Who are we?

Its' not a foolish question.
I have seen two films who one more time send this question to us.
As we are animals made to survive as individual and as a specie, we seldom ask this kind of questions. We have no use or them in our strive on earth.

We want too feed our selves, make children and look or enemies, to fight or to flee from.
We want some status, we want to improve our reputation and so on.

One man working in a cool mine i Germany said to some demonstration who wanted to put down the mine; "Why - it's going to and i disaster anyway.." As he meant that it was too late...

Maybe evolution is the director of our drama; it´s good for a specie to have some fights, so the strongest ones will survive and have children.
But I guess the director hadst calculated with  technology.

Now we can destroy most life on Earth very fast.

So we have to evolve very fast, and we can evolve through culture and ideas.
The way we have behaved have changed a lot because of ideas like communism, liberalism, capitalism, Christianity and nationalism.

The cruelest ideas may lead to progress too, if we learn from them.
We may not forge what happened in the Nazi period i Germany. All the witnesses are soon dead, but let us not forget what they told us.

That period is a dark hole in modern European history; but from that hole a white light may be spread.

The worker in cool mine is not right, it may be to late for him to change his way of life bur not for us.

As nationalism again is singing its brutal songs in Europe it may be tunes from the past that is born from the fear of loosing power.

We have been going towards internationalism from the beginning of our history.
And today its very hard to see European countries fighting each other with arms.

We have had an agreement of reducing the climate effect to mostly two degrees Celsius.

That most mean something.

If we don't see the progress we might get very cynical.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cora Diamond on eating animals - with the help of Wittgenstein´s ideas

Image
Cora Diamond is a new name for me, even if she has worked as a professor in Philosophy in the states for a long time and is still  teaching at the university of Virginia, even she is over 80 years old. She has written a lot about Wittgenstein and that has helped her to express her view of the topic. Although she, like Wittgenstein,  has lived in a hut in Norway - and actually brought Tractatus with hes - she seems to be different and for sure more glad than W. Anyways, its W: s writings that interests her and especially his critics of metaphysics and ethics in philosophy. As it is said in Tractacus  : " Whereof one  cannot speak , thereof one must be silent." And of ethics philosophy should not speak - why? Is it like in Buddhism - its better to sit in silence and let know yourself, than to speculate about what will happen when we die? But for sure there ethical guidelines in Buddhism,  but the behaviors is often named skilful, not good (or bad). Another
Read more

I think, therefore I am NOT

Image
So Descartes was wrong. He said that he could doubt everything about himself except that he was thinking. That proved that he existed. The word "I" is the central point here. What does it mean? Perhaps we are sure that we know the answer. Is it the thoughts? In that case - where are you when you aren't thinking? Is it your job, your title? In that case - what happens if you loose your job or change job? Is it your house, your nation? Under my course to be a mindfulness instructor, the teacher, Ola Schenström, made us ask to each other; "Who are you?" After each answer the question was repeated by the questioner.We soon discovered that there were no end to the answers - or maybe an adequate end could be; "I don't know."Or maybe; "It seems I have no essence." Other thinkers have come to the same conclusions; Buddha, Sartre and more recently Damasio and Parfit. Sartre, for instance, has said that we are the sum of our actions. We ha
Read more

Wittgenstein and Buddha -buddies?

Image
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous philosopher, reflected in the posthumously published  book "Philosophical Investigations" about the picture above; Is it a hare or duck?  He meant that we make, or must make, a statement what it is. And I suppose he meant that we often or always has to interpret the world around us. But two different interpretations can both be right! Language and thoughts controls what we see.....   You can compare with the picture of a glass. Half empty or half empty?  Who decides? Yes, it's you... And whatever you say is right.  But you can be aware of what you think. That can say more of yourself than of the glass....  You can be aware of that you always do interpretations of things that happens.  If you have a pessimistic or a naive point of view, you can be aware of the view and your statements.  Buddha and Wittgenstein were both aware of that different persons uses different perspectives.  But Buddha spoke about the "right 
Read more