to tell a story

[Peter Kropotkin]

I want to tell a story.... as we all do... telling stories is
a natural part of being human... one could, could, make
the argument that all communication is simply telling a story....
its who we are as human beings.....

so, I want to tell a story... but what story should I tell?
the various disciplines of history, economics, social science,
science, mathematics, literature... are all stories of one kind
or another...

one of the ways we find out what story we want to tell, is
just another story... the psychological story... virtually ever
story ever told comes first from our psychological side...
our mental state, conscious and unconscious.... from needs, wants,
desires, hopes, dreams, to name a few of the psychological
possibilities that each of us have....

that our need to tell a story is a psychological one...to express oneself
might be the primary need of being human...

and we return to the original question, what story should we tell
and why that story and not another? and that answer is our psychological
needs/wants at work....

why tell a story about philosophy and not a story about history or biology
or economics or math, lies within my own psychology..... for I am interested
in the why of existence and not the how or what or where or who of existence....
but in the why....

the beginning of the story for me begins in human asking a basic question
about existence, why do we exist? It has been often said that philosophy
began in wonder or seeking knowledge, but I ask the question in doubt....
the current answers fail to satisfy my doubts...

I suspect that the story of why we exist, began right from beginning
of human existence.... we lived in trees and the first person came down
from the tree and walked, that very first person may have wondered,
why should we walk instead of moving through trees like we have always done?
and that very first person may have asked themselves, what is the point of
existence, now that we are walking on the ground, and not traveling through
the tree's?

and that question has not changed in over two million years...
what is the point of existence? and in over two million years,
we are still trying to understand what existence is and what it means
to us.....and we have various stories we tell to answer that question...
and we use history and theology and biology and physics and
philosophy as a way to answer the question, why existence
and why us?

the question is not, as much as we try to make it as such,
an individual question and answer, but it is a collective
question and answer... for evolution, another story,
has bound us together.. we are social creatures, who need
and want other human being to exist, so we can hear their
story and they to listen to our story....

for one of the essential aspects of being human is feedback....
we offer up feedback to others and they offer up feedback
to us... and depending on the feedback, we may change our
thoughts and actions, or not.... even nature gives us feedback
as to our thoughts and actions....if we go out into nature, the outdoors,
and we fail to dress warming on a cold day, we become very cold,
that is feedback... we learn, hopefully, that we must dress warmer
on cold days.... and stories inform us, entertain us, titillate us,
shock us and humor us....

and what story am I going to tell today? the story of philosophy....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

in the beginning was the word, and the word was ''story''

every society that ever was, had a creation story... how did we come to be?

and that creation story was a theological story...
a metaphysical story.. but they didn't think of it that way,
for the breakup between theology and philosophy, was a million
years after this original story of creation....

stories tend to break down into two different types of stories,
stories of outside forces, be it god or nature, that dominate
the world and we have the stories of man... without any
metaphysical, outside of or beyond the physical, impulse..
theology tells the story of the gods, metaphysical events,
and philosophy tells the story of human beings....

and I choose to tell philosophical stories... and that is as much
a quirk of my own nature, my own psychology.. to want to
tell the story of existence as a philosophical story...
not a theological story....or a science story or a biological story
or as an economic story... (as Marx did) or an historical story....

In the beginning, was a human being... and his first thought may have,
may have been, why am I here? What is my purpose in existence?
and all other stories thereafter have tried to answer that original
question....and this question is as much an psychological story
as it is a philosophical story... for what is one of the basic
psychological needs of human beings? of belonging and love...
and the story of why we exist is a story of belonging and safety...
a primary human need is to feel to be a part of something...
to be a part of something bigger than we are, and the story
of existence is a communal story, not an individual story...
and within that story, we get to belong to something bigger than
ourselves... and that is an important human trait... to belong....
if we forget that and we forget one of the vital motivations of
human beings...to belong, to be part of something.....

one of the important facts of being human lies in the fact that
our psychological needs are just as important as our biological needs....
fail to sort out our physical needs create real problems in human beings,
but the same goes true for our psychological needs... failure to
fill those needs also creates difficulties in human beings...

and that is part of the human story... the bodily needs and, AND
the psychological needs must be fulfilled by human beings to
be human beings... to be human is to juggle many different
and diverse needs.......

In the beginning was the metaphysical aspect and the physical aspects...
and part of the physical aspects is the bodily and psychological aspects
of being human...

but Kropotkin, you seem to be telling many different stories...
no, I am telling many different aspects of the exact same story....
for I am human, and that means juggling many different sides
of being human....for we human beings can be mean or happy
or sad or vicious or we can hurt people and love people,
at the drop of a hat.... for we human beings can be one
thing this minute and another thing in the next minute....
we can love in one minute and hate in the next minute.....
and that is being human.....our story is a complex story
that changes by the minute, depending on our needs, desires,
wants and hopes... and can change by the minute,
depending on our physical needs as well as our psychological needs...

our human story changes as quickly as our psychological and
physical needs change....and once a value is decided upon,
the story changes... there is no set, fixed story of human beings...
it goes minute by minute... as to what it means to understand
the ''human condition''...

