CONFLUENCE OF ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 28, 2013
REFERENCE:
Readers have written to me by e-mail and my website (www.peripateticphilsopher.com) wondering what has happened to me. “You haven’t posted a missive since February, have you been sick?” No. I have been busy working with Amazon to get my nine books ready for the Kindle library, and a new book ready for publication with the able of assistance of George Edward Daly of Alberta, Canada. We are getting these same nine books ready for re-release by a print publisher. Yes, all nine of them! I’ve signed a contract for these nine re-released books and for this new book. What follows is an excerpt from Confident Thinking, my newest book and tenth in a series, which will be published in late summer or early fall, 2013. All my books have been updated for the 21st century reader. Incidentally, there is no special reason for this excerpt except to say I am currently proof reading it.
JRF
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Everything starts with the individual. The science of people in general and the individual in particular has not made equivalent progress to that made in the material world. Dealing confidently with complexity in this new century has left much to be desired.
Man remains essentially lost in description, an object analyzed, categorized, labeled, and identified, a subject opened to conjecture, bias and fantasy, but hardly understood. The idea of man varies according to metaphysical beliefs. A physical scientist and theologian accept the same definition of a crystal of sodium chloride. They do not agree on the same definition of man. The sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and etiologist have their definitions as well. .
We are late to make man a subject of pressing concern. Astronomy was already far advanced at a time when man’s physiology was relatively primitive. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler reduced the earth from the center of the universe to a humble satellite of the sun, while their contemporaries had little idea of the elementary structure or function of the brain. Even earlier, the study of spiritual life and philosophy attracted greater men than the study of science and medicine.
Our mind is designed to contemplate simple facts and solve simple problems.
There is a reluctance to unravel the contradictions and aberrant behaviors of man. French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) stated flatly, “The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.” He claimed we love to discover in the cosmos the geometrical forms that exist in the depths of our consciousness. “You can see it,” he said, “in the exactness of our monuments, the precision of our machines, and the purity of our algorithms, all a fundamental character of our minds. Yet, geometry doesn’t exist in nature. It originates in us.”
We abstract from complexity simple systems that bear certain relationships to one another and reduced them to pure mathematics.
Alexis Carrel, Nobel Laureate for Medicine (1912) writes in “Man, The Unknown” (1935), “The knowledge of ourselves will never attain the elegant simplicity, the abstractness, and the beauty of physics.”
Three-quarters of a century later, little has changed. Carrel’s point was that while our universe is exclusively mechanical; man is not. He claimed that with each technological advance that civilization was threatened with more mental deterioration than any infectious disease.
Carrel goes on to say, “Modern civilization seems to be incapable of producing people endowed with imagination, intelligence, and courage.” Is this simply Nietzschean or are there grounds for concern? Perhaps a better question might be: has man’s development kept pace with his technological advancement? Science and technology have sprung from man’s brain, but what is the status of man’s moral equivalent?
Imagine if Galileo, Newton and Einstein had applied their intellectual gifts to the study of man, would our world be the same? Men of science do not know where they are going. They are guided by chance, curiosity, craving to explore the unknown, but always outside themselves as men.
Each is in his own world governed by his own laws.
From time to time, obscurity is penetrated with some meaningful discovery without prevision to its consequences. Einstein admitted as much. “I made one great mistake in my life when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.”
We are now in a postindustrial society moving further from the idea of man while our factory programming and mentality continue to dog us, structured to operate as if our institutions were living factories with a physiology and mental landscape impossible to alter for fear the corpus might die.
Modern industry has been based on the idea of progress, progress in school, in health, wealth and happiness, in our careers, in production at the lowest cost so that the individual and the company can earn as much as possible. The individual who runs the machines with little consideration as to the long-term effects to his existence has embraced this concept.
Education today is essentially job training to package man as a conduit component to Electronic Age fruition. Man was passive before and after the Industrial Revolution. Now, he has taken a great leap backward to complete passive receptivity. We see this in his electronic games of virtual reality, spectator sports, celebrity watching, Internet surfing and vicarious recreation that makes atavistic television couch potatoes appear as activists.
The microchip continues to be reduced until it will be little more than the size of a grain of sand. Videophones, video watches, and lapel pin sensing devices will soon be as common as McDonald burgers leading to an obesity of the mind to match that of the body.
Inert science of matter has come to be matched by our own physical inertness. The power to clone animals has resulted in our cloning without having to undergo the science.
Protagoras was confident that “Man is the measure of all things,” when it seems he is a stranger in the world he has created. Man is capable of organizing this world for himself but not himself for this world. Why? It seems he does not possess the practical knowledge of his own nature.
Technology soars on the great advancements in the sciences of nature while nature through tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, mud slides, avalanches and floods become increasingly hostile to man. “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall,” observes Einstein, “He will end by destroying the earth.” The science of matter has taken precedence to the science of man. Science has opted for the less challenging conundrum.
That said we shouldn’t wait for science to create a definitive mind map to guide us. We should instead develop confluence between our essence and personality on our own. There are certain facts we know:
· Everything in Nature is connected to everything else.
· Everything in Nature has to go somewhere.
· Nature knows best.
· We can’t change Nature.
· There are no free lunches in Nature.
This is as true of matter and it is of man. Confident Thinking is not rocket science. It is a practical guide to better understand and leverage us to more satisfying and effective behavior. While neurophysiologists dig into the neurons of our brains, theologians into our souls, psychologists into our consciousness, and sociologists and anthropologists into our work and play, we have the important business at hand of living and saving our planet from ourselves.
Society gets better one person at a time. To be useful to others we must first be useful to ourselves. To be comfortable with others we first must be comfortable with ourselves. This means we must know, understand and accept ourselves, as we are in order to accept others as we find them.
We are all more alike than different. We are all products of our experience. We are inclined to see others as reflections of what we see and understand in ourselves.
A society is an organism as real as the individual. If a society can only see other societies in its own image, then it is a blind society. Whatever its plans it will quicken its doom and ultimate demise. We as individuals must recognize this flaw. We must plan our work and work our plan to connect rather than to divide us.
Nothing is ever wasted. Curiosity is a blind impulse that obeys no rule. We may go down many false roads before we find the right one. Our minds are as naturally given to exploration as lower animals. We are intrigued with machines but forget we mirror the same complexity in our human anatomy and physiology. Our curiosity extends quite naturally to outer space but not so naturally to inner space. We are drawn to the terrain of the unknown. But it seems to stop when the curiosity turns to human behavior. We remain a puzzle to ourselves. Cartoonist Walt Kelley’s Pogo states the obvious, “I have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
We hear variation of this, “We are our own worst enemy!” No matter how many false turns we make we are picking up valuable material along the way.
No one escapes the morality of his time. It surrounds us and bombards our senses with its stimuli while we think we are exercising free will. Therefore, we should give pause before we make choices recognizing that the influence is always present. There is a natural confluence between our essence and personality, which is our failsafe protection to sanity and survival.
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