IAM, I am not ignoring you, I just have other fish to fry at
this moment…
Arche: foundational…
the Greeks used the word Arche at first, as “beginning”, “origin”, or
“source of action” later the Greeks expanded its meaning to include
“first principle”, or “element” and by extension, it may mean,
“first place, power”, " a method of government" “empire, realm”,
or “command”……
that is the basic search of human beings…to discover or find out
what is our “beginning” or “first principle”…what is foundational
about being human…
many different and diverse answers have been offered…
love, life, hope, death, the pursuit of happiness, justice,
pain, avoidance of pain, drinking, sex, pursuit of money,
money, fame, wealth, power, material goods, knowledge,
god, the search for god, rock and roll, violence,
murder, crime, hate, fear, greed, lust… all have been offered
up as possible answers to the question of what is foundational
about being human……and so many more answers have been offered up…
to make a list of all the possible answers to what is foundational about
human beings could take up dozens if not hundreds of pages…….
one might suggest needs… that we human have needs is what is
foundational about humans…
one of the best answers yet…
but even this answers doesn’t cover what is foundational about human beings…
for we could include art, beauty, aesthetics, symmetry, form, function……
and for some, we could include knowledge like history, science, philosophy,
social science, economics…
and for some the foundational aspect of being human lies in
ism’s and ideology like capitalism and communism and Catholicism
or Buddhism or any other ism or ideology……
and for some, the foundational aspect of being human lies in
the superstitions, biases, prejudices and habits of human
beings…
the problem lies in the fact that all these answers could be
foundational aspects of human existence and, and none of
them could be………
we just don’t have a sense of what is the foundational
aspect of being human…
and perhaps the answer lies here… we don’t have a sense
of the foundational aspect of being human because there isn’t one.…
perhaps, perhaps no matter how hard we search or how long we search,
we can never find a foundational basis of what it means to be human…
and perhaps that is both our greatest strength and our greatest
weakness…
as our strength, it allows us to be adaptable to changing
environments and situations…
as our weakness, it doesn’t allow us to find a home… it is hard
to be human and not have a set, solid place to affirm our
humanness…some foundational aspect of being human that
grounds us…… we might not have that…
in some ways that is what is lacking in the “modern” era…
we lack some foundational aspect of being human that allows
us to become grounded… to have a solid sense of who we are,
individually and collectively…to have a foundational understanding
of what it means to be human… we are lacking that……
to understand it slightly differently… human beings need to
have a sense of who they are and where they came from…
we need a home for our understanding of what it means to be human…
human beings need, need to feel at home… and when we don’t feel
at home with either ourselves, our family, our society, our state,
we feel alienated, disconnected, apart, separate from both ourselves
and the source of our discontentment…be it society, or state or
ourselves…
if there is a flaw in Maslow, it is here… his failure to include
our innate and sometimes fatal need for home………
perhaps, perhaps that is our foundational piece of existence that
we must, must attend to… home……. for without a sense of home,
who are we, exactly?
I can’t say……
but perhaps not, perhaps there is another foundational aspect that
defines us as human beings…….
once again, perhaps not…
and that is why we feel so lost in this modern age?
we don’t have a foundational aspect of who we are,
we don’t have a home for what it means to be human…
we cannot become human unless we know what being human means……
what is the fundamental, foundational viewpoint of human existence?
what does it mean to be human?
what is the home, the foundational aspect of being human?
is it love or is it hate or is it hope or is it god or is it life or is it………
I don’t know and you don’t know and that is the problem…
we don’t know… and we are lost without that knowledge…
so what is the foundational, fundamental property of being human?
Kropotkin