how are we to live?
Part of the human answer is in politics and political ideologies
such as democracy and monarchy and fascism… as they are all
part and parcel of the answer of, how are we to live…
as we have had so many different political answers to the question
of how we are to live, clearly there hasn’t been one answer that has
been able to solve all the problems presented by human existence…
the question of how I AM TO LIVE is clearly tied
into the question of how WE ARE TO LIVE…
Marx AND Adam Smith thought man was an economic being…
Plato thought man was an political being…
and most philosophers thought man was a moral being…
So what are we? Are we economic beings or political beings or
are we moral beings?
part of the confusion lies in the fact, that we are part economic, part
political, part moral and how do we understand what each aspect means
to each of us and to us collectively…how does one create a theory of
“how one is to live” when each of us is part of those three things, economic,
political and moral…therein lies the confusion… we really can’t build
or create a theory of man until we decide what we are… are we political
or are we economic or are we moral?
the question of who we are lies front and center at the morass of
our world today…the religious believe we are moral and act upon it
thus we have the religious wars of today and the businesses and government
acting as if we are economic beings and the political attempts to mediate between
these two plus more…
the complication from not understanding if we are moral or economic or political
has created, in no small part, the mess we have today…
for if we look into history and see past civilizations and cultures,
they, the Greeks or Egyptians for example, knew, absolutely knew who
they were… and the Medieval man had a very clear notion of
who they were and what there place in society was…
it wasn’t even a question to the person of the medieval age…
even into the age of Enlightenment, people still had a very clear
understanding of who they were… the idea’s of the Enlightenment,
of progress and reason and denial of religion, were all based on a set
ideal of who we were and who we were trying to be…
and all that changed with the 20th century, with modernity…
we no longer have any sense of, who a human being is…
Marx attempted to create an idea of who we are and the Nazi’s
did the same and we have Darwin saying something else
and Nietzsche saying something else…and they are all right and
they are all wrong…but in what parts are they right and in what parts
are they wrong is the very stuff of our investigations into who we are
and how are we to live…
if man is a political being, then we can live in a certain way and
if we are an economic being, then we can live in another way
and if we are moral beings, then we can live in another way…
once, Goethe wrote that he had “two souls in my breast”…
two souls, god, I wish it was that simple… we are a many soul beings,
we human beings…think of all the virtues we human being can be,
both good and bad and we, each of us, is every one of those possible virtues
and we exhibit those virtues every single day…
every virtue is another possibility for us… another
course of action…The Greeks believed in arête, which was
excellence and the Greeks practices that possibility every single
chance they had… in warfare and in playwriting and in speeches
and in philosophy and they held competitions in an attempt
to discover their arête, their excellence…we have no such
similar thing…and I suspect we are the worse for it…
so how are we to live really depends on who we are
and we moderns, we have no idea who we are or what
is possible for the human being…and that is the real
nature of modernity… we don’t know who we are and
how we are to live…
Kropotkin