Background Worldview Summary
Worldview Summary
On this page, I summarize my worldview of living action by emphasizing my core, fundamental principles. In doing so, I discuss my outlook in the areas of Being, Living Action and their Relationship; Modes of Awareness; Value Judgment; Autonomy; Interdependence and Society.
Worldview Summary: Table of Contents
| Introduction | ||
| Being, Living Action and their Relationship | ||
| Modes of Awareness | ||
| Value Judgment | ||
| Autonomy | ||
| Interdependence | ||
| Society | ||
| Closing Words | ||
| Acknowledgements | ||
I'm grateful that you're reading this. I feel excitement sharing and expressing the following. I feel profound optimism about it. Writing this has helped meet my needs for clarity, progress and meaning, and I hope it may help others meet such needs, as well.
All my life I've been developing my outlook and I continue to do so. I'm preparing various summaries of my worldview, including one of book length. All remain works in progress.
In the following summary, I present some aspects of my worldview in more detail than others. In particular, I aim to express something of the relevance, purpose, substance, structure and interconnections within my worldview. Throughout, I endeavor to clarify why I call mine a worldview of living action.
Even so, I feel struck by how much I've omitted, much of which I regard as important, and which I'm hoping both further dialogue and additional summaries will help bring to light.
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In part given this, I welcome comments and questions aimed at meeting both others' needs and mine. I especially welcome questions aimed at clarification and compassionate challenge. I will welcome comments posted here or sent to me privately. (My contact information appears here.) If you do send me comments or questions, I'll especially appreciate mention of what you would like in return.
I've written more about my process of developing my worldview here. In the following summary I've not included footnotes. At the end, though, in the Acknowledgements, I have included a list of some of the sources that I've found helpful in shaping my worldview. In addition, in my website's About Me area, here, I've written about my influences.
Regardless of what I've learned from others, however, the following remains a summary of my own worldview. I'm firmly convinced that no two individuals' worldviews ever remain exactly alike. In addition, I'm well aware that my opinions differ in numerous respects from those expressed even by those individuals from whom I've learned the most.
I hope you will find value in my outlook.
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I. Being, Living Action and their Relationship
I've long striven to clarify for myself those principles that 1) capture for me the basic nature of being, of living action and of their relationship and 2) serve as the foundation for my worldview. Accordingly, my foundational principles follow.
What endures, endures (being). What endures, endures as it endures (identity). Contradictions can't ever endure (non-contradiction). The nature of a cause causes the nature of its effect to endure as it does (causality).
With the word being, I mean to point to that of which I'm aware to any degree, but without specifying the particular nature of that of which I'm aware.
I can be aware of something while knowing little about it. Also, even with those things about which I've learned much, so much remains for me to learn. My model of reality always remains limited.
With the word being, then, I mean to introduce an open-ended foundation to my worldview. I'm aware that something endures, but I may know little about that particular something. Even with those things about which I know much more, I never gain a comprehensive perspective on them. In my effort to model the things of which I'm aware, I can always learn more. To incorporate such learning, I remain ever willing to modify my model of the things of which I'm aware.
With the word identity, I mean that with whatever particular thing I choose to consider, it endures as it endures. Put in other words, whatever particular thing I consider embodies a specific nature.
With the word non-contradiction, I mean that with whatever particular thing I choose to consider, it endures as it endures, and thus it can't both endure and not endure at the same moment and in the same respect. To make my model of the things of which I'm aware most fully satisfy my needs for clarity, efficiency, explanation and truth, with any contradictions that I might notice in my model, I commit to resolving them. As I resolve such contradictions, I modify my model and more thoroughly integrate it.
With the word causality, I mean that with whatever particular thing I consider, any action, motion, change or endurance that it embodies, it embodies. I consider any action, motion, change or endurance an indivisible aspect of that which acts, moves, changes or endures. I likewise consider any particular thing that acts, moves, changes or endures as an indivisible aspect of its action, motion, change or endurance.
At root, when I say "this causes that effect," I mean, for example, that "this person [the cause] runs [the effect]" – or even that "this person's running [the cause] made this person run [the effect]." In this example, the running and the person remain indivisible.
In modeling particular things, I often relate attributes. I might say, for example, that "this person can run because he has normally functioning legs," and thus relate the person’s legs to the ability to run. I might say, in other words, "this person's normally functioning legs enable [cause] this person to run [effect]."
Only the present exists. The past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist. By my standards, in a strictly literal sense, the past never exists and the future never exists: the past never now endures and the future never now endures. Only and always the present endures.
For me, "being," "the actual," "the real," "the present," and "what endures" all ultimately refer to the same reality. Everything actual and real exists now, in the present (the now).
For me, saying, "I'm able to drink this coffee now because I made it earlier" really qualifies as shorthand rather than as a literal statement. Literally, I took a succession of actions now leading to my drinking this coffee now.
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As I endure, I endure (self). I live and embody need-directed action (living action).
As part of remaining alive as the specific (animal and human) life form that I do, I also remain aware.
I'm aware of things (awareness). Things that I perceive and my senses cause me to experience perceptual awareness of those things (sensory perception, the body). Things that I perceive, my senses and my body generate sensory-perceptual, pleasure-pain experiences (pleasure and pain). With my feelings I experience varying degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction (feelings). With my mind I can consider my experiences with my thoughts (thinking attention). In my unified environment, with my mind, by means of my power to choose, I embody the capacity to choose between alternatives and to guide my actions (mental choice).
Just as I regard a person's running as indivisible from the person, so I regard a person's awareness as indivisible from that person (integrity of awareness and the body).
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Every living being embodies needs and enacts strategies within its environment in an effort to meet those needs (needs, strategies, environment). By satisfying its needs a living being serves its life. Not always does the specific strategy that a living being enacts end up meeting its needs. Even so, any living being enacts any of its strategies with the aim of meeting its needs, which means: with the aim of serving its life (aim).
I'm vulnerable to need-frustration, which means that I embody the potential to fail, even profoundly, in my effort to satisfy my needs (vulnerability, mortality).
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As part of remaining alive as the specific (animal and human) life form that I do, my awareness depends for its nature on the aspects of my environment of which I'm aware (primacy).
Some things endure absolutely and so remain beyond my power to change, while other things endure that remain within my power to alter (the absolute and the alterable).
Given my awareness of the nature of being, living action, my nature and their interrelationship, I feel a degree of hope that I embody some power with which to strive to meet my needs (sense of life). Also, given my awareness of the nature of being, living action, my nature and their interrelationship, I feel a degree of confidence that in enacting strategies in my effort to satisfy my needs, I embody some power with which to actually satisfy them (sense of efficacy).
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| D. | Feelings and Thoughts | |
| E. | Presence | |
| F. | Observation, Prediction, Experimentation and the Canon | |
| G. | Empathic Dialogue |
As with other aware animals including other human beings, as I aim to satisfy my needs, my power of awareness remains central in guiding my action. As a living, vulnerable, mortal being, I may satisfy my need for health, endure a dying process or linger somewhere in between. As an aware being, in a specific respect, I may satisfy my need for awareness sufficiently to serve my well being or miss something crucial. Likewise, as a human being who feels, I can experience pain, pleasure, happiness, hope, depression or devastation - or something in between.
Because I want to satisfy my needs for health and well being and maximize my happiness, as I guide my action in my effort to meet my needs, I want to maximize my awareness.
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I'm always aware by some means and in some form. At any given moment, how things seem to me remains the form by means of which I remain aware of those things. Without such form, I couldn't be aware at all.
By my standards, then, things always remain exactly as they seem. With further inspection I can change my perspective on things, develop awareness of them in new forms and learn more about them, and on this basis modify my action relative to them. Yet at every stage, how such things seem to me remains the form by means of which I remain aware of them.
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B. The Continuum of Truth Satisfaction
Given that by my standards things always remain exactly as they seem, I conceive of truth differently than those who refer to such divisions as "fact vs. error" and "truth vs. falsehood." Instead, I regard truth as a need that I aim to satisfy ever more fully.
In my ongoing learning process, I refine my strategies in order to more deeply satisfy my needs. In a fundamental sense, I conceive of all my forms of awareness as strategies for meeting my needs for awareness and truth - strategies that I want to modify any time that I discover a more aware, life-serving way of meeting those needs.
In this sense, by my standards, human strategies for meeting the need for truth endure on a continuum: some such strategies meet this need more fully, some less. I like some such strategies far more than others. I rank such strategies according to my judgment of how fully they maximize my awareness and thus serve my life.
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So, for example, I regard all worldviews (including all religions, philosophies and belief systems) as strategies for meeting human needs rather than as needs in themselves. Some such strategies meet my need for truth more fully, while others do less.
I seek neither to dismiss casually, nor to adopt thoughtlessly, any part of any worldview. Instead, with reflection, I seek to learn from all such sources, even when in some part they don't satisfy my need for truth.
When in some part a particular worldview doesn't satisfy my need for truth, I selectively adopt only those parts that I regard as life-serving and strive to learn even from those parts that I dislike. In my view, human beings developed even the parts that I dislike with the aim of meeting their needs. If I don't adopt an aspect that I dislike, I still want to understand how another person hoped with that aspect to satisfy what need.
I apply the same principles even when it seems to me that based on their worldviews, particular individuals enact strategies that I dislike. I find that I far more fully meet my needs for understanding and intelligibility when I remember that like all living beings, they do what they do with the aim of meeting their needs.
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I regard even my own worldview not as a need in itself but as a strategy for meeting human needs. By treating even my own worldview this way, I find that I more fully satisfy my need for open-mindedness. With this approach, with experience, and more deeply than I would by treating my worldview as if it were a need, I satisfy my need for truth.
In this process, I describe neither my worldview as an "-ism" nor myself as an "-ist." In terms of nuance and evolution neither form satisfies my needs for awareness or flexibility nearly as much as I prefer.
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I regard all concepts, words, thoughts and worldviews as forms by means of which, to some degree, a human being satisfies one's need for truth. By my standards, such a thought-form qualifies neither as "true" or "false." By means of such a thought-form, a person models the world.
By my standards, for each individual, even at the level of thought-forms, things always remain exactly as they seem. In a sense then, for me, no illusions, errors or falsehoods exist. Instead, with each concept, word, thought and worldview, each person satisfies one's need for truth to some degree.
