The character of life is fascinating: It is frustrating and fulfilling; trivial and tragic by turns; often routine, sometimes roisterous; a steady diet of picayune days, from time to time caught up in vast national and global events, as humanly powerful as the great earthquakes and the swirling weather patterns that sweep across our blue planet as it orbits its star.
To survive, to make the most of our days, to make sense of life, and to change it for the better are primary human occupations, for which, among other tools, we need conceptual tools. in Homer's classic metaphors, human life is a journey (the Odyssey) and a battle (the Iliad), for both of which a map is useful. But the map room on a ship is at one remove from the boiler room, and the map room at army headquarters is at one remove from the front line. Maps point, but the map readers must generate the movement.
This statement needs to lie beside the daily newspaper. The newspaper reports the action; the concept map displays the lie of the philosophical land and helps us to place that action in a wider vision of significance. Philosophy editorializes experience.
To use an extended metaphor, we may say that for every territory of experience there is a Crossroads of choice, a Street of action, a Market Place of public discourse, and a Balcony of reflection. Each position has pros and cons. None can take the place of any other and each has a necessary function to fulfill.
We present this statement as a Balcony view, a concept map of Ethical Culture. In Ethical Culture we have given a primacy to deed over creed, but we have always been a philosophically minded people, and from time to time we make the ascent to the Balcony to formulate and explicate where we have come from, where we stand on the intellectual map of our time, and what our direction may be.
©1997-2007 Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture
this page last revision: 4/23/07