“A human being who lives in ignorance will never be free, because he lives in a world that is alien to him, outside him and beyond his reach. He never attempts to make any part of that world his own. From the first spark of curiosity and desire to know to the highest philosophical efforts, the search for knowledge is an attempt to overcome this lack of freedom and to create a world that belongs to us and is the product of our own thought.” — Hegel

Registration Announcement
“Philosophy for Life” Seminar Series
Presented by Aydin Areta

Philosophy for Life is a series of webinars/seminars to be held monthly from March 2020 (13 March / 23 Esfand), both in person in Sydney and online for friends who do not live in Sydney or elsewhere in Australia. Sessions will take place on the second Friday of each month from 7:00 to 10:00 pm Sydney time.

To participate in person or online, please complete and submit the registration form at the link below. Participation is free, and the only prerequisite is a desire to know more.

Registration:
https://forms.gle/JLtwDPznzCcyULDYA

The principal aim of these seminars is to examine concepts that connect our individual lives to the larger society to which we understand ourselves to belong—concepts that shape the structure of our thinking and affect our everyday decisions.

Freedom, justice, individuality, ethics, power and faith are among the concepts that have occupied some of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy for centuries, and they remain living and contested within our own beliefs.

It does not matter whether we know philosophy, whether we are familiar with the history of human thought, or whether we have ever studied these concepts seriously. Regardless of our background and knowledge, all of us hold beliefs about them that influence how we live and who we become. The purpose of this course is to become more familiar with the history of human thought, especially the history of philosophical reflection on these ideas, and to give ourselves the opportunity to look again at our own beliefs.

Thought strives to become action, and the word strives to become embodied in the external world. In this way a human being shapes the world through thought. The world is nothing other than the external manifestation of thought. This statement attributed to the nineteenth-century German writer and thinker Heinrich Heine expresses the idea that everything we learn shapes a new thought within us; every new thought becomes crystallised in our decisions; and every decision leads us towards a different future. In this sense everything we learn contains seeds of change, both for ourselves and for the world.

My aim is to present these seminars genealogically, because great concepts such as freedom and justice cannot simply be defined. Human understanding of them has changed with the history of the development of human consciousness and will continue to change. We can therefore approach such concepts through genealogy: by examining the history of their changing meanings and thinking more deeply about their different dimensions.

As Michel Foucault puts it in the formulation presented here, genealogy deciphers our grey and obscure past. The genealogist knows that he is only an interpreter of the history of thought; his interpretation remains uncertain and always open to review and revision, and he keeps in mind that he himself is a product of the history and social conditions in which he lives.

As the first step in this seminar series—which may extend across many sessions—I intend to examine “A Genealogy of the Idea of Freedom.” Nearly two years ago I had the opportunity to present a four-hour seminar in Sydney under the same title, but afterwards there was no opportunity to revisit the concepts raised there in more regular and careful sessions. I hope that the Philosophy for Life seminars will make this possible.

Hegel believed that world history is nothing other than the development of consciousness of the idea of freedom. This powerful belief also brings the history of philosophy into relation with the expansion of our understanding of freedom. For this reason we begin Philosophy for Life with freedom, because philosophy itself, at its beginning and end, is nothing other than liberation from not-knowing.

With thanks and respect,
Aydin Areta