In my judgment, individuals model the world differently from one another and vary in how fully they satisfy their needs for truth. Yet each individual remains a living, human being who always acts with the aim of meeting one's needs in the service of one's life. Given this aim, each moment, each person satisfies one's need for truth as fully as one then knows how.
So I don't attempt to avoid or eliminate "error." I regard such divisions as "truth vs. falsehood" and "fact vs. error" as dichotomous strategies that don't optimally meet my needs. For me, truth is not a target that one hits or misses, but a need that one satisfies more or less fully. Potentially, with time, one can meet this need more fully.
Given this, I aim to move along the continuum in a direction that will ever more deeply satisfy my need for truth.
Using my capacity to think in combination with my power of subconscious integration, I mentally identify and integrate the material provided by my various forms of awareness. I gather such material via my sensory perception and my experiences of pleasure, pain and feelings (which get stimulated with the help of my sensory perception) and via my memory (which accumulates material with the help of my sensory perception). By means of such mental identification and integration I more fully articulate what I observe and experience.
Methodologically, I involve logical, dialectical and rhetorical integration in my effort to help meet my need for truth. I involve logic (primarily inductive and secondarily deductive) in my effort to integrate my principles without contradiction. I involve dialectics in my effort to preserve the relevant context and to interrelate my principles within a unified whole. I involve rhetoric in my effort to use language to meet my needs, including for clarity of thought and communication.
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By observing what stimulates me and by identifying in my underlying, authentic, human needs the ultimate sources of my pleasure, pain and feelings, I also deepen my awareness of what's alive in me and of what would make my life more wonderful.
With the help of such mental integration I can reflect upon and learn from my own and others' past actions; make predictions about the future and plan ahead, even long range; and more deeply serve my life by more fully meeting my needs.
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In my effort to mentally identify and integrate the material provided by my various modes of awareness, inherent or irreconcilable conflicts never arise between my reason and emotion, thought and feeling, logic and passion or mind and body.
Likewise, in my effort to mentally identify and integrate my observations, inherent or irreconcilable conflicts never arise between the individual and social aspects of my human identity.
In learning, conceptualizing and expanding the range of my thoughts, and in further integrating and differentiating my concepts, I dismiss none and involve all these dimensions of my awareness.
I've heard some maintain that because feelings can arise from underlying and often subconscious thoughts and evaluations, such feelings can't serve as judges of truth nor can they reliably guide a person's actions. Some go so far as to claim that thinking clearly, logically and rationally involves setting one's feelings aside.
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Although I also maintain that feelings can arise from underlying and often subconscious thoughts and evaluations, I find that a different conception of my feelings' nature and role far more deeply satisfies my needs.
I suspect that one reason why some maintain that feelings can't serve as judges of truth or guides to action lies in the following. If I feel something, and I attempt to describe the feeling by saying, "I feel like hitting you," such a person might say that I shouldn't act on the feeling; that my feeling this way doesn't prove that I should act this way; that in this situation, in deciding how to act, I should set my feelings aside; and that all this illustrates that feelings can't serve as judges of truth or guides to action.
In my conception, however, the statement "I feel like hitting you" omits the authentic feeling and mixes in the thought of a specific strategy: that of hitting.
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I prefer to express what I feel in the following way. "I feel rage." By my standards, words such as rage, anger, fear, sadness, joy, excitement, exuberance, melancholy and depression (plus many more) authentically name feelings. They succeed in naming feelings in part by omitting thoughts, strategies, or judgments that imply wrongdoing or that suggest that any other person bears responsibility for causing them. (For example, when I say, "I feel offended," without ever naming an authentic feeling, I attribute both responsibility and wrongdoing to another person in the form of a thought-judgment.) Instead, without mixing in thoughts, such words as rage, sadness and joy help me to draw my attention to those bodily sensations that I experience in the form of feelings.
Contrary to many persons' opinion that in this example acting on the feeling of rage would involve danger, in my judgment, the real danger would involve acting on the thought - the only thought that had yet popped into mind. In other words, in my judgment, by themselves, feelings don't dictate a way to act.
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Returning to the realm of truth satisfaction, I wouldn't feel satisfied if someone said, for example, "Totalitarian dictatorship represents the ideal social system - and I know it's true because I feel it." In addition to not naming any evidence with which to support this claim, by my standards, such a speaker wouldn't even succeed in naming a feeling.
When I develop and formulate my conclusions I don't want to set aside - but in fact want to thoroughly involve - logic and reason. Yet in my effort to more deeply satisfy my need for truth, I also involve my feelings.
I would like to clarify how I involve my feelings.
In gauging how certain I am of a given assertion, I will say or think to myself something like the following. "When I follow this line of reasoning, and consider how much its conclusion satisfies my need for truth, I feel highly confident (or deeply doubtful, or somewhat uneasy, etc.)." So I involve such feeling in gauging how certain I am of that assertion. If I feel doubtful or uneasy, I take that as a sign that I will more deeply meet my need for truth by inquiring further. As I inquire further, naturally I will engage in more thinking and reasoning. If I happen to discover any apparent contradictions in my principles, I will make a conscious effort to resolve them. At each point in this process, however, I will continue to pay attention to what I'm feeling. If I still feel uncertain, I won't yet classify my conscious conclusion as "certain."
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I include such feeling in my assessment in part because I'm convinced that the human fulfillment of the need for truth involves not only conscious but also subconscious processes of integration. While I follow the pattern that I've outlined, by paying attention to my feelings, I can access the results of such subconscious processes of integration.
This leads me to another point. I can also view feelings, not only as arising from possibly subconscious thoughts and evaluations, but also as arising from underlying needs.
For example, if I shout at my daughter, and shortly afterward, I think, "I shouldn't have done that! Blast! How could I be such a terrible parent?" - I may feel guilt. And I feel quite confident that such a feeling will have arisen from my thoughts and self-evaluations.
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Yet at another level, I can help focus my attention on the biological role that my feelings play. I can also appreciate that when I feel some form of satisfaction (such as calm, happiness or confidence), then, to some degree, some underlying, authentic need of mine has been met. In addition, the degree of my satisfaction corresponds to the degree to which I sense with my body that this need has been satisfied. Likewise, when I feel some form of dissatisfaction (such as sadness, irritation, frustration or anger) then some underlying, authentic need of mine hasn't been met, and the degree of my dissatisfaction corresponds to the degree to which I sense with my body that my need hasn't been satisfied.
In the example of my feeling guilt, if I consider a level deeper than that of my thoughts, I can appreciate that an authentic, human need of mine wasn't getting met: my need to communicate empathetically, which I especially want to meet with my daughter.
In the example of the person who said, "I feel like hitting you," by extracting and isolating the authentic feeling, I can show that by my standards, by itself the feeling threatens no one. Assuming that I isolate the authentic feeling of anger, it alone doesn't force me to act or even tell me what to do. Feelings by themselves don't articulate strategies. Thoughts do.
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Frequently, in addition to the feeling, thoughts may also run through my head, and in the heat of anger in a given moment my only thought may remain, "I want to hit you." Yet I can then pause, take a deep breath, and reflect. I can appreciate that the strategy of hitting remains only one among many that I may choose to enact in my effort to fulfill my underlying need.
As an example, I may choose to express to the person that I feel anger and that for a specific duration I want to take a break from our interaction. That way, before interacting again with that person, I can fully experience and process my anger.
Given the foregoing, I want to guide all my actions with the fullest possible awareness of my feelings. This involves attending to the roots of my feelings at a level deeper even than that of (possibly subconscious) thought. Specifically, I want to attend to the roots of my feelings in my needs. Always, I want to remember that no matter what I feel, I still retain the power to choose what strategy to enact for the sake of meeting the need that underlies my feeling.
In reflecting on my own responses and those of others, it helps me profoundly to keep in mind that given the foregoing perspective, their feelings, whatever form they happen to take, in and of themselves don't threaten me. Indeed, it helps me enormously to pay close attention to others' feelings, their underlying needs, and the degree of those underlying needs' fulfillment.
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In considering new and alternative points of view, I dismiss neither that in which I feel confident nor that about which I feel suspicious. I deepen my focus on my needs and thereby increase my strategic flexibility. I relinquish attachment to old strategies with which I'm no longer satisfied and revise my principles until I'm more satisfied with the degree to which I'm meeting my need for truth.
In this process, I cultivate neither what I'll now call "dogmatism" nor "deep skepticism."
By dogmatism I now mean a defensive attachment to strategies. Such attachment involves, in part, a lack of willingness to alter such strategies. Such attachment arises from a failure to distinguish clearly between strategies and needs.
By deep skepticism I now mean a defensive unwillingness to express conviction in any strategies. Such unwillingness arises from a lack of confidence 1) in the power of human awareness and/or 2) in the ability to remain strategically flexible even while remaining confident in one's principles.
To clarify my own approach in these respects, as I learn and more deeply meet my need for truth, rather than proceeding with either dogmatism or deep skepticism, I find that I far more fully meet my need for truth in another way.
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In considering my various principles, and in considering those of others, I experience a continuum of feelings, running from serious doubt to a high degree of confidence. I find it helps me to pay close attention to such feelings. The more deeply I feel doubt about a principle, the less certain I am of it. The higher the confidence I feel about a principle, the more certain I am of it.
Such certainty, however, remains a matter of degree. In no case do I reach a closed-minded, dogmatic state of certainty about any principle. Instead, I always regard my particular thoughts and principles as strategies for meeting my need for truth, rather than as needs or ends in themselves. Rather than with strategic attachment I treat even those principles of which I'm most certain with a sense of strategic flexibility, holding my authentic needs and the service of life as more important than any mental position.
Moreover, I'm always aware that at any point, my perspective and knowledge remain limited. Although whenever I'm aware, I remain aware by some means and in some form - and even though I think in terms of a continuum of truth rather than in terms of "truth vs. falsehood" - even with respect to those principles about which I remain most certain, I remain certain only to some degree. The world remains much vaster and deeper than any of my thought-forms can comprehensively identify. I can always learn more. In the course of my learning, even with principles about which I've felt quite certain, sometimes I've learned things so new and significant that I've ended up radically revising those principles.
