On Technology

The most considerable difference between previous generations and those born after the 8o’s, or better still, between 1950 and 2000 is the incredible speed of technology’s improvement and reachability to the world. The internet! Mobile phones, smart phones, androids! The Hubble telescope! This is not nothing and unless other areas of learning being keep up with the speed with which mechanical technology is advancing, they will really lag behind. This is the case with Philosophy, unless it keeps up with the changing times (meaning technology in this case) it could become obsolete. Even though the study of the world and the human being, through ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and all other nice them for branches of thought that Philosophy looks at will never be obsolete in a level of abstract importance, and will always always be necessary for us as humans; there is a danger that the flashing blue light that illuminates our screen will make us forget everything, even what is important, even ourselves.

The American Transcendentalist Philosopher Henry David Thoreau said of technology: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” 

 

In a way I think he means that never have we have such good means of communications, yet nothing really worthy to communicate. If he said that about the telegraph, imagine what he would say now! Reading a text message thread of a twitter account. Poor Thoreau!

Now a days we have the means to educate the whole world, to spread news and truth, and instigate real change but guess what? The biggest use we give our technology is sending petty messages to people when we are bored and we invent and manufacture social personas that we are ‘happy with’ but are not who we are or how we really feel.

Do not get me wrong, this is not by any means an attack to technology. The point of this article is to shine light on the fact that although technology is advancing so fast and is becoming more available; our moral, social, intellectual attributes are not advancing at the same rate, or are not being distributed at the same rate, or are taking the back seat to mechanical technology. Our ‘what’ is getting better, but our ‘why’ is lagging behind. Let me give an example, and important one to my eyes. There is a big debate going on at the moment: privacy on the internet.

So it turns out the National Security Agency or NSA has created a program to collect all the data of everything you do on the internet. American citizens and others, of course. The have even built massive infrastructure to store the hardware necessary for all the information to go to. All you have ever looked at or posted on the internet, every conversation you have, everything you have purchased, everything will be known and stored, like a file. Great! Not great. Really, not great. The internet has become like a second collective consciousness for humanity and to my view, no government or agency has any business storing and possessing the very personal life of so many millions of people. Something, along the lines, is not right. We must review the purpose of it and the ethics of it. We must open debates. Here is where Philosophy has a place again. In the midst of a technology wave, we must swim to find our moral ground again.

Technology doesn’t need to be a scary thing. It can be a marvellous thing. It gives us the means to spread art and information to the whole world at incredible speeds! But we must also beware that this speed will end up standardizing knowledge, ethics and aesthetics. The word technology comes from the Greek word techne, which means art, skill or cunning of hand. And logia, which means branch of learning. Technology is a testament to the refinement of our skill, to what we can achieve and become. It is what it is because of the tools and objects that we’ve created with our hands, from our minds. But as the current state of the world tells us, technology will always work better when it is in agreement and balance with nature and the human being, not against it. Technology is for thriving, yet for so long we have also used it for war and destruction.

It is almost a cliché to say that Einstein did not have the intention to kill so many human beings when he split the atom. None the less, this is the use we have given to the discovery of such a brilliant mind. Perhaps when we understand and heal and tackle our self-destructive instinct and our desire to hurt others, maybe then we will use our technology for higher purposes. I’m afraid to say that this change needs to happen as we don’t want our very survival to hang from a string. Just imagine, if the money spent on wars and drones was spent on good infrastructure, education and nutrition! We would catapult a hundred years into the future and have a better chance at exploring space! But for now, it’ll be nice to have a world we can look at and feel proud. 

 

You may now think I’m an idealist (or at best, very impatient for change), but I do believe that technology is not the problem and governments alone are not the problem either. I think part of the problem is that too many generations now, in the developed world, have become too comfortable and we all feel unable to do anything real about it all. Unfortunately, personal technology (which is how I call mobile phones, laptops, etc) seem to accentuate the bubble in which we live our lives. We can burst the bubble and use our technology to connect instead of isolate and distract. How? By remembering what is important and remembering why we built all these things in the first place.

