In Defense of Modernity
I have noticed that there seems to be quite a few philosophers who have a tendency of spending a lot of time criticizing modernity. These criticisms are quite unusual as it is quite contrary to the opinions of most non-philosophers who mostly think that modernity is clearly better than living in the past. After thinking about this issue for some time, I must say that I think the intuitions of the non-philosophers seems to be more plausible to me. I think we don’t give modernity nearly enough credit and that it is only appropriate to criticize modernity if it can be pretty decisively shown that living in modernity is worse than living in the past. I suppose one might respond that the critics of modernity are just trying to point out that there are problems with modernity that we are not taking seriously enough as a society and that criticizing modernity isn’t necessarily about saying that modernity is worse than the past. But, I don’t see why pointing out problems caused by something requires us to criticize that thing in any significant way. For example, one can talk about the problems that come with being married or problems that come with having children without criticizing marriage or having children. Given this, it seems to me that it’s only appropriate to speak harsh words about modernity if the grass was really greener in the past. I find it more plausible to think that modernity was far superior to living in the past despite the alleged problems that may come with it.
I think there is an asymmetry between the upsides and the alleged downsides of modernity. One such asymmetry involves my need to put the word “alleged” only beside the downsides of modernity in the previous sentence. This is because one can reasonably be skeptical about there being those downsides that the critics of modernity like to speak of. In contrast, even those critics of modernity themselves would likely acknowledge that there are obvious upsides that come with living in modernity. After all, what madman would say that there’s absolutely nothing good about having access to modern medicine and the Internet and clean drinking water. The advantages of modernity need little explanation and everyone can understand what makes modernity appealing to many. In contrast, the claims that modernity is bad because it leads to a crisis of meaning or a crisis of loneliness or some sort of a spiritual decay seems to face some plausible challenges.
One debunking explanation that could be presented for these claims is to argue that people in the past also faced these allegedly modern problems but they didn’t spend much time complaining about these problems because they were too busy dealing with the problems of the past. If you’re struggling to survive or to achieve a reasonable level of comfort then it could be argued that you wouldn’t even have much time to think about deep existential matters and your lack of perceived meaning in life and your spiritual decay would just become an afterthought. I think it might even makes sense to say that people in the past often just derived meaning and a sense of purpose by the constant need to have their physiological needs met and having to keep themselves safe from the constant threat of harm. It is only the privileged modern man that cannot just be satisfied with eating, drinking, and sleeping. It kinda just seems to me that the so-called crisis of meaning that the critics of modernity are concerned about is basically what one might call a “first world problem”. Of course, “first world problems” can cause some serious distress to modern people and may even cause them to commit suicide. But, this wouldn’t entail that modern people are justified to be so upset about these problems or that these problems are just as big as the problems that existed in the past. On a final note, it’s also worth noting that the problems of past seemed to be problems for everyone. There’s no one in the past that didn’t have some problems that could have been alleviated by modern technology. In contrast, it seems like there are plenty of people like me that just don’t have any problem with modernity whatsoever. Given this, I tend to think that maybe we should give modernity more credit and maybe we should be more modest in our criticism of modern life.
I think there is an asymmetry between the upsides and the alleged downsides of modernity. One such asymmetry involves my need to put the word “alleged” only beside the downsides of modernity in the previous sentence. This is because one can reasonably be skeptical about there being those downsides that the critics of modernity like to speak of. In contrast, even those critics of modernity themselves would likely acknowledge that there are obvious upsides that come with living in modernity. After all, what madman would say that there’s absolutely nothing good about having access to modern medicine and the Internet and clean drinking water. The advantages of modernity need little explanation and everyone can understand what makes modernity appealing to many. In contrast, the claims that modernity is bad because it leads to a crisis of meaning or a crisis of loneliness or some sort of a spiritual decay seems to face some plausible challenges.
One debunking explanation that could be presented for these claims is to argue that people in the past also faced these allegedly modern problems but they didn’t spend much time complaining about these problems because they were too busy dealing with the problems of the past. If you’re struggling to survive or to achieve a reasonable level of comfort then it could be argued that you wouldn’t even have much time to think about deep existential matters and your lack of perceived meaning in life and your spiritual decay would just become an afterthought. I think it might even makes sense to say that people in the past often just derived meaning and a sense of purpose by the constant need to have their physiological needs met and having to keep themselves safe from the constant threat of harm. It is only the privileged modern man that cannot just be satisfied with eating, drinking, and sleeping. It kinda just seems to me that the so-called crisis of meaning that the critics of modernity are concerned about is basically what one might call a “first world problem”. Of course, “first world problems” can cause some serious distress to modern people and may even cause them to commit suicide. But, this wouldn’t entail that modern people are justified to be so upset about these problems or that these problems are just as big as the problems that existed in the past. On a final note, it’s also worth noting that the problems of past seemed to be problems for everyone. There’s no one in the past that didn’t have some problems that could have been alleviated by modern technology. In contrast, it seems like there are plenty of people like me that just don’t have any problem with modernity whatsoever. Given this, I tend to think that maybe we should give modernity more credit and maybe we should be more modest in our criticism of modern life.
Comments (87)
However, unlike in the past, today we have much significant problems - existential threas such and mass specie extinction, climate change, etc. - of an order of significance not even dreamed of by our ancestors.
As with most things there are pros and cons. But the way I see it all the cons are destroying the biosphere, making the pros a mute point in the long run.
I think existential threats actually constitute the best argument to be given against modernity as this is a pretty uncontroversial downside with modernity. I’m kinda surprised that most critics of modernity don’t seem to place that much emphasis on it. I would say that I’m ultimately not convinced that these existential threats make modernity worse because I don’t think it’s obvious that the average human life contains more benefits than harms. Given this, it’s not clear to me how much we should really fear the possibility of extinction. On the other hand, having to live without running water, Internet, or electricity would cause people to suffer more rather than simply killing them which I think makes the absence of those things seem bad to me in a more obvious way than the badness of existential threats. Though, my views on this are probably pretty unpopular and the critic of modernity could likely just get away with appealing to the intuitions of most people that extinction is like the worst thing that could ever happen.
Well, I would say that plenty of modern humans living today might look back at horror at what you have tolerated as well. But, I’m not sure if dissatisfaction is really the best judge of one’s welfare. It may be argued that suffering that one feels is acceptable and justified is still something really bad and that we have plenty of reason to avoid it. In contrast, there may be some forms of suffering that make someone contemplate suicide that are not actually all that bad. For example, if someone thinks his life is not worth living because they have to put up with doing laundry, then does it make sense to think that this person’s suffering is more significant than that of a person who cheerfully undergoes a very painful surgery?
How long do you think that the present period is?
I'd be willing to say that the last 100 years, give or take 15 minutes, is the modern age.
WWI (started in 1914) was a watershed event which destroyed a lot of 19th century society and culture. It was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that a lot of the scientific and technological discoveries were made that characterize our time.
I think of modernity not as an age or a period in history but as exponential progress in some ways and exponential decay in others as humanity moves forward. Which leads to rapid growth in the gap between what is good and bad with the world. A prime positive example is technological progress, but so is the alarming ballooning overpopulation and ensuing loss of planetary resources. Perhaps Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four didn't actually happen in 1984 but it's coming.
Maybe one way to think about it is the way the dynamics of families are brought into question or practically challenged by other dynamics. Stated that way, the scope includes the anthropological view of social structures but also permits claims like those made by Ortega y Gasset that the appearance of the "State" is the result of restless young men.
I could go into many other examples but my observation is that the "modern" is an inevitable result of experiences more than an invention or diversion that distracted us from some stable form of life that we gave up for something else.
Someone on here introduced me to the concept of the hedonic treadmill, something I believe may be of relevance to your claim.
Take my favorite PC game. I really like it. When I first played it I couldn't stop. Then after I beat it, started a new game, several times over.. I kinda just needed a break lol. It didn't "give" what it did when I first got it and everything was new.
The idea(s) of something being new, unfamiliar, and exciting I believe are all related. Remember your first car? I remember mine. It was like a chariot from the gods. Now it's just what I use to go to work or pick up beer. Same idea. :grin:
So, would this mean that it’s possible for there to be a society that has technologies like our modern society without it actually being like our modern society?
In regards to overpopulation, it’s worth noting that birth rates are actually decreasing quite a bit in the world due to a greater widespread use of contraceptives and the greater education of women in the modern world. Of course, contraception is also getting more reliable which likely is going to lead to a population decline at some point in the near future. As far as the loss of planetary resources, it’s worth noting that modern technology will likely allow us to extract resources from places where we couldn’t extract them before like Antarctica and even asteroids in space. In addition, we have come a long way in developing technologies that can utilize renewable resources and so I would wager that the future will probably be even cozier and more comfortable than the times that we are currently living in.
I think so. There is a materialism amongst communitarians such as Ivan Illiich who considered our tools as limiting what could be made of them. That point of view is helpful in comparing universal agendas against more local ones. But the local thing has often showed itself to be a praxis of tyranny.
I would like to dispense with nostalgia from all sides.
I think one can acknowledge the reality of the hedonic treadmill and still argue that modern technology and material goods increase the welfare of humans. At the very least, the continuous improvement of technology will lead to more pre-adaptational periods of great happiness. For example, you might remember the first time you played a PC game. It was probably the late 90s or maybe the early 2000s. You were probably pretty excited even though the graphics and features of the game were pretty inferior compared to modern games. This created a period of great joy and happiness which improved your own welfare. Then, you got tired of the game and your level happiness returns back to normal until a new and better game comes out which might raise your level of happiness again. Even though this raise in your level of happiness isn’t permanent, it doesn’t follow that temporary raise in happiness that those games provided had no significant impact on your level of welfare. I think that the way that you can hack the hedonic treadmill is by making slight improvements in your material wealth that will give you a continuous boost in happiness and maybe it’s also helpful to practice modest abstinence from activities that give you pleasure so that they can give you more pleasure as you start to miss those activities more.
Just so you know, I'm on the PC, listening to a few songs on YouTube, and just got back from playing a console system. So. But. For the pure point of debate, it [modern technology] is often likened to the modern day Pandora's Box. And for reasons that can be argued quite well. As you acknowledged, the modern day reality of total nuclear winter is nothing other than nightmarish, if given sufficient focus. And why shouldn't it be. That said, few know of the hardships and realities of life before technology. If a man broke his legs or arms in an accident, he was often considered "good as dead" .. literally. Things were done back then that now thankfully don't have to be due to modern science, medicine, and surgery. So it's a valid debate with both sides having very powerful arguments toward one another.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I was thinking the same thing, the idea of "circumventing" the idea. That's why you don't ever need to get too comfortable, and when you do, consider taking say a weekend outing in the woods with the pledge that any modern technologies you bring with are to be used solely in case of an emergency only. It can do wonders, essentially what your saying. A "reset" of one's complacency and inevitable lack of appreciation due to abundance of ease and convenience.
Well, I thought about a potential consideration that could be given regarding the existential threat that modernity poses. Some people might think that the risk of extinction cause by technology is smaller than the risk of natural extinction without having technology to prevent that extinction. It requires a rather optimistic view of how humans will use future technology or it requires a rather pessimistic view about the possibility of extinction through natural causes that are unrelated to human stupidity. One can think about how an asteroid or a super volcano would eventually kill off the human race if advanced technology never comes about to prevent that. It can then be argued that if technology keeps progressing that it would actually provide a way for humans to prevent asteroids or super volcanoes from being an existential threat with the use of futuristic technology. This question really comes down to how much one believes that technological causes of extinction are more probable than natural causes of extinction. Nonetheless, I personally don’t find it very plausible that natural disasters are more likely to make us extinct than human made disasters as I think it’s pretty easy for someone to cause some sort of accident with technology that will just kill a bunch of people. Yet, it’s still worth admiring the potential that technology has to keep everyone safe from something like an asteroid.
Quoting Outlander
Well, that’s one way to do it. Some things that I do to reset myself is eating mostly a bland and healthy diet. This has made appreciate food that actually tastes good a lot more and I can now experience a lot of pleasure from just eating some yogurt or a turkey sandwich with nothing but turkey and wheat bread. In the past, I almost never experienced any pleasure from eating food because I just ate what I wanted to and eating just got boring. Another thing that I found helpful is working long hours. It really made me good at being able to entertain myself with just my thoughts and I now appreciate my leisure time so much more.
Why is the only alternative to modernity "living in the past". What about an alternative modernity?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It's literally the definition of criticising.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Really. What is more severe than suicide then?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
You're happy with it so the rest of us should be? What a bizarre argument.
What is alternative modernity exactly?
Quoting Isaac
In the sentence that you have responded to, I said “I don’t see why pointing out problems caused by something requires us to criticize that thing in any significant way. The key phrase here is “any significant way”. I was referring to the kind of severe criticisms of modernity that I often hear from philosophers who seem to think that things were better in the past.
