My picture of humans
MY PICTURE OF HUMANS
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ABILITIES AND CHARACTER:
Learning from experience
What one can do and what one doesn't affect a lot how easy it is to do things
and so affect also what one chooses to do in each situation:
what is easy, feels nice and/or is profitable for the individual.
What one knows and can notice and one's skills, one's picture of the world
affect all what routes one chooses to one's goals:
happiness and following the basic instincts of human beings,
especially social instincts: the will to belong to groups in a natural way
and to live a happy life.
And especially these things affect the choise of minor tool like goals.
The environment affects a lot what one does and can do
- especially the social environment but also other factors.
Human being is a collective animal.
What one learns depends on one's environment:
the parents and what one automatically learns from them
and how they automatically affect the lives of the people around them
by their pictures of the world, by the values that they follow in practise
and by what one automatuically learns frm them if one lives with them:
intellectuals or ordinary farmers?
And so on.
In my picture of humans is an important
the Song of the Family (but nothing else) in Steinbeck's novel Pearl.
HUMAN BEINGS ACT ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN TRUE MOTIVATION
Directions:
motivational factors, instincts, needs
A map:
one's picture of the world
(= the practical understanding
- the theory learned from books being just notes
that one uses in special occasions
without them being part of one's practical understanding
except in a form of a general view
that one has formed oneself
and those parts that one has learned
to notice in the practical experience in everyday living)
Easy routes:
one's skills,
strenghts,
habits
Different personalities can be understood this way.
(In the above light:
history of life (strenghts),
one's situation in life (strategies),
power in use compared to obstacles,
routes that one chooses).
Different people run to different situations in life,
in a same kind of environment they notice different sides
and get to contact with different sides of the reality,
of the social environment,
depending on what they themselves are like,
what values they follow,
what kind of social and other skills
and character they have
etc.
Form a landscape:
how urgent is each need,
how big are the obstacles which hinder one from achieving it
compared to one's abilities and strenghts,
what is the person's history of life in this respect
-> what does the situation feel like,
appear to be,
how much strenght is there left for other purposes,...
AN ANALOG TO PLANTS' GROWTH
Plants grow toward light, not toward shadow. An animal too aims at benefical environment. Based on its own ability to notice things, it chooses benefical ways instead of unbenefical ones. This is a clear analog to the easy example of plants growing toward light: the plants offer a good sensed model for thinking.
A more detailed description about the way that a tree grows: partly a fixed old structure: how the tree has earlier grown toward light; partly flexible: how the tree can now grow toward light.
Trees are living beings. From the looks of a tree one can see its history of life and its situation now - analogiously to the history of life of a human being. In a forest one can see many many different kinds of trees at once. So one learns by the analogy to think about groups of people and their situations of life and their histories.
Links
The looks of men
Social things are complex systems
My Favorite Things About Angelfire
Email: KaisaHanneleTervola@webinfo.fi
