Philosophy As The Ultimate Expression Of The Human Spirit

 

 

Philosophy As The Ultimate Expression Of The Human Spirit
By Bradley Harrington

For most of man’s history, human beings have lived under the thumb of either (a) A state; (b) A Church; or (c) Both at the same time.

Examples of all three abound, and the existence, historically, of such organizations that have sought to employ either the “social” or “mystical” methods of human control are responsible for the abysmal state of most of human existence.

Take communism, for instance, which qualifies as an (a). Here we have a system of social “organization,” if you want to call it that, that subverts the free and independent will of individual human beings in favor of the “State-centered” mentality, the approach that the individual is nothing and that society is everything - and individuals within that culture who resist such an approach are dealt with via the tools of the State. Usually quite bloodily.

Or take the Moonies, for instance, the “Unification Church” under the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, from which the slang word “Moonies” derived, which qualifies as a (b). Here we have a system of religious organization that also subverts the free and independent will of human beings, but this time in favor of the “Church-centered” mentality, the approach that the individual is nothing and that the Church and God are everything - and individuals within that culture who resist such an approach are dealt with via the tools of the Church. Maybe not physically bloody, but still psychologically controlling and intimidating all the same. Who can forget the “de-programming” experts that had to be employed by families missing their loved ones to the Moonie organization, swallowed by what were once their own free choices?

Or take the reign of the Catholic Church during the Dark and Middle Ages, for instance, which qualifies as (c). Here we had a system combining both the “social” and “mystical” aspects of control together into one fell punch, the State and the Church rolled up into one. Generally, under such systems, the “mystical” method is first employed to re-establish the desired control - but, if and when that were to fail, then things usually got bloody through the State side of things.

Or crispy, in Giordano Bruno’s case; he was fried alive at a stake by the civil authorities after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of “heresy” in 1600, for daring to assert that the Sun was a star and that the Earth orbited around it. His long laundry list of “crimes” boiled down to... “Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith.”

Nor is any of this to say that all States are executioners, or that all Churches are mind-floggers. Historically, however, when reins of control have been handled by either, the record hasn’t been very good; indeed, one could conclude that whenever a concentration of power exists, whether it be based in the “social” or “mystical” arena, things are going to get ugly.

Is there another way possible, a different way, a way that doesn’t employ either mental or physical force, a way that does not seek to establish control at all?

Yes, there is - and the best historical example of it, in either the “social” or “mystical” arena, is the United States of America, the land of the Enlightenment, the land opened up by the power of man’s untrammeled mind in either arena. For the first time, people were left free to assume their own thoughts, beliefs, ideas and peaceful actions, without having to conform to someone else’s standard of conduct. It was no longer an issue of either “social” or “mystical” control, but an issue of control versus non-control instead.

Nor was the path that led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States an easy one to follow. It was a terribly hard climb up the ladder of man’s mind, while proponents of both State and Church control hollered bloody murder over a period of nearly three centuries - through Spinoza, Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Newton and dozens of others in the disciplines of both physics and philosophy. Those men continued to climb, discover, advance and triumph. The unparalleled accomplishment of Newton’s Theory of Gravitation changed everything; someone had finally beaten the Ancient Greeks at their own game. The resulting beauty and simplicity of Newton’s intellectual achievements in the realm of physics fired up an entire generation of thinkers - men such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who applied that “Newtonian” approach to the political arena. Men who believed in the power of the mind to overcome all obstacles and build a society in which all of the historical controls were minimized or eliminated.

This - not religion as such - was America’s guiding idea, her integrating principle, her leitmotif, her approach to existence: The belief that all men and women, not just a select few, were intelligent enough to govern their own affairs - and that such citizens had an inherent right to do so. Thomas Jefferson, as well as many of the other Founding Fathers, were the direct intellectual descendants of John Locke, who did so much to establish the principles of private property that ultimately came to dominate American culture throughout the 1700s’ and 1800s’.

And, again, this is not to say that religion doesn’t and didn’t play a huge role in men’s lives, because it did. But man had religion in the year 800; what he didn’t have was freedom, which required the accomplishments of Newton and Locke before that could happen.

This is the “revival” America needs: To reassert the fundamental value, efficacy and integrity of human consciousness and its power to, in the words of Thomas Paine, “begin the world over again” anytime we care to.