Quoting Isaac
I would say that having someone scream in agony for many years and not be able to commit suicide is more severe than suicide. I think having time, energy, and resources to commit suicide is actually a privilege in many ways. People in past often didn’t have adequate means to commit suicide and they often were too busy trying to survive and find comfort to even seriously contemplate suicide.
Quoting Isaac
My argument is that there’s no one who would be completely happy to live in the past but there are some people like me who are perfectly happy with modernity. This is an asymmetry that I think gives us some good reasons to think that maybe modernity is better than living in the past.
Wtf?
Could be. In societies where culture, state, religion, or obligation were placed higher than personal needs, execution of the physically or socially unfit and suicide were acceptable and regularly practiced, I suppose on the grounds of achieving higher good or to end the pain..
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinandrews/2017/06/26/executions-and-suicides-the-terrifying-tale-of-two-deadly-japanese-volcanoes/?sh=7e2fa3cd1a46
Though I would think that for a philosophical hedonist considering all options, it might follow more to avoid the greater evils and pains first before seeking comparatively more transient pleasures.
Yes, I would say that many hedonists like myself tend to think that minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure. This sort of view does tend to encourage a less negative or more positive view on suicide since suicide might be viewed as a strategy for minimizing your own suffering. Though, it’s probably more popular among hedonists who are also egoists like myself rather than say utilitarian hedonists. This is because a utilitarian hedonist might argue that suicide causes too much suffering to others even if it alleviates your suffering. I think the combination of egoism and hedonism is more likely to produce a more positive attitude towards suicide than the belief that suffering is more significant than pleasure as even a pleasure seeking egoistic hedonist would probably have a hard time justifying continuing a life of sickness and disability which probably wouldn’t produce much pleasure either.
So then I suppose that you would likely favor presentism and materialism that simplifies judgment closer to immediate wants and sensibilities. That would be an ego centered psychological approach but also subjectivist in terms of reality, in other words that there is only one reality and it is mine, and when I die the world comes to an end unconditionally. Or am I pushing the position too far into some channel?
I wouldn’t say that I favor the satisfaction of immediate wants as I actually favor a pretty prudent lifestyle focused on avoid tragic events from happening as much as possible and having the best long term strategy for alleviating the suffering caused by those tragic events as much as possible. Also, egoism doesn’t really have anything to do with egocentrism. Egoism is simply the view that one ought only to improve one’s own life as much as possible. I don’t think that the world comes to an end when I die. I just don’t think that I have reason to care about the world beyond the consideration of how caring about the world might benefit me.
I am as concerned about the extinction of the majority of flora and fauna species going extinct as I am humans going that route. But ultimately the problem is not with particular technologies but rather how they are used. The real problem - on almost every level - is, in my opinion, Capitalism.
That’s interesting, what makes you value plant life? Do you believe that it is sentient or something like that?
Whatever the case may be, it seems to me that those who approve of modern life, as you do, do so on the same ground: the benefits of science and technology to the improvement of man’s physical well-being; as though merely living longer and in better health were the keys to human bliss.
According to this optic, one might say,”Oh Mozart! If only he had lived in this day, when modern medicine prolongs lives, so that he could produce so many more masterpieces!”...but modernity has not only extinguished the aristocratic taste that he exemplified in his music: it has also turned our taste away from any real appreciation of it. Not only this, but Mozart, who died at the age of 35, accomplished far more than any present musician will ever accomplish, should he live to the age of 100.
Genius aside, let’s consider the everyday lives of everyday ppl like you and me: what modernity promotes is individualism, the notion that each human being is a separate entity with peculiar rights, not necessarily attached to anything other than his or her own selfish self; and this leads to divorce, and alienation from family and friends, and the unsatisfactory compromises that result, and the addiction to alcohol and drugs that is required to cope with it, etc, etc...
Neither living long nor being healthy is a guarantee of true life, that is, the life of the soul.
Well, I don’t actually care about living longer. I actually think one legitimate criticism that people can have of modernity is that we spend too much money and resources trying to keep people alive as long as possible. I personally hope that I’ll die around the age of 55 in a fairly painless manner. In addition, it could be argued that modernity has enabled the obesity epidemic which is actually making people die sooner. My reason for thinking that modernity is great has more to do with how it enables us to live comfortable, cozy, and pleasant lives. After all, it’s really great that I live in a house that is just the right temperature and that I’m not freezing in the winter. It’s also great how I’m able to eat the kind of delicious food that would make the aristocracy of the past envy. I’m also able to be sexually intimate with women who have great hygiene and who take care of their appearance and I’m able to look at extremely beautiful women on the Internet. In contrast, even an emperor from the past was sexually entertaining himself with women who haven’t showered in months and had lots of leg and armpit hair. Honestly, would you want to live in that kind of world?
Quoting Todd Martin
I agree that Mozart wouldn’t be any more accomplished but I have a hard time understanding why it matters if people appreciate Mozart’s music. Wouldn’t Mozart’s music be just as valuable in a world where no one cares about his music? Besides, there are actually more people today listening to Mozart than any other time in history. This is because everyone can just listen to his compositions on YouTube today. In contrast, Mozart was only heard by the aristocracy of the past and the peasant were too busy performing back breaking labor all day.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I think we shouldn’t ignore the harmfulness of the collectivist narratives that were promoted in the past as well. For example, was it better that people were pressured into continuing a bad marriage in the past for the supposed benefit of the family unit? Isn’t it a travesty that we sent lots of young men in the past to die on the battlefield for some stupid king who promoted a collectivist narrative of national unity? I’m pretty anti-collectivist mainly because I fear that collectivist narratives are often used to take away our freedom and it’s not clear to me that this freedom reduction is useful to anyone but the power hungry tyrants who often use these collectivist narratives. Those power hungry tyrants might include a husband who wants to control his nuclear family and accuses his wife or children of being selfish individualists if they go against his will. Other examples of tyrants using collectivist narratives might be religious institutions and rulers of nations who might justify taking away freedoms in the name of some supposed collectivist greater good.
Your other sentiment, that you like modernity because it allows us to live “comfortable, cozy and pleasant lives” actually seems more that of an older than younger man. When men are young, their bodies and souls are full of vigor, and they are more willing to undergo physical hardship for some higher purpose. You, however, seem to be content to live the life of a tomcat, sunning yourself and taking naps on the porch all day, getting fed Friskies for breakfast, lunch and supper, taken to the vet for ringworm, etc...but at least when the tomcat prowls at night, he is willing to fight off his rivals, risking wounds and scars, to get the feline in heat he desires so greatly...though she sport hairs under her arms!
As far as Mozart is concerned, there are three sorts of ppl that are attracted to him out of the general population: the most obvious are the white-hairs who commonly go to classical concerts because that is the music that they were steeped in as youngsters (that group may have already died out); another is the younger sort, wealthy and upwardly mobile, who take an interest out of vanity and ostentation; the last is the mothers who think their infants will become smarter if they hear his music regularly...
...but there are very very few who listen to his music now simply because it stirs their soul, regardless of how many listen to his music on YouTube, and there are no new Mozarts, or Schuberts, or Beethovens, or Brahmses being produced in our day. They have all been replaced by jazz and rock and hip-hip and rap in the popular consciousness...which is an opprobrium less of classical music than it is of the modern soul.
As far as what you call “collectivist” positions of power are concerned, the head of a family or state, sure: they often used, and still use, their power to mistreat those they oversee, and limit the freedom of those in their charge unjustly. But is the bald fact that a power can be abused reason to eliminate it entirely? Don’t such powers often also conduce to greater good? Do not the traditional marriage vows, “for better or worse”, take account not just of misfortune, but also of the frailty of the paterfamilias, his proneness to error, of the fact that he is a mere mortal?
When divorce becomes easy, when a man and woman who have formally pledged to devote their lives to each other decide that they might be happier going separate ways, and split up, what do their children learn from this to guide them in their adult lives? They learn that there is no unbreakable bond between human beings, and that, with whomsoever they should form a bond with in their own lives, be it a wife or husband, mother or father, brother or sister, priest or friend, that bond has no fetters, is a will-o-the wisp.
We may decide to discard every position of power that can be abused—let’s just make sure we’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Hello. I think every part of Creation, every species, is universally unique and I value that intrinsically.
Well, I think my comment about preferring to die by the age of 55 was a little bit misleading. I don’t value dying at a particular age for its own sake. Rather, I’m extremely against the idea of continuing life under the threat of severe physical pain like the physical pain that might come with old age or maybe the physical pain of cancer. Unfortunately, I will probably have to either euthanize myself or I would have to be able to afford enough palliative care to numb most of my pain until I die a natural death. The latter only seems like an option if I get diagnosed with cancer that will be lethal without medical treatment or something like that. Theoretically, I would want to live past 55 but I doubt I can maintain a life free from physical pain past that age. Given this, I think that I will need to find a way to die before life hurts me too much and I probably won’t be able to wait beyond the age of 55.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, it’s worth noting that most people who liked Mozart in the past were also just elitist aristocrats who treated his music as a frivolous luxury and a status symbol. Classical composers were like caviar and golden crowns for the royals and aristocrats who employed them. They were used as means to show off wealth and prestige. In fact, Mozart and other composers like Bach and Beethoven were often quite angry about how their royal employers didn’t give him enough creative freedom and that they wanted to dictate what compositions they should compose and what compositions they ought to perform. Classical music was never actually popular or appreciated contrary to popular historical misunderstandings(well, maybe during the romantic period it was but that’s past Mozart’s time.). Folk music and religious choral music was really the pop music in the past. They were like the McDonald’s of the music of the past. In contrast, composers like Mozart were considered to be like a fancy restaurant where everyone pretended to enjoy the food to look prestigious.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I would say that there are plenty of jazz and multi-genre musicians that are more talented than any classical composer was. For example, listen to a guy named Jacob Collier and tell me that he isn’t more talented than Mozart. The dude can write beautiful compositions using notes and scales that have never been used in music before. In contrast, Mozart used the same musical vocabulary that have been used by his predecessors and by the majority of modern musicians. Whether or not Mozart’s music is more beautiful just strikes me as highly subjective. For one, Mozart’s music can only be appealing to a Western audience that are accustomed to certain rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns. I think a guy like Jacob Collier can actually write compositions that people of all cultures would find appealing which is an especially rare talent.
Quoting Todd Martin
No, but it’s a pretty big downside of collectivism. One could reasonably argue that the cons of collectivism outweigh the pros. My whole point is that individualism is probably better because it isn’t as appealing to tyrants.
Quoting Todd Martin
Maybe, but I honestly can’t think of very many upsides of collectivism. I’m not saying that collectivism is always bad but I think we have more than enough collectivism in our modern world today.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, as a guy who never understood marriage or romantic relationships, it’s hard for me to make sense of that question to be honest.
Quoting Todd Martin
I agree but I don’t understand why you think this is a bad thing. I’ve never been a fan of being intimate with only one person for the rest of my life and I kinda wish that I lived in a world where it was normal for friends and acquaintances to have sex with one another just for fun except considering the risk of pregnancy, STDs, and romantic drama that it may cause in the real world. It’s kinda a growing trend today and I’m kinda happy about that as it does create a lot of unexpected excitement. For example, the idea of having one of my female coworkers old enough to be my mom inviting me to her place for some friendly cuddling and sex just excites me to no end. It’s most exciting for me when it’s so shocking and unexpected. It just makes the experience very magical and unbelievable for me.
Would you extend such a sentiment to complex non-living things like a robot that is controlled by a sophisticated AI?
Perhaps it should be noted that modernity and modernism are two different things.
And of course, improvements happen when we aren't happy and/or satisfied with the things we have. Philosophers naturally see things to be corrected at our present society, in the one that they live in. It is a thing that is crucial for modernity, actually. How useful and beneficial their input truly is, is another question.
Well, what is the difference between modernity and modernism? I’m a little bit confused by your use of the word modernism. I thought modernism is just the belief that modernity is highly preferable in some manner but I don’t know if you have something else in mind.
Yeah. There is a thesis in this subject and we have yet to define terms. Modernism is long gone and was a hugely influential movement that ultimately led to post-modernism.
This original statement:
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I think this lacks precision. Thinkers across millennia are often critical of the era they live in. Each contemporary era has its preoccupations and ideas worthy of criticism. What is it about the present era that sticks out for you?
Well, I was talking about the views of many philosophers that I have encountered that seem to be critical about the age that they happen to be alive in. It just so happens that philosophers that I’m most familiar with are alive today and are talking about the 21st century as modernity. I agree with you that those criticisms are no better than the criticisms made in the past about the past time periods.
It's generally the job of philosophers to be critical of their times and the ideas in current circulation. Society is so atomized these days that it must be hard for philosophers to know where to begin or what to rate as important.
Modernity is the present that we live in, it's a historical period of time. Modernism can be said to be a philosophical movement and can be understood in many ways, starting from an art style to being a broader societal view. Hence many of those philosophers are more likely to be critical of modernism rather than of modernity, starting with the post-modernists.