Eliza Veretilo

The Subject

There is much talk of men being the primary subject. Or more specifically, white, relatively young, European or North American males are the subject and the rest of us are but a variation to this ideal of human being. There is currently endless literature on this, to the point that my topic almost feels redundant. Yet this still needs to be stressed. Why? Because of the same reason that all the rest of literature is written about this and that is to bring the issue to light, to de-normalise it. 

 

I’m not saying that every white man has an easy life and that all is handed to them, of course not. It’s not about privilege, it’s about identity. When your culture, gender, appearance and so on, is not the norm, you start to question your validity as a human being, thus hindering your progress. The plant does not question whether it is a rose or a lily… it just grows. 

 

We can’t. We create and accept cages all around us. Cages that cut our roots and make us silent and insecure. The first of these cages is that of our appearance. We fall into the trap of being “different” and step by step, day by day, we carve wounds into our personal being to the point of running the risk of never actualising the potential of the beautiful thing we might have been. We hope one day someone will notice the gift we carry inside of us and that belief will elevate us to heights of acceptance, of success, of happiness.

But it seems that an actualised life is only reserved for a few. That only certain people can walk this Earth feeling worthy, feeling error free. I have noticed that Europeans and North Americans already have more self-entitlement than people from other origins (South Americans for example). Only these people can relax their defences to the point that they don’t have to worry about being persecuted and being belittled. Once that is out of the way they can think! They can think of the world and of self-development! Whereas the rest have to think on whether their existence is remotely ok.

Why has most of Philosophy been written by white European males? Answer: it hasn’t. Philosophy as a subject is a very ancient discipline that has existed all over the world. The Philosophy we study in the Western world is the edited Philosophy of the Western world (apply the same principle with most if not all subjects). It is not THE Philosophy, just the current trends of the latest European thought. The thought of men of privilege who never had to fight starvation or persecution and thus were able to sit and think, and investigate themselves and our Universe. But do not misunderstand me please, I do not see this as a bad thing at all. I think this should be the goal of a society; to develop itself to the point where its people can dedicate themselves to contemplation, to art, to investigation, without the struggle to survive another day.

There are still millions in our world who live in a daily struggle to survive, to feed themselves, to look after their children whilst in a war zone. There are still millions of girls and women who cannot access the most basic education, there are still people who are so ignorant of themselves and their own history that they take a nationality as a thing of pride, but do not want to take any moral responsibility for the things that that nation has done.

The reason why it is important to realise these things is that once we become aware that the wealth and power of nations is built upon the blood and sweat of others, and not because of some divine entitlement, we begin to grow some kind of empathy for other nations, for other people. Only through understanding each other can we become complete people and start doing something better for this otherwise ridiculous world.

Eliza Veretilo

Life in 3D

 Once you overcome frustration, the world in 3D is not that bad.

Density. The passage of time. Places being so far away. The slowness of travel. These are all characteristics of life in 3D. Light for example, light is so pure that it doesn’t have to sit on an aeroplane for 30 hours in order to get to Thailand. No, light travels fast. It lives in the dimension of the eternal now. How about time?

Time, slow at work, fast when having fun. Supposedly eternal. Time. We crave to grow up and then wish never to be old. Time. It takes TIME to master any craft, any art. And then there is density and matter, a matter that blooms and decays. There is tiredness. Having to feed a body, your body. These, as I said, are all traits of life in 3D. The Third dimension which causes what? What effect can this have on our being, which is so full of wishes and whims which we want immediately satisfied? Full of desires we are. Pleasures and pains. And boom! Here we find ourselves, in the third dimension, the dimension of density, of matter, of the passage of time, of slow travel… what do our desires have to face? Frustration. That’s right. We live in frustration because of our unfulfilled dreams and expectations. Because our mind and being long for an immediacy that is not from this world, or more like, not from this dimension. But don’t get me wrong, its not all bad, this is the only dimension we know in which we can taste food and watch sunsets, so its not that bad.

We just have to get used to the awkwardness. Maybe the elements that our body is composed of, the atoms which are claimed to have belonged to stars, want to live and behave in the same way that they do in space (freedom) and they find themselves trapped in the small confines of 3D life. Maybe our deep mind and self belong to the less denser realms and that’s why we can’t grasp… our own selves? Because we are trapped in 3D. Dense. We see it with our eyes and touch it with our hands.

