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Life categories

Philosophy can not only be limited to rationality.

According to Wikipedia in English, Life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes. This means life is mainly defined by something biological which itself also has life as main characteristic. The same refers to the notions of Nature and culture. They

all can only be defined by recursion meaning stepwise and never complete approximations at something unknown. They necessarily include something irrational beyond the borderlines of our knowledge.

This would support the idea that philosophy can not only be limited to rationality. What has to be added, can make out a longer list. To simplify the thereby arising philosophy of development we call the sum of all those additional elements of the list “pragmatism” mainly referring to public life (especially social life) and private life (especially own experience).

Both terms can be used for any place and at any time This should be an advantage as it has been pointed out that space and time can not be assumed to generally exist in the same way. Furthermore to each of our main body parts in everyday language an own kind of life can be attributed (actually claimed to be formed by dual pairs):

head               perceiving and deciding

upper body   heart beat and feelings

abdomen       sexuality and power

extremities    activities and moving around.

All these eight aspects formed by the four pairs are considered to represent life. The modern Middle Way is expected to lead between them. All of them, not only the head, include own kinds of cognition and processing, thus not only by eyes and ears.or by the brain.

The same refers to all kinds of interaction between us and our respective life spheres. Nowadays in the human realm these interactions are mainly dominated by languages of all kinds (e.g. natural ones in different areas or artificial ones like operating or programming systems for computers). A vast, but never complete oversight of interactions and spheres which are considered to be public is just given by the modern internet. The filter for mentioning some of them on ARS UNA is personal judgement or judgment (the writing already differs between UK and US) of their relevance to philosophy of development and to a modern Middle Way. Own life experiences concerning languages and their spheres according to such own subjective appreciation could, however, have an impact on other people too, but only, if they are willing to sacrifice a little bit of their precious time.

© Hans J. Unsoeld, Berlin 2018. All rights reserved.

Updated Febr.18, 2018 

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