I think many times the clash happens when the so-called "modernist" solution, or what is viewed to be a "modernist" solution to some problem, which likely is the rather pragmatic, technocratic (that the solution is to use technology, science and experts) or free market oriented (let the market mechanism solve the problem) solution to a complex problem, which then the "anti-modernist" doesn't like (and likely sees a political power play in the modernist solution).
Well, I think the effectiveness of the modernist solution is that it led to the modernity that we are living in today. If one agrees that modernity is pretty good and up to snuff, then I think it would be hard for them to be too critical of modernism as the results seem to speak for itself.
I generally agree with your description of how Mozart’s music was appreciated/exploited in his own day. Yes, musicians of that time were dependent on kings and archbishops for their appointments, who sometimes suppressed or attempted to influence the character of the music produced. The same thing was operative concerning ancient literature, e.g. the obeisance to Caesar Augustus paid by Vergil and Ovid; but that didn’t compromise the greatness of their works. The truly great artists of antiquity knew both how to appease their bosses, and consummate their geniuses.
It strikes me as strange that you praise folk music as being “the McDonald’s” of music in olden times.
Didn’t you, in an earlier post, say one of the benefits of our day was being able to eat better than any emperor ever did? Surely you weren’t thinking of a Big Mac when you said that!...or were you???
As far as Mr. Collier is concerned, I frankly have neither the time nor inclination to look his music up and listen to it. Dave Brubeck was wonderful, and stirred my adolescent soul...but so did Elton John and Pink Floyd, and later on a few other pop/rock artists of that day. But once I was introduced to Mousorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique, I realized there were vistas of musical experience that had been hidden from me...not purposefully, but by a general denigration in the culture of classical things.
I know musical appreciation is a very subjective thing. All I can say—and this doesn’t help our discussion—is, let’s see whose name is remembered a hundred years from now: that of Jacob Collier, or that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The latter’s name has certainly outlasted all the names of all the “McDonald’s” folk musicians of his own day.
But a couple of the things you praise about the former’s music strike me as emanating from democratic prejudice. One is that you say that he writes music using notes and scales that have never been used before. Novelty is one of the hallmarks of democratic taste. Whatever is most emergent and new, contrary to what ever came before, is praised prima facie, at the expense of true skill and accomplishment.
Similar to this is the assertion that his music appeals to all cultures, not just the stultified Western one of a Mozart. O Hedomenos: what is more modern and ultra-democratic than all things multi-cultural? especially if they aren’t derived from the traditionally dominant one?
But I like Herodotus’ method better: he compared the different cultures of his day, not under the assumption that they were equally good in all things, but rather to find what was best in each. It is not novelty or equality that should guide us in our tastes, but rather the good.
You apparently live a life very independent of binding attachments to other ppl, apparently even to ppl of your own family, but the vast majority of other ppl don’t live this way. Most other ppl, especially women, consider the “romantic drama” surrounding sexual intercourse to be justified, and I imagine this is something you have either already, or soon will, experience yourself. Consider all the cultures of mankind past and present: do you find any that don’t consider sex more than just having fun, experiencing a thrill? Then, as a multi-culturalist yourself, you might learn something from that fact.
Much of the thrill of a sexual encounter in the good ole days was due to the fact that it was prohibited and forbidden. Now that all is laid bare and everything is permitted, what do we find? gay couples legally married, and bickering just as much as straight ones did, and still do...
...I imagine that your sexual conquest and pleasure, the girl old enough to be your mom, either coaxed you into a ho-hum regular not-as-exciting sexual routine, or pressured you to become more committed. Either way, what you sought was lost.
Why 55? I am ten years north of that and have never felt better. There are many people who have taken really good care of themselves (or have genetic privilege :) that are in great shape well into their 80's and even 90's now.
The problem with man is his thinking. Regardless of the era, there are people who make the best of it and those who make the worst of it.
Believing that things will always get better is a tough way to go through life, never satisfied, always looking for the "new and improved" version of every damn thing.
Well, I think I’m just much more sensitive to physical pain than most other people. I get really upset if I have even a fairly bad cold. The worst moments of my life are when I got physically abused as a child and when I got circumcised at the age of 9. I was actually put to sleep during the circumcision but it was still hours of agony. I would do anything to avoid having to re-live those bad events.
Quoting Todd Martin
Actually, I was thinking about foods like cheap ramen noodles and a sandwich with just cheap white bread and bologna. I think a Big Mac just blows the food that the emperors ate out of the water. It was really hard to find any kind of sauce or seasoning or spices for their food. Plus, the food and water wasn’t very safe for consumption by modern standards. They didn’t know about germ theory or how diseases got spread so they didn’t bother sanitizing anything. Also, they didn’t have access to refrigeration so they couldn’t have delicious desserts like ice cream and meat and dairy products spoiled super fast. So, even modern day budget food seems to be better than what the emperors had. Big Macs are pretty damn delicious though. I think they would be worth their weight in gold during the 16th century.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, isn’t that kind of the problem with people that don’t appreciate Mozart? That they just don’t have the time nor inclination to try his music. You kinda have to listen to a musician in order to know what you are missing. Though, admittedly few people would like Collier if they listened to him kinda like few people would like Mozart if they listened to him.
Quoting Todd Martin
What is a culture of classical things?
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I think luck plays a pretty big role in determining who ends up being remembered and who gets forgotten. For example, the composer Bach didn’t become popular until 200 years after his death. Mozart was also not super popular while he was alive and his music had to be revived long after his death. In contrast, a composer like Wagner was really famous during his lifetime but became a mere footnote in the history of classical music. Jacob Collier has a sizable following today and he might be regarded as being better than Mozart 300 years from now because you never know. These opinions about who is a greater composer are often dependent on the opinions of an establishment of posh music critics.
Quoting Todd Martin
But, how do you know that Mozart is the one with the true skill and accomplishment? You never even listened to Jacob Collier whereas I have heard both Mozart and Collier and I think Collier is more talented. Isn’t my testimonial evidence about this more reliable given that I have actually listened to both composers whereas you haven’t?
Quoting Todd Martin
I feel like you misunderstood the point that I was trying to make. I was not arguing that all cultures were equal; I was arguing that musical taste is largely predicated on what musical patterns you have been exposed to growing up. For example, there is some music that sounds out of tune to western ears that sounds in tune to ears of a particular culture which was engrained in feeling that the note belongs in the music. Collier is known to be a master of something called microtonality which means that his compositional abilities are not limited to the notes on a western piano. He can make notes that normally sound out of tune to us sound kinda mysterious and strange yet somehow befitting the music. Mozart didn’t have that talent and it’s a rare talent to have. You don’t see many microtonal composers in the Western world. Of course, Collier can also compose great music using just the notes that can be played by a piano as well. So, he can arguably do what Mozart did to some extent yet Mozart had no ability to write anything using notes he wasn’t familiar with. That is an asymmetry of talent worth pointing out I think.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes, but why should I live like other people? It’s also worth noting that this trend is changing because of modernity. So, my question is why exactly is it bad that people are slowly becoming more like me?
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes but modernity is creating new cultures that are challenging the old trends. I’m saying that I think that there’s nothing wrong with challenging traditional relationship preferences because as I think people are slowly changing their preferences and that this preference change isn’t a tragedy in my mind. Just because something has been popular throughout history doesn’t mean that it ought to be popular forever.
Quoting Todd Martin
Umm.... I still find it very thrilling even though it isn’t really stigmatized as much.
Quoting Todd Martin
I was actually just talking about a sexual fantasy that I have rather than an actual event that occurred. I don’t sleep with my coworkers and I just don’t get invited to cuddle and have sex very often. I’m the one who has to invite the girls over for those things because we don’t really live in the kind of world that I think it might be cool to live in. Nonetheless, there are ways to get women to sleep with you without the promise of a committed relationship and I like modernity because it makes this sort of thing safer and easier than before. I also think it’s kinda epistemically arrogant for you to think that you likely understand better regarding what I want in a sexual relationship than what I’m claiming that I want in such relationships. After all, I have private assess to my emotional states, desires, and beliefs. In contrast, you never even met me but somehow you feel that I likely have some sort of a secret desire to have a romantic relationship as though you have some kind of private knowledge about the inner depths of my mind or that you think that some psychological claim about human nature is more reliable than my testimonial evidence predicated on my introspection that suggests that I don’t want to have a relationship. I personally think that it’s more rational to take people at their word most of the time as I think most people know themselves far better than some random guy on the internet knows them.
Well, I would have to wait and see if I end having health problems. It’s kinda common to start having them before 55 though
Live each day really well and it will take care of itself.
Secondly, when I said, Quoting Todd Martin, I didn’t mean that you would experience it in your soul, as a felt desire or emotion; just that you would experience it from the women you get involved with, drawing from my many relationships with them over my lifetime. I don’t presume to know anything more about you than you tell me. Of course, like everybody, I make judgements about ppl from what they tell me about themselves.
I took your advice, and I looked Collier up on YouTube and listened/watched, so now we are even: we have both heard/experienced Mozart and Collier. What do you think my impression was; I, this random guy on the internet who, actually, is not so random now, since I to you, like you to me, have shared particular, even sometimes intimate, details of each others’ lives? Before you read further, turn away from the computer screen and imagine, knowing what you do of my aesthetics, what I’m going to say about Mr. Collier’s music, and only then proceed to my next paragraph...
...he is nothing more than a fancy pop-star and musical stuntman. The gulf b/w him and a Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms is so deep and unfathomable that no comparison can be made. I heard nothing in his music that was not predicated on Western harmony, and everything else I heard was just showmanship. The only thing I might say to his credit is that he is the Big Mac we see in the advertisement rather than the one we hold in our hands.
You are wrong about the diet of the ancients: they had excellent sauces and spices, drawn straight from the garden, both aristocrat and plebs, and the former had blocks of ice drawn down from the snowy mountaintops to cool their perishables. And to think that the pleasure they either experienced or hoped for from their sexual conquests suffered from lack of hygiene is to fail to appreciate that there is nothing better in bed, for a good ole southern boy, than a skanky redneck whore.
But let me ask you this, O Hedomenos: what effect do you think your physical abuse as a child had on the way that you perceive the world now?
Ahh ok, I actually agree with you there. It’s kinda hard to have regular casual sex with a woman for awhile without there being any discussions about relationships or without giving the woman some kind of financial incentive to keep things casual.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I now realize that I was kinda wrong to assume that you would know less about me than other people because you are a random guy on the internet. I actually share more private information with random people on the internet than I do with my own family. Heck, it is actually large internet corporations like Google that know me best because they know my internet search history lol.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I’m kinda suspecting that you are not very familiar with western harmony or harmony in general. As a music theory nerd and someone that has dabbled in songwriting and composition, I can notice lots of extremely unusual harmonies in pretty much every one of his songs. I also want to point out that I actually enjoy the music of Mozart more than I enjoy the music of Collier. Collier is a little too experimental even for my tastes. I believe that it is more difficult to compose music like Collier due to my admittedly limited but fairly decent understanding of music theory. He constantly uses unusual time signatures and it does make composing music more difficult as I have tried to compose music with those time signatures and I don’t even know where to start. By contrast, classical music usually just uses a 2/4 time signature if I recall correctly and many classical pieces are non-rhythmic or they have a loose relationship with rhythm. This means that you don’t really need to worry about the groove of the song as a classical composer and that does make classical composition easier in an important respect to groove centered genres like funk, disco, pop, jazz, hip hop, and jazz fusion.
As far as the harmony used by someone like Mozart, he used the same chords as pop musicians but his chords were more spread out and this is pretty common in classical music. By contrast, Collier uses very rare chord inversions and he typically uses 5 note chords which were actually popularized by classical composers like Debussy who came after Mozart. Collier also incorporates really fast chord progressions which you rarely see in any genre except jazz and jazz fusion. You mentioned that Collier is a pop star. I would agree with you that he can pass off as one but he also incorporates elements of jazz fusion, funk, hip hop, and electronic music. I think he pretty much invented his own genre of music. Collier also occasionally uses notes that are in between the notes that are found on a standard piano and he usually mixes those notes in a composition with mostly normal notes. This is one of the things that give his music that disorienting feel that it has. Though, to give classical composers credit, I think they were extremely talented at composing music for large orchestras which might be something that Collier wouldn’t be as good at. Writing operas is pretty hard as well. Also, classical composers didn’t have access to recording software so they had to write everything down in sheet music which was super time consuming and it made a trial and error approach to composition a bit more difficult. I think that Collier is more talented than Mozart not adjusted to the fact that he has a clear technological advantage. Collier has the privilege of being able to work on his compositions even while he’s on the toilet or waiting in line. Mozart had to spend time drawing out the sheet music and that would limit you in many ways as a composer.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, that isn’t what I have heard. I would interested in knowing where you read about this. Admittedly, my claims about the diets of emperors are just bits and pieces of what I remember from school and what I remember from watching history videos on YouTube.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, the physical abuse was really just one incident that lasted for about 15 seconds. It was no worse than the typical ass whooping that lots of kids my age have gotten as punishment. I have had friends and acquaintances share similar stories from their childhood with pride as they believed that this physical punishment has disciplined them and made them into a better person. The interesting thing about corporal punishment is that it affects different children in different ways. I would say that I feel traumatized by the experience because of my sensitivity to physical pain and because of my belief that intense suffering is really difficult to justify. If I wasn’t so anti-suffering then I probably wouldn’t care that much about that really short moment in the past.
