The development of a high intelligence and of a self-consciousness seems to characterize the essence of human being. These characteristics of human being put him in comparison with the problem of love and freedom. Freedom does not belong to the animals nor to plants. They depend on the "species", while human being possesses an individual "I".
Dear all,
Heinz von Foerster said
‘’ we become metaphysician whenever we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. ‘’ ‘’Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.’’ ‘’ the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer."
''But we are under no compulsion, not even under that of logic, when we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions.''
''With this freedom of choice we are now responsible for whatever we choose!''
''But with responsibily choice comes the burden/risk of being blamed , of being punished by other or the sequences of event we are responsible of. Come the temptation of reducing these risks by voluntary reducing our choices by setting rules which remove these free choices and these risks. But this strategy has to remain hidden, the rules have to be presented as being imposed from others or a natural state of affairs.''
http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html
Dear Daniele, your question does historically speaking make all sense, indeed.
The ancient greeks - roughly said - did not know a world with love, but a world with freedom. Whether nurtured from scholé (Leisure) or from thought, the ancient Greeks did have a world of freedom. Autos-nomos, f.i. (However, one must careful take into consideration the differences among the archaic, the classical and the hellenistic Greece).
With the arrival of Christianity, the west came to know love, but seems to have distrusted freedom. For the Christina world, freedom is not as important and fundamental as love. As such, freedom was "re-discovered" thanks to 1789 - onwards.
...This, for the time being...
Dear Carlos,
I totally agree with you, It is exactly what I also think. The problem is now to understand what is the task of human beings in our time where the self-conscious soul is so developed to make above all many young people psycopathic. As I said in other place that we have crossed the threshold of spiritual world.
kind regards
Daniele
Dear Daniele, I apologize, but I distrust the individual "I" that was implemented by the west. It is, if allowed, just a belief - serious one, though, for I am not fully convinced that the 2I" does truly exist. There are numerous societies, cultures, and civilisations where the "I" has not or does not exist(ed). That little hard-necked I has been the reason for numerous wreckages in the history of the western world. Te sortie of that I coincides with the loss of freedom, I believe...
Without freedom but with love - wouldn't it be a very strange world ?
Leonid
From Greek Classical Philosoiphers" love , to parental love, to religious love and up to now , the modern reference to love, there is a spectrum of its meanings.
No World would exist without attraction, which is a form of love as the phiyical one resulting to augmenting the natural world.
Notwithstanding the referred binding nececity to those involved in love, it is realized that absolute freedom cannot exist otherwise love turns into lonliness or hate.
It is either "love" and not freedom ," lonliness" which is real freedom of body and pure thoughtt or, " hate " which involves freedom of body but not freedom of thought involving thinking of others.
Dear Carlos the Greek for love was and is EROS [ ἔρως ] .
Daniele,
'' Freedom does not belong to the animals nor to plants.''
If freedom did not exist before homo sapiens sapiens, then where does it come from? Humans are more adaptable, can learn more, than the non-human animals and in this sense are more free. But the behavior of higher animals do seem to have a lot of similarity to our behavior including making choices in the sense of not being forced into them or doing them automatically.
Higher animals have also the sense of an ''I''. They cannot speak about their ''I'' but have the same kind of ''I'' we have when we act rapidly in sport. They are self-aware which mean they have a sentient body and they are also aware that other animals are sentiant body. Higher primate are aware of other mind primate and can see other's perspectives.
And mammals care/love for their offspring so much so that they risk their life to defend them. The experience period of grief when close one or offspring dye. Mate get attached for all life in certain species. All that are related to love in between animals and they all enjoy sexual love. And only bonobo and human female have permanent sexual activities that are not limited to period of fertily. This indicate that not only human love is a continuation of primate love/caring, but might be key to our evolution and our special type of freedom and intelligence.
Some humans called psychopath seem to conserve only intelligence and loose the love part of their being. An humanity without love would be a psychopathic one and not for long on its path of self-destruction. It is the love path of our humanity that keeps it going and evolving.
I don't think the choice is valid, Daniele. Freedom and love are not mutually exclusive, nor do I think one can say that "I" isn't present elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
We are predators, although highly adaptable predators, who can successfully subsist on plant life alone. Still, our eyes are strictly in front of our face, so that should not leave a lot of doubt. And, as other predators, we definitely prowl for the best interests of #1. But not exclusively so.
