Three Ways of Being Human

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Explanatory Note

This book needs some explanation. I wrote it seven years ago, and although I was trying at the time to be as clear as possible, it reads to me now as lacking a theoretical context.

In general, it brings together several strands of thought. My main philosophical project was finding a way to resolve the tensions between individuals and communities, between the self and society. Accordingly (while studying educational administration) I developed a way of looking at the world that divided things into three aspects: "universal", "personal", and "communal."

I found that this basic model was infinitely variable, and could be applied to many such trios, such as "objective, subjective, and socially-constructed," and so forth. Most importantly, I found that my "new" system was a close match for the traditional Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit representing universal, personal and communal aspects of God, respectively.

Another important trio that matched this model was the religious, the individualist and the social attitude towards life. By examining that trio, I was able to formulate a philosophy combining Christianity (as the religion), Existentialism (as the point of view), and Humanism (as the social project). In that way, although never mentioned explicitly, Christian Existential Humanism became the underlying theme of the book.

The other major influences on the book were Taoism and chaos theory. In particular, I was interested in the Taoist idea of Yin and Yang. From the Taoist point of view, any object or phenomenon can be viewed as a combination of Yang, the active force, and Yin, the passive force. Aspects of Yang are hotness, activity, passion, brightness and so forth, while aspects of Yin include coolness, passivity, calmness, darkness, and so on. Instead of one force being viewed as good and the other as evil, as in Western (Zoroastrian-influenced) thought, the two forces are instead viewed as both good when balanced. The only "evil" in a Taoist world is the evil when one force overdominates the other.

The other interesting thing about Yin and Yang is that the basic concept can be applied again and again to give additional insights into a phenomenon (in a series of binary decompositions). This idea is explored explicitly in the "I Ching" but is also present throughout Taoist thought. Thus, in human society, men are Yang, and women are Yin, and there should be a balance between them. But each person also has Yang or masculine traits and Yin or feminine traits, and these also need to be balanced. In addition, certain internal organs are Yang, and others are Yin, but even a Yang organ has Yin aspects and so forth. One can continue to subdivide Yin and Yang into ever-increasing levels of subtlety and depth.

I was also struck how closely this subdivision of Yin and Yang matched up the recursive, self-similar nested structure of fractals. In particular, I was reminded of a fractal called the "gasket," which was a triangle made from three smaller triangles, where each smaller triangle was made of three smaller triangles, and so on in diminishing levels to infinity. Of course, triangles are three-sided, and Yin and Yang is only two sided. In this way the gasket fractal was less like Yin and Yang, and more like my own three-aspect look at the world.

By placing these powerful ideas together, I came up with a methodology of analyzing objects and phenomena in terms of universal, individual and shared aspects. By applying the idea of fractal structure, I could reach levels of increased subtlety and depth. In other words, I could not only look at the three larger aspects, but also nine smaller aspects: the universal of the universal, the universal of the individual, the universal of the shared; the individual of the universal, the individual of the individual, the individual of the shared; the shared of the universal, the shared of the individual, the shared of the shared. As with the Yin and Yang, the process could be continued to any desired level of depth. And, as also was true of the Yin and Yang, it seemed as though the best possible situation was one of balance, where no one aspect or sub-aspect dominated the others.

This, in brief, is the theoretical underpinning of "Three Ways of Being Human." It is a look at the universe as a whole, with a focus on human society, through an examination of the three aspects as reiterated to two levels of depth, yielding nine subjects divided into three chapters, "The Individual", "Society" and "Religion."

Additionally, the book is fictionalized as the philosophy of a society called the "Watatu" (from the Swahili word for "three") and as expressed in dialogue with a character named "Diotima" (from Plato's "Symposium"). It is further augmented with a three-aspect discussion of some other issues, including schooling, art, and technology (and interspersed liberally with my other major philosophical opinions of the time).

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"Three Ways"
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