I just finished another biography, Da Vinci by Isaacson…
and I was thinking about stuff… and I thought about the very
idea of reading a biography, why do I read biographies?
over the last couple of years I have read a dozen plus biographies,
from Da Vinci to Darwin to Hesse to Hume to Hegel…
but why? what can I learn from a biography?
What do I want to know?
I want to know how these people viewed the world…
by what method did they use to view and understand the world…
what was their reaction to people, events, moments, idea’s?
I am trying to discover what these various people can teach me
about viewing the world…and how should I approach viewing
other people, events, moments and idea’s.
I guess it is a matter of perspective, by what perspective does
one view the world and the idea’s therein…
I view these biographies as teaching tools to discover what I can
take from or as the case may be, steal from other thinkers, writers,
artist, philosophers.
Good artist copy, great artist steal…as one wag put it…
the question of what it takes to be a human instead of animal/human is
at the forefront of everything I do or read… I read Goethe because he
was a human who was human because he explored his possibilities to
the fullest.
How, or by what means, can I explore my possibilities…
I see biographies as “how to books”… how to see and understand
the world and universe we live in…
but thought without action is barren and action without thought
is brutal and violent…
I must unite, in some fashion, the thoughts and actions, of one
Kropotkin……
how am I to act but within the confines of having thought about it…
I spend far more of my days thinking about what it means to be human
then I do writing about it… and reading biographies are part of that
reflection of what it means to be human.
in my other readings, I can see I am not very original in thought…
almost everything I have written has been written or thought of before…
but that doesn’t stop me or even slow me down… for the very simple reason,
given that human beings has reflected upon the status of being human
for over 10’000 years, it would be tough at this stage of the game to actually
have some completely original thought about what it means to be human……
so all I am doing is restaging old, ancient thoughts into modern words and language…
and I am ok with that…
but we are at a completely different ballgame in regards to
our current historical situation…we see in our “modern” world,
the influence or impact of those anti-human ism’s and ideologies
of nationalism and capitalism and communism and Catholicism
and all those other ism’s and ideologies that negate or dehumanize
human beings… ours is a nihilistic age and we must overcome that
which negates and denies human beings and their values…
so, the battle of being human in our modern age is slightly different
then it has been, say before the revolutions that changed the world,
the political, economic and social revolutions of science, the French,
the Industrial and the Russian…
we must have another revolution… and the basis of that revolution is
to overcome the nihilistic ism’s and ideologies of our “modern” world…
the question is really one of, can we human beings live without
ism’s and ideologies? or are we forced to have them in order to
give our lives, meaning and purpose?
does existence itself, by the very fact we exist, can that give
us meaning and purpose?
or must we have ism’s and ideologies to give our lives meaning?
can you live without the ism’s and ideologies of religions or political
or economic of the 21st century or must we exists within those nihilistic
values of our modern age?
can human existence, all by itself, give us enough meaning and purpose
to justify our existence without any reference to any ism and/or ideology?
if we live by values instead of ism’s and ideologies, we might be able to
find meaning and purpose in our lives…we can find meaning and purpose
in the values of love and justice and hope and freedom and charity…
if I live in the value of love, I might not need to hold to any such ism
and ideology as capitalism and communism and Catholicism, for example…
the values we hold can give our lives meaning and purpose…
we can dispose of all those destructive ism’s and ideologies
that populate our lives today……those modern ism’s and ideologies…
examine your life, know thyself… what ism’s and ideologies drive
your life and do you need, really need those ism’s and ideologies
to make sense of your life?
it is only by examining one’s life, can we begin to see
what is possible…
Kropotkin