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In this process, I've found it far more satisfying to keep foremost in my awareness that my thoughts and principles don't equal what endures in the world. Strictly speaking, my thoughts and principles don't even equal my experience. Instead, my thoughts and principles serve, metaphorically, as stepping stones. Rather than equaling my life or the world, my thoughts and principles serve as strategies for serving my needs and life in the world. With them, I model the world in the form of words, concepts, propositions and a worldview.
Understanding all this, I appreciate that feelings play a crucial role both in satisfying my need for truth and in guiding my action, including in my social interaction. Provided that I understand and clearly appreciate their differences, no inherent or irreconcilable conflicts arise between my thoughts and feelings.
Even so, partly since in my judgment, in many circumstances, acting impulsively on the basis of the first strategy I happen to think of can involve grave danger, next I want to consider a mode of awareness with which I find that I much more deeply meet my needs in this and many other respects.
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Although with my capacity to think I gain profound, potential power with which to assist my process of contributing to and enjoying my life, I can also attend to what endures in a different yet crucial way. I can do so by deeply immersing myself in the now via mentally quiet, meditative attention. I also call this form of awareness presence.
By presence I mean attention which, rather than identifying with and getting lost in thought-forms, focuses instead on the present moment.
I find that by meditating I can enjoy deeper presence now, which I value. Yet I also find that by meditating I can enhance my ability to more easily deepen my presence at other times - such as when I observe the world; when I observe what's alive in me now; and when I attend to what's alive in others now.
In this mode of awareness, even if thoughts happen to arise in my mind, I can observe rather than identify with those thoughts. I consider this crucial in part because I've found that it doesn't meet my needs for awareness, truth, inner peace or progress if I let runaway thoughts overtake my mind.
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I can let my thoughts overtake me if I identify with them and treat them as if they equaled my self. Yet such mental identification far from fully satisfies my needs for truth, awareness or clarity. Meditation helps me to more deeply appreciate that "I am not my thoughts" and that I want to treat my thoughts as strategies for meeting my needs rather than as ends in themselves.
When I deepen my presence and treat my thoughts as strategies for meeting my needs rather than as ends in themselves, I likewise more fully meet my need for authentic open-mindedness. I leave myself free to modify my thoughts and, as I discover them, to incorporate more deeply need-fulfilling, life-serving mental strategies.
When I mentally identify with my thoughts, let them overtake my mind and treat them as if they equaled my deepest self, I generate mental inflexibility, increase resistance to both the now and the new, treat "past" and "future" as if they actually existed, and increase my defensiveness. When sustaining such a mentally identified process I lose touch with what's in front of and alive in me right now.
By contrast, from a basis in deeper presence, when I deem it helpful to do so, I can choose to direct my thought and related action with more intentionality and efficiency in the service of my needs and life.
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If I mentally identify with my thoughts, let them overtake my mind and treat them as if they equaled my deepest self, then when I experience strong feelings, I tend to act impulsively, seizing upon the first associated strategy that arises in my thoughts without first considering any alternative strategies that might more fully meet my needs.
So rather than blindly obeying my thoughts, by dis-identifying with them I can treat them as strategies and increase their flexibility. In this way, by strengthening my ability to pause rather than to react impulsively out of unquestioned, mental habit, I more effectively meet various needs. I more effectively meet my need for inner peace; leverage my power of choice; generate thoughts more creatively; and both more consciously direct and take responsibility for my actions.
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In this sense, I've no need for belief. For me, believing in something qualifies as a profoundly suboptimal strategy for meeting my needs. To me, believing in something involves defensively identifying with a mental strategy and confusing a mental position with one's need for truth.
From a foundation of presence, with deep awareness of my need for truth, I seek to model the world in thought-forms that, as I learn more, remain flexibly capable of remodeling. By this means, I keep my thought-forms dynamic rather than frozen, open rather than closed, ever freer of belief and ever more supportive of authentic conviction.
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F. Observation, Prediction, Experimentation and the Canon
In satisfying my need for truth by developing and formulating my principles, to the fullest extent, I endeavor to involve observation, prediction and experimentation and apply what I call the canon.
With observation I endeavor to carefully consider what I want to learn about, and with my various forms of awareness notice as much as I can.
With prediction, based on observation, logic and dialectics, I endeavor to form principles and anticipate what will happen if those principles prove to efficiently model the phenomena which I observe.
With experimentation (or further observation) I test my predictions, and whenever my further observations support doing so, revise my principles in order to more efficiently model the phenomena which I observe.
Along the way, I apply "the canon" - "the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and the meaning of intellectual integrity" according to Walter Kaufmann – which involves asking and answering seven questions with respect to one's own and others' propositions, views, beliefs, hypotheses or convictions.
The questions of the canon ask:
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- What does this mean?
- How would incorporation of this help me model what I observe?
- How would incorporation of this not help me model what I observe?
- What alternatives remain available?
- How would incorporation of each alternative help me model what I observe?
- How would incorporation of each alternative not help me model what I observe?
- In light of such considerations, incorporation of which alternative(s) would most help me to model what I observe?
[adapted from Without Guilt and Justice by Walter Kaufmann, p. 178]
By involving observation, prediction, experimentation and by applying the canon, I find that I keep my thought-forms flexible; clarify and challenge my concepts, parinciples, propositions and worldview; consider others' alternative conceptions; and, with reflection, model the world in fresh ways that more deeply meet my need for truth and serve my life.
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As much as I value observation, prediction, experimentation and the canon, I find that I can't optimally apply these if I fail to remain present and empathize with those who maintain points of view that differ from my own.
By "empathize" I now mean the following. With deep presence, I attend to the feelings and needs of the person who expresses the point of view that I wish to understand.
If, for example, a person has written a book, and remains beyond my ability to contact, when I read the book, I still value empathically guessing what the author's feelings and needs in writing it might have been.
Sadly, much of my cultural conditioning teaches me to make up stories that not only declare the other person's different position "false," but that also label the other person "wrong." (I write about value judgment, including "right-wrong" value judgment, below.) Such conditioning further encourages me to judgmentally diagnose the reasons why the other person maintains the position that differs from mine. When I get caught up in such conditioning, I can easily develop a defensive, closed-minded attitude and dismiss different points of view.
Engaging in such dismissal robs me of the opportunity to enrich my own point of view in a way that will more fully satisfy my need for truth.
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I don't want to allow myself to be overtaken by the thought-forms of such mental conditioning. Instead I want to cultivate deep presence and pay close attention to the feelings and needs in relation to which a person develops and formulates a point of view.
By paying attention in this way, I can infuse my attention with my awareness that every living being acts with the aim of meeting its needs in the service of life. In a sense, even profoundly different points of view will make sense to me if I deeply understand the context of feelings and needs in which a person developed them.
If I declare the other person's position "false," label the person "wrong," or otherwise judgmentally diagnose the reasons why the other person maintains such a position, I lose sight of the authentic reasons why (on some level) that individual imagined that the position would meet human needs. By doing this, I prevent myself from more deeply understanding a point of view that I might even embrace if only I knew what another's authentic reasons were for embracing it.
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Although many refer to any logical reasoning process as an "argument," within my worldview, I don't. As I often tell my wife, Cherita, if I never engage in another argument, it will be too soon! Even arguments that allegedly remain purely logical and free of attack I'm convinced frequently involve an implicit intention to generate such conflict. I don't find that such an intention satisfies my need for truth.
Of course, as I attempt to engage another in empathic dialogue, interpersonal conflict may arise accidentally. I see no reason for attempting to generate such conflict, however.
So, for the sake of most fully satisfying my need for truth, I want to engage in empathic dialogue rather than argument.
If, with a person whose point of view differs from mine, I sustain deep presence and succeed in attending empathically to that person's feelings and needs, something wonderful happens. Even if I remain less than satisfied with the other person's model of the world, I stand to learn much more from it. I do so by striving to sense the needs that the other person sought to serve by developing that model.
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I also value empathically considering my own reasons for maintaining aspects of my worldview. I value this whether such aspects involve points of view that I no longer hold or ones that I now maintain. If I pay attention to the feelings and needs that I once experienced or now experience in relation to such aspects, I find that I deepen my self-understanding. Again, I do so by paying attention to the needs that I sought to serve by developing such a model.
If I don't listen empathically, I can ritualistically ask the questions of the canon without authentically understanding alternative points of view that I allegedly consider. This deprives the canon of its value. If I listen empathically, I can ask the questions of the canon with authenticity, and much more deeply understand such alternative points of view.
By my standards, no point of view comprehensively describes the world. By involving observation, prediction, experimentation and applying the canon and empathically engaging others in dialogue, I increase the odds that I will expand my worldview beyond its present limitations, more fully satisfy my need for truth and deepen my understanding.
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| D. | Distinguishing Moralistic, Morally Relativistic and Life-Serving Value Judgment | |
| E. | Feelings, Needs, Presence and Happiness | |
| F. | Sense of Life and Nine Specific Areas of its Engagement | |
| G. | Self-Esteem |
A. The Aim of Living Action and Value Judgment
As a living being, my every action's aim remains to meet my needs. In my effort to serve my life I choose and enact strategies. Even so, the strategies I happen to choose don't always and inevitably satisfy all my needs as fully as I prefer.
Yet, as fully as possible, I want to enact strategies that will satisfy my needs.
Given this, I make value judgments about the degree to which my environment, my processes and my strategies - and those of others - will satisfy my needs.
By 1) deepening my awareness of the nature of human beings and the wider world in which I live, 2) reflecting on my choices and actions (and those of others), and 3) deepening the presence with which I attend to my authentic feelings, I can draw my attention to and deepen my awareness both of my authentic needs and the degree of their fulfillment.
With this deepening awareness I can develop more informed and creative value judgments. With such value judgments I can choose new strategies, more deeply fulfill my needs, and thereby not only aim to but also more fully serve my life.
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Since feelings and needs play so central a role in my own living action, worldview and value judgments, for the sake of clarification I've chosen to include the following table in order to list a fraction of the words that I like to employ in my effort to name and identify each. I don't regard this list as definitive or exhaustive, however.
By my definition, a feeling endures as a psychosomatic form in which a person experiences a sense of the need-satisfying significance to oneself of something, and to what degree.
By my description, a need endures as that in a living being that it aims to satisfy in the service of its life, the fulfillment of which enriches its living action. I distinguish such needs from the strategies that a living being enacts in its effort to meet its needs.