To turn the question around, what is love without freedom? It doesn't mean anything. What is the value in anything that is compelled, beyond our control?
Dear Louis, what you call I of animal is the "species". When you say that "mammals care/love for their offspring so much so that they risk their life to defend them" , they don't defend them as individuals but they defend them and risk to defend the "species". This has been well studied by biologists as Jay Gould (see for example his Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Surely mammals have the ability to be more independent from the group stereotype, but as I said in an other answer the characteristic of human I is the confrontation with th evil, and that is connected with freedom, not with love.
Goethe's Faust is a wonderful example of this confrontation with evil. Do you can imagine a macaque who wagers his soul with the Devil, with Mephistopheles?
Dear Albert your answer is very interesting and I will reply later.
kind regards
Daniele
Daniele,
Yes non-human animals did not created an anthropomorphic theatre of spirits,gods with deviant characters, etc. This is part of the human animal pecularities because we are the only one telling stories to each other. We can enter all kind of fiction worlds of our own making such as Faust. This is part of our pecularities. Cultural stories, important ones are there to stabilize us in certain cultural forms. Since the time, around 10000 years ago, we entered a very destuctive form of humanity, one that is against our foundational humaness of love and caring, the phase of the herders with horses, weapon and war, in other word patriarchy. Patriarchy is stabilized through evil stories, fight against evil. Many attempts to reverse that gigantic cultural trend through love stories but so far we are still stock in this destructive phase of domination, competition, guns and fight against evil/animals. We project all that is bad in that patriarchal reinforcing story into animals while these are essentially good. This is the price of patriarchy.
Dear Albert, the question is now: what does it mean "love". For St. Augustine love is the third person of Trinity, while he identifies the Father and the Son with the truth. This is only an example. There is hierarchical system of love, from the lower, the craving, to the spiritual love, the love for the "person". An other example is the Einfühlung of Edith Stein, the empaty. The ability to feel the original experience of an other person, it is an asymptotic approach. But more high is the experience of love more free it must be. It is impossible to really love without freedom.
Dear Louis, please, just for the sake of our conversation in this thread, allow me this:
Anaxagoras used to say: the gods of the cows arte cow-like; the gods of dogs are dogs-like, the dogs of trees are trees-like. And yes, the gods of human beings are human-like. God does not need to express him/herself in just one one, as the waits has traditionally taught. We cannot force him/her to be one particular expression period. Hence, other realms and dimensions of life to have their own experience of divinity. _ Someone like Spinoza would agree with this, I believe.
Dear Carlos, this is also the point of view of Plato and Goethe. It is also my point of view, the whole multiplicity of existent beings have an "archetype, an ideal form. At the end of IX century the "linguisting turn", which did lead to analytical philosophy, following Sir Michael Dummet, a great analytical, was born because, above all, in English philosophical world, influenced by Wittgenstein's Logical Researches, it was considered impossible to solve the Platonic Myth of "ideal forms".
If I may, dear Daniele, we could perhaps rephrase your question as follows, just to broaden up a little bit the scope: how does freedom stand in relation to happiness in nature - explicitly recognising that in nature there are no hierarchies whatsoever?
The tension between nature and culture is a most serious challenge within the frame of the western mind...
Very interesting answer, dear Carlos. The German Idealsts, in particular Fichte, did state that the I lives in will, only in human individuals, this I is God, God who after the Mystery of Golgotha, entered into human soul, where the I is a form of the spirit and is different from soul, like in the first Crhristianity and before the Council of Constantinople in 869 where it was affirmed that human being is made only of body and soul, renouncing the ancient thricotomy of body, soul and spirit. It is difficult to find a solution because to be spiritualist or to be materialist cannot be based on logical thinking, but is "a philosophical choice"
That, dear Daniele, was exactly what Fichte claimed, namely: the kind of philosophy we choose depends on the kind of human beings we are. This, of course, is no relativism in any way.
Fichte had a clear answer to your question: he truly bet for freedom more radically than Kant himself. It seems that the ones who are free are willing to pay the cost for happiness... And the other way round.
Very well, Carlos, I think we are going a little bit more deeply. It is interesting for me to talk with you
Dear all,
Heinz von Foerster said
‘’ we become metaphysician whenever we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. ‘’ ‘’Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.’’ ‘’ the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer."
''But we are under no compulsion, not even under that of logic, when we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions.''
''With this freedom of choice we are now responsible for whatever we choose!''