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

why would I want to a philosophical story as opposed to a
theological or scientific story?

In regard to science, science is about the how and what, when
and where....but it can't go into the why.... why is there
being as opposed to non-being? Science can't tell us the why
of the story... and that is what interests me, the why of a story....

philosophy and its metaphysical counterpart, theology,
engages in the why of existence, not in the how or when,
but why...

and the ''human condition'' is about asking why, and not the how or
what or when of human existence....and how do we understand
the question of ''the human condition'' in terms of why that question
and that answer? it is as much psychological as it is biological.....
the why answer can bring us to a sense of belonging... we belong because
we believe in a set, fixed beliefs, together...

I have no real interest in the theological questions because they
are theological questions.... metaphysical questions,
who only interest is in the fact that they also ask why?
and theological answers, like god or returning to the void,
has no interest for me because they have no basis in reality or
truth.....which again, is a psychological need as it is a biological
need.... what is the ''TRUTH'' lies in our psychological selves
as must as it does in the biological self....

to hold belief in god or heaven is a psychological need, as much
as a biological need... and if belief is a psychological need,
as I suspect, then it means that a belief in god can change
once the psychological need for god changes...
god exists because our psychological needs exists.....
that doesn't sound like a god who is objective or in some
metaphysical land far away watching over us... a personal god...
which leads us to ask, why do badly need a personal god?
what psychological need in us, demands us to have a personal god,
that controls our lives?

much of what it means to be human can be explained in
terms of our bodily needs and our psychological needs....
and how to fulfill both of those needs.....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

In my precocious youth, I read a lot of poetry....
I read all of the familiar suspects, Tennison, Goethe,
Longfellow, Byron, Whitman....I loved the English Romantic
poets...

and my soul was enthralled... I was moved and shamed
and I cried at the beauty of it all...... I wrote some poetry
myself, but it was never really good enough to go anywhere with it....
and then, I put down the poetic books and moved on to other
wonders of the writers past and present.....

because of house renovations, I had to move thousands of books
of mine to create space... and in doing so, I came across dozens
of books of poetry that I have collected over the years....

I read them, hoping to recover the old thrill of poetry...
but the books, the poems that cast such a spell in my youth,
were just words on a page... they didn't move me at all in
rereading them... the words, the poems were the same, it was
me that had changed so much that poems that once caused me
to cry and feel great emotions... now leave me cold.....
and I feel that I am the lessor for this... but that is part of the great
movement in our lives... our story, for better or worse, changes
in time.... what once thrill us and moved us, leaves us cold...
and not just in poetry, but in books and movies and plays
and in the people, we once knew... how does the movement of
us, people through time, leave us so changed? there is a story here,
but one I am unable to tell....and I feel sadness for being
unable to tell that story....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

In telling a story, one is creating, it is an act of creation,
even true stories.... and the creativity in stories lies
in our choices made within the story.....

let us say, I want to tell the story of philosophy.....
who I choose to put into that story as well as who
I remove from that story changes and defines that story.....

for example, let us tell the story of Philosophy without, without
talking about Plato or Descartes....or just downplaying their
role in philosophy.... We have the greatest philosopher of all time,
Socrates and then some minor philosopher named Plato, than
another great named Aristotle....and if you don't know any better,
the impression left is that Socrates and Aristotle were great philosophers,
and Plato just a minor player in philosophy....
one we can just ignore...

and therein lies another tale... that in the universities, by
making such choices, we tend to be influenced by the choices
that the philosophy departments decide are the ones to study...
so, an Analytical philosophy department will emphasize Analytical
philosophers over existential philosophers...thus the students will
get a partisan viewpoint of certain philosophies and philosophers...

but this also true in our general society... that what we emphasize
will get a partisan look at being favorable... so, in today's society,
we emphasize capitalism, as the reigning economic system...
but it is quite clear to anyone who takes an unfiltered look
at it, capitalism is clear and present danger to humanity.....
and millions of people today are becoming aware that capitalism
is a danger to humanity... but to criticize capitalism is to risk
being called a traitor or a liberal or a communist/socialist...
and to be punished by the society/state at large.....

but we cannot and should not ignore the various dangers of capitalism,
in its pushing on us income inequality, pollution, overpopulation,
the destruction of vital resources that allow humans to survive....
we are engaged in what has been called the 6th extinction event....
where we human beings are destroying vast wilderness areas for
resources for to live and work and play in......and in doing so, we
are destroying areas of forests in which animal life needs to live in....

and this an example of a story we tell.... my emphasizes is about
the dangers of capitalism... but in your story, capitalism may become
the hero of the story..... and what creates this change?

