@Vonbek777, you mentioned Aristotle's Ethics'; with his three ways of living: "To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment. For there are, we may say, three prominent types of life — that just mentioned, the political, and thirdly the contemplative life." Here is where I get a bit closer to my first post; if I may use Dante's Inferno for the first part, the collective, and the world around - the life of enjoyment; climbing your way up with the art of Politics - the Purgatorio (more or less) - ending with Paradiso, the pinnacle of life; it seems like Epicurus' philosophy, and stoicism, and Spinoza rationalism is the only way the reach it. Like you said - "value the individual over the collective". Living like Father Ferapont, invisible..hmm..maybe not my best idea; I need to catch some shuteye.
@Vonbek777, you mentioned Aristotle's Ethics'; with his three ways of living: "To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment. For there are, we may say, three prominent types of life — that just mentioned, the political, and thirdly the contemplative life." Here is where I get a bit closer to my first post; if I may use Dante's Inferno for the first part, the collective, and the world around - the life of enjoyment; climbing your way up with the art of Politics - the Purgatorio (more or less) - ending with Paradiso, the pinnacle of life; it seems like Epicurus' philosophy, and stoicism, and Spinoza rationalism is the only way the reach it. Like you said - "value the individual over the collective". Living like Father Ferapont, invisible..hmm..maybe not my best idea; I need to catch some shuteye.
If I ever get a holodeck, my program of choice will be the First Circle Pub. A seat by the fireside and just sit back and listen to the discussions, a la Tolkien and CS Lewis holding Inklings meetings at the Eagle and Child. Populate the program with all those lost penny philosophers denied entry to the upper realms by conventional religious dogma.
You can't mention Spinoza without his opposite, Descartes, just like the Stoics and Epicureans...on the surface that implies duality, except you get a silent member of neutral balance in there by definition of the other two, and you're back to trinitarianism, but then you can go back to that 3 made 1 and get a fourth aspect, 4th dimension, what ever you want to call it, but it is the solution to entropy.
This 4th aspect is where the solution to the individual vs. the collective lives too.
My personal model on the subject is what I call temporal ethics, or the 3 Ds: Duty, Dedication, and Determination. Human consciousness divided into id, ego, and superego (what I call the hive mind) and by the perception of time. Past associated with the id due to the fact that the id is always trying to recreate past sensory experiences and must be tempered by duty. The hivemind associated with the future since it is concerned with the community's future response to a present action, also the province of dedication. And last the ego, which is a projection decision matrix designed to reconcile the demands of the id and hivemind in the present governed by determination. We're trapped in the ego. Jungian psychology says that collective unconscious lies beneath all, the machine language of the brain where the archetypes swim in that murky sea, and the self rises above all making all the aspects of human consciousness one in essence, back to that 4th way of looking at things.
What I tend to see now in terms of human ideas is a giant two-step dance of point and counterpoint with the truth somewhere in between, the dialectical process Plato chronicled so well through Socrates and was taken to new levels with German philosophers such as Hegel. But like human consciousness, the dialectic solution is a compromise, an ego projection...the true solution is not compromise but reassimilation of separate parts into one coherent whole.
The entire problem mathematical is liner in nature. Order and Chaos the heads of that two-headed snake that are trapped in eternal conflict. That snake is a line trying to figure out how to become a circle again. An apt metaphor for existence. This is why primes, pi, and fibonacci grab the mind's attention. They're markers in the fabric of reality that point to the whole and not separate parts of life, the universe, and everything. 42 is in there somewhere too I'm sure.
Community vs. individual is a hard one for me. At this point in my journey, I think some individuals are slightly disconnected from the hive so to speak as a survival coping mechanism. These individuals while generally useless to the community serve a vital role of introducing new ideas needed to move the herd in directions it needs to go in order to survive. Also, in cases of society breakdown, they offer a way back to a more primitive mode of living. But for every prophet there is the opposite of the coin, mad hatter, and time, fate, chance distinguishes between the two.
I have a theory in infancy tying entropy to the mass of ideas required to maintain a stable society. The more complex the society and the demands for resources, the more energy required to maintain the mass of ideas at work in any given society. When a critical mass is reached, the society has to level up, i.e. new ideas have to occur in order to progress and reduce the overall energy expenditures needed to combat entropy and thus remain stable. If the ideas don't come, the society has to fall back to a previous state (oh noes level drained) in order to survive. Individuals serve as conduits for these ideas, truly avatars for muses either from that 4th state or the collective unconscious.