The third dimension is the dense dimension that gives us matter, and matter, many believe, is us! As in, you are your body! Are you? Are you a being from the 3^rd dimension? I thought so, earthling.

Thus, we deal with the frustration of living life as if we had to cross a bridge in order to do pretty much everything. There is a bridge between our ideas and desires and reality. Time and space are that bridge. So we feel, frustrated. Then we try to beat time. We start to ‘work’ towards things (some call it the process of life). We create habits, we create life patterns in order to organise our life in 3D.

We feed our body with healthy things if we wish to be healthy, we cannot simply wish it, willed it, attract it and be it (or can we?). We turn the frustration into our ally. We can learn to enjoy the passage of time and how with it, we receive our wishes and desires like little drops of mother pearl that come to satisfy our previously frustrated being. Things here are dense and slow, but once you grow some patience and learn to accept how linear time works in the 3^rd dimension, you will be much much happier.

The End.

Eliza Veretilo

‘The Difference Between Knowledge and Opinion…’

These days, everyone has an opinion. You could even say that this article you are reading is an opinion. With our incredible and unlimited access to the internet and all the media we are constantly presented with, we cannot help but be full of opinions. But opinions are not clear, they are not knowledge, they are subjective and they rarely tell us something about the thing that people are giving an opinion about. I believe there is a difference, a huge difference, between knowledge and opinion, and philosophy holds the key.

When you compare a decent news article to a thread on twitter, you can notice a slight difference between the two, cant you? But its hard to explain just what it is. Plato has a theory that helped me differentiate between the two. A good investigative journalist, similarly to a philosopher, is interested with what the things are, in themselves I mean. What is commonly known in Philosophy as the Love of knowledge. What happened? Why? Where does it all come from? The trouble I mean. A wish to understand the concepts. Plato would argue that a piece of news is a manifestation of what things are in themselves, in the same way that a beautiful landscape or a piece of art is a manifestation of beauty itself. Thus when you want to find out what the thing is in itself (go deeper) you are looking for knowledge. When you just look at the manifestation and say ‘that’s pretty’ or ‘that’s bad’ then you are just stating an opinion. The contrary to the love of knowledge is to just love beautiful things, or things, without thinking about the thing itself, only about the manifestation of it. Thus you give an opinion, almost like giving a superficial gaze.

This very populated land of opinion was placed by Plato, as a land right in between knowledge and ignorance. He claimed that to give an opinion, is a capacity, but not a very deep one, as to look for knowledge. So opinion is clearer than ignorance, because at least it looks at the manifestations of what things really are, but darker than knowledge, because knowledge wants to know what things really are.

To be fair to most of us who fill the internet with opinions, most of the media we are shown are manifestations of things. We are shown just and unjust actions, we are shown beautiful and ugly scenes… Thus we see the manifestations we can give an opinion about. Yet we have to dig deeper by ourselves to really find some knowledge about things, especially about what is going on in our world. To claim to have knowledge, we have to cultivate this knowledge, otherwise, we are just arbitrarily calling things good or bad, without understanding. And you might agree with me that it is incredibly annoying to see someone have an ignorant opinion on something you know or understand, so lets not do the same.

Eliza Veretilo

New Year’s Deconstruction!

It is a new year, technically, according to the Gregorian calendar we seem to follow. Still, our phone, calendars and laptops will reset and we will have the brand new opportunity to rewrite our history. Indeed we always have the opportunity to do that, but on dates such as this, when and where the ‘beginning’ is so evident, we can do it consciously. This year, I didn’t make a resolution, this year; I propose we do the opposite, this year I propose we do a deconstruction.

Did you know the number one cause of unhappiness and failure in people are wrong beliefs? Yes. Well, I´m not sure that´s completely accurate but it should be. We follow lies and tales from others that insist that their way is the way and then we crash and burn. But this doesn't need to be so. My proposal for this new year is that each one of us takes the bucket of assumptions and beliefs that we carry around with us and put it to the test.