Our physical and psychological needs and wants and desires
can and will change our needs within the story... in telling our
own stories, we emphasize our bodily needs over our psychological
needs and yet, many a story been told, not from our physical needs,
but in our psychological needs.... and we fail to see that.... and why?
because we don't emphasize the psychological aspect of human
existence enough... we clearly emphasize the physical aspect of
existence, with our emphasizes on capitalism, but what about
our psychological needs and wants and desires? we deemphasize
that aspect of human beings... and therein lies part of the human story,
that we don't take the psychological aspect of being human
into account in our daily accounting of what it means to be human....
it is clearly a much larger part of our story then we are prepared to
engage with....

and until we begin to do that, we will not have any sort of successful
public policy because our public policies are physical, bodily based
and not with any understanding of the psychological needs of
human beings being taken into account..... we overemphasize
the bodily/physical aspect of the human story and underestimate
the psychological aspect....

but you can tell another story will the two aspects, the bodily
and psychological aspect of being human being different than
my story... what we emphasize changes the nature of our stories...

and what does your story emphasize?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

ask yourself, where are the Artist, Poets, writers that promote
the human self? why have we lost the ability to tell an Artistic
story?

Because we have drank the modern age too deeply...
we have facts and data and numbers and the bottom line.....
but we don't have beauty and love and the sunsets in our lives...
we are much too practical to engage in those time wasting
activities... for time is money and any wasted time is wasted money.....
but what if, what if the most important part of that equation is not
money but time.... our concern should not be money but time...
and spending our time on beauty and the light display of the sunset
and the viewing of the beautiful vista of the mountains....
what if those ''wasteful'' actions are really the point and meaning of
existence? we certainly wouldn't know because we are too busy
engaging in the chase for trinkets of existence...
money, fame, titles, power, and material goods.....
to see any other possibilities for us to engage with....

for truth be told, all we really have is time... for money, money
is a tale gone wrong....a work of fiction we have taken far too seriously....
for the search for wealth is a dishonesty to our souls... what does money
do to improve or help the soul become better, wiser or fairer?

in fact, I would argue that the search for the trinkets of existence
has degraded our souls in ways we can't even understand.....
and this degradation of our souls has allowed us to 
accept ideas and practices that would have horrified us a few
decades ago... putting children into prison to punish the parents
for entering this country.... how truly barbaric can we get?

and the acceptance of bigotry and prejudice as official public
policy... to punish those who are ''different'' than us, who love
another than us, that dress differently than us.....how far
has our souls declined for us to punish those who believe
and think differently than we do... how far have we fallen?

to deny medical care based on sex or on sexual orientation...
that is something the Nazi's did..... have we sunk that low?

if we cannot find beauty in the sunsets or lovely mountains,
how can we find beauty in the diverse nature of the human soul?'

for we have imbibed the prejudices of the day, and we are worse for it.....
for we have lost our souls in counting our money and wondering about the bottom
line...and in seeking titles or materials possessions....
and the soul, and the soul, what does she pine for? certainly, not
an excellent quarter in which profits rose by 2%.....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

a modern search is for the soul, the connection between
the soul and the eternal spirit... and we search the depths of
the soul to discover what miracles lie in the depth of our soul....
and like an onion, we peal and we peal and we peal
the soul away until we discover that there is nothing there......
it is empty... and the question becomes, now what?

Kropotkin

[Harbal]

and the soul, and the soul, what does she pine for?

I don't know, I don't know, what does she pine for?

[Peter Kropotkin]

but Kropotkin, you contradict yourself, you hold that man
is of many natures... and all of them contradict each other...
your reply, sir?

I am a man, a human being of many values and beliefs...
I am not a one cell amoeba, or a rock that has but one meaning,
one purpose....

I am human and thus many diverse lives exist within me....
I am for and against, often the same thing on different days.....
I can flip like a switch, to love another and then to hate the same person....

I know a Christian... one who talks about sex and becoming drunk
and swears like a sailor.... acting and believing two different things...
is that a Christian or is that something greater, a human being?

to seek that unifying principle of existence is to peal that onion,
only to find there is nothing there........

I am man... is to say, I am possibilities....
what possibility are you?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

and the soul, and the soul, what does she pine for?

I don't know, I don't know, what does she pine for?

K: for many, it is unity of soul, to become one with....
but how is that possible if we don't even know ourselves?
to know thyself is to know what is possible for human beings...
and to unite our various selves into one possibility...
but what possibility?

Kropotkin