I came across this Paragraph while reading William Barrett book,
“What is Existentialism?” and it suggests something…
….“in the seventeenth century this rational soul falls within the
framework of a universe whose basic features are expressed by the
physical notions of Newton. The fundamental key to the human
situation becomes the relation of the rational soul to this inertly
material universe: Man becomes the epistemological animal”
Our understanding of the universe, our explanation of the universe
becomes an understanding of this “inertly material universe”.
Man become a animal engaged in knowledge… what is knowledge,
what can we know, what are the limits to knowledge…
and lo and behold we have the man who tries to explain the
universe in exactly these terms… Descartes…and from Descartes
to Kant, we have philosophy attempting to explain the universe in
in the understanding of knowledge…
then we have Hegel who place philosophy into a historical perspective…
we now see philosophy having a history and being within history…
before Hegel, philosophy didn’t have a history… it was simply
a study of isolated idea’s that didn’t extend in time…
so the study of being, the basic understanding that the Greeks
had of the universe was a study of being, as of right now…
what does being mean to me right now? it has no past or future
to it…being was study as a stand alone idea with nothing
attached to it…and we could take aim at ancient philosophers for
not understanding being in a historical context… what does being look like
across time? and all hail Hegel for his extremely valuable contributions to
philosophy…but as philosophy lies within history, philosophy itself changed…
the 19th century tried something different then an understanding of
man within the context of knowledge, the epistemology animal…
thinkers and philosophers tried to understand man in a different sense,
and this includes Hegel…the 19the century could be thought of as the
“Ism” century…how do we understand man within the context of the various
“Ism” that exists…this is a good way to understand Marx…how does man/human beings
exists within the context of communism or how does man exists within the context of
capitalism or how does man/human beings exists within the various ism’s of democracy
or Catholicism or Buddhism or ……….what does it mean to be human in the
context of a democratic state? so people were studied and understood in
context of their place within some ism or ideology… but we have Kierkegaard,
who wanted to put man front and center of any understanding of the universe…
what is my role, the individual’s role, within the larger context of the world…
his concerns were the existentialist concerns of what does it all mean to me?
K. rejected systems because man/human beings would be lost, his needs lost
and K. thought religiously, man religious needs would be lost in a world
where we are just cogs in the machine…
and he was right… we are cogs in the machine and we have lost not only
the religious within us, but we have lost the chance to plot our own course
of exploration of who we are and what are we to become… by this I mean,
our course is set when we are young… schooling, perhaps collage, then a job,
a house, two cars, a wife, two kids and a dog name spot… work for 40 years then retire…
that is the “American dream”………
it is a materialistic dream for a materialistic world…the existentialist questions
of meaning or of becoming who you are, are simply avoided, dismissed, driven
away from us with 40 years of nonsense of being in the working world…
we are suppose to be rational, logical, realist, pragmatic… just like Zero…
who prides himself on being a realist, pragmatic… a modern man…
whereas, he has accused me of being a naïve idealist… a dreamer,
not a realist, not a pragmatist… in other words, he is accusing me
of not being a modern man…Zero rails against the modern world and
yet he the representative “modern” man that he argues against…
(now whither he is actually rational, logical, a realist or pragmatic,
is doubtful, but let us take him at his word)
as for me, I am a dreamer for I dream of a better world…a world
apart, separate from the nihilistic modern world that has dehumanized
and devalued human beings and their values… Zero fits into
such a world because his values fit quite nicely into our modern
nihilistic world… whereas I oppose and fight the modern world…
I oppose the notion of man as an “epistemology animal” that
we are animals that seek knowledge and the limits of knowledge…
the last century could be considered to be the “epistemology age”
where “knowledge is power” as they say…personally, I have quite
a bit of knowledge… I know the population of New York and what
H2O means and I know what “epistemology” means… but that
knowledge isn’t what is important nor does that knowledge
allow me to gain what is most important, wisdom…
the pursuit of knowledge, which is the same as the pursuit of profits,
leads us nowhere… if profit or knowledge is the goal, it has to
be used to do something to be of use…by itself, profits or knowledge
has no value… it only has value if it is used to get to some other goal…
that is the problem with profit/money or knowledge… it has no intrinsic value
of its own…profit/knowledge can only be used as a means to some other goal…
it is not an end or a goal… it is a means…
and that is why, in part, why I rail against profit… it has no value…
unless it is in context of something else…
I search for the goal, the end game, not the means to the end game…
and what does it mean to be a human being?
the end game…
Kropotkin