Maybe you are familiar with Descartes, the 17^th Century French Philosopher (‘I think therefore I am’ guy). To begin writing his master piece, The Meditations, he locked himself in a room and started to doubt everything he thought he knew (he even doubted he had a body!) He practiced extreme skepticism. I am not here suggesting you lock yourself in a room and do the same, but you can use it as a metaphor to review what you really hold as truth. From our principles to what we believe from the media, politics, the internet, our family, friends, colleagues, parents and what not. We are constantly being influenced by what other say and communicate. I think this year we owe it to ourselves to review this beliefs and try to know our selves and hold a system of belief that doesn't melt like butter under the first ray of light and truth.

From the moment we are children and are sent to school, we are already presented and fed one version of reality. I don’t here want to get into details of what was good or bad, useful or not, because I am sure each one has their own opinion on the school system). My point is that our own faculty of free thinking and discernment has been intervened our entire life and we deserve to regain possession of our own reason.

So this year, I´m not going to try to loose weight or make more money or stop swearing or whatever it is that I ever made myself promise before. This year, I am going to doubt anything that I held as a truth but smelt like a lie. This year I am going to review where my beliefs come from and act on them. Why? Because I am certain that the person inside the layers of conditioning and assumptions has a lot to say. What better than to get acquainted with ourselves a little bit for once.

Happy New Year and good luck with your own meditations!

Eliza Veretilo

Philosophy Takeaway Newsletter 65

Madness, Art, Value - By Eliza Veretilo and Samuel Mack-Poole

Madness, Art, Value

And now, a videogram!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c80oaaDz4ZY

Eliza Veretilo and Samuel Mack-Poole

A Mind for Philosophy - By Eliza Veretilo

A Mind for Philosophy

A mind for philosophy, or a philosophical mind, is a mind ready to discover and is a mind ready to enquire. It needs to be empty, so to speak, of preconceptions. When Socrates said ‘All I know is that  I know nothing’, he was talking about the incredibly massive and wide universe of experience which is life. When we compare our knowledge to the whole of that experience, then we really know nothing. And to experience anything, to learn anything, to know anything in this universe, we must look at it fresh, as it is. Why? Because if we come to an experience with a preconception, we are going to shape the experience in such a way that it fits our previous knowledge. If you want to experience something new, you have to empty your mind of your projected ideas first.

Philosophy, in principle, is an opportunity to look at the world fresh. With the eyes of a child, but with intelligence; but not the intelligence that is bred with reading books and studying subjects, although that is good technical knowledge. In order to really discover, to really investigate and to really see, we need a type of intelligence which is free and unafraid. This would be an intelligence of awareness, not an intelligence of limitation. Think Leonardo Da Vinci, a well known and recognised genius. It is a known fact that Leonardo did most of his research and discovery by himself. How? By observing the world with eyes of wonder.

I am not saying that we should reject all the knowledge that we have historically accumulated. Well, I am saying that in a way, yet I am not, I am speaking in a more fundamental way. Each human being has the capacity and right to experience the world for itself and thus, find his or her own truth. My point is that a real curious mind, a philosophical mind, looks at life without the frame. It is a fallacy of modern philosophy to conceptualise experience and to build on blocks of complex confused language and claim that knowledge lays there, in the high land of the ‘specialist’. If we are to look at the past, let it be as an example, not as a cage. Think of Descartes, thinking the world all anew, all by himself, inventing mathematical methods and philosophies.

We know the world through ideas, it’s true, but some ideas are the product of tradition, prejudice and habit. That is why it’s important to question them, truly. To ‘know’ can be very isolating; when you think that you know, sometimes that makes you unwilling to investigate and listen and learn from others. The more you know, the more complex it becomes.

Philosophy can be a great opportunity to step back and really have a good look at what is going on. For that we need a simple mind.  To have a simple mind, a true philosophical mind, is to break your ‘I’m convinced’ state and let your mind be truly observant and truly creative.

So, observe but don’t judge. Observe, but don’t condemn. Observe, but don’t believe. Don’t believe anything that is not soundly true to your most inner being (the one you ultimately can’t lie to). A real philosophical mind does not deceive itself. But don’t get me wrong, I know why we sometimes do it; for comfort, for security, or simply in order to make sense. Truth cannot come from lies. That is why I say, we need to keep our minds simple, in order to observe the world as it is and not through the lens of our prejudices, because at the end of the day, Socrates was right and all I know is that I know nothing either, so why pretend we know it all?

Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 51 'Open Topic'

Art - By Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: www.neonsuitcase.blogspot.com

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 49 'Open Topic'

Art - By Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: http://neonsuitcase.blogspot.co.uk/

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 48 'Freedom'

Freedom, are you free? - By Eliza Veretilo

Freedom, are you free?

My heart yearns for a promise,

That is not an actuality.

Inside of me,

There is a point that doesn’t break...

Wants to observe it all. I want to be myself.

Freedom is the promise,

Time is the price.

The clock reminds me that this dimension has its ties.

Patriotism is an act of violence - By Eliza Veretilo

Here is the debate: what are the things we have caused and can be accounted for and what are the things we have not and can therefore not feel responsible?

Nationality is as accidental as eye colour. We did not consciously choose them. We cannot yet say they are our fault or responsibility.

Another example is the current war in Iraq. People do not currently feel their actions or lack of them are part of the reason for this ongoing massacre, even though our life-style might be part of the reason. Nonetheless, we hear countless amounts of people feeling proud of this or that empire’s achievements, regardless of the destruction it has brought upon others. Maybe your ancestors were very active in it. I do not know. But I have seen people very willing to ascribe the achievements of certain historical periods upon themselves; and of course, we have a selective memory on what events really took place, and which ones we are ‘proud of’.

This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world

Before this enterprise even takes its most basic shape, I would like to clarify the following point: under my understanding of people, a human being is an individual, a person, a personality so to speak, before they are a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’. Thus my article will concentrate not on the fact that this world is mainly controlled by the biological male, but on the fact that what we classify as ‘male’ characteristics are the dominating side of our culture. 

So why do I say that you are an individual before you are a man or a woman? I’d like to present three arguments to support this claim. The first argument is found in the observation of children. Children are thinking, feeling human beings who are not yet of reproductive ‘capabilities’ and thus do not display specific gender characteristics. They have not yet being assigned gender roles; at least at an early age. At a later stage we force this upon them. These beings who are not yet manly men or femme fatales still ARE, they live, feel, create, experience, laugh and cry without a specific gender role to fulfil. Children in play, also play with their identity. They have personalities and make choices, yet when a boy likes dancing for example, we might fall on the prejudice of claiming that that’s a feminine tendency, here we are assigning the activity a gender and thus we impose this prejudice on the boy. The boy was expressing a liking for the activity, not a sexual preference or a gender tendency. To a big extent that is what we have done; we have given what originally is a biological role, the gender, to an activity, an abstract concept or a thing. We do that assigning constantly.

My second point is the huge psychological variety of shades and degrees of between male and female that we have amongst individuals. Who is completely male or completely female? None. We have different shades of the palette of assigned role activities. Yes, some cultures and people are stricter than others in their assigning of roles; but human beings keep coming to the world with an extreme originality and variation in the scale between male and female. People come into a society which is frightened of that obscurity and forces upon every individual the so called way of belonging to their genre. The person is only validated (especially during adulthood-productive and reproductive age) on basis of their gender. The person then becomes obsessed on being this male or female ideal rather than whatever version of human they are. This of course creates a schism and its obvious conclusion of suffering and a feeling of inadequacy. Sad times. We cannot bear the beaming individuality of the human creature.

This doesn’t mean that we would all be ambiguous beings if there weren’t gender roles, but it would mean that a man who enjoyed fashion wouldn’t immediately be classified as a homosexual and a woman who plays sports and is of larger physical mass wouldn’t either - and the same with personalities. A freer ‘gender’ concept would give us greater freedom to do different activities whilst still remaining true to ourselves. Besides the fact that men can’t bear children and women can’t father children, we have a greater leeway in gender roles than we think.

My third point as to why we are individuals before we are a gender is that although our body is male and female, our psyche is not. The mind of human beings, both, the one that collects information and logically processes it and the one that creates and imagines, are neither male nor female, they are both. We have yet again tried to give gender to things such as creativity, saying it is a more female attribute than, say, scientific thought. This last point is very important as it brings me to the thesis of this article. This is a man’s world because the accepted thought characteristics of our historical time belong to the assigned category of male.

