
about a past or a future, that was one marker that we had
advance beyond being just animal...

to be human is to know/understand that there is a history
in existence... time flows from the past to the present to
the future...

past was, present is, future will be...

this understanding of time, might be, perhaps the most
important aspect of being human...in a very real sense,
we find meaning in time, in the past or present or the future...
we find meaning in time....

Now one of the important lessons of Freud, was that
if you wanted to understand a person, you have to understand
their past, their childhood... to make sense of who we
are means we have to understand/make sense of who they were...
and the same holds true for us collectively as human beings...

if you want to understand humans, you have to understand
our childhood, our million years as a hunter-gatherer society...
we were formed within those long years... you cannot understand
what a human being is, without some sense of what those
years did to us and for us....

and today, what interest us as being within time?
some of us hold to the past as a goal, we call them conservatives...
some hold to the present.. those are animal/human
and those who hold to the future, we call them human beings....

we are defined by the past but we find meaning in the future...

to be human, either individually or collectively is to think of
ourselves within a context of living in time....

within time, we find our context of what it means to be human...
the human experience is to make a journey, from past to present
to future.. from being animal to being animal/human to becoming
fully human...and that fully human is to be found in the future...
a future that we must work for.. here is where our
work ethic comes into play... we are building today,
by putting up building and factories and playgrounds, not
for today, but for tomorrow.. for who we will be tomorrow...
remember the only real way we can think of human beings
as beings traveling in time... as going from past to present to
future.... to be human is to be on a journey...

but if we look at ourselves today, with the slew of problems
we are facing, why do we have these myriad of problems?
I would say, that we face these problems because we were
passive and reactive to our environment... instead of being
pro-active and creative to what might be... instead
of creating the future, we want, we simply allowed the
past and present to act on us... we were passive and allowed
the past to happen instead of creating our present and future...

we have income inequality and global warming and pollution
and a reduction of resources because we simply and passively
allowed them to happen instead of creating, forming our
future...until we take control over our lives, socially, economically,
politically and philosophically, we will be passive actors in
the drama that is occurring today...

you want a peaceful world... you have to want it, to create it,
to form it....to create the world that we want is to be an active
and dynamic actors in the world today...

but we also need to think about the future, to think about
what future we want... instead of thinking about some
vague recreation of a past that didn't exist, we
think about the active formation of the world of tomorrow...
it is not enough to be like conservatives, to have a vague
desire to recreate a past, but we have to be liberals and
create the future we want...that is the lesson of history....
at key moments in human history, we create the future we
wanted....we stepped out of the trees and began to walk
on the African savanna... that we a choice we made...
and to become a hunter-gather society, that was a choice
we made... and to bring the food to us and create the city,
that was a choice we made.... at moments in history,
we made key choices and have become something different
in our being human because of those choices.... today, we
are at another crossroad and we have to make choices...

to be passive or to be active... to seek out the past or
to seek out the future? we make our choices and then
we must learn to live with our choices, our decisions....

and that is the role of philosophy... to paint a picture of
our choices and lay out what those choices mean...
provide an understanding of what each choice
means....both in terms of choice accepted and choices
rejected....for not making a choice is just as impactful
as making a choice....

Kropotkin

literally what it means to be human is to
take a journey...from our collective past, from
being a hunter-gatherer species to our modern
day technological society...from being animals to
being animal/human to becoming fully human...
from past to present to future... all of these
are aspects of the human journey...

history is simply a record of our journey of becoming,
economics is just another means of a journey,
as is evolution is just another record of our journey,
from animal to human...

we know where we have been, the past, and we know
where we are today, and we must make choices as to
where we will be tomorrow...

philosophy is an understanding of that journey...
as is psychology... it is clear that human beings
have changed psychologically over the last 3000 years....
I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks were astonished
that a Greek philosopher would talk to himself... that
was something beyond the pale for the Greeks...
(I can't recall his name)
today, what person doesn't talk to themselves?

you too are making a journey.... you just haven' realized
it yet....if someone were to write a story about your own
journey, what would it say and what should it say?

to find a goal is to create meaning in the journey of your life...
to have no goal is to have no meaning or point in your life...
so, ask yourself, "What am I to do?" 'What am I to believe in?"
''What should I hope for?"

and ask yourself, what needs to happen to answer these questions?
and what is the path into the future that will allow me to answer
these questions?

Kropotkin