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In judging whether a word names a specifically human need, I ask myself the following. Does what the word names qualify as fundamental (as distinguished from a strategy for meeting it)? Does it qualify as universal (in the sense that it endures in all members of the species by their nature, regardless of race, age, worldview, opinion or other such difference)? I also ask myself if my word for the need qualifies as abstract rather than particular, as this further helps me to ensure that I'm distinguishing the broad need from the specific strategy that I might choose in my effort to satisfy the underlying need.
|
FEELINGS
(needs satisfied) |
FEELINGS
(needs unsatisfied) |
NEEDS |
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admiration
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agitation
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air
|
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amusement
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anger
|
autonomy
|
|
anticipation
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annoyance
|
awareness
|
|
arousal
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anxiety
|
celebration
|
|
attraction
|
anguish
|
closeness
|
|
bliss
|
bafflement
|
empathy
|
|
buoyancy
|
befuddlement
|
food
|
|
calm
|
concern
|
growth
|
|
certainty
|
confusion
|
harmony
|
|
confidence
|
depression
|
health
|
|
curiosity
|
despair
|
honesty
|
|
delight
|
disappointment
|
integrity
|
|
eagerness
|
disbelief
|
intelligibility
|
|
ecstasy
|
discontent
|
learning
|
|
encouragement
|
discouragement
|
love
|
|
engagement
|
disgust
|
meaning
|
|
enthrallment
|
disillusionment
|
mutuality
|
|
enthusiasm
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doubt
|
participation
|
|
excitement
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frustration
|
peace
|
|
exuberance
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guilt
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play
|
|
giddiness
|
helplessness
|
precision
|
|
gladness
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indecision
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progress
|
|
gratefulness
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irritation
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purpose
|
|
happiness
|
melancholy
|
resolution
|
|
hope
|
overwhelm
|
responsibility
|
|
inspiration
|
rage
|
safety
|
|
joy
|
resentment
|
sexual expression
|
|
relief
|
revulsion
|
shelter
|
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reverence
|
sadness
|
truth
|
|
satisfaction
|
shame
|
understanding
|
|
uplift
|
skepticism
|
water
|
|
wonder
|
worry
|
well being
|
I hope that these lists will help clarify for others what I mean by feelings and needs, and will contribute to readers' understanding of my approach to value judgment.
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C. The Continuum of Value Judgment
In a fundamental sense I regard divisions such as "right vs. wrong" and "good vs. bad" as dichotomies that artificially treat different strategies as opposites. Such divisions don't optimally meet my needs. Instead, I conceive of all possible human actions as strategies aimed at meeting human needs - some of which in my judgment serve life more fully than others.
In this sense, by my standards of value, I evaluate human strategies on a continuum: in my judgment, some such strategies meet human needs more fully, some less. I like some such strategies far more than others. I rank such strategies according to my judgment of the degree to which enacting them satisfies human needs.
Even those strategies that I evaluate as profoundly less than satisfying I'm convinced arise from the same, ultimate aim that every living being shares: to meet its needs in the service of its life. So, by my standards, even strategies that I profoundly dislike belong on the same continuum as those that I prefer.
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One might wonder whether the ''pleasure-pain" distinction provides a basis for treating different strategies as "opposites" such as "right vs. wrong" and "good vs. bad." I suspect that the ''pleasure-pain" distinction has contributed to many individuals' impression that it's "natural" to treat different strategies as "opposites." Even so, I've found that when I treat different strategies as "opposites" I satisfy my needs far less fully than I do when I treat them as belonging on the same continuum.
I'm convinced that biologically, pleasure endures to draw us toward those parts of the continuum most likely to satisfy our needs, and pain endures to draw us away from those parts of the continuum most likely to frustrate our needs. In a similar way, conceptually, as a mental shortcut by means of which to reduce the sheer number of units that at a given moment I endeavor to process contemplatively, I do find the following strategy sometimes helpful. As a kind of shorthand, I will mentally split the continuum of human strategies in two as I contrast what I regard as life-serving and life-alienating strategies.
When I do that, though, I still regard all such strategies as remaining on a single continuum. I still understand that anyone who chooses any strategy - even one that I profoundly dislike - chooses it with the aim of meeting authentic needs (though not always with full awareness). Strictly speaking, even those strategies that I call "life-alienating" don't qualify by my standards as "opposite" to those that I call "life-serving." Even what I call "life-alienating" strategies ultimately arise from the (not always optimally conscious) aim of meeting needs. Put another way, such "life-alienating" strategies remain "life-serving" at least in that narrow sense. Such "life-alienating" strategies don't meet needs nearly as fully as I prefer (such as when such strategies don't equally honor other human beings' needs).
By contrast, when I employ such divisions as "right vs. wrong" and "good vs. bad," I find that I cloud my awareness of the value continuum by treating as "opposite" that which I find it far more fulfilling to regard instead as varying by degree and as arising from any living being's ultimate aim.
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For these key reasons (plus others, aspects of which I will address below), I find that when I evaluate human strategies I much more fully satisfy my needs by relinquishing such divisions as "right vs. wrong" and "good vs. bad."
At times, out of mental habit, such divisions do still arise in my thoughts, however. I've absorbed an overwhelming amount of teaching that inclines me to think in terms of such divisions. When such divisions do arise in my thoughts, I prefer to pause, breathe deeply, and deepen my sense of presence. Then I can seek to discover my underlying feelings and authentic needs; with this awareness relinquish such dichotomies; and refocus my attention on the continuum along which I find it most helpful to evaluate human strategies.
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D. Distinguishing Moralistic, Morally Relativistic and Life-Serving Value Judgment
I classify and evaluate as moralistic, morally relativistic or life-serving various strategies for making value judgments. I do so according to how much I like or dislike such strategies and why. I find that I much more fully meet my needs when I regard these strategies as enduring on a continuum instead of classifying any of them as "true vs. false," "right vs. wrong," "moral vs. immoral." I judge that some such strategies serve my needs (and those of others) more or less fully and in a more or less costly manner.
In my conception, at least implicitly, moralistic value judgment involves the authoritarian labeling of actions, individuals and groups in a dichotomous manner (for example, as "right vs. wrong" or "moral vs. immoral"). Such labeling artificially creates a sense of opposition. Frequently, a person who makes such a judgment neglects to take responsibility for making it (for example, by stating, "What that person did was wrong," rather than stating, "That action fell far short of meeting my needs"). I feel confident that by implication, historically and even today, such moralistic judgment treats human beings as if they were innately evil; regards right action as involving the painful resistance of such inner evil; and, when it's claimed that such evil has arisen (whether within oneself or others) regards good action as involving the punishment of such evil, which according to this view deserves it.
By my definition, morally relativistic value judgment tries to counter such moralistic judgment by insisting that no value judgments can legitimately claim any superiority over any others. In this view, one may like and label a given action as "good" and dislike and label another as "evil," yet such labeling remains a matter of arbitrary preference and ultimately lacks any substantive justification. Some take this approach to imply that maturity involves relinquishing value judgment altogether.
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By my standards, by vivid contrast with both moralistic value judgment and morally relativistic value judgment, life-serving value judgment relinquishes both by instead maintaining that 1) the aim of every living being remains to meet its needs; 2) as a living being, every human being also always aims to meet one's own needs; 3) some enacted strategies fulfill needs and thus serve life more or less fully than others; 4) to a large degree, every human being satisfies one's own needs by making and acting on value judgments; and 5) with learning, reflection and deepening presence, by observing the world and by attending to our feelings and needs, each of us can, over time, make our value judgments serve our lives more fully.
Such life-serving value judgment likewise relinquishes the labeling of actions, individuals and groups in a dichotomous manner (for example, as "right vs. wrong," "good vs. bad" or "moral vs. immoral"). Instead, in order to focus on the degree to which specific strategies satisfy human needs, life-serving value judgment categorizes such actions as enduring on a continuum. When making such a life-serving value judgment, a person takes full responsibility for it (for example, by stating, "When you raise your voice like that, I feel upset because I need peace, quiet and consideration").
Life-serving value-judgments draw attention to what specifically one likes or dislikes (observation); how one feels about it and to what degree one likes or dislikes it (feeling); what need gives rise to the feeling (need); and what one presently imagines would make one's life more wonderful if done (request). As an example, "When you raise your voice like that, I feel upset because I need peace, quiet and consideration. So when you ask me that, would you be willing to lower your voice?"
I find that by making life-serving value judgments I much more fully serve my needs than I do with either moralistic or morally relativistic value judgment.
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E. Feelings, Needs, Presence and Happiness
In my experience, in essence, by means of one, essential pattern, I can cultivate and experience happiness: by valuing, honoring and fulfilling my authentic needs. By attending to my feelings I can gauge what underlying needs of mine are getting met and to what degree, and then I can conceive of strategies by means of which to fulfill them.
I also find that by deepening my presence I more fully experience the sense of inner peace which I regard as fundamental to honoring my needs and to experiencing authentic bliss. So I also deeply value such presence and consider it central to my experience of happiness.
In addition, in terms of my mental action, I find that it often helps me to categorize my needs, actions and values in four, admittedly overlapping areas: growth, love, creativity and play. In this context, I use these terms very broadly.
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Growth involves such things as reflection, learning and self-improvement. Love involves the full spectrum of my interpersonal activities. Creativity involves what others may sometimes call creative and productive work. And play involves all forms of recreation.
I find it helps meet my need for balance to ensure that I'm not neglecting any of these areas.
I've written more about how I conceive of these categories elsewhere on my website. I will also explore nine more particular areas in the next section of this summary.
For now I want to add that even though I find it helpful to conceive of play, in one sense, as one among four overlapping areas that I strive to balance, in yet another sense, I want to make everything that I do as playful as possible. I find that by deeply connecting to my feelings and needs and by focusing on the authentic reasons why I choose to act as I do, I re-orient my attention in a way that can make even the most challenging effort more enriching and enjoyable.
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When I do something less out of a sense of play than I prefer, with reflection, frequently I find that one of two, moralistically judgmental principles has become involved in my motivation: duty and/or obligation. In my judgment, these principles focus my attention not on my feelings and needs and not on the service of my life and happiness, but instead on the idea that my action "should" flow without consideration of my feelings and needs. Even when I'm doing something that in other circumstances I would naturally value or enjoy, I find that introducing a sense of duty or obligation will quickly transform my action into drudgery, and I'll soon find myself thinking, "I hate doing this!"