Having said that, I recall that my oldest brother held a grudge against our mother into his adulthood because she slapped him in the face in front of our grandma, uncles and aunts, and cousins: he, a small boy, found a long gray hair in his food, and held it up for all to see, and proclaimed, “there’s a hair in my food!” at which point Mama’s hand came down forcefully on his tender cheek: “Don’t you ever say that again!” she admonished him. It wasn't the sting on his cheek that he never forgot; it was rather the sting of injustice: this was probably a thing he had either never experienced (a hair in his food), or had never been reprimanded for, at home.
At any rate, as I said, my brother did not hold his grudge because of the physical pain—how can physical pain that is soon gone last in the memory of a child?—but rather because of the sting of injustice. So I suspect your 15 seconds of pain as a child must have been etched in your memory for some reason other than that it was physically painful (?)
As far as your assumptions about my musical experience go, I can tell you I am an amateur piano/guitar player; I read music and have studied harmony and voice-leading. On piano I play Mozart, Bach, Schubert, my own compositions, and my own arrangements of Baptist hymns; on guitar I play old Elton John and John Denver and Pink Floyd and Carly Simon, etc. I wish there was a way we could share our compositions/performances, for I would like to read and play what you have written.
But it is late, and I must go...
Suppose that I were to get sexually touched by a pedophile for 15 seconds when I was a child. Wouldn’t you think that it is appropriate to call that sexual abuse? If it’s appropriate to call that sexual abuse then I don’t see why it wouldn’t be appropriate to call my 15 second beating physical abuse. After all, many people including myself would have preferred to get molested.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yeah, I probably would have tried to kill myself by now if I were in their shoes.
Quoting Todd Martin
No, I think it’s mostly about the physical pain because I remember the sensation of that pain quite vividly. It felt like someone had broke my body in half. I think the guy threw me on the grass or something like that. I think he then continued to slam my body on the ground covered in grass because the sharp pain in my back kept repeating. Also, I actually was being an awful brat that whole day and that caused him to snap and attack me. I kinda empathize with him and understand why he did it. Though, I really think this person should never be allowed around kids again. That moment really haunts me to this day because the pain was just unbearable for those 15 seconds. I think it did teach me the value of respecting others but I still feel very traumatized by this moment even if there is some positive narrative that could be attached to the experience. Once again, I would emphasize that I’m very sensitive against physical pain. Like, you know how professional mma fighters don’t seem to feel any pain even after they have been hit over 100 times by their very strong opponent. Well, I’m like the exact opposite of an mma fighter. I’m hypersensitive to physical punishment.
...when I was a young man, a sexual predator enticed me into a secret location and attempted to force himself on me. A struggle ensued, and during the struggle my shirt was torn, I endured scrapes on my back and knees, and had the tip of an ink pin (he tried to trick me into thinking he wielded a knife) driven into the midst of my palm. I felt like I was fighting for my life, and when I had escaped I felt violated, even though he had failed to achieve his goal.
My psychological trauma lasted for a few weeks or months. I had a few bad dreams...then I got over it. Now it is just an old memory, something that happened when I was young. I never think about it. Images from it never enter my mind uninvited.
Of course, if he HAD overpowered me and had had his way with me, then things would, I’m sure, have been very different for me; or, if he had REALLY wielded a knife, instead of an ink pen. I have no good idea anymore just how long the struggle lasted: maybe it was 30 seconds, or a minute; maybe it was only 15 seconds.
At any rate, the pain from my wounds was absolutely unremarkable; the pain to my soul more substantial, but not eternal...
...many years later, I was in a bad relationship with a woman. She tried to shut the door on me and lock me out of the apartment. In a fit of rage I struck at the door with my left hand to try to keep the door from closing, and, because I was enraged, mistakenly struck the glass instead of the wood...
...blood was everywhere. When I extracted my hand and saw the two bloody chasms the jagged edges of the broken pane had carved into my wrist, I glanced up at my girlfriend: her face was frozen in horror. My first thought was, “FINALLY! This is over (meaning our relationship: it had taken such a catastrophe to end it for good)”...
...but then, immediately afterwards, all that concerned me was the preservation of my life, for I thought I was bleeding to death (though no blood was spurting out like a geyser, the tale tale sign of a ruptured artery). I cried for her to call 911, which she did, and then cried for her to find a rope or belt to tourniquet my arm, which she did...
I passed out from fear before the ambulance ever got there; I passed out from pain later on lying on the ER bed when a couple of doctors-in-training started messing in (examining) the wounds. But before I lost consciousness I remember crying out, “I don’t want to die!”...when I awoke, I saw the faces of two or three nurses smiling at me, the ones who had rushed in to elevate me and raise my blood-pressure, and I felt silly and ashamed that I thought I was going to die!
One tendon was severed, and stitched back together, and though I have occasionally felt unusual pain and weakness in my left hand, nevertheless I can say that it has not prevented me from performing any of the tasks of daily life that I need it for; especially piano and guitar. And two tattoos, the natural kind as opposed to the unnatural, the sort added for some sort of ostentation or self-advertisement, streak down my left arm to remind me of the heedlessness of anger.
Nor do I hold in my mind the trauma of that pain and relive it. I have experienced similar pain since then: a third scar was added a few years ago when, weed-eating a grassy embankment, I slipped and fell and empaled my left wrist on a sharp woody stalk. This time I was less fearful. All I could see was the butt end of the wood protruding from my wrist, so, thinking it a small thing, I took a pair of pliers and tried to extricate it myself...but it broke off, and I realized I must go to the ER...
...once there, I watched the doctor, after he stuck me with several anesthetizing needles, pull out tiny pieces of wood. He kept digging deeper. At one point he grabbed something that wouldn’t come out, and I , who was watching this the whole time, exclaimed, “Are you sure you have hold of a piece of wood?”...for I was afraid he was gonna yank a tendon or ligament outta me. At this point he removed the forceps and exclaimed, “I think I got it all”, stitched up my wound and sent me home...
...but he hadn’t got it all, for, within a couple days red streaks were running up my left arm and I had to go back to the ER. They saw something in the ultra-scan, scheduled a surgery, and this different doctor put me under and cut out a piece of woody stalk that was imbedded in my wrist that was more than an inch long!...
Now I have three tattoos running down my left wrist: two due to anger, one, to folly: for, had I worn proper shoes that day I weed-ate the bank, I never would have slipped and fell and impaled my wrist on a sharp woody stalk.
As for the moral to my stories, I haven’t the time now, at this late hour, to dwell therein. Read them and tell me your impression. One thing I’m sure of: the fear of pain and death is far greater than its actualization.
Well, I think your stories mostly just suggest that you are less sensitive to physical pain than I am and you are also probably more afraid of death than I am. I actually never recall ever being anxious about death and my mortality but I am constantly anxious about the future physical pain that I may have to endure. It’s possible that I’m not anxious about death because death seems so far away for me but I’m curious to know if you ever felt anxious about death before you had one of your injuries that you mentioned in your comment.
Also, I find it a little weird that most people are perfectly ok with having a doctor touch their genitals but they feel very violated if a pervert touches their genitals for sexual gratification. Why do you think that people are like that? I always just found that very confusing to be honest. The hatred of physical pain seems much more straightforward though. If a doctor causes physical pain for a medically valid reason, then it’s still viewed as being pretty bad because the badness of physical pain seems to be less context dependent. I’m not a very sentimental guy so I have a hard time caring about the intentions behind the person who caused me suffering and I care more about the actual sensation that produced the suffering.
Once, when I was a boy, I became rather constipated; for what reason I cannot tell. The next morning, before I was to go to school, I went to the bathroom, and, attempting to defecate, found that it just wouldn’t come out...or, it certainly wasn’t going to come out easily, as it always had before then. I was afraid to force it; because, for some reason, I thought that if I forced it, and it only came part ways out, that I would somehow perish.
I told my mama I had an “upset stomach”, and she kept me home from school and, because she thought I meant I had diarrhea, gave me something to stop me up!...you can imagine the pickle I was in now (or the pickle that was in me!). At any rate, by the end of that excruciating day, the misunderstanding was cleared up, I received a much needed enema, and the world, and my colon, were restored to order.
The second obstructionist drama has two acts. The first act opens with me and my twin brother seated with our cousin Craig on Uncle Ivory’s couch, watching TV. I was drinking something that had large cubes of ice in it, and as I sucked on one of those cubes it got somehow sucked down my throat and lodged in my windpipe.
I sprang immediately up off the couch, pointing to my throat and trying to say, “I have a piece of ice in my throat!”...which, of course, was unintelligible to them in my state: my brother thought I was trying to imitate Donald Duck. After several seconds of repeating myself and trying to cough up the foreign object, the next thing I remember is watching the ice cube slide along the linoleum floor. My brother says Uncle Ivory slapped me on the back, which seems very plausible and which I cannot deny, though I never felt the slap.
Soon afterwards Craig and I and my brother were playing with toys on the carpeted steps as though no one had almost died. The only after-effect was a soreness in my larynx, which was gone within a day or two... but this scene in the drama was just prolegomenon for the one that would occur a few years later...
...in the final scene, my older sister has taken me to the movie theater to see an R-rated movie (she must have snuck me in somehow). The movie was one from the early 70s whose title I have long since forgotten. There were a lot of dirty words spoken in it that I had never heard and didn’t understand (though she did, and laughed at them in the way that ppl do who pretend they are morally outraged but delight in the scandalous nature of it).
In the movie, two men are cutting logs next to a lake when one of the logs falls on one of them and pins him in the shallows. His head is above the water, but the tide is rising, and as it does, his head gets pushed down further and further toward the surface of the water as the log rolls, and it is clear to both that it will soon be under water...
Once his head is under, his friend begins delivering him mouth-to-mouth inhalations of oxygen... until they both are overcome by the comical nature of two men kissing under water, and the friend laughs out his next delivery in bubbles, and his pinned buddy expires, and his friend grieves and vainly attempts to pull him up, crying out to the universe...
It was many days before I got over this. The thought of expiring from obstruction of the breathing passage, by H2O either frozen or liquid, was unendurable...so I gradually learned to just not think about it. I eventually became an excellent swimmer, and I have never felt any compunction sucking on ice since, nor on a lozenge or candy. These are the sorts of trauma you’re supposed to suffer as a child and then move on from, get over with.
The “badness” of pain is VERY “context-dependent”. You say there is no difference b/w a doctor touching your genitals, and a pervert doing the same? Their separate motives make no difference, because the pain is the same?...
...are you not heartened to be with a doctor to whom you have gone to relieve yourself of some malady of your privates, and if a little pain is involved, don’t you endure it, trusting that it is for your better health? A needle stuck in your arm is painful, right? But isn’t the thought of being safe from a deadly disease worth a little painful prick? On the other hand, do you entrust your health to a pervert? What if his perversion is delight in cutting boys’ balls off? How would you know unless yours went missing?
You say, when you got slammed on your back as a child, that “the pain was just unbearable for those 15 seconds”, and that that is why it “haunts you to this day”. This just doesn’t make sense. Either the pain lasted a lot longer than that, days or weeks or months (in which case your fear makes more sense), or you’re making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Who in their right mind fears 15 seconds of pain more than an eternity of death? “Fifteen seconds of unbearable pain” is a contradiction in terms, for nothing is unbearable that lasts only fifteen seconds, for it’s over after fifteen seconds, and then you no longer have to bear it.
Do you have this same reaction when you stub your toe over a chair-leg, or receive a paper-cut on your finger, or bang your knee against a door-edge? For everyday life offers plenty of opportunity to experience momentary excruciating pain. But we don’t fear it; for, though it be excruciating, we know from past experience that it is merely temporary. If you are so sensitive to pain, you must live day-to-day in fear of even these most common sorts; what kind of life is that, fearing to move about a room, or lift a hot coffee-pot, or handle a piece of paper? [quote="TheHedoMinimalist;504279". ]well, I think luck plays a pretty big role in determining who ends up being remembered and who gets forgotten. For example, the composer Bach didn’t become popular until 200 years after his death. Mozart was also not super popular while he was alive and his music had to be revived long after his death. In contrast, a composer like Wagner was really famous during his lifetime but became a mere footnote in the history of classical music. Jacob Collier has a sizable following today and he might be regarded as being better than Mozart 300 years from now because you never know. These opinions about who is a greater composer are often dependent on the opinions of an establishment of posh music critics.[/quote]
Have you considered exactly why Mozart’s music was not popular in his day, yet was revived, or why Wagner became a footnote, despite his popularity? Is it wise to judge the quality of something by its popularity, to take a poll? Is the majority of everyone’s opinion the proper standard of judgement?...