We have reached a point in our culture where we have assigned different affects to different genders. For example, our culture identifies violence with male thought, and female with a nurturing principle. We also think of ego consciousness as male; aggression (thus wars), the logical mind (thus science), inventiveness, outward acting. The male is the builder of civilization, and I should also mention religion is a male institution, culturally. On the other hand, we think of the subconscious as female, as female characteristics in our culture are thought to be passive, creative, intuitive, uninviting and concerned with preserving the status quo.  Yet in this division, we can clearly appreciate that the first set of characteristics are the most widely accepted in our culture, as we find the subconscious frightening. Even in this separation we can tell that what we have built up to be the ‘male consciousness’, is the accepted consciousness and what is considered the ‘female consciousness’ is feared and unknown and thus repressed. Our society keeps hurting and trying to control what represents the unknown part of the psyche and the connection of humanity to nature through birth, the female.

Thus when I say this is a man’s world I mean the choice of consciousness we have adopted; the masculine-technological. This man’s world represses female elements, including his own. If the male was to be devoid of nurturing elements and compassion, he would be biologically hard wired to be so, yet he is not. Here I would also like to add that the great human qualities of love, strength, compassion, intellect and imagination, do not belong to one sex or another and thus we could advance and reach a true civilization if we merged the different types of consciousness, instead of repressing them, in order to reach true understanding.

Till that day, good bye.

Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Gender' Issue 38

A narration of the philosophical process inside a person as seen from the outside - By Eliza Veretilo

He walked alone, again. Birds flew up above in the sky, away. They were flying in circles, yet he couldn’t tell. For the circle was too large for his human eyes.

             
We are so unable to see the bigger picture. But everything moves in circles, don’t you know? The birds, the events, the planets. He stopped walking, just to think, leaning one hand on a humid wall. The energetic work of the mind had liberated him and drained him and filled him up again, with questions. A city always wet with rain. He bowed his head as if to cry, but laughter came out instead. How he laughed! How he cackled! How he filled his mouth with sound so loud! Oh yes, again, but this time it was life changing and funny. You cannot live a life of tricks without being tricked yourself, they say. Escaping the pointless chit-chat to find meaning can be a comical process. Some dance their life to a music that changes its tune from a comedy to a tragedy, without even giving us a warning.

            
 He was finally there, right in the place he dreaded all along. Nothing left. Nothing of the old... mind. Yet it didn’t feel empty, it felt free. Like an open path that has been cleared from all debris by a cold, strong wind. This is what life looked like right now. Empty. No compromises, no possessions, no ties, no drama. In believing, in thinking, in feeling, in living, you can lose it all and yet somehow, carry on. Always ahead, always on. He distrusted the liars, the church, the school, the government, the framework pre-packed and given to him, from early, innocent childhood. No more. With a reason, some reasonable people might say. He grew an allergy to pointlessness, and it showed in his face. Time becomes precious once you find something... something, something, something with meaning. That’s the shade he would use to paint it all from now on. Meaning.

            
Everyone’s meeting with philosophy is different, but when its life changing, it truly is. A read of a certain book, a pure philosophical work, or a novel, or a film even (why not...) can make you despise society, or understand it, or understand yourself further, you in your loneliness, it can make you breathe harder, love harder, it can disillusion you from the world, it can open your eyes to the world, it enriches your experience, and experience is what we are after. Our character finds himself in the middle of a nihilistic storm. The pointlessness of it all has been unmasked, but not everything is lost, you always have yourself, you always have love. Not a partner, but love, just love. The love of knowledge is one aspect of this. He laughed, he cried, he was so alone in his truly self-owned mind, and that was delicious. He could be anywhere, now he was in the middle of the road, but he could be anywhere. Have you heard that even in the darkest jail you can be free? That he was now. Free.

Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open topic' Issue 40

Human Nature Is Good

                     

 

You may wonder, how looking at the world today, dare I say that human nature is good? Well, because of two reasons, the first is that I believe so, the second reason is why I believe so.

