I.
Intro
Invoke gods
Leave from Hades
Plead my own – as opposed to traits of modernity and present
culture. Criticize modernity from my point of view.
II. Lay out values guiding my investigations, perhaps worth pursuing now –
Critical Glances at Modernity:
First Issue: Science
Acknowledge your progress: elements,
constellations, circulation of blood.
Paid for by loss of experience, loss
through one-sidedness in split
between scientific and humanistic
outlook.
Gap between the world of human
subjects, culture and nature –
In effect dehumanizing nature,
including your own. Disregard for your
own nature.
Consequences: Dualism, scientific
monism, idealistic monism.
My nature: change; the four causes as
different reasons for change and stability.
My problem: observation and
experiment largely missing.
Compatibility between science and my
views: genetics. The blueprint
for growth and restitution.
Second Issue: Aiming
at the Whole.
The many
aspects of my outlook: cause, function/purpose, form.
Essential connectedness, holism.
Analyze, synthesize, organize,
evaluate.
The
order of soul functions, the order of living beings,
The order of kinds of friendships.
Systematic thinking.
Third Issue: Aiming at Homogeneity While Recognizing Difference.
Principles: the four kinds of
account, universal applicability to humans and in science.
Example: Animals – Humans:
Differences and Commonalities.
Difference and Hierarchy. Are we
the ‘higher’, ‘better’animals?
Critique of
the Humanistic and Scientific World Pictures:
Unscientific humanists vs. de-humanizing scientists.
Science: laws, experiments, causal analysis. Truth as guiding
value.
Humanities: cultural patterns and values. Authenticity,
orientation, transmission and transformation of culture.
Third Issue: Aiming at
Right Order.
Example: scientific medicine –
psychosomatic points of view.
Drug medication vs. psychotherapy?
My orders: soul subfunctions as
example. Applied to medicine.
Things have place in order/system. An ordered cosmos. The
order of the cosmos.
Lost in Newtonian and experimental science.
Recent tendencies in my sense: Big Bang (temporal order);
autopoetic character of life; ecology as research into systems.
Critique of modern position of soul:
Psychology splits it into motivation, learning, memory,
skills, normal and abnormal, clinical, developmental, etc. Where is the unified
model of the whole, the ‘right’ order of them? Where is agency, choice? Where
the will with its strengths and weakness (akrasia:
knowing better but not doing it – Alcibiades again).
My threefold hierarchy of soul-faculties –
Preservation of life – sense-perception and drives -
rationality. Plants, non-human animals, human animals. Evolution,
paleoanthroplogy. At least a grid that could be used, modified, expanded …
You: Taking care of the soul delegated to churches and
therapy. But not the task of everyone in his or her everyday lives. Modern soul
not the agent of self-guidance in everyday life.
Fourth Issue: Aiming
at a ‘Good Life’
Modern ethics: Do what morality prescribes. Action oriented.
Seize your transcendent freedom by rejecting your desires. Self-constraint
(misreading!); contribute to happiness of all concerned –the happiness of
pleasure and utility. Satisfaction.
I concede ways of using modern values as forms of
self-realization.
Self-constraint as important feature.
My ethics: a different kind of happiness. Self-mastery.
Mastery over … and … being the master
of … Being my own master. Includes self-control (Alcibiades). But also joy in
self and the happiness in the management of the interplay of reason and passion
(Sappho).
The good concerns a whole life. I am the one who is
responsible for my life, maker and product at the same time. Judge and
judged/evaluated at the same time.