''But with responsibily choice comes the burden/risk of being blamed , of being punished by other or the sequences of event we are responsible of. Come the temptation of reducing these risks by voluntary reducing our choices by setting rules which remove these free choices and these risks. But this strategy has to remain hidden, the rules have to be presented as being imposed from others or a natural state of affairs.''
http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html
I get your point dear Louis. However, any undecidable questions ends/stops when life/living comes to the fore. In other words, undecidable questions are somehow solved or superseded when the question becomes about making life possible and always more and more possible.
Of course, I remember Camus: The only philosophical question is suicide. Well, still so...
Dear Humberto, Woody Allen is always right! In this case, in the voice of Prof. Levy. In some other cases, thanks to M. McLuhan, and so on and so forth...
It is better a world without love but free or a world without freedom but with love?
Think a world without love but freedom might cause clashes, chaos, fighting, wars etc. due to everybody can do what they want, hatred arises etc. A world without freedom but with love is a kind of strange scenario because without freedom or when people are under suppression, they are more likely to feel dissatisfied & rebel against the authority, oppression party etc. Think we need both love & freedom on the right place at the right time so that the outcome is beneficial to mankind.
very interesting, Louis, I did'nt know this statement by Heinz von Foerster
Dear Carlos, dear Louis, the problem I think is basically what we believe through our experiences, our life and especially our destiny. When Louis writes that human person is a "human animal", he makes us understand that he remains at inside of evolutionary paradigm, whereby the human being comes from monkeys. I am totally outside of this paradigm. This does not mean that we cannot communicate. But the philosophical assumptions, but especially those that are based on his own experience oblige us to play fair. I have experience that human being is a spiritual being and that the world of fairy tales and legends is the world to which I tend spiritually through free self-consciousness. I am an old Rosicrucian, a researcher of spirit following Brentano,s and Husserl's phenomenology an both Goethe's and Steiner's epistemological research. Practical science of the spirit which is an occulte science lets you do incredible experiences, if you don't become a fanatic. I respect the opinions of others and i am very interested regard to points of view opposed to mine. But I do not like people who contradicts only for love of contradiction.
Dear Daniele, with different motivations I have the same approach to yours. The world of children is full of spirits, ghosts, fairytales, demons and angels - as well as animals that speak, and the like. The world of adults is rather... boring. Literature does enrich very much te experience of being human, and one particular chapter in literature is exactly children literature. (Of course I know there are good and bad books herein).
From a different take, the frontier between reality and dreams is not as rigid as people think. I believe they are a sort of wonderful interplay. All in all, very much as Husserl said, we can only understand the world and the others from within - never from the outside. Easy said, very difficult to be done.
Dear Carlos, Husserl stated also "immer wieder" I. e. "over and over again", that means that phenomenology is an open metaphysics. In any case I think we should regain the imaginative thinking, not returning back to time of myth, but as the overcoming of pure logical thinking. The imaginative thinking must become an exact fantasy able to grasp the deepest links starting from the self-conscious perception of nature. Steiner, for example, with regard to the manner of thinking of Goethe in his scientific writings, calls it "morphological thought". It is difficult to speak of these things, because we live in a materialistic time that considers only the intellectual thinking and does not know a thought which contains in itself science and art. This kind of thinking works deeply on the feeling sphere trasforming it in a enthusiastic way and not merely competitive as the purely intellectual thinking, where one wants to have reason on the other.
Daniele,
We thought that we could escape the mythical by creating the myth of the objective reality. We only produced of a new one which is authocratic and which we create at the cost of excluding ourself from our own subjective reality which we have desacrated in calling it an illusion. And now some as so much believer of this external objective machine world that they try to build life/consciousness back into it. Exactness is the quality of the mechanistic mode of thinking of science. It is not to be reproduce into the imaginative mode of communication, arts and languages.
Our imagination is a slightly different version of the mammalian primate imagination and this small difference has allowed us to get some control of the reality engine of the mammalian imagination and do collectively construct through different communication medium different realities and they are all dream-like as all perceptions are.
The scientific challenge is to discover the evolutionary structure of the mammalian imagination and how humaness evolved as a new overt communcation structure built-on top of it.
Yes, dear Daniele. Hussars call it differently: f.i. "eidetic Intuition", and also Phantasie and Imagination. This, I believe, is the real heuristic of the phenomenological philosophy.
I personally think that the real thought is imaginative (what else?). Put on a different track, I am o the side of Poincaré, not of Hilbert.