... the reason Mozart’s music lasted was because his peers, not the general population, considered him worthy: Beethoven had his piano concertos to study as models for his own; Schubert thought his music the finest available, and Tchaikovsky called Mozart “the Jesus Christ” of music. Should we follow the experts’ opinion on this, or rather the people’s, with whom he fell out of favor?
Not really, I don’t find that painful at all.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes, but it’s not worth suffering intense pain(for me at least). The badness of pain is not just determined by its duration but also the intensity of the pain. If a pain is very intense then I think it is really bad and catastrophic even if it is short lasting. A pinprick isn’t intense at all and it isn’t even long lasting so it’s not the kind of pain that I’m concerned about.
Quoting Todd Martin
If that pervert happens to be a doctor then yes unless given a reason not to. Honestly, how do you know your current doctor is not a pervert? He might have chosen this line of work because he’s glad that he’s allowed to grab men’s balls for all you know. It only bothers you if you know that he gets aroused by it. So, why does the mere knowledge of his excitement of touching your privates something that might bother you? Or would it really bother you?
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, that would be bad because that would cause physical pain and having balls is good for other stuff that is valuable like getting women to be comfortable having sexual relations with you. But, I was asking about why people would be bothered by a pervert who only wants to molest you since doctors typically only molest you for medical reasons except prostate exams and colonoscopies. But, those can also cause a significant amount of physical pain or discomfort and that’s the main explanation for why we are bothered by those procedures to some extent.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, first of all, I don’t think it makes sense to talk of death as eternity because you don’t perceive time after you die. I think time is actually just a subjective experience and so it doesn’t seem to make sense to talk about eternities that you don’t actually experience. Second of all, we are all going to die eventually anyways so why is it that much worse to die sooner? How much benefit am I going to get for living past the age of 55 anyways? Thirdly, I just want to illiterate the point that I made earlier about the intensity of the pain being just as important as the duration of the pain. For me, the intensity is even more important because extra duration of pain has at least some silver lining as it gives me time to adjust to the pain and it will just start to hurt less. Intense pains, on the other hand, make their sting before your mind is even prepared to deal with it. Fourthly, I think that this 15 seconds of pain that I have experienced might have actually been worse than any pain that you have experienced in your life because I am just more sensitive to pain. Of course, if I had to undergo your painful life moments, I would really just go insane but luckily I hadn’t put myself in that sort of a situation quite yet.
Quoting Todd Martin
No, because those things didn’t hurt me as bad as the physical abuse did. The intensity of pain from different stimuli can also kind of differ from person to person. You seem to be listing very mild forms of pain in comparison to my scenario of being beaten by a grown man as a child. Trust me, it caused me much more pain than stubbing my toe would. I might partially be because I was still a child with a fragile child’s body and that would also increase the pain involved.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes, I have actually. I think it has to do with the music education establishment choosing to fetishize Mozart’s music over Wagner’s. I’m not convinced that it is really based that much on merit. A lot of it is also preserving a status quo music curriculum that was created 100 years ago. Also, I wonder how much Wagner’s white supremacy tendencies and how Hitler loved him had to do with his eventual fading. There is a lot of politics that go into determining what composers get taught to children at school. I personally have learned about Mozart in music class at elementary school at 3rd grade in the US. Before then, the only composers I knew were Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Beethoven. This is because I learned about them in 1st grade also in music class at an elementary school in Russia. Hmm..... I wonder why they taught me about Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov instead of Mozart in Russian elementary school. It’s probably not predicated on the merit of those composers. Also, first author that I had learned about was some guy named Alexander Pushkin. In Russia, this guy is more admired than Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare. In the US, I never heard anyone talk about him. The Americans consider Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to be the greatest Russian authors. Again, I’m not sure how much of that has to do with merit and not politics and tradition.
Quoting Todd Martin
No it’s not, but Mozart had to be more popular than other composers to some demographic in order to be remembered. If it was just a demographic of skilled composers then he would deserve to be remembered above other composers. I suspect that his popularity was more influenced by his popularity among the wealthy and powerful who continued insuring that his music got introduced at least to those who studied in the music academy. Of course, this would cause future composers to be influenced by him as well and they will have nice words to say about him as well.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist.
a couple of things stand out to me: firstly, if we are to judge the intensity of pain objectively, wouldn’t we do so by observing the reaction to it by the one experiencing it? For example, if I stub my toe on something (and who hasn’t done so?) and either utter nothing or at most cry, “ouch!”, and continue on as though nothing happened, you would assume that the pain was rather mild. But if I instead double over (and to whom has this never occurred?) and cry, “oh, oh, oh!” over and over and curse and moan for a good while before I can right myself and do anything else, wouldn’t you assume the pain was excruciating? And we don’t even need to be objective in the matter, because EVERYONE has experienced the excruciating pain of severely stubbing a little toe and being doubled over, momentarily, in great pain...which, thank god, soon eases off, though I doubt within just 15 seconds. So when you say that the examples of pain I listed are “very mild” in comparison to what you experienced, I just can’t believe that, at least judging pain by mere intensity.
Secondly, the rhetoric you use to describe your painful experience is revealing to me, for the words you use to contrast your unique pain with my pedestrian examples are, that it was inflicted by “a grown man” on “a child”. A grown man is indeed much stronger than a child and can therefore inflict great pain on him...but a door jamb is more solid than a grown man, and can inflict great pain on my toe also. What’s the difference then? The only difference is that the grown man might have done differently, while the door had no choice.
The real reason the experience of being slammed to the ground was traumatic to you is not because it was painful to your body—that pain only lasted 15 seconds—but because it was painful to your soul, and THAT pain has lasted all your life; and until you realize this, you will continue to misattribute the trauma to mere physical pain, and you will fail to realize that physical pain is always context-dependent; that is, on how it touched your soul.
In your search for an excuse as to why the pain was so traumatic, you offer the theory that it was because your youthful body was so “fragile”...but everybody knows that a child’s bones are more supple and pliant than an adult’s; and, besides, you don’t say any bones were even broken.
The real reason this event of your childhood has lived on in your memory is because a soul in a stronger body lost its temper, and took it out on a weaker one unjustly. You even give excuses for the perpetrator, saying you were being a “brat”, and that this justified his actions; then you give excuses for your trauma, saying it was the result of the experience of mere physical pain!
If any of my words have cast the shadow of a doubt in your mind about the etiology of your trauma, then let me know, and I will continue to attempt to persuade you; otherwise, I will leave off, and consider my efforts to have been in vain.
Stubbing my toe hasn’t ever caused me to scream as much as my physical abuse did. Stubbing my toe only ever caused me to have a mild scream. Me getting beat up caused me to scream very loudly for the whole 15 seconds. My body did also hurt afterwards for several hours but that pain wasn’t nearly as painful or important so I wasn’t even thinking about it. Secondly, I don’t think you can observe the intensity of pain objectively. I think asking people about how badly that pain hurt is a far more accurate way of gauging the intensity of that pain.
Quoting Todd Martin
So, is it not possible that you just experience pain differently from the way that I experience pain? I don’t see why it’s so implausible to think that people have vastly different ways of experiencing pain. Rather, I find any sort of universalism about human nature and the way humans experience things to be highly implausible as I think people just experience the world in vastly different ways.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, a grown man beating me up with a door would be more painful than than a grown beating me up with his body alone but you are extremely unlikely to accidentally hit yourself with a door as hard as the big muscular guy who hit me did as he was using the force of his body more efficiently as to increase the damage caused by his hits. It matters not only how hard the thing that hits you is but also how hard it trying to hit you. To use an analogy, imagine a wooden robot that is as thick as a door beating you up. Well, that robot can probably hurt you much worse than you accidentally stubbing your toe on a door can. This is because the robot will swing it’s robot arms in the most efficient way to hurt you. In contrast, doors aren’t trying to hurt you and so they aren’t going to be as efficient at doing so.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I don’t know what else it can be except the physical pain. You mentioned that you thought it’s related to me feeling that a grown man beating up a child is unjust. I did feel it was a bit unjust indeed but I think that theory has other explanatory weaknesses in the context of my life because I think my experience of getting circumcised when I was 9 years old was also traumatic. That experience had nothing to do with justice. That procedure was actually done for a legitimate medical purpose and I’m actually kinda glad that I got circumcised as circumcised penises are usually preferred by the ladies. So, there are definitely some clear advantages to being circumcised. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be willing to undergo that pain again for those benefits. It seems like the physical pain explanation would be the obviously best explanation for why I was traumatized by that. I don’t see any other good alternative explanations for that trauma.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, it’s more about the sensitivity of the nerves rather than anything to do with bones. There are certain excruciating torture methods that do not require you to cause any bodily damage like water boarding for example. Slowly pealing off a very small portion of one’s skin also does minimal bodily damage but it is extremely painful. Sometimes a particular way of being hit can also be much more painful even if it didn’t correspond to obvious bodily damage. Then there are also strange phenomena like the phantom limb symptom where someone with a missing limb reports experiencing physical pain in the area where the limb used to be. I think this sort of thing really challenges any sort of theory that claims that physical pain always strongly corresponds to bodily damage. In reality, it’s possible that physical pain can sometimes work in very mysterious yet still context independent sorts of ways. It’s sometimes hard to explain what makes something hurt someone with any theory.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, that’s something that I find mildly disappointing about many philosophical conversations. So many times everyone just wants to be the persuader and no one is open to being persuaded themselves on anything. I think that I’m always open to persuaded but I don’t really want to talk to someone that is just interested in promoting their own way of thinking about the world. I want to talk to someone who sees this conversation as an opportunity for 2 people to discover the truth together. That often means considering that one might be wrong at least about something that they are probably far from being an expert in(such as the personal experiences of the person that they are speaking to.)
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
If there is no universal human nature, and no common human experience, how can two different human beings discover any common truth together concerning either their natures or experiences? Indeed, what motivation would two ppl believing that even have, to seek truth together? In that optic, there is only my truth and your truth, and there is nothing to guarantee that they share any resemblance.
...and yet it is obvious, sine multis exempliis meis, that human beings share a common both nature and experience.
Your sentiment, that you want to converse with someone with whom you might discover the truth, smacks more of Socrates as portrayed by Plato than of modern philosophy, which, nurtured on Nietzsche, tends to place separate unbridgeable cultures on a higher pedestal than the universalist old-school philosophy and science. Nietzsche’s separate cultures ultimately became our separate individuals...all unique and peculiarly “creative”, incomparable with anyone else...all great rewards for the ego of the common man suffering under the heavy burden of his obscurity, giving a boost to his flagging self-confidence...
...but there was a cost. As one member of this site recently stated, nothing is truly free, and the cost we pay for choosing culture/individualism over philosophy/science is that there then becomes no intellectual common ground on which to share our experiences.
What reason or motive do you have to be open to my argument that your pain is memorable not because of its pure intensity, but because it was the result of a grown man beating up on a defenseless small child? For as you say, ppl just experience the world in vastly different ways, and that’s that...but then to say you hoped that you and I could discover the truth about it together?? Well, your first premise pretty much puts an end to that, O, Hedomenos, doesn’t it?
Yet I offered evidence from your own words to illustrate my point: that your trauma was due to more than mere intensity of physical pain. You said,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
What do “grown man” and “child” have to do with intensity of physical pain? By using those terms you prejudice the reader: he imagines a powerful brute having his way with a defenseless weakling, and the effect on the reader is not one of excruciating pain (though that too may be involved), but rather of stronger taking advantage of weaker in order to vent his animus. THAT, O Hedomenos, is the context of the pain you keep denying exists, though you have given it to us in your very words.
As far as your late circumcision goes, you have not focused on that nearly to the extent you have on being bashed on the ground by an overpowering brute. Yet the lateness of it, at 9 years of age, when most boys receive it, like I did, soon after birth, says much. I doubt you would agree with this, but I think any medical procedure done in “the nether regions” of the body on a sentient being must be more traumatic than if performed most anywhere else. Why? Because those parts of the body are most private...
...I had a beautiful 4th-grade teacher. She began having health problems, and the male (of course, in that day) doctor wanted to examine her breasts, to which, out of modesty, she refused; a year later she was dead from breast cancer.
