The Individual as Triadic Philosopher
The earliest iteration of Triadic Philosophy began with the individual. The individual is the essential element whether you consider history, power, universality, ethics or anything else that is philosophical.
The first thing to consider is that each of us is the center of something. We are in ourselves actors, doers, thinkers, deciders.
We are the locus of emotions,
aspirations,
memory
and
the spaces we occupy.
As long as we live, we can say, “I am I.”
The second thing to consider is that an “I” is not an “I” without another.
We come from
and
we go to.
We are social.
The world functions only because there are two and more.
The trick for those who would be Triadic Philosophers is to see what is individual and what is social.
For the most part, what is individual is what is chosen,
willed,
determined by each of us.
I do not decide to come to New York. She did. I did not decide to live downtown. She did. She did not want to walk into the wrong place but she did. He did not want a relationship but when he saw her, that changed.
Just at the point that the other is real, life becomes social and all of the values that are implicitly social kick in. We are finally meant to be a functioning community aimed at fusing truth and beauty and becoming loving and free. To takes two — and then billions.
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Much of our lives are a mystery to us, precisely because of the vagaries of a multiplicity of freedoms that appear to have more autonomy and chance than we might imagine.
We could examine the actions of termites and determine that they appear to do one thing with exceptional flair. They build. They do not move to New York.
We do things out of who we happen to be.
But who we happen to be can change in a nanosecond.
We are determined as much by chance as by our choices.
The Triadic Philosopher is one who has traversed the ground that Adam and Eve lived on and decided to look behind the story of how the world began.
On looking, the Triadic Philosopher observes that the world is a spectrum, that society is a spectrum, that she/he is a spectrum.
And it looks a bit like this:
Life is not these things exactly but these things are a snapshot of options for the one who considers expression and action with a bit of consciousness.
Such a person is aware of the existence within of consciousness, of a higher self.
Such a person is aware that life is contingent, that a certain amount of care is needed to avoid situations which seem to bode harm.
Going down the chart one can see that the way to goodness begins with mindfulness and critical thinking and that the way to harm (to self and others) is signaled by selfishness and mindlessness.
Whim and spontaneity are wonderful qualities when they emerge in the context of love and freedom. They are not so wonderful when they are manifested during a time of intolerance and bullying.
The Triadic Philosopher is never far from the need to consider things, whether in the course of daily back and forth or in a more intentional environment, say walking alone or engaging in Triadic Meditation.
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You’ll note on the chart the presence of democracy. It is our individuality that makes democracy the only form of governance that can give us the freedom we need to function. It is our social nature that demands democracy as the only fair and decent way to deal with our fallible tendencies toward harmfulness.
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There is a massively important reason why being a Triadic Philosopher makes not merely sense, but is necessary even to those who know nothing suggested on this page.
The individual is the locus of what religionists call the holy spirit but which the Triadic Philosopher sees primarily as the freedom to choose and, in extremis, the freedom to say no. This freedom is the signature of humanity. It is the crown of the individual.
The individual may be a brute as Peirce suggests but the individual is the only entity that can light up the world with a free choice that lands somewhere on the up side of the chart above. And the individual cannot make that choice without being aware of the consequences of not making it.
The Triadic Philosopher smiles at facile condemnations of individualism as the root of all evil. She knows that individualism is the root of the only freedom that exists that can vanquish harm and move toward freedom and love.