Father Ferapont has always been an intriguing character. Another one of those mad St. Johns, both diabolical and divine, and perhaps that is the point. Ferapont draws us back to the ancient mystery schools, a link to the past where knowledge was held ransom by mystery and ritual. The human experience still cries for that today. It would have to for if the enlightenment produced light, there must be shadow too, and Ferapont I would argue is a creature of shadow in light of the dawn or rationalism.
I don't think that one's outlook on life has anything to do with stats. That's just personality.
I happen to like Xan because he personifies my own pessimism. By lampooning me, and exaggerating parts of myself that I both like and despise, he winds up boosting my spirits in an ironic way, sort of like a jester lampooning the king and thus "speaking truth to power."
One of my favorite characters in the Star Wars saga is Threepio, for the same reasons. The way I approach life in real life is so much like the approaches and behaviors of Threepio and Xan. I tend to try to disarm those who might harm me or oppose me by putting on that "poor me" control drama.
Plus, both characters provide hilarious comedy relief.
Comments
You can't mention Spinoza without his opposite, Descartes, just like the Stoics and Epicureans...on the surface that implies duality, except you get a silent member of neutral balance in there by definition of the other two, and you're back to trinitarianism, but then you can go back to that 3 made 1 and get a fourth aspect, 4th dimension, what ever you want to call it, but it is the solution to entropy.
This 4th aspect is where the solution to the individual vs. the collective lives too.
My personal model on the subject is what I call temporal ethics, or the 3 Ds: Duty, Dedication, and Determination. Human consciousness divided into id, ego, and superego (what I call the hive mind) and by the perception of time. Past associated with the id due to the fact that the id is always trying to recreate past sensory experiences and must be tempered by duty. The hivemind associated with the future since it is concerned with the community's future response to a present action, also the province of dedication. And last the ego, which is a projection decision matrix designed to reconcile the demands of the id and hivemind in the present governed by determination. We're trapped in the ego. Jungian psychology says that collective unconscious lies beneath all, the machine language of the brain where the archetypes swim in that murky sea, and the self rises above all making all the aspects of human consciousness one in essence, back to that 4th way of looking at things.
What I tend to see now in terms of human ideas is a giant two-step dance of point and counterpoint with the truth somewhere in between, the dialectical process Plato chronicled so well through Socrates and was taken to new levels with German philosophers such as Hegel. But like human consciousness, the dialectic solution is a compromise, an ego projection...the true solution is not compromise but reassimilation of separate parts into one coherent whole.
The entire problem mathematical is liner in nature. Order and Chaos the heads of that two-headed snake that are trapped in eternal conflict. That snake is a line trying to figure out how to become a circle again. An apt metaphor for existence. This is why primes, pi, and fibonacci grab the mind's attention. They're markers in the fabric of reality that point to the whole and not separate parts of life, the universe, and everything. 42 is in there somewhere too I'm sure.
Community vs. individual is a hard one for me. At this point in my journey, I think some individuals are slightly disconnected from the hive so to speak as a survival coping mechanism. These individuals while generally useless to the community serve a vital role of introducing new ideas needed to move the herd in directions it needs to go in order to survive. Also, in cases of society breakdown, they offer a way back to a more primitive mode of living. But for every prophet there is the opposite of the coin, mad hatter, and time, fate, chance distinguishes between the two.
I have a theory in infancy tying entropy to the mass of ideas required to maintain a stable society. The more complex the society and the demands for resources, the more energy required to maintain the mass of ideas at work in any given society. When a critical mass is reached, the society has to level up, i.e. new ideas have to occur in order to progress and reduce the overall energy expenditures needed to combat entropy and thus remain stable. If the ideas don't come, the society has to fall back to a previous state (oh noes level drained) in order to survive. Individuals serve as conduits for these ideas, truly avatars for muses either from that 4th state or the collective unconscious.
Father Ferapont has always been an intriguing character. Another one of those mad St. Johns, both diabolical and divine, and perhaps that is the point. Ferapont draws us back to the ancient mystery schools, a link to the past where knowledge was held ransom by mystery and ritual. The human experience still cries for that today. It would have to for if the enlightenment produced light, there must be shadow too, and Ferapont I would argue is a creature of shadow in light of the dawn or rationalism.
I happen to like Xan because he personifies my own pessimism. By lampooning me, and exaggerating parts of myself that I both like and despise, he winds up boosting my spirits in an ironic way, sort of like a jester lampooning the king and thus "speaking truth to power."
One of my favorite characters in the Star Wars saga is Threepio, for the same reasons. The way I approach life in real life is so much like the approaches and behaviors of Threepio and Xan. I tend to try to disarm those who might harm me or oppose me by putting on that "poor me" control drama.
Plus, both characters provide hilarious comedy relief.