In another post I'll tell you a nice story... Cheers!
When he was dying - Husserl died poisoned by tabac - he remained three days speechless in his bed. His wife Malvine sat there all the time, waiting for the best. The third day suddenly and unexpectedly Husserl recovered his voice and said, while his eyes were glooming: "Ich habe es gesehen, aber ich es dir night sage. Nein, das kann ich nicht", and immediately after that he passed away.
("I saw it, but I cannot tell you; no, I can't".)
Dear Louis, first of all I speak of the aspiration toward a science of the future, of which we find traces in the way to study the "face" of nature we find in Goethe's scientifical writings. Moreover what you affirm " Exactness is the quality of the mechanistic mode of thinking of science" can be reported only to physics. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant said " "will never be a Newton for a blade of grass", and so the organic must be explained “as if” it were constituted as teleological. The life sciences are still studied with the mechanistic thought and method of physics. But at this level to speak of "exactness " It is no longer appropriate. This is one of the most important problems in philosophy of science. In 1830 there was at the French Academy of Science a face to face between E'tienne Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire and Cuvier, named "Principes de phiosophie zoologique". Saint Hilaire advocated the unit of the animal type, what Goethe called "Urtier". The conception of Saint Hilaire and of Goethe was considered "metaphysics" and non-scientific by supporters of Cuvier. Studies on genes Homeobox have demonstrated that the same homeotic genes which build the segments of the body of arthropods are involved in the construction of the segments of the rombenchephalon of rodents. The comparative morphology of Goethe and Saint Hilaire proved capable via the imaginative thought to demonstrate with two centuries in advance what the science of normal paradigm has discovered through molecular genetics. This is my point of view that I tried to explaine in my last answer.
Daniele,
What you said in your last post is true but it is totally compatible with what I am saying. What Goethe and other where exploring within their imagination eventually became more precise scientific knowledge a bit like the drawing of an artistic architect eventually become translated in more precise blue print and become realized by workers. But the architect is not saying where to put the screws and its mode of thinking has not much to do with this and the plasterer do not have to fantasized about how to plaster the wall nor the architect.
When you watch a masterpiece of Raffaello as the Sistine Madonna, also called the Madonna of San Sisto in Dresden, you immediately know that Raffaello has created the framework with the imaginative creativity, but the laws of chromatics, on which is based the set of colors that we observe, have not been infringed. However we are all aware that Raffaello has not created this masterpiece following the chemical laws of colors, according to a reductionistic process. Hiere science and art meet. The imaginative creation go on with a very deep feeling, something that is difficult to imagine, something that is very similar to love. And all the creation go on through a phenomenological morphological way. It is impossible to create the form starting from the matter.
"Humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress". "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto"Seneca. To Dalai Lama, "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism
Dear Irina,
your answer is very deep. Why at this point of our debate you did write this answer? Do you mean that someone did hurt an other person? Or your answer concerns my original question. Please answer my question? I totally agree with you, but I don't understand...
kind regards
Daniele
Dear Louis, dear Carlos you may find the relationship between imagination and logic thought in the Descartes' VI metaphysical meditation. I would like to discuss with you about this very important topic. All that has to do with freedom and love.
king regards
Daniele
Daniele,
I am interested to hear how you see the relations between imagination,rationality(logic),freedom and love. Synthesize in the extreme my position is:
First we have to understand this from the evolutionary biological perspective. So Rationality/language came after and is less fundamental then the others. With the mammals comes: love in the form of care of youth and herd and come a lot more freedom with the increase in cortex size which I take as the organ of prediction in the future of a realm of possibilities in the form of proto-narrative which are the core of the mammalian imagination and are embodied in terms of action schemata.
Although the enlightment period is a period of affirmation of political freedom and the idealisation of freedom, it is also a period where nature began to be understood in a mecanistic way denying any place for freedom in it. This is only an opposition between freedom and understanding/rationality when the later claim that nature is totally rational, i.e. totally mecanistic. There is no oppostion between freedom and understanding if the claim of understanding to not claim to get at the bottom of Nature. von Foerster comments elegantly limits reason to the decidable and show that not all Nature is decidable; even the most rational realm of mathematics has been proven to not be all decidable. The whole domain of biological evolution and of life is a realm of freedom. Freedom can only exist outside of any rational framework. It is why it is so difficult to deal with since rationality is not what allow us to deal with freedom. Freedom is self evident in the domain of life as we experience it.