I’m arguing that the common truth to be discovered is the truth of there not being any universal human nature. I believe in objective truth but I don’t believe in universal human nature. I don’t see why the existence of objective truth would entail the existence of universal human nature.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, adult men are usually stronger than children and children usually have a worse pain tolerance than adults. This isn’t always true but it’s usually true and it might help explain why the experience hurt me more than you think that it should.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, it only puts an end to the discussion if you can’t come up with another good reply or counter-argument. You gave me some counter-arguments and I think I gave you a good reply each time. If you can respond to my replies of your counter-arguments well or you can present additional considerations or arguments then I might agree with you. This issue is very complex and there’s always new opportunities for you to make some novel points that I might have not considered. For example, usually when a philosopher tries to argue for the existence of notable universal similarities between human experiences of something specific like pain they will either cite studies in psychology or cognitive science that provides evidence for universal human experience of pain or they will elicit a thought experiment that can better elucidate their intuitions on the matter to their interlocutor.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I’m afraid that you are reading too much into a few choice of words that I used and you are misinterpreting what I was trying to say. I wasn’t trying to use the words “grown men” and “child” rhetorically or emotionally in any way. I was just pointing out that adult men have more potential to beat up children than a door has to hurt an adult men by accident under most circumstances.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, my parents and doctors have examined my penis on multiple occasions and it seems like your explanation for my trauma implies that I should be just as traumatized by the touching of the penis as I would with circumcision.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
But, Honey, you have given no proof of your argument other than your own subjective (not objective) experience. You say human experience is necessarily subjective, but have given no objective proof that this is so, and you dodge my question of why two ppl would want to seek the truth about anything together when, as you assert, not as an argument, but as an axiom, that there is nothing they have in common other than their separate unique individual experiences...which might, or might not (as ours hasn’t come together) mesh, depending on chance.
You seem to me to have this attitude: “This is my experience as a human being; I would like for someone to validate it. That would make me feel as though I am not alone in the world”...but all those who may have sympathized with you are mute, and the only one who has stuck with you is me, I, who profoundly disagree with you.
And I tell you now: I will stick with you to the bitter (or sweetest) end. As long as you respond to me, so will I to you, and I will never give up in attempting to show you the weaknesses of your arguments...in case that somehow benefit you, and your responses somehow benefit me.
What do you mean by common nature in this context? I thought we were understanding common nature in discussion as just a short way of saying common human nature regarding how we experience physical pain. You seem to be talking about common mathematical nature and common physical nature now so I’m a bit confused. I’m not rejecting the viewpoint that there are some kinds of common natures. Rather, I’m just stating that there could be very radical differences in how human beings experience pain.
Quoting Todd Martin
I have made an additional argument earlier actually. I talked about the phantom limb syndrome and how it is difficult to explain why some individuals experience pain that feels like physical pain and happens to be localized in a limb that isn’t really there because it was amputated from that person. This phenomenon is certainly not universal among all amputees. So, why do some amputees have it or others don’t? Another challenge that could be posed by the viewpoint that people have a pretty common experience of physical pain is the phenomenon of “blue balls”. This is where a man reports experiencing testicular pain after having his sexual or masturbatory session interrupted and the pain gets alleviated once the man finally gets to orgasm. Though, I’ve actually had blue balls where the pain got worse after I orgasmed so it does seem to feel differently for me than it feels for other men. The thing about blue balls though is that there isn’t a good physiological explanation for it. Some skeptics of blue balls say that blue balls is just disappointment and it is an emotional pain actually. I think a better explanation for blue balls is that it is a form of culturally engrained physical pain. It is physical pain because it is localized in the testes as men who have experienced it have reported it and it has the same sort of felt quality as physical pain. Nonetheless, I think being taught a narrative that blue balls exists can actually make the physical pain exist through the placebo effect. Though, the pain can still be considered context independent as it could be experienced regardless if you are with a sexual partner that stopped the sexual activity or you had your masturbation session interrupted.
Lastly, I want to point out that it’s just difficult to talk about the intensity of pain without feeling that pain itself. The intensity of a given pain is subjective but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t objective facts about our subjective experience of pain. We just don’t have any reliable way of accessing those objective facts and testimonial evidence seems to be the strongest type of evidence here.
Quoting Todd Martin
That sounds awesome to me. I rarely get to have really long and epic discussions on this forum.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist You then say,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
There are two elements involved here: the harmful capacity of a physical object, like a door (and you admit that solid wood is more formidable, in a mere physical sense, than even a “big muscular guy”), and the hurtful intent of a violent person, and your explanation as to why the latter is to be feared more than the former is because his intention leads to greater “efficiency” at hurting you, and you experience greater pain because, since he intends to hurt you, he is more efficient than a motiveless door would be at inflicting pain.
But this, I assume, doesn’t apply to your circumcisor, for he, I presume, had no intention of hurting you. You said, of your circumcision, that it was as traumatic as your beating, yet the two men had inherently different motives, so how do you reconcile your theory of intentionally inflicted pain with that? Or do you think your circumcisor was sadistic?
Since you have admitted the element of intention into our discussion about the trauma of pain, let me give you some examples of that sort of trauma that involved no physical pain whatsoever...yet long-lasting trauma...
You and your long-time best friend, one to whom you have cleaved throughout many years enjoying together the joys and adversities of two lives lived inseparably, get caught up in a heated argument, over something probably forgettable and trivial, and he takes a swing at you and misses: had he connected, you might have suffered a black eye or broken nose, etc; since he didn’t, is the pain to your soul any less because of that? Will you just forget that your best friend tried to clock you, because he caused you no intense physical pain?
Your wife, whom you love and adore, serves you your customary evening beverage, and at the first taste you detect something different and wrong, so you surreptitiously save it and take it to a chemistry lab, only to have it come back positive for antifreeze. Are you heartened that you did not drink down the draught? Of course you are! But is the trauma any less because you didn’t?
There can be intense pain that wasn’t intentionally brought about and some of those unintentional pains can be more intense than most intentional pains. The only reason why I brought up intentionality is to suggest that the hardness of the door and the man isn’t the only singular variable to consider than trying to predict how intense a pain is going to be.
Quoting Todd Martin
I never said that trauma can only come about from physical pain. Of course, people can and do get traumatized from things that don’t cause physical pain. I was just arguing that I was traumatized only by physical pain in the incidents in my life that we were discussing and not by something else. Also, I want to point out that I have actually been traumatized by things other than physical pain in other incidents that I haven’t mentioned but I was traumatized more by physical pain in my life.
#comment-508491" class="quote-link">Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Remember saying that? Now let me remind you of what you initially said, the statement I was responding to:
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Notice that, initially, you didn’t say “...universalism about PAIN...”, but rather, “ANY SORT of universalism about HUMAN NATURE, and the ways humans experience THINGS to be highly implausible, as I think people just experience the WORLD in vastly different ways”. Now, had I said that, bright man as you obviously are, wouldn’t you have jumped all over it, accusing me of having made a generalization that I then tried to make look like a statement about something very specific?
I think your initial statement, that you believe there is no universal human nature or experience in anything, is the one you truly believe, or at least want to believe; and I think you backtracked from it and pretended you were only talking about pain when confronted with the absurdity of your belief.
So which do you assert now? that you were talking about all human experience, or only the experience of physical pain?
The way that humans experience pain is one aspect of human nature. By the phrase “the way that humans experience things”, I was talking about private emotional experiences. I suppose you could say that human beings have some kinds of common perceptions but I was talking purely about psychological human nature. I’m sorry for the confusion.
Also, please don’t accuse me of things especially before even asking some clarification questions that might clear up the confusion. I’m sorry that you sometimes get the wrong message from my choice of words but that’s a normal part of any philosophical conversation. Words can have multiple meanings when used in different contexts and this is especially true with more complex concepts like “human nature” which normally refer to universal psychological human traits when used colloquially(hence, my use of the term) but you might have someone that thinks that human nature is like akin to how all humans have certain kinds of body parts or that all humans perceive the shape of an object very similarly. Either way, it’s really bad manners to accuse the person that you are speaking to of being dishonest in any way. If you really think that I’m dishonest then you should stop talking to me. Why would you talk to someone that you really thought was dishonest? Also, why would you bother telling me that I’m being dishonest? Doesn’t the very definition of dishonesty require someone to know that they are not being truthful? If that’s the case, then why would tell the person something that they would already know? It just seems to me like you just want to be insulting because I don’t see how your accusations add anything to the discussion at all even if they were hypothetically true.
Also, I really want to know your thoughts about the evidence that I have provided for there being radically different ways that people experience pain like the evidence regarding the phantom limb symptom and the blue balls symptom. You asked me to give you the evidence for my position but now you seem to be bringing up lots of things that do not even pertain to the discussion that we were having.
Nevertheless, in your description of my accusation, you seem to me to have asked a quite philosophical question: does the dishonest person necessarily know he is being dishonest? You answered it in the affirmative, as definition; but it gave me pause, and I wonder to myself if there are any examples of dishonest ppl who don’t realize they are being dishonest...
I was once at my mama’s house when the phone rang. It was her friend Shelby. I answered it, and Shelby asked , “is your mom there?” to which I replied, “yes”, and handed the phone to Mama and said, “it’s Shelby”, but she refused it, and whispered, “tell her I’m in the shower”; so, feeling uncomfortable that I must tell a lie, but yielding to my mama’s command in her own house, I told Shelby that Mama was in the shower...
...a couple minutes later, having hung up with Shelby, I went looking for Mama: “Mama, where are you?” I called. “In here!” came her reply. Following her voice, I entered the master-bathroom to find Mama: she stood, fully clothed (thank God), inside the shower stall!
Now, obviously, Mama had been dishonest; but did she realize it? Had she realized it, would she have ever retreated to the shower stall? She thought by doing so she would be telling the truth, and she DID tell the literal truth. But, clearly, the LITERAL truth is not THE TRUTH, a thing my mama didn’t understand or appreciate.
Segue to your evidence of blue-balls and phantom limbs: yes, ppl obviously experience physical pain in very individual ways...but is this the whole truth about pain? Is the traumatic pain you suffered as a “child” being slammed to the ground over and over by a “grown adult” not similar to how my mother was “in the shower” when Shelby called?
Finally, I would like you to, if you are willing, tell me about the other things you have been traumatized by other than physical pain in other incidences that you haven’t mentioned.
I don’t think that your mom was dishonest. She really was in the shower and so what she said wasn’t false. Also, I think genuine dishonesty causes most people to have an emotional reaction or hesitation in the process of telling the dishonest thing. This is why lie detector test often work(though not always.). Liars fail lie detector tests because they know that they are being dishonest and that causes them to breathe heavy and their heart rate to increase.
Quoting Todd Martin
No I don’t think that it’s the whole truth about pain, but I think it’s the most relevant evidence to consider. This evidence seems to suggest that we shouldn’t really be too surprised when someone reports experiencing pain in ways that are very counterintuitive to other people.
Quoting Todd Martin
I don’t think it’s similar at all. Though, it’s hard for me to give you a convincing reason for why I think that way because it just comes down to speculation either way. I spend more time thinking about the physical pain of my physical abuse so I tend to see that as the most likely explanation for my trauma. Though, in a way, it’s really hard to know for sure what causes any given instance of trauma or even if trauma has a cause at all. It’s not like we can observe trauma with some kind of a scientific instrument like a microscope or a telescope. Psychological explanations always lack that rigor that might be present in a hard science like Physics and Chemistry. It seems that the best evidence comes from within the person who experiences the trauma but even that evidence falls short of the rigor that real scientific evidence has. Unfortunately, hard science and it’s rigorous methods is useless for anything relating to the mind and private experience.
You claim that my mom was not dishonest, because she really was in the shower, and therefore what she said, “I’m in the shower”, was not false, and so you consider this one bald fact sufficient to prove her honesty. But there are other facts implicit to this scenario that have greater weight when considering her honesty or dishonesty. One of these is that she obviously, for some reason (it happened too long ago for me to remember now) did not wish to speak to her friend. How do we know this? Because she refused the phone when I handed it to her.
Another is that she didn’t want to hurt Shelby’s feelings. How do we know this? Because, had she accepted the call, and been honest, she would have told her she didn’t want to speak with her, which, obviously, would have hurt her feelings, Shelby being her friend. Of course, she could have accepted the call, and said to her something like, “I can’t talk right now Shelby, I’ve got to run to the store before it closes”, or, “...my cake is getting over-done if I don’t pull it out of the oven”, or, “...I’m already way late to meet Aunt Julie. Can I call you back later?”
But it takes quick thinking to realize that it’s almost time for the store to close, and Shelby could have gone there to see if Mama really went; or might have said, “Go ahead and get your cake out, I’ll wait”; or called Julie later and asked her where she and my mama went that day, etc...but ppl generally do not know how plausible or implausible it is that someone is taking a shower, and once you begin talking to someone, they can ask some uncomfortable questions...especially if you initiated the conversation with a lie.
Notice I said “taking” a shower, not “in the” shower: the genius of Mama’s plot was in the difference b/w taking a shower and being in one. If she had said, “tell her I’m taking a shower”, then I would have discovered Mama naked under a shower of water, soaping it up and all. As it was, since she said “in” the shower, and “shower” stand in for “shower-stall”, all she had to do was walk in fully clothed and BE there, no water flowing, in order to orchestrate her air-tight alibi.