(For those who might imagine that without a sense of obligation some individuals will thoughtlessly and without warning neglect to honor their agreements, I offer that in my experience, focusing instead on one's need for integrity helps a person honor one's agreements with far deeper enjoyment and reliability.)
In my effort to increase the degree to which I remain consciously connected to the needs that I'm striving to fulfill by means of my strategies, I find that if I'm saying to myself, "I hate doing this!" it helps me to treat this as an alarm. In such moments, I like to pause, take a deep breath, deepen my presence, and then ask myself for what reason I'm taking such action. By checking in with my feelings and needs I find that I can either 1) discover that I don't like my reason for doing what I'm doing, and so cease doing it or 2) discover that I like my underlying reason but not the way that I've been thinking about my action in that moment. In the second case, by deepening my presence and my empathetic awareness of my feelings and needs, I find that I can re-orient my thinking in more life-serving ways that make my action more enjoyable.
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I also find it helpful to treat four types of feelings as alarms: anger, guilt, depression and shame. Any time that I experience anger, guilt, depression or shame I find that by my standards, less than optimally life-serving thinking underlies my feelings and, out of habit, overtakes my mind. Beneath such thinking, I find that authentic needs underlie these feelings, too. Yet to unravel my thoughts, I look for moralistic judgments in them.
When I feel anger and reflect on what thoughts underlie it, I find that I'm moralistically judging usually another person (for example, with the thought, "She shouldn't have done that!"). When I feel guilt and reflect on what thoughts underlie it, I find that I'm moralistically judging myself (for example, with the thought, "I shouldn't have done that!"). When I feel depression and reflect on what thoughts underlie it, I find that I'm moralistically judging myself (for example, with the thought, "I'm a worthless excuse for a human being! I've no hope of changing my life or experiencing happiness and I definitely don't deserve to!"). When I feel shame and reflect on what thoughts underlie it, again I find that I'm moralistically judging myself (for example, with the thought, "How could I do something so unworthy? That wasn't right! I've been horrible in relation to those others!").
After having identified such thoughts, by attending to the unmet needs that underlie my thoughts and feelings, I find that not only can I free myself from such life-alienating moralistic judgments, but that I can transform my thoughts into a more life-serving form. As I do I find that my feelings shift.
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For example, instead of saying to myself, "She shouldn't have done that!" I might instead think, "When I now recall her raising her voice, I feel irritation, because I need peace." Soon my feeling may shift again to disappointment or even sadness. With sufficient self-empathy I may even reach a point at which I can empathize with the other whose strategy I didn't like, now appreciating that although it didn't meet my needs, at least it arose from the other's aim to meet her needs.
I bring up my strategy for dealing with anger, guilt, depression and shame in the context of my discussion of happiness in order to shed light on how 1) even these feelings signal to me something crucial about the status of my needs; 2) even though thoughts trigger these four feelings, authentic needs also underlie them; 3) moralistic judgment doesn't optimally satisfy my needs and 4) in the moment, I can with self-empathy and without self-criticism reflect on my state of mind and reorient my thoughts (and eventually, even my feelings) in more life-enriching ways. I find such reorientation invaluable in deepening my experience of authentic happiness.
Later, when discussing my understanding of authentic self-esteem, I will revisit the foregoing pattern in the context of learning and growing - including from actions that I later regret - in ways that remain compatible with authentic self-esteem.
Next, though, I imagine it will even more fully clarify my approach if I turn to nine specific areas, all of which also remain involved in my experience of happiness and which especially involve my sense of life.
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F. Sense of Life and Nine Specific Areas of its Engagement
Earlier, I mentioned that given my awareness of the nature of being, living action, my nature and their interrelationship, I feel a degree of hope that I embody some power with which to strive to meet my needs. I call this awareness and feeling a sense of life. I call a sense of life the felt form in which a person experiences one's most fundamental convictions about being and about one's relationship to being.
Although all aspects of human life seem to me to involve sense of life, in my experience, nine realms especially involve mine: my needs for beauty, art, games and sex; friendship, familial love, intimate love; experiencing the outdoors; and creativity.
That quality in an object that stimulates an intensely personal, affirmative and integrated sense of life experience in me satisfies my need for beauty.
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An artifact in which a person creatively embodies a selectively stylized world in an effort to evoke in an audience an experience of that artist's intended, sense-of-life vantage point qualifies by my definition as art. I profoundly value and deeply enjoy it when my strategy of contemplating such art satisfies my need for beauty.
Because I consider meeting my need for play so crucial in my life and in experiencing authentic happiness, I find that playing games especially satisfies my need for sense of life engagement and personal satisfaction.
In the realm of sex, which often lives as a major component of intimate love, I find that I meet many needs, including for closeness, openness, play, fun, stimulation, sexual expression and appreciation.
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In the realm of friendship, I find that the sharing of similar and compatible senses of life provides the foundation for friends to fulfill their needs for closeness, companionship, mutuality and empathy.
In the realm of familial love, I profoundly value and deeply enjoy it when my strategies of interacting with others whom I call "family" meet my need for such love.
I'm convinced that the sharing of similar and compatible senses of life provides a crucial foundation for a couple's fulfilling their needs for intimate love, which I also profoundly appreciate.
I profoundly enjoy experiencing the outdoors, whether while walking, sitting, exercising or quietly contemplating my surroundings.
In the realm of creativity, which word I use to capture what others may call creative and productive work, I find that I meet many needs, including to exercise my capacities and to contribute.
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I regard as closely related to one's sense of life one's sense of - and need for - authentic self-esteem.
Earlier, I mentioned that I feel a degree of confidence that in enacting strategies in my effort to satisfy my needs, I embody some power with which to actually satisfy them (sense of efficacy). By my standards, such a sense of efficacy constitutes one component of self-esteem.
In my experience, a second component of self-esteem involves passionately valuing one's own needs.
This involves not moralistic, dichotomous judgment ("Am I good or bad? Moral or immoral? Right or wrong? Worthy or unworthy of living?") - which moralistic judgment I regard as far less than optimal in meeting one's needs in general, including for the development of authentic self-esteem.
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Nor by my standards does development of authentic self-esteem involve others' judgments ("Do others consider me good or bad? Moral or immoral? Right or wrong? Worthy or unworthy of living?")
Instead, in my experience and judgment, authentic self-esteem fundamentally involves deep presence, increasing awareness, unconditional self-acceptance and self-celebration. It involves the deep understanding that in one's living action, one's ultimate aim always remains to meet one's needs in the service of life. It involves integrity: living in harmony with one's values and taking responsibility for one's actions. It means empathizing deeply with one's own feelings and needs; learning from one's choices and actions; purposefully valuing and pursuing one's dreams and goals; asserting oneself openly and honestly; and valuing and satisfying one's need for autonomy.
Some may now wonder whether, in the name of preserving what I've called unconditional self-acceptance, I end up doing the following. Do I then turn a blind eye to my own limitations, refuse to acknowledge when I fall short of my aspirations and values, and thus defensively deny myself opportunities for self-improvement - thereby undercutting my capacity to authentically live more efficaciously? Wouldn't all that also undercut my authentic self-esteem? Isn't some moralistic self-judgment crucial, after all?
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In my effort to answer this and to clarify my conception of self-esteem, I'd like you to consider the following.
Earlier, I mentioned that when I feel guilt and reflect on what thoughts underlie my feeling, I find that I'm moralistically judging myself (for example, with the thought, "I shouldn't have done that!").
I also mentioned that after having identified such thoughts, by attending to the unmet needs that underlie such thoughts and feelings, I find that not only can I free myself from such life-alienating, moralistic judgments, but that I can transform my thoughts into a more deeply life-serving form. As I do so, my feelings shift.
For example, instead of persisting in saying to myself, "I shouldn't have done that!" I might progress to the point of being able to think instead, "When I now recall raising my voice with my daughter much more loudly than I wish I had, I feel sadness, because I need compassion, and I deeply want to meet this need when I communicate with her." Now I've discovered what need I didn't meet as much as I would now prefer (to communicate with compassion). Yet as I identify and relinquish my moralistically self-judgmental thoughts, my feeling shifts from guilt to sadness.
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With sufficient self-empathy I can next reach a point at which I can empathize with what need I was aiming to meet with the strategy that I later didn't like. Now, though, I can learn to appreciate that although that strategy didn't meet my needs, it still arose from my aim to meet my needs. In this example, I wanted peace, but in retrospect I disliked how I tried to meet that need (by raising my voice much louder than I now wish I had).
Having identified both needs (peace and to communicate with compassion) now I can creatively conceive of strategies by means of which to meet both needs in the future more fully and at less cost.
Following the foregoing process I find that I much more fully satisfy my needs for awareness, learning, truth, progress and compassion for self.
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Even so, I've absorbed an overwhelming amount of teaching that inclines me to use a different strategy. Such a strategy involves moralistically judging and "beating oneself up" psychologically. This involves - regardless of how painful it feels - "setting one's feelings aside" (as if that were possible!) and instead "doing what one should," "doing one's duty," "fulfilling one's obligation" - in other words, blaming and punishing oneself psychologically. In this model, one expects that at least at first, repeating the "wrong" action will seem tempting, while actually doing the "right" action will feel laboriously painful.
When I implement such a strategy I find that I fail to empathize with, and therefore fail to authentically identify, the feelings and needs involved in my doing that which I later regretted. When I implement such a strategy I find that not only does it make learning and growth more painful. When I implement such a strategy I actually undercut my learning and growth by preventing myself from identifying both 1) the need that I tried to meet with the action that I later regretted and 2) the self-fulfilling reason why I want to discover a different strategy by means of which to meet my needs.
For me, such a strategy of moralistic self-judgment makes my efforts at self-improvement both less pleasant and less effective.
Relating the foregoing back to self-esteem, I maintain the following.
By contrast with moralistic self-judgment, by involving an authentically self-valuing process, I'm convinced that the unconditionally self-accepting, self-empathizing approach to learning both reflects and fosters an orientation of authentic self-esteem.