Humans are very malleable creatures, we respond to our environment, to stimulation and to manipulation. We live mainly in a state of ignorance, the majority of us have no access to education and the education we do get is mediocre. Thus our true nature as such, is rarely actualised; it’s rarely seen as what it could be. The reason why, to me, things appears so bad and dominated by the ‘evil side’ of us is because of fear. Fear is the tool that enabled 'primitive' man to survive, to be aware of dangers, but it has also stopped the modern man from fully flourishing. 

Fear has become conditioning and we have not yet learnt to drop it. Underneath it all, the human spirit is good, it’s undeniable that we strive for goodness as a whole. That’s why things like universal peace are so appealing, because we are creatures that thrive in peace. We have created war out of fear, but that doesn’t make us bad. Even the politicians who declare these mentioned wars go and give themselves a Nobel PEACE prize. Why? Because they have to show a good side, even characters who are moved primarily by greed have to put on sheep costumes in order to appeal to others. Because we are fragile and compassionate by nature. We care. Our bodies are fragile and we are sensitive. WE are not predators. We are biologically quite weak but our strength lays in that we are primarily emotional and intelligent.

             
Thomas Hobbes said man is the wolf of man, and how right he was, but he forgot to add, man is the friend of man, woman is the mother of man, humans are the lovers of humans. Who causes you pain? People. Who relieves you from that pain? People.

Take the example of a child, pure and innocent, old enough to talk yet young enough to not have been schooled to hate. In a child you see a tendency to play, to interact, to discover and create. He gets taught evil. You can say people are born with a personality, yes, but people considered evil, have a history of having evil done to them. Evil is not intrinsic, because it’s not life affirming and we are a surviving species.

            
 I propose you an experiment; say one generation of children of the world are given good living conditions, food without poison, a well rounded education which doesn’t consist of memorizing things like our current education consists of. These children are taken on trips to see natural wonders, they are taught to respect animals, and they’ve had a stable home with present parents. I say one, only one generation that has these conditions in the whole world and you will see human nature; the goodness of human nature. We are evil because we are scared, because we suffer so badly. 

We need to evolve in other aspects than technological, we need to care for each other, and that to my view, is the next step. We live in a world which sits half way between ignorance and primitive living and the modern world, we are a stone throws away from enjoying watching public executions and a stone throws away from visiting other planets. We sit half way between the past and the future, here in the present. We are not at the top of our capacity; we haven’t experienced the full capacity of human nature. But I can see, I can feel, a capacity for love, for understanding, for growth toward a world of philosophers and free thinkers. Human nature is ever changing and ever evolving, evolving to perfection and what is that? Goodness. 

That’s why I believe human nature is good.

Eliza Veretilo

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Human Nature' Issue 36

Art by Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: http://neonsuitcase.blogspot.co.uk/

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34

Philosophical Train Journeys- Transcendentalism - By Eliza Veretilo

Philosophical Train Journeys- Transcendentalism

Train journeys are good places to accompany mental journeys. I wonder how many brilliant theories have been thought out through the window of a train, with a beautiful open country side landscape whizzing past outside. Silence makes us pensive and the constant change in the view makes us question, makes us wonder. Seems like the perfect setting to philosophise, if only in our minds. Alone with our thoughts we can reach that place, the place beyond remembering where we left the keys or what we are going to have for lunch. That place where we become immortal in thought.

This August, I discovered American Transcendentalism in Philosophy; it’s a beautiful doctrine from the 1830’ East Coast of America which believes in the inherent goodness of both humans and nature. They also claim that it is society and its institutions, especially the influence of organised religion and political parties, what are corrupting our essentially good nature. As if as children we were programmed to forget that part of our being, in order to maintain the previously existing society/economy. Transcendentalists believe that real individuals, who are independent minded and productive, are prone to show their goodness, instead of being the victims of fear. Thus if you are free minded and self-reliant, your true nature can be expressed, in its pure estate, thus the potential of who you could be, can be actualised. And then, a true community, formed of such individuals, can exist. Beautiful. When looking out through the window to the soft, beautiful and tender landscapes, and the taciturn faces of the rest of passengers whilst looking at the sunset, I wonder... Can we do that? Could we be that? Why people are not good to each other? We could be good to each other. Let’s be good to one another!