My mama did not realize that sometimes it is best to be dishonest. Clearly, it was best that she tell a lie and deceive her friend in order to not hurt her feelings. But Mama wanted more than she deserved: she wanted to both not hurt her friend’s feelings and also not be dishonest...and she didn’t fool me, but she fooled her friend, herself, and ultra-literalists like you, who believe that the letter of the truth is it’s spirit.
So, O Hedomenos, where in my analysis have I gone astray? Is there anything I said about it that was not implicit in my story? Have I misrepresented anything? Do you still believe that the literal truth is the whole truth? Would you like me to give further examples as evidence that it isn’t?
I think you believe I can do so...but I don’t believe you will be persuaded: for I think you have decided that the way you see the world is the way it really is...or, at least, the way you think it ought to be. I don’t think you believe that anyone could convince you that the way you see the world is wrong, and you are smart enough to propose objection to anyone who might offer objection to it, by dissimulation.
...I see you as a sad young man who doesn’t realize he is sad; who has lacked the human connections in his life that would tie him to other ppl, that would make him realize that he might live for someone other than himself; that might give his life some significance other than coziness, comfortableness, and living on Raman Noodles and bland turkey sandwiches that he claims are more hedonistic than the cuisine of ancient emperors.
That’s my honest opinion, O Hedomenos. If I haven’t offended you, please answer the question whose answer I most looked forward to: what were the traumatic experiences of your life that didn’t involve physical pain?
Well, I think that you can avoid being dishonest while still withholding information from others. A person doesn’t have to tell you everything that you need to know in order to remain honest.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, being careful with words could make a subtle difference between something being x and something not being x. At least that’s just my current intuition on this topic.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I think we just have different intuitions about the nature of dishonesty. It’s kinda hard to resolve those differences in very basic intuitions. Though, I kinda feel like you are confusing dishonesty with a lack of perfect honesty. It seems to me that one can avoid being dishonest without mentioning every piece of information to someone else. For example, I used to date a 40 year old woman when I was 20. My mom wouldn’t approve of that sort of thing. I used to mess around with this woman in the back of my car at the local library(we kept all our clothes on so it wasn’t as risky as it sounds.). Whenever my mom asked me where I was at, I told her I was at the library. Do you think I was lying to my mom just because I failed to mention my 40 year old girlfriend? I just find it unusual to think that I must tell someone every one of my secrets that may pertain to their question in some manner just to maintain honesty. At the same time, I think it’s also kinda silly that we would think that telling lies as a means of withholding information that the person to whom we lie doesn’t really deserve to know in the first place is bad in any way.
Quoting Todd Martin
I never said that the literal truth was the whole truth. I thought we were having a disagreement about the literal truth of dishonesty. Of course, there are multiple metaphorical ways of understanding of dishonesty. For example, I can say something silly like “Sarah is being dishonest about not wanting to cheat on her boyfriend with her handsome physical trainer Tom because her vagina is soaking wet when he helps her stretch.” If her boyfriend asks her if she wants to have sex with Tom, it wouldn’t necessarily be dishonest for her to say no because she isn’t planning to have sex with Tom and her choosing to leave out details about the wetness of her vagina when Tom helped her stretch doesn’t really constitute dishonesty. It’s just not wanting to mention certain private information.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes, that would be nice.
Quoting Todd Martin
No, because I’m tired of you trying to psychoanalyze me. I find it very rude and disrespectful. Please treat me like I’m your equal philosophical conversation partner and not like I’m your patient and you’re my therapist. I find psychoanalysis to be very arrogant, rude, and condescending. To demonstrate why I think this way about psychoanalysis, I want to give you a taste of your own medicine. I’m going to be rude for once and psychoanalyze you so that you know how it feels to be treated in the manner in which you are treating me. So, here it goes......
The hypocritical thing about you is that you accuse me of denying that the cause of my trauma is not related to physical pain but in reality you just want to believe that yourself because you can’t emotionally accept that there may be people like me who can’t be explained by your rigid universalist worldview about human nature. You want to believe that everyone is like you deep inside and you want to believe that everyone who says that they aren’t like you is just a “sad person” or has some kind of mental illness.
You have a choice to make: you can either realize that your understanding of human psychology is wrong or you can conveniently claim that any testimonial evidence against your views on human psychology is predicated on self-deception or misunderstanding about the cause of one’s own trauma. Of course, you are going to make the convenient claim of arguing that anyone who contradicts your false understanding of human nature is wrong about their trauma. This is because it’s difficult for you to admit that you are wrong and so you feel like you have to explain away the trauma of others that does not affirm to your worldview. By doing this, you are unfortunately doing exactly what you accuse me of doing; you are confabulating a narrative about me confabulating a narrative about my trauma to protect your precious theory about human psychology.
As you can see, I can be a psychoanalyzing asshole too if you want me to be one but I hold myself to higher standards and I prefer to talk about ideas and not the motivations of my interlocutor in holding those ideas. So, our discussion can either be a complete shit show where we just accuse each other of lying to ourselves or we can just have a nice calm discussion about the relevant ideas and not be rude or condescending to each other. I think the latter option is much better.
Quoting Todd Martin
So, when you say,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
What if we were to substitute, in the above quote, “not telling the whole truth” for “dishonesty”, and “telling the whole truth” for “perfect honesty”? What we would have is, “I kinda feel like you are confusing not telling the whole truth with a lack of telling the whole truth”, which is a tautology, isn’t it? This means that, in your estimation, honesty is not equivalent to “telling the whole truth”, whereas, in mine, it is. For example, when you told your mama you were at the library, you believed you were not being perfectly honest, but justifiably so ( and I agree with you), but I think you were being justifiably dishonest.
Our difference of opinion is, therefore, not due to different intuitions, but rather definitions: I identify honesty with the telling of the “whole” truth, while you identify it with what I would call telling the “convenient” truth. Therefore, my gripe with Mama is not that she told Shelby she was in the shower, for I think she ought to have lied to her in order not to offend her. But you defend her as having not been dishonest, because she told the literal truth, and you defend your statement to your own mama, that you were at the library, on the grounds, not that it was the literal truth, but because,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Which is it, O Hedomenos: were you honest in your response to your mom because you were literally “at the library”? or were you honest because,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist?
And, btw, I think you meant to say “...that you WANT to know...”, for, if you withhold information from someone they NEED to know, that becomes morally problematic, doesn’t it?
I hope I have straightened out our dialogue in a more philosophical path, more in the direction you wish it to head. I didn’t want to respond to the other things you said for fear of distracting you from our intellectual discussion, but I will add this one tidbit: you and I share an apparent affinity with older women. I have had several relationships with different women throughout my life, and most of them have been older than me, a few much older: my current girlfriend is almost 30 yrs older than I am, and I have been with her more than eight years.
I want to elaborate a little more about my views on honesty and dishonesty. My use of the phrase “perfect honesty” was a poor choice of words that I wish I could take back. I meant to describe what I was talking about as “excessive honesty” instead. For example, we sometimes talk about someone being too honest when they constantly share information that they don’t really need to share with others. For example, suppose that someone was asked a simple question about what she likes to do for fun. Suppose, that this person responds by talking about how she spends roughly 20% of her free time watching pornography and maybe 30% of her free time watching Alex Jones conspiracy videos and she also likes to kill stray cats on a rare occasion. She also mentions some uncontroversial hobbies like playing chess, hiking, and watching tv. My point was that she seems to not be required to talk about every one of her controversial hobbies just to avoid answering the question dishonestly. Rather, she seems to be excessively honest in her response.
Every time someone asks you a question, you can pretty much always provide more private information than the information that you decide to provide. The question is how much information must you give in order to avoid being dishonest. You might say that you think your mom was being dishonest because she would have told the literal lie if she couldn’t figure out a way to make her statement true. I don’t think that criteria suffices for dishonesty either though. Suppose that a person gets asked the question about what they like to do for fun and they refuse to mention a particular hobby that they might find embarrassing or maybe a hobby that might be controversial and reveal too much information about them. They may be willing to be dishonest in order to avoid revealing their engagement with that hobby to others but it strikes me as highly unusual to claim that they are being dishonest for simply failing to mention that hobby. My question to you is would you call failing to mention a hobby after being asked about hobbies dishonesty. If your not willing to call that dishonesty then what makes that case different from my case involving telling my mom I was at the library and the case involving your mom and Sally?
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, the “literal” definition of dishonesty is usually understood as telling false information when you know that the information is false. It’s doesn’t extent to a refusal to tell true information. So, that’s my understanding of dishonesty.
Quoting Todd Martin
Yes, I meant to use the word want. I knew I shouldn’t have tried writing a philosophical response after having like 3 beers worth of alcohol lol. I didn’t realize how sloppy the use of language in my last response was.
Quoting Todd Martin
Thank you, I really appreciate that. The conversation we are having about the nature of honesty is very interesting and productive I think.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, I’m glad we have something in common. We seem to be polar opposites in almost every other regard. Dang, I’m really surprised that your girlfriend is 30 years older than you. I figured you were in your 50s so I guess she’s either in her late 70s or early 80s. That’s older than my grandma.
#comment-510887" class="quote-link">Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I cannot agree with this. Obvious examples appear before my mind: if a stranger asks you whether your dog is friendly and you tell him, “Well, he licks my face first thing when I come home from work, and he loves my wife and kids”, and he reaches down to pet the loving beast and gets his hand bitten, were you not dishonest by failing to reveal to him that your dog hates strangers?
But what if you didn’t know he hates strangers? What if this is the first person he’s ever bitten? You wouldn’t know that until he bit someone. In that case, you were not being dishonest. So, in this scenario, your honesty or dishonesty depends upon your knowledge.
Now let’s consider the telling of “true information”, as opposed to withholding it. A good example is you telling your mom you were “at the library”... but this was not “the whole truth”. The truth was you were having an affair with a woman old enough to be your mother, a thing scandalous in her eyes, but not in yours, nor in the law’s. She was trying to meddle in your business unjustly, for, at 20 years of age, you were of majority, were no longer under your parents’ control, and had the right to do whatever you pleased, so you told a literal truth that would mislead her into thinking you were reading a novel rather than living one...
...and you claimed you were not being dishonest, not because you were actually at the library, but because you weren’t required to tell everything you knew in order to remain honest.
Now let’s consider this scenario: your mom calls you and asks where you are and, instead of answering, “I’m at the library”, you instead answer, “Why are you asking me that question, Mama? Do you think I would frequent a disreputable establishment, as well as you raised me to discern wholesome from unwholesome places? Do you fear I am heading down the road to perfidy despite the excellent upbringing you gave me to avoid it?” Do you think this answer would have been more or less honest than the one you actually gave?
It depends on whether you believe your mama actually raised you that way. But if you don’t think she did, but you think she believes she did...
...it gets really messy and complicated real quick, O Hedomenos: honesty seems to depend not only on the integrity of the one displaying it, but also on the one to whom it is displayed. In an ideal world, where all are honorable and just, it would be simple: just tell the whole truth. But because we are all imperfect we must hide things from one another, tell lies that look like truths, dissimulate and prevaricate, sometimes tell the honest truth when that is hurtful...
...about ten years ago or so I became alienated from my family over a squabble that developed over my care for our parents. My sister and I have since then become reconciled, but not me and my older brother, with whom she has maintained a relationship. She told me recently that he told her he wouldn’t have ever been attracted to me as a friend; that his only affinity with me was due to the fact that we were brothers...
...now, I don’t doubt that what she said is true, but I wonder: should she have told me that? aren’t siblings tied by the bond of family only, not by friendship? After all, my older brother would not call his wife of 50 years his “friend”, for they don’t get along that well. But because he lives with her he must remain amicable...
...and because he doesn’t share a household with me, he can, though we are brothers, reject me because we can’t be friends.
Consider this scenario: a certain man forbids his son to go to the carnival, which has set up in town for the weekend, because he fears he will be seduced by certain unsavory side-shows, so the boy goes downtown instead that Friday evening. While walking along Main St. he witnesses a man snatch an old lady’s purse and take off running, so he chases him...
They run for a considerable distance, and the boy is gaining on the thief until he suddenly realizes they have entered the carnival grounds, and hesitates, remembering his dad’s injunction, and in that moment of uncertainty the purse-snatcher disappears among the myriad of booths and hawksters and becomes concealed by the thick press of ppl. Stricken by a sense of guilt, his efforts in vain, the boy retreats home.
When he enters the house he finds his dad sitting in his recliner, watching tv, and says, “Daddy, you won’t believe what happened tonight!” His dad turns off the tv, takes a hard look at the boy, and asks, “Have you been to the carnival, where I told you not to go?”...
What should his reply be? It depends: if he knows his dad to be a reasonable man, and a just enforcer of his own edicts, he might reply, “Yes daddy, I went to the carnival, but not intentionally”, knowing the man would be willing to hear his son out, and approve of his behavior after hearing the whole story...