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In my judgment, the self-empathizing approach far more fully fosters authentic learning and growth by
1) focusing attention on what needs weren't met by the regretted action
2) focusing attention on what needs one had tried to satisfy by means of that action and
3) conceiving of new strategies by means of which to more fully and at less cost meet both needs in the future.
In short, by my standards, authentic self-esteem involves two, major components. It involves a sense of efficacy and also an active process of sustained self-valuing. Such self-valuing crucially involves learning with self-empathy. By learning with self-empathy, I find that I most effectively enrich my sense of efficacy, and thus enable both components to mutually reinforce each other.
Next I want to turn to a human need the care and nurture of which I also consider crucial to the cultivation of authentic self-esteem: autonomy.
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A. Meeting One's Own Need for Autonomy
I feel convinced that as a human being, one of my deepest needs endures as my need for autonomy. In my experience and judgment, when I frustrate this need, I diminish my ability to meet any of my other needs.
By my need for autonomy I mean in part that I most fully meet my needs when I acknowledge that only I can choose and remain responsible for my actions.
By my need for autonomy I also mean in part that I most fully meet my needs when I acknowledge that only I remain responsible for my own intentions, feelings, thoughts, expressions - and for fulfilling my own needs.
By my standards, by nature, none of us lives as "a means to the end" of fulfilling any other person's needs. Even if we happen sometimes not to consciously recognize or honor this need, by nature, each one of us remains autonomous. I live as an autonomous end in myself.
I remain responsible also for meeting my need for autonomy.
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B. Distinguishing Personally Relative and Authoritarian Value Judgment
By my understanding, every human being makes value judgments individually and with the aim of satisfying one's own, authentic, life-serving needs. Not everyone remains equally, consciously and focally aware at all times of this underlying aim, however, and some may never consciously and clearly identify it. Yet given that we live, I feel certain that this aim remains at the core of every person's motivation, even when only implicitly.
Given this, in my view, every value judgment involves personal relativity. Any value judgment presupposes the person who makes that judgment; reflects that individual's likes, dislikes and standards; and even if not consciously, obviously or explicitly, still at least implicitly involves that person's estimate of what strategies will most fully satisfy that person's authentic needs.
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I'm convinced that each of us remains the only person with direct awareness of our own, individual experiences, feelings and needs. In my judgment, then, no authoritarian source can dictate for others the value judgments by which those others can reliably guide their actions in a manner that will most fully serve their needs.
In my judgment, therefore, rather than obeying any authoritarian dictates or pronouncements, most reliably making life-serving value judgments involves each person's autonomously making one's own observations; attending to one's own feelings and needs; making one's own value judgments; and on this basis directing one's own course of action.
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In my judgment, moralistic value judgment in such forms as "right vs. wrong" and "good vs. bad" qualifies as at least implicitly authoritarian and therefore life-alienating. Indeed, I feel confident that on the basis of the implicit standard that "right" action consists of obedience to authority, such moralistic judgment incorporates its sense that value judgments inherently involve opposites. In this approach, conformity is claimed to matter, not the person's feelings and needs. In my judgment, attention to one's own, authentic feelings and needs qualifies as one of the gravest threats to authoritarianism.
By contrast, what I call life-serving value judgment relinquishes such implicit authoritarianism, recognizes the personal relativity of all value judgment and instead focuses attention on the person's feelings and needs.
Next I would like to consider another area that strikes me as essential in meeting one's need for autonomy: taking responsibility.
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By my standards, each person remains responsible for one's own feelings and needs. No one remains responsible for anyone else's feelings and needs. Others' feelings and needs remain their responsibility; my feelings and needs remain my responsibility.
For example, at one moment, if my daughter raises her voice, and I feel agitation because I need peace, I remain responsible for my agitation and for my need for peace. In another situation, upon hearing my daughter raise her voice, I may feel delight because I'm then needing play.
How I feel in each situation depends on my needs and on how fully they are then met. Depending on the status of my needs, another person's same action in different circumstances may stimulate quite different reactions in me.
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If I'm not getting my needs met in one interaction, in my effort to meet my needs, I can make a new request of the other or even of myself. If I find that the other is unwilling to fulfill my request, I can make a different request or go elsewhere - thus respecting the other's need for autonomy as well.
In this connection, strategies that I find don't optimally meet my needs include my attempts to blame, criticize, to induce guilt or shame, to "make another wrong" or to "make myself right," to threaten punishment or even to offer a reward. All these, by my standards, involve moralistic judgment; employ attempts at manipulation rather than appeals to another's authentically self-fulfilling motivation; and fail to understand that each one of us remains responsible for one's own feelings and needs. In my experience and judgment, all such approaches both cloud my awareness of authentic needs and typically (sometimes in the long run) stimulate defensiveness and counter-attack.
I find that I don't meet my needs for respect or autonomy when I appeal to others in these ways.
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Given my social nature (and that of all other human beings), I feel certain that my own and others' authentic and optimal self-fulfillment crucially involves interacting with others, including by satisfying my own need to contribute to others. Yet I'm equally convinced that each of us most effectively fulfills this need to contribute to others when one does so out of a willingness to self-responsibly meet one's own, individual needs - including for autonomy.
This leads me to another need which by my standards complements rather than contradicts my profound need for autonomy: my need for interdependence.
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| D. | Communicating Compassionately |
A. The Harmony of Authentic Human Needs
By my understanding, authentic, fundamental, universal needs of all human beings endure in natural harmony, not conflict. All human beings embody the same needs. In a fundamental sense, then, when conflict arises between human beings, I'm convinced that it arises artificially, at the level of strategies, not at the level of needs.
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B. Alteregoistic "Self-fullness"
I don't imagine that altruistic or egoistic strategies can most fully satisfy anyone's authentic needs.
By altruistic strategies here I mean self-sacrificial ones allegedly pursued for the sake of meeting others' needs.
By egoistic strategies here I mean 1) "selfish" sacrifice of others allegedly enacted for the sake of meeting one's own needs or 2) allegedly "enlightened" concern with one's own interests enacted without cultivating deep compassion for both oneself and others. In my judgment, for reasons that I will soon elaborate, such lack of compassion doesn't optimally meet one's own needs for awareness, self-fulfillment or contribution.
In my experience, whether it's altruistic or egoistic, sacrifice cannot optimally serve human needs because it always does violence to some such needs. Sacrifice to others stimulates at least resentment in the self; sacrifice of others does violence to one's own capacity to enjoy those others. In addition, sacrifice of others typically stimulates resentment in those others and often also stimulates violent counter-attack.
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By contrast, only with alteregoistic strategies can I help discover and put into practice the most deeply need-fulfilling and life-serving strategies. By "alteregoistic" strategies I mean "self-full" approaches. Such approaches seek to meet one's own needs while honoring and cultivating deep compassion. Such compassion includes both oneself and every other person and recognizes each person's equal aim and need to meet one's own needs.
In my experience, the most deeply and authentically life-serving strategies neither sacrifice others to self nor self to others. I most fully satisfy my own needs when I equally honor and value the fundamentally identical needs of all human beings - including my own.
Thus, by my standards, without sacrifice, authentic compassion self-fully creates the quality of connection most favorable for meeting the authentic needs both of self and other.
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By my standards, alteregoistic strategies involve the cultivation of deep compassion. The following qualify as key roots of why, by cultivating and acting with deep compassion, I much more deeply satisfy my needs, serve my life and enjoy deeper happiness.
1) Every living being enacts any of its strategies with the aim of meeting its needs, which means: with the aim of serving its life.
2) Even when enacting strategies that fall tragically short of optimally meeting their needs and serving their lives, human beings ultimately still take any actions that they do with the ultimate, underlying aim of meeting their authentic needs and serving their lives.
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3) Authentic, fundamental, universal human needs exist in harmony, not conflict. Different persons' authentic human needs remain the same. Fundamentally, conflict arises artificially at the level of strategies and human beings can resolve such conflict by focusing on their authentic needs and altering their strategies.
4) As a living, aware, human being, anyone who deeply appreciates that one can meet all one's involved needs more fully and at less cost by replacing an old strategy with a specific, different and new strategy will choose to do so. Most efficiently facilitating this process of change, learning and growth involves a) contemplating the old strategy; b) empathizing both with the needs that one met with that old strategy less fully than one would have liked and with the needs that one tried to meet with it; c) conceiving of a specific, different and new strategy or set of strategies with which to meet all the involved needs more fully and at less cost.
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5) As a social being, in interacting with others, by empathetically attending both to one's own and to others' feelings and needs, one can deepen one's connection both within oneself and with others and facilitate the imagining of new strategies that are more likely to meet everyone's needs. Such empathetic connection alteregoistically serves both the life of the self and the life of one's relationships with others.
I find that moralistically judging either my own or others' actions or characters by using such dichotomous divisions as "right vs. wrong," "good vs. bad" or "moral vs. immoral" - or by making up the story that someone "should have known better" - clouds my awareness of the foregoing roots. In particular, it obscures my awareness of the authentic reasons why any person chooses to act as he or she does. With such moralizing I don't meet my needs, serve my life or deepen my happiness anywhere near as much as I prefer - nor nearly as much as I know I can with deep compassion.
By cultivating and acting with deep compassion for self and others, with alteregoistic self-fullness I find that I much more fully meet my needs, including my needs for inner peace, self-responsibility, harmony, connection, relationship and communication.
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D. Communicating Compassionately
As one, central component of living in harmony with my values I want to communicate in a way that meets my need for compassion.
In doing so, I want to express myself honestly, listen with empathy and pay attention to 1) what's alive in me and in others and 2) what would make life more wonderful.
In expressing myself to others, I want to deepen my presence; observe in relation to what stimulus I feel as I do; deeply tune into what I'm feeling and needing; and express requests that clarify what I imagine would make life more wonderful. For example, "When you threw that pie in my face, I felt amusement because I needed play. I liked it so much that I'm now wondering: would you be willing now to throw another pie in my face?"
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In listening to others, I want to maximize my presence and deeply tune into what they express, focusing my attention on their feelings and needs. Sometimes I support this process with guesses and words. For example, "Are you feeling dismay because you're needing stability, and that need isn't getting met for you now?"
Such examples provide only a glimmer of this process, which in my judgment involves a rich spectrum of possible forms of expression, both verbal and nonverbal, and in which one pays attention to one's own and others' observations, feelings, needs and requests.