Some philosophical theories, such as this, do speak of a direct action. Transcendentalists criticise political parties, claiming that it makes the individual ultimately uninvolved with his/her community matters and a free minded person become nothing more that a number to vote, with the illusion of a voice. Having a voice over your small community could, perhaps, work better. Same with religion, which already tells you what is waiting for you in the afterlife before you can even attempt to live this one! Well, my fellow train passenger, the declaration of Human Rights was ultimately based on this the Transcendentalist theory, which claims that life is sacred and that we are good or have some sort of moral compass, if we only care to listen. A compass that can help us to live life deliberately, even if sometimes is easier to walk around with our eyes shut. Maybe there is something, something something to Transcendentalism. The train moves, time to eat, sleep, motive, organise, raise, recognise. We all have this dormant potential, if only we could stop the rush. To appreciate it and recognise it in one another could be the first step. Transcendentalism expresses the idea of a life lived like poetry, where you appreciate yourself and nature, where awareness if a gift and nature a blessing and we can build a world, were progress doesn’t look like destruction.

By Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34

Art by Eliza Veretilo

Art by Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 33

Use what you learn - By: Eliza Veretilo

Use what you learn

                              

                               Life is a lesson. We fall and get up, and when we do get up, we are awarded with a lesson. Every day we learn something new. So this life thing is a constant learning process in which we expand our circle of experience. Don’t agree? Well, you are entitled to it, but much evidence points to it. Our vocabulary inclines to take us from one premise to another in a succession that builds up from what was previously said thus our language and its structure are designed for instruction, for teaching and learning, sharing and listening. Our institutions are the same, we begin at school and parents want their children ‘to learn’. We then go to college, university, and there are learning courses everywhere. In my opinion this idea is somehow flawed. We assume that we learn in the first part of our life and in the second part we use that knowledge. I believe both processes are constantly going on whether we want it or not, simultaneously; but we don’t have such a big element of control. Control is gained with awareness. Planet Earth seems like a big training ground sometimes, of our chosen subjects and of life. Surviving is thus a learning activity, to hopefully, stop making the same mistakes.

                               We learn to thrive in this Universe, with its laws. The extent of our rational analysis still doesn’t change certain laws of nature, such as cause and effect, it can merely understand them. We are responsible for the consequences that stem from our actions and thus we are rational and can become more conscientious of what we do. This is why I propose that people should use all these lessons gathered in life, practically. We think we do, but do we really? We are so keen to learn from other people’s experiences, for example when we hear someone has done something terrible we say ‘Oh but I would never do that!’  Unfortunately, all our education and gathering of experiences still has not sank in deep enough; we don’t usually act on what we know.

                               My proposal is quite simple. Regardless of the economic system, the government and the weather, we could have a much better life if we lived it with awareness. If we took what we constantly learn and used it, instead of turning a blind eye on it or become lazy with our ideals. We would save ourselves and the world much loss and suffering. For example: if you think it’s unethical that when tuna are fished some dolphins get trapped in the nets, well then buy line fished tuna instead. In this world, unfortunately our money has a voice and a vote, so that is a place to apply our principles. This is a small example, but it can be applied to any aspect of life. If we do a little self evaluation, we will find that we do things that we know we know better than doing them. We can change this, by using what we have learnt and keep learning, expanding our world. Both, in how we live our practically and how we live our emotional life and most importantly, on how we treat others. Saying this, using what we have learnt doesn’t mean charity, I believe that one person living an aware life, and acting upon what they believe and have learnt, will have a lifestyle that prevents poverty in the first place. Thus a person living a life well lived is worth more than ten who live a completely upside down life, perpetuator of chaos, and then give money to charity.

                               Constantly adults tell children to apply the lesson they have taught them into their life. We say ‘didn’t you learn that at school’ we say ‘haven’t I taught you that before’ we say ‘you should know better’. But when was the last time we looked at ourselves and said the same things and actually lived by them? We constantly learn new skills; we learn how to use a new phone or how to take a bus to a new place, but our life lessons... do we apply them? Why being aware of what we do? Why are we rational? Because only awareness can reconcile chaos. Thus I say: Use what you learn.

By: Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 33

Art - By Eliza Veretilo

Art - By Eliza Veretilo


The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 32

Art by Eliza Veretilo

Art by Eliza Veretilo


The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 33