so what ought I do?
we use such things as physical activities like running, swimming,
basketball, mountain climbing, baseball, to name a few things,
to discover what is possible for us physically…we push
the boundries of being human with such physical activities…
we try to break the 4 minute mile and we try to hit the baseball
enough to get a 300 average and we climb ever new mountains to
discover who we are………
we use these things to discover our physical possibilities…
we have yet extend this into our mental or emotional life…
in other words, what ought we do to discover our mental or
emotional abilities?
we can use such things as history or philosophy or math to discover
what our mental possibilite are and we can use love and hope
and justice to discover what are our emotional possibilities…
I have have loved… I can love… and if I have learned something
like philosophy, then I have learned my possibilities in the mental…
what is possible for us emotionally is things like love and hope and
equality… for we emotionally hate inequality…
so we have emotional possibilities… things that we learn when
we act emotionally…love is a great example… I haved
loved my wife for over 20 years but it is not a love like the
rush of a new love…I was watching some TV show where the
character falls in love… and it has been a long, long time
where I felt the rush of falling in love with someone like that…
and it is attractive, a wishing for, to fall in love like that again…
but then I have something else… a different kind of love…
whereas my love is a slow burning, steady pace of a long
lasting love… not the bright fire and indeed, explosive
first moments of a new love…
I don’t think I shall ever have the rush of falling in love again,
but it is understanding of where I am at these days…
experience does help us make these understandings…
so, what ought I do?
we should use things like our physical activities and
falling in love to discover what are our possibilities…
we must push the boundary of what is means to be human
with such things as our physical activities and our mental
ones such as learning a new language or learning disciplines like
math or philosophy…
and why? because we cannot “know” what is possible until
we push the borders of human actions in the physical, mental
emotional………… for example, we have seen such events as the
Holocaust and we wonder how, how someone could participate
in such horrible actions… guards and doctors and plain folks who
engaged in such actions… these actions push the boundary of
what is possible for human beings…we see it is possible for
ordinary people to engage in and be active participants
in pure and unadulterated evil…we see what is possible for
people, for us… for despite our best intention, we too can
engage in acts of evil, even in such evil as concentration camps
and the deaths of people whose only crime was to be born a different
religion…or to be born loving someone different then who love…
and this is why we must engage in and become aware of
intolerance and bigotry and inequality…for belief in those
beliefs allow us to accept and possibly engage with evil like
Auschwitz… intolerance and bigotry and inequality gives us
the possibility of thinking that it is acceptable to engage in
and support acts of evil like Auschwitz…
belief in intolerance and bigotry and inequality leads us to
to the possibility of acts of evil…
and is that how we are to define the possibilities of being human
by acts of evil? don’t we engage with our possibilities best
when we engage with our higher possibilities… the possibility
of love and the possibility of hope and the possibility of peace
and of justice and equality…
we must engage with, ought to do, with the higher possibilities
of being human, not with the lower possibilities like hate
and intolerance and anger and greed and lust……
it is not about our oughts being acts of something,
like slaying the dragon or making millions in business but
what we ought to do is explore the possibilities of being human…
that is what we ought to do…discover who we are and
what are our possibilities…and we use actions and event
and experiences to discover those possibilities…
we ought to become more human…
that is what we ought to do…
Kropotkin