I've provided some additional examples of those forms of expression that do and don't meet my need for compassion in a segment I've added to my Current Activities page. I've called that segment, Before and After: Authoritarian vs. Life Honoring Expressions, and I've posted it here.
I've also posted related material in Communicating Across Differences: An Introductory Presentation for a General Audience.
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| Sources of Domination | ||
| D. | Social Change |
A. Distinguishing Domination and Partnership
By my standards, the more a society serves life, the more it honors all authentic, human needs including those for autonomy, interdependence and harmony. Such a life-serving society organizes itself to maximize the authentic, mutual consent of its participants (autonomously interdependent consent). Such authentic consent involves its participants' seeking to value, inform and benefit each other.
In my judgment, violent domination of some by others - including by using such strategies as patriarchal domination by men of women; treatment of women and children as property and/or as morally inferior; and/or treatment of individual members of specific races, ethnic groups, religious affiliations or sexual orientations as morally inferior - undercuts authentic social order (domination).
Only to the extent that regardless of such differences a society's intentions, culture and structures pluralistically and equally honor each person's autonomy and individuality do I remain confident that such a social order can thrive (partnership).
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In living in harmony with my values I seek to manifest partnership in my dealings with others by seeking not power over but power with them.
Social structures such as institutions manifest orientations that I evaluate according to how fully they value, embody and exhibit characteristics of domination or partnership. In the following table, I've outlined how I distinguish them, isolating distant points from along the continuum of strategic possibilities.
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|
DOMINATION
|
PARTNERSHIP
|
| assumption of innate, human evil | assumption that innately, human beings aim to meet their needs in the service of life |
| assumption of fundamental, natural conflict between human needs (irreconcilable discord) | assumption of fundamental, natural harmony of human needs (potential for conflict engagement, resolution and reconciliation) |
| assumption that some are superior to other inferiors (hierarchy) | assumption that all remain equal in their basic humanity (fundamental equality) |
| typically, subordination of female to male and of children to adults | in their basic humanity, female, male, child and adult persons regarded as equal |
| power over | power with |
| expectation that those labeled inferior must sacrifice to those labeled superior (whether in the form of self to other; other to self; individual to group; or group to individual) | expectation that participants can act self-fully without sacrifice, valuing the needs of each person both for autonomy and contribution while equally honoring all others' human needs |
| assumption of scarcity | assumption of abundance |
| authoritarianism | autonomy |
| authority dictates labels of right and wrong and discourages the expression of personal feelings and needs | participants value and encourage the expression of personal feelings and needs |
| moralistic value judgment in the dichotomous form of right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, normal vs. abnormal, appropriate vs. inappropriate, reasonable vs. unreasonable, rational vs. irrational, should vs. shouldn't, too much vs. too little | life-serving value judgment in terms of each person's feelings and needs; recognition of a continuum of value judgment rather than artificially introducing a sense of opposites; recognition that needs are satisfied and life is served to various degrees |
| authority demands obedience | participants interact voluntarily and with the awareness of meeting their own needs; authority remains equal rather than superior; others respect rather than obey authority |
| denial of choice and responsibility aimed at fostering unquestioned obedience (in terms of have to, can't, must, should, ought to, need to, got to, duty, obligation) | embrace of choice and responsibility; focus on the beauty of the authentic needs of oneself and others; actions willingly chosen with awareness of the life-serving reasons for taking them ("I choose to because I want to satisfy my need for...") |
| justice as punishing what authority dictates is bad (crushing of evil forces; retribution) and as rewarding what authority dictates is good (distribution); "just deserts" of punishment and reward based on the standard of obedient conformity | respect, safety and resolution rather than punishment and reward; focus on self-full, self-responsible action to meet needs rather than out of less conscious, obedient impulses; authentic needs rather than obedient conformity as the focus; expression of pain rather than punishment when needs aren't met; expression of joy and authentic gratitude rather than reward when needs are met |
| blame (psychological punishment) and praise (psychological reward) | appeal to others in terms of fulfilling their own needs only self-fully and willingly |
| manipulation and coercion | honesty, openness and willing cooperation |
| punitive use of force | protective use of force |
I hope this table helps clarify what I regard as the differences between domination and partnership.
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B. Distinguishing Punitive and Protective Uses of Force
In my judgment, no individual - and no group - can most deeply satisfy its authentic needs by using punitive force against other human beings (punitive force). Crucially and tragically, such violent action lacks appreciation for more than just the harmony of human needs. It also lacks appreciation for the human needs for autonomy and interdependence.
In some emergencies - when 1) pursued with the aim of securing safety 2) arising from a compassionate rather than a violent intention and 3) sustained only so long as that compassionate intention remains - I feel confident that the protective rather than the punitive use of force can authentically serve human needs and life (protective force).
As an example, a parent may compassionately use protective force to remove one's child from a busy street, engaging in a loving dialogue afterward with the child about safety.
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Even though I consider strategies of domination profoundly tragic and far removed from what can optimally meet human needs, I also remain convinced that even such strategies arise because those who enact them aim to meet their needs. Notwithstanding that I deeply dislike the strategies that they enact in that effort, I feel confident that in terms of their ultimate, underlying aims, such individuals act from the same, root aim that I do.
I don't believe that such strategies arise from any innate, human evil. I also don't believe that those who enact them "should've known better." By my standards, proceeding as if anyone "should've known better" endures as a moralistic judgment which far from optimally meets human needs. Proceeding as if anyone "should've known better" "makes up a story" as an explanation rather than deeply appreciating why human beings choose to act as they do.
Indeed, the very sort of thinking that generates the "should've known better" judgment also, I feel confident, leads to domination more generally.
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Given that by my standards, innate, human evil doesn't explain the prevalence even today of so much domination and violence in our world, what do I think does?
As I mentioned earlier, I'm convinced that 1) every living being enacts any of its strategies with the aim of meeting its needs, which means: with the aim of serving its life; 2) even when enacting strategies that fall tragically short of optimally meeting their needs and serving their own and others' lives, human beings ultimately still take any actions that they do with the ultimate, underlying aim of meeting their authentic needs and serving their lives; 3) authentic, fundamental, universal human needs exist in harmony, not conflict; 4) as a living being, any human being who clearly and deeply appreciates that one can meet all one's involved needs more fully and at less cost by replacing an old strategy with a new one will choose to do so.
I'm convinced that tragically, it's not that those who use domination strategies "should've known better." Given my understanding now both of the aim of living action generally and of the underlying aim of any human being, I'm quite confident of the following. Those who use domination strategies do so because in their context, they've not yet discovered how to meet their needs more fully and at less cost with more fulfilling strategies.
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For those who wonder what I think about doctrines of "free will," "determinism" and "compatibilism," to the extent that I understand some such doctrines' varieties, I remain less than satisfied. Indeed, I feel deeply suspicious that doctrines of "free will" and "determinism" arose as part of an effort to sustain various, authoritarian structures.
Regardless of such doctrines' origins and possible interpretations, however, within the vocabulary of my worldview, I speak instead of "responsible choice." I maintain that moment by moment, we each choose strategies that in that moment seem equally or more fulfilling of our needs than others we imagine in that moment. In this we face authentic options, remain fully responsible for our choices - and yet neither blame nor excuse-making will ever optimally serve our needs.
Returning to my earlier discussion of self-esteem, learning and growth, tragically, most of us learned only the self-blaming strategy for learning from actions that we later regretted. Only during the course of the last two years did I first learn the self-empathizing strategy that I outlined earlier.
Some never learn a self-empathizing strategy, though. Rather than endure the pain of psychologically beating themselves up, and encouraged by domination teachings that urge us to ignore our feelings, they learn instead to ignore or repress the feelings of guilt or remorse to which they otherwise could have paid close attention.
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In addition, few in today's world consistently maintain that the authentic needs of human beings endure in harmony. Combined with other, prevalent messages which urge that "the superior good" crush "the inferior evil," many who use domination strategies genuinely regard their approaches as natural, necessary or even inevitable.
Again, though, from what source does that domination mindset originate?
In responding to this question, the following, in profoundly abbreviated overview, most deeply satisfies my needs for explanation and intelligibility.
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Today's culture teaches us in innumerable ways to play the game of "who's right," a game in which it's assumed that "somebody's got to win and somebody's got to lose." In this game, though, tragically, everybody ends up losing in the long run, whether by experiencing resentment, anger or even violence.
This game involves moralistic judgment and domination, blame and criticism, and the assumption that some deserve punishment and reward.
I'm convinced that the origins of the "who's right" game lie in our complex history and even prehistory, about which I plan to write more in the near future.
For now, in my view, once prevalent social structures such as monarchies, from which our own forms of government descended, relied upon moralistic judgment and the whole matrix of domination principles as they strove to convince their "subjects" that they owed obedience to the ruler. Likewise, such regimes sought to convince their "subjects" that paying attention to one's own feelings and needs was of no value - insisting that "right" behavior consisted instead in conforming to the ruler's dictates.
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Even though I don't live in a monarchy, I'm convinced that this form of domination-style thinking still influences our minds and actions. I remained quite unaware of much of this influence until the last couple of years.
In this connection, though, I've found my everyday experience profoundly persuasive. I've noticed how frequently I observe others - or even myself - resort, out of habit, to playing the game of "who's right" instead of playing the game of "what would make life more wonderful." I've likewise observed how consistently the game of "who's right" ensures that everybody loses. For me, nearly everywhere I look, the presence of such strategies overwhelmingly supports the view that innumerable, cultural influences still teach us this tragic way of interacting.
What amazes me, however, isn't how much evidence the prevalence of such "who's right" games provides to support the view that humans are innately evil. What amazes me instead is how much evidence I see that in spite of so much moralistic teaching and conditioning, throughout our culture and world, there remains as little domination and violence - and as much authentic compassion - as there does!
Given this, I'm bolstered in my conviction that human beings at their core remain naturally compassionate.
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Given all that I've expressed up to this point, I want to approach my social change efforts in a spirit of compassion and partnership rather than with a spirit of moralistic judgment and domination. Rather than fighting against that which I dislike in social practices and structures - even those that I'm convinced use moralistic judgment - whenever possible, I want to appeal to others in terms of what I imagine those practices and structures instead could be.