If instead he knows him to be a harsh punisher, one not known to hear you out, someone who tends only to see the literal truth and nothing else, then he might lie; might say, trembling, “No, I didn’t go to the carnival”, hoping no one who knew him and saw him there might report back to his dad. If his dad then asked, “Well, what happened then?” he might reply that he saw a man snatch a lady’s purse on Main Street and took chase, only to loose track of him...in the woods...
But we’re not through with a thorough analysis of this situation: we must inquire into the boy’s integrity. Suppose he have a reputation for deceit? Then it’s like the boy who cried “Wolf!” It’s hard to believe him even though it’s true. Suppose he had sneaked off to the carnival the year before and been involved in some scandalous side-show incident that compromised his family’s integrity in the eyes of the community? In that case his dad might justly doubt the veracity of his son’s story. Everything depends, in this scenario, on the reputations and characters of the ppl involved, not just on what actually happened.
Finally, in your story about being at the library, the same sort of things apply: does a mom have the right to ask her son where he is? It might be an “innocent” question, meaning, as they say, she has no “dog in the fight”, that is, she’s just curious, unsuspecting. Sometimes we misinterpret such innocent questions to be the beginning of an interrogation, and we always so misinterpret because we feel some guilt about our behavior...
...on the other hand, your mom might have been concerned about the wholesomeness of what you were up to, in which case the question, which I have already raised, occurs of whether she has right, because at 20 years of age you had reached majority, to inquire into that...
...and much depends upon whether you were still living at her house at the time. Even though you were at the library when the affair took place, nevertheless one may reasonably assume that what happens at the local library—unlike what happens in Vegas—might come back home to haunt Mom one day. If you weren’t living at home then, nevertheless: if you were close by, maybe next door even, maybe just in the community where you were raised, and your behavior might cast aspersions on her family and reputation, does she have the right to inquire, because of those facts, into your whereabouts and activities?
Just some thoughts and scenarios for you to consider, O Hedomenos. Btw, I drink more than twice the number of beers you do, and my girlfriend turns 88 later this year; and she’s a wonderful girlfriend...in every way imaginable.
I agree with you that the answer that you gave here is more honest than the answer that I gave but I don’t think that this necessarily implies that my answer was dishonest. In fact, it seems that it could reasonably be argued that the answer that you have provided doesn’t tell the whole truth either because it isn’t the most truthful answer that you could possibly give. It would be even more honest of me to say that I’m going to the library to mess around with my 40 year girlfriend. Though, I don’t think even this would be the most honest answer. It would be even more honest of me to say that I’m going to mess around with my 40 year old girlfriend who still lives with her mom. After all, my mom might also be interested to learn about that. It seems to me like we can pretty much always give a more honest answer than the answer that we give to any question.
I think that honesty is not necessarily an antonym of dishonesty. Honesty is mostly about telling the truth as you understand it. I also think this provides a good explanation of why most people wouldn’t think it makes sense to describe a person that can’t communicate such as a comatose person as an honest person. You have to share true information with others in order to have honesty. Though, a lack of honesty doesn’t necessarily imply dishonesty in my humble opinion.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I would argue that honesty is not just telling the truth, but acting, in any way, consonant with it. You can do certain things (or fail to do them), take certain actions that are honest or dishonest, without ever uttering a word.
For example, if your mom asks you, as she’s leaving the house, to sweep the floors, and while she’s gone you sweep all the dirt under the rugs, you have already been dishonest without ever saying, “I swept the floors”. Indeed, she would have no reason to ask you whether you swept them: she can see whether they are clean or not...unless she fears you may have acted dishonestly. In which case she might suspect you might have swept the dirt under the rugs, and therefore surreptitiously check underneath them.
On the other hand, if you collect the dirt you have swept from the floors and throw it in the trash, then you have acted honestly... without saying a word.
Sometimes someone tries to correct an earlier dishonest action by performing an honest one. Consider the man who steals his neighbor’s possession one day, then, after a bout of bad conscience later that night, surreptitiously places it at his doorstep, and steals away unseen, the next morning. What are we to think of him? Did he correct his dishonesty by performing that apparently honest act? or was confession to his neighbor of the transgression necessary, in addition, for complete absolution from the theft? In other words, was it enough for him to have returned the pilfered property, or did he need to let his neighbor know that it was HE who stole it?
It all depends, O Hedomenos. If he believes his neighbor to be a forgiving sort, then he might confess to him; if, on the other hand, he knows him to be unforgiving, then he would be inclined to hide the fact that it was he who stole and then returned his property. In this case, the thief becomes the honest man, and the one stolen from becomes the dishonest one: dishonest, because he was unforgiving...
But then one might argue that a thief is subject to his victim’s judgement: he might expect forgiveness from God or his conscience, but, having confessed to his crime, he ought to expect whatever punishment might be meted out by his victim.
But I cannot agree with that statement of your’s, O Hedomenos: surely dishonesty is the antonym, that is, the opposite, of honesty. Why, it is so by definition, My Child, is it not?
I agree that this actually would be a case of dishonesty but I don’t think this case is quite analogous to the Sally case or my library case. I think this case does give us reason to modify the definition of dishonesty that I initially given but that was just meant to be a quick definition to begin with. The reason why it would be dishonest for me to tell my mom I swept the floor in this case is because I understood what my mom meant by the phrase “swept the floor”. By “swept the floor”, she meant completed the chore to a reasonable standard. If I “swept the floor” by some other sense then this doesn’t mean I swept the floor by her definition of the phrase. But, the case involving Sally isn’t like that it seems. Sally didn’t ask your mom if she was in the shower. Rather, she just stated that she was in the shower. Though, your mom might have been dishonest if she said that she couldn’t talk because she was in the shower. Similarly, when my mom asked if I was at the library, she was just asking about my location and so I don’t think it would be dishonest not to mention other things that she didn’t ask about.
Quoting Todd Martin
The dictionary might call it an antonym but it’s worth noting that the writers of the dictionary often just assume that the prefix “dis” in front of the word automatically implies that the word is the antonym of the root word. Most philosophers don’t understand the meaning of words just purely on grammar though. Also, these grammatical rules don’t apply in most other languages as I know these sorts of prefixes do not exist in the Russian language. Given this, we can’t necessarily make assumptions about the “antonymity relationship” between 2 words from grammar alone.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
That is THE question, O Hedomenos! The “just” you inserted in the above statement signifies that your mom was simply curious where you were, had no ulterior motive. Doesn’t motive mean everything when it comes to human actions either verbal or physical?
But when we ask someone where they are, isn’t it true that there is always SOME or other motive or reason, however innocent it may be? Otherwise, why would we ask it? Sometimes we ask someone where they are when we already know the answer. Let me offer you some examples to illustrate some of the many possibilities...
I call “where are you?” to a man whom I seek, but who is trying to hide from me; but I know where he is, because I see his shadow cast upon the ground. My motive in this case is to make him believe I don’t know where he is...
I’m talking to someone on the phone and I ask them where they are, because I hear certain noises in the background that are either strange or familiar, and, in the former case, my curiosity is aroused because either I am alarmed—maybe worried about their safety, or just mystified— and in the latter, because I want them to confirm or deny my assumption about their location.
In the above examples, the motive for the question was based on sensory data; but, more often, it is based on a suspicion, or a prejudice, or a fear in the soul of the one asking it about things that can only be discerned by a vigilant soul...
When the father of the boy who inadvertently “went” to the carnival asked him whether he had gone there, he did so out of suspicion based on either fear or knowledge of the boy’s character—unless, perhaps, he smelled popcorn or cotton-candy on the child...
When your mom asked where you were when you were fooling around with the woman at the library, what was her motive? Yes: on the face of it, she was just asking about your location; but, as I’ve pointed out before, there is a question about the right she had to inquire about your location, and you admitted that she didn’t have that right, for you said it would have been more honest of you to question it.
So much depends on the details, O Hedomenos, of which you have supplied the barest information. When you got that call from your mom, were you in the midst of your sexual adventure, and had to interrupt it in order to take the call? After you had taken the call, did you put your finger to your lips to let your lover know to be quiet, while you talked to your mother?
You know your mom a lot better than we do: When she asked where you were, did you immediately think, “Mom suspects I’m up to no good”, or did you think rather, “Mom’s just concerned about my well-being, as any mom would be”?
Which is it, O Hedomenos? Doesn’t the honesty of the answer you gave, that you were at the library, depend upon this question?
I think that my mom’s motive was either that of curiosity or that of concern for my welfare. She didn’t ask me this question over the phone. Rather, she would ask me this question any time I’m about to leave to go somewhere or after I returned from the library if she wasn’t home when I left. Of course, it’s always possible that she might have been concerned about me being up to no good but I had no good reason to think that was definitely her motivation. It’s not as obvious as determining that if someone asks you to sweep the floor that they want you to perform that chore properly as that’s usually just seen as a given.
Nonetheless, I still think it would be more honest for me to tell her about my girlfriend because I think sharing secrets increases one’s level of honesty. My refusal to share secrets isn’t dishonest though. It’s kinda how it’s usually considered really honest of someone to share their personal desires and insecurities with others but one is not being dishonest by refusing to share those things with others.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I assume you mean that, when you tell someone secrets, that they get the impression you can be generally trusted to tell the truth, since our secrets are the last things we tell; after all, how else did they become secret?
But whether you should tell your mom about your girlfriend depends on several things, doesn’t it? What if it would upset her? Surely you wouldn’t want that to happen just because of some abstract ideal of an “increased level of honesty” b/w you two? But maybe, though it would upset her, by telling her, you would be sending the subtle message that this is YOUR life, and you’re gonna live it the way you want to, regardless of what she wants.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
And “concern for your welfare” might extend to concern for the sort of women you might be getting involved with? As far as curiosity goes, I attempted to argue in my previous post that no one is just curious: there is always a motive, however subtle or hidden, for one asking or exploring.
Would a mother who had complete trust in her child ever even think to ask him either where he has been or where he’s going?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I have a question for you, O Hedomenos: who is the one with whom we are willing to share our personal (secret?) desires and insecurities? What is his name, or what do we call him? For it is surely not with just anyone that we are willing to share such things.
But, as you pointed out in a previous post, there are some who confess all to anyone, who tell everything “in quaslibet aures” (to whomever will listen). Ironically, we cannot trust such a person to be our friend, despite his perfect honesty, because we find that he dishonors our friendship by telling everyone the things he should only confess to us.
I agree that telling secrets is often quite bad and I believe that people shouldn’t be excessively honest. As you have mentioned earlier, just because a particular word has a positive connotation doesn’t necessarily mean that it is always positive. My notion of honesty is actually an Aristotelian one where Aristotle argued that people should be fairly honest and not tell lies but they should not be excessively honest and they should at least keep secrets about their friends.
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, the key word here is “might”. Can I reasonably be expected to immediately interpret my mom’s possibly complex motive when she’s asking me a quick question about my location. The truth is that I hadn’t thought about her motive and I just answer the question immediately. If she was interested to know what I was doing then she would have been more clear in asking that question instead. I don’t think that mind reading abilities are a reasonable requirement for avoiding dishonesty.
Quoting Todd Martin
I would disagree. I sometimes just ask my mom where she’s going out of curiosity too it seems. It seems that people just like to know things about others sometimes.
Quoting Todd Martin
Are you willing to answer it or not?
I don’t understand the question or how it pertains to our discussion.
With whom are we willing to share the secrets about our delinquent accounts? Isn’t it with our financial planner? And aren’t we most willing to divulge the secrets of our pet’s misbehavior with its trainer?
And what about the secrets of our soul? Don’t we go to our priest and confess, if we’re Catholic, or go to a therapist, if we’re secular?
But let me ask you, O Hedomenos: with whom would you be willing to share your innermost secrets? Is there someone in your life that you trust that much? Wouldn’t anyone long to have such a one? If anyone would want to have such a person in their lives, wouldn’t there be a general term we use to describe him, to characterize him (or her)?
Well, there’s some secrets that I have that I wouldn’t want to share with anyone. Simply because it wouldn’t have conversational value and there’s no other reason to share it.
Quoting Todd Martin
I wouldn’t share my secrets with anyone who has any power to produce negative outcomes in my life if they knew a particular secret of mine. So, I have a tendency to share the least about myself with people that I’m closest to.
Quoting Todd Martin
I don’t think everyone wants to have a person like that. I personally don’t see the value in sharing secrets for their own sake. I also don’t know of any term to refer to a person that you would share secrets with.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
By “for their own sake” I suppose you mean “just because they are secrets”. The problem with that though is that they are secrets because you are hiding them for some reason.
Of the things that we hide there are, I think, two different sorts: the general things all ppl routinely hide from each other because they are low and what we share with mere beasts, and the more particular things that a person hides because he is ashamed of them. An example of the former is defecation and it’s clean-up: who would want to hear someone give his particular details of this universal phenomenon