Love is a conditio sine qua non of natural life. Love also implies freedom. We need both love and freedom.
Dear Louis, I totally agree with you when you say that not all in nature (as in maths) is decidible. Life and freedom are strongly connected.
Dear Luisa I think that freedom is the condition for loving.
Life is absolutely unbearable without love. Can we say the same about happiness? It seems, no. There are, there, around us, many people who are not entirely happy - and yet, they strive...
Love this sentence louis Brassard: "The whole domain of biological evolution and of life is a realm of freedom."
BIOLOGY OF LOVE
By Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zoller
http://www.lifesnaturalsolutions.com.au/documents/biology-of-love.pdf
Charles S. Peirce
Evolutionary Love
Published in The Monist, vol. 3, pp. 176-200 (1893)
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/evolove/evolove.htm
Here Peirce promote a evolutionary love paradigm for the evolution of the whole cosmos and discussed on modernity and Darwinism and Political economy bullshit ideology has been a replacement of the Gospel of Love by a Gospel of Greed.
In the following, Ravaisson presented the evolution of Nature and life as a quest towards more and more freedom through the acquisition of habits. Here natural evolution and biological evolution are part of a single evolution of nature towards Freedom. What is remarkable in this approach is that order/habit is the consequence of undecibility and freedom and not its opposition.
On Habit, 1838
Félix Ravaisson
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/colt607/ravaisson-of-habit.pdf
Here against another description of life evolution towards increasing level of possibility.
Michael Polanyi *
Life’s Irreducible Structure, 1968
http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polanyi%20Lifes%20Irreducible%20Structure%20Acience%201968.htm
the paper concludes as:
''Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of inanimate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.''
Is there a DNA for love and a DNA for freedom ? This might answer the very important and difficult question posed. Love can be defined and understood in many ways. I recall ( an observation of Buddha ?) " we pluck a flower because we like it , but we water the plant , when we love it" To my mind .this says it all , love which is unfettering, is the other side of freedom and one cannot exist without the other.
Cheers
When we provide freedom in the world, love is not barred from this freedom. Therefore, it is always better to have w world with freedom in general, freedom to love one another in particular.
Live and let live
Love and let love
The two are essential so I will prefer a world full of love and freedom
Dear Daniele,
Can't we imagine a world with full of love. Without any kind of hat, then how thw question of freedom will arise? though it is a hypothetical thing, but in metaphysical worlp freedom is require to love.
While the scientific exploration of love is its phetal state, love is the most is one of the most important theme of litterature, poetry and songs. Here is one such song from Jacques Brel : Quand On N'a Que L'amour
https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=quand%20on%20n%27a%20que%20l%27amour
Quand on a que l'amour
A s'offrir en partage
A jour du grand voyage
Qu'est notre grand amour
Quand on a que l'amour
Mon amour toi et moi
Pour qu'éclatent de joie
Chaque heure et chaque jour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour vivre nos promesses
Sans nulle autre richesse
Que d'y croire toujours
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour meubler de merveilles
Et couvrir de soleil
La laideur des faubourgs
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour unique raison
Pour unique chanson
Et unique secours
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour habiller matin
Pauvres et malandrins
De manteaux de velours
Quand on a que l'amour
A offrir en prière
Pour les maux de la terre
En simple troubadour
Quand on a que l'amour
A offrir à ceux là
Dont l'unique combat
Est de chercher le jour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour tracer un chemin
Et forcer le destin
A chaque carrefour
Quand on a que l'amour
Pour parler aux canons
Et rien qu'une chanson
Pour convaincre un tambour
Alors sans avoir rien
Que la force d'aimer
Nous aurons dans nos mains
Amis le monde entier
Dear Louis, Jacques Brel deserves thousand up-votes, today and always!
Heidegger did state that human being is a being-toward-death. I think that human being is a being-toward-freedom. This is also the difference between animals and humans. Animals can love in a very deeply way but they cannot be free.
Anti-psychiatry has it clear: the phenotype of those who prefer happiness over freedom is rather fatty, sedentary, confortable with whatever-there-is. On he contrary those who prefer freedom are rather thinner, and more active. Of course this is a generalisation but it helps provide a picture...
To be free as well as to be in love simultaneously is marvellous. But as human when we love we run away into abstractions so go into the subject of what love is we should first free it from the encrustation of centuries, swallow all ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To segregate something into what it should be and what it is, is the most illusory way of dealing with life.