In this I want to focus on finding ways to honor and meet everyone's authentic human needs - including those of the individuals who now happen to support the social practices and structures that I dislike. To the degree that my vision of a more life-serving society authentically identifies strategies that will more fully serve life, implementing such strategies will more fully meet the needs of those who now happen to support what I dislike.
Accordingly, rather than engaging in protests that resort to the moralistic denunciation of contemporary social practices, structures and those who support them, I want to communicate compassionately, both empathizing with the needs of those who support the practices and structures that I dislike while also honestly expressing my own, passionate vision of what I favor instead.
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No less importantly, given the limited perspective that anyone ever has, I care passionately about the following. In my social change efforts, I want to remain flexible in my thinking, meeting my need for open-mindedness by authentically empathizing even with those whose worldviews overwhelmingly differ from mine. I want to remain willing to alter my thinking and principles. When I learn of strategies that could meet every involved person's needs more fully and at less cost than others that I've previously favored, I want to adopt the strategies that I've newly learned. As in all areas, I want to remain strategically flexible rather than attached and to clearly distinguish between 1) my underlying needs and 2) my strategies for meeting them.
Also given the limited perspective that anyone ever has, I remain profoundly confident that no one has already discovered every aspect of every strategy that will create optimally life-serving social practices and structures. I'm betting that nearly every human being could learn from almost any other at least something relevant to such issues.
This last provides a key reason why, when I consider the opinions of those who engage in moralistic judgment, I feel dissatisfaction. I feel such dissatisfaction because with moralistic expressions of opinion my needs for truth, trust and reassurance haven't been met. By my standards, in such contexts, moralistic judgment qualifies as a form of ad hominem. Anything that I classify as ad hominem far from fully satisfies my need for truth. In my judgment, those who engage in moralistic judgment fail to fully empathize with, and thus fail to fully understand, the different points of view with which they've not yet empathized. In such situations I feel especially dissatisfied with the moralizing person's characterization of his or her "opponent's" position.
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Even in such cases, however, I don't want to casually dismiss the opinion of the one who uttered it moralistically. I still want to consider that opinion empathetically and to learn whatever I can from it. I may learn much and discover that despite our parting company on the issue of moralistic judgment, I still find value in or even agree with much that such a person offers.
In part for these reasons, I want to pursue and encourage honest and empathetic dialogue with others, including those others who maintain vastly different viewpoints. I want to do so in my effort to develop and refine my understanding of the social practices and structures that I want to see put into action - and to help refine and revitalize every aspect of my worldview.
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On the basis of my worldview and the spirit that underlies it, I feel profoundly hopeful that we human beings, both individually and in our interactions with each other, can make spectacular progress.
I'm grateful that you've read what I've shared here. I sincerely hope that you have found in my worldview some value for your own life. Regardless, I wish you well in your efforts to satisfy your authentic needs in the service of your life and happiness.
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In developing my worldview, I've drawn upon the whole of my life experience. Right now, I want to name only those influences that strike me as most obviously impacting what I've written in the foregoing sections of this summary. In addition, in my About Me area, here, I've also written about my influences. Notwithstanding my gratitude for these influences, of course, those from whom I've learned haven't always maintained the same opinions that I do.
I'm grateful for my childhood exposure to the Unitarian Universalist approach to religion, in response to which I've felt encouragement to engage in my own, personal search for truth and meaning unencumbered by conformity to any specific dogma. I'm also grateful for my adult participation within a Unitarian Universalist church, which continues to help meet many of my needs including not only for intellectual stimulation but also for acceptance, honest and empathetic communication, pluralism and community.
I'm grateful to J Milton McGinnis, who taught World History and History of (Western) Philosophy courses that I took while I attended high school. With these courses, J not only conveyed content but did so in a way that I found both captivating and relevant. These courses profoundly deepened my appreciation for the study of different times, cultures and worldviews. I'm also deeply grateful to J for our communication during the years since.
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I'm grateful to the rock band, Rush, for expressing what struck me as challenging, philosophical themes in their music in a form that appealed to me when it made quite a difference (starting even before I entered high school). In my interpretation, Rush also emphasized the importance - regardless of prevailing dogma - of engaging in one's own, personal search for truth and meaning and inspired me to investigate the work of Ayn Rand.
I'm grateful to Ayn Rand for expressing her unique philosophy of life, which she called Objectivism, and for writing novels that not only dramatized that philosophy but that gave me much inspiration starting during my early high school years. Notwithstanding my many differences with her (especially with what I regard as her dichotomies of truth and falsehood and moralistic judgment) I expect to always remain grateful for her having stimulated such excitement in me about developing a specifically philosophical, integrated and principled approach to thinking and living. Her fiction, including We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and her nonfiction, including The Virtue of Selfishness, influenced me, including with her projection of human possibilities and her consideration of the foundations of philosophy, ethics, value and art.
I'm grateful to Nathaniel Branden, once Ayn Rand's closest associate and student, not only for his efforts to clarify the meaning of her philosophy (as in his Basic Principles of Objectivism lecture series) but also for his own philosophical and psychological thinking. What he has described as his "biocentric" (life-centered) approach to psychology has deeply influenced the way that I think about living action, human nature and worldviews. Among many other of his works, I've found his books The Psychology of Self-Esteem and The Six Pillars of Self Esteem especially helpful. I've also appreciated his willingness to question various aspects of Objectivism, as in his article, The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement. Although my views about Objectivism, philosophy, psychology and self-esteem differ from his in various ways, I'm grateful for the leads his ideas gave me in these areas.
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Again despite many differences, I'm grateful to Leonard Peikoff, who remained associated with Ayn Rand until her death, for his efforts to clarify the meaning of her philosophy systematically, especially in his lecture series, The Philosophy of Objectivism, upon which he later based his book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
I'm grateful to David Kelley for showing a willingness to question what some call the orthodoxy of Objectivism and to forge an alternative path both by writing the first edition of The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism and by founding what's now known as The Atlas Society. Again, notwithstanding significant differences, I've learned much from the offerings and seminars of The Atlas Society.
During my teens and twenties, my friend Marsha Enright engaged in innumerable hours of dialogue with me about countless issues including philosophical ones and encouraged my participation in her New Intellectual Forum salon in Chicago. Others in that salon, including especially her husband, John Enright and also Stephen Lloyd, also provided much friendly support, active listening and stimulating dialogue. I'm grateful to them and to everyone else who then contributed to the New Intellectual Forum. I'm also grateful to Marsha for the following of her articles: If "Emotions Are Not Tools of Cognition," What Are They?: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Reason and Emotion;" The Habit of Hope; and Why Man Needs Approval.
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I'm grateful to Chris Matthew Sciabarra for his emphasis on dialectical method and human freedom, for his books Marx, Hayek and Utopia, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Total Freedom, and for his dialogue and friendship. During the course of my post-Randian, post-Objectivist evolution, Chris's work has profoundly assisted me in teasing out that in Ayn Rand's work with which I still resonate; has helped me to deepen my appreciation for dialectical method; and has helped me to move in new directions.
I'm grateful to D. Moskovitz for his talk, "Moralism in Objectivism." To a degree that I had never before experienced, D.'s talk helped me to appreciate the topics of moralism, acceptance and compassion. In addition, D. helped to stimulate my interest in Buddhism, mindfulness meditation (including the single most helpful introductory article on the subject that I've yet discovered, written by Joshua Zader), and the work of Eckhart Tolle, author of the books, The Power of Now and A New Earth.
I'm grateful to Eckhart Tolle for his books, The Power of Now and A New Earth, which have helped me to understand presence as a form of awareness; to deepen my own presence; and to enrich my appreciation for the perspective that only the present moment exists.
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I'm especially grateful to Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D. for his teaching and work, including in such books as Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and Life-Enriching Education. Not only in his teaching about Nonviolent Communication (NVC) but also in his specific conceptions of observations, feelings, needs, strategies, empathy, compassion and human nature, as well as in his understanding of domination, partnership and social change, plus much more, I've found his work invaluable. I consider no other teaching more significant in its impact on my life and worldview.
Even so, even though Marshall Rosenberg's influence figures prominently in my teaching of the process of Communicating Compassionately, I'm not a certified trainer of NVC and I'm not affiliated with Marshall Rosenberg or his nonprofit organization, the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC). So I wouldn't recommend assuming that Marshall Rosenberg would agree with any of what I've posted on this page.
While watching an intermediate-level training DVD in the series, Making Life Wonderful, I understood that Marshall Rosenberg recommended reading a book as an aid to learning why Nonviolent Communication asks that we learn to relinquish the concept of "deserving" either reward or punishment. Specifically, Rosenberg recommended the 1973 book Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy by then-Princeton professor of philosophy Walter Kaufmann.
I'm grateful to Walter Kaufmann for that book. In addition to its consideration of historical and philosophical conceptions of justice, reward and punishment, I've benefited from its discussion of "decidophobia" (the fear of making fateful decisions); the lingering - and in my opinion malignant - residue in our culture (and even in Objectivism) of one, decidophobic strategy in particular (Manichaeism); and the book's advocacy of what Kaufmann refers to as "the canon," which he urges us to apply in the process of making decisions.
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I'm grateful to Walter Wink for his book The Powers That Be (excerpted here) and to Riane Eisler for her book, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future which, notwithstanding our differences, have stimulated me to consider fresh interpretations of prehistory, history, the influence of myth on culture, the nature of domination and partnership and the projection of possible futures.
I'm grateful to my life partner and wife, Cherita, for our dialogues and for her empathy when we've talked at length about my worldview.
I'm grateful to our daughter, Aliana, for contributing one of my top sources of inspiration and for teaching me in ways that nobody else could.
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I'm grateful to Julie Hilsher and to my friends Pam Missimer and Fran Hill for their dialogues with me about my worldview at various stages of its evolution.
Finally, I'm grateful to my parents: first, to my late mother, Barb Larson, for listening to and discussing with me my worldview for countless hours; and to my father, Len Larson, for providing much intellectual stimulation and encouragement when I was a child.
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Greetings!
Welcome to my Living Action website. I'm delighted that during your voyages through cyberspace you've chosen to visit my virtual planet.
I hope that you will welcome my introducing myself to you. My name is Vid Axel.