We should look upon love without any codes, without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, come upon it as soothing breeze... What I mean to is Love will come into your well being only after self- abandonment. It is beyond the realm of thought, no searching, no wanting, no focus at all. And when you experience such love beyond the fields of thought in absolute stillness you are free and in love simultaneously.
We just need to overcome thought, silent mind there are no chains there never have been the only prison exists in the field of thought and the basic delusion is to identify with thought ... We need to transcend thought so that there will be no thought and no time. And when you cannot identify with some centre you are freely in love.
Dear Sumira, dear all, I think we should analyse more deeply what we call "love". I have observed that for many persons "love" corresponds with "to fall in love". But we should consider more types of"love" . The extreme love is "sacrifice". I say that in the most lay way. And I think that is only at this level that we can talk about "freedom". "To fall in love" means the plane of emotions, not that one of self-conscious feeling.
Daniele,
Rene Descartes is attending a soiree at the Palais Versailles. A sommelier approaches and asks, “Monsieur Descartes, would you like a glass of wine?” Descartes pauses and answers, “I think not.” And poof!–he disappears.
Quoted from:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_do_YOU_know_there_is_a_God#view=57780d535b4952dc743bee64 [accessed Jul 3, 2016].
Very funny, dear Louis. It is as if Wittgenstein was asked: "What do you do during your free time?", and he kept silence. The reason is that he was afraid of language going into holidays!
See Tractatus
Dear Daniele, dear All,
Humanism can be only free. "We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion"Mother Teresa.Surely, Narcissists are free in their own way- they love only themselves.
https://ru.pinterest.com/pin/354095589427894041/
Daniele,
Heidegger's being-toward-death reminds me of what Joseph Cambell was saying in ''Myths to Live by''
''the most evident distinguishing sign is man's organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws. ... If a differntiating feature is to be named, spearating human from animal psychology, it is surely this of he subordination in the human sphere of even economics to mythology. And if one should ask why or how any such unsubstantial impulsion over should have become dominant in the ordering of pysical life, the answer is that in this wonderful human brain of ours thre has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual , conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die.
This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology. And along with this there runs another realization; namely, that the social group into which the individual has been born, which nourishes and protects him and which, for the greater part of his life, he must himself help to nourish and protect, was flourishing long fore his own birth and will remain when he is gone. That is to say, not only does the individual member of our species, conscious of himself as such, face death, but he confronts also the necessity to adapt himself to whatever order of life may happen to be that of the community into which he has been born, this being an order of life superordinated to his own, a superoranism into which he must allow himself to be absorbed, and through participation in which he will come to know the life that transcends death.''
By these sad days for Italy, all you know what happened in Dacca. All this pain, Italians and other wesrtern and eastern people tortured and killed by terrorists... A young man, of a rich muslim family, who did study in USA, has choosed to be killed to share the destiny of two girls also following a course of study in USA. This is a "great" example of what I mean about the relationship between love and freedom. This young man is a true hero! Dear Irina this is also an example of humanism, and yes Irina, humanism can be only free. And I agree with you when you say " Narcisists are free in their own way- they love only themselves.
Dear Louis, what Joseph Cambell said is very interesting. "This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology." Human being, unlike animals is self-conscious to be a being-toward-death. It is, in fact, in this context that the free will becomes possible. Nietzsche's Birth of tragedy highlights the polarity between Apollonian and Dionysian. It is the most ancient form of pre-philosophical trascendence. For ancient Greeks the idea of death was the most terrible thing. Joshua J. Mark writes:"The after-life, for the ancient Greeks, consisted of a grey and dreary world in the time of Homer (8th century BCE) and, most famously, we have the scene from Homer's Odyssey in which Odysseus meets the spirit of the great warrior Achilles in the nether-world where Achilles tells him he would rather be a landless slave on earth than a king in the underworld."Between Apollo and Dionysus does not exist free will. Everything depends on the wishes of the Gods. Cambell said also: "not only does the individual member of our species, conscious of himself as such, face death, but he confronts also the necessity to adapt himself to whatever order of life may happen to be that of the community into which he has been born, this being an order of life superordinated to his own, a superorganism into which he must allow himself to be absorbed, and through participation in which he will come to know the life that transcends death.'' The problem of free will begins after the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. After the time of Myth.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Philosophy
- Moral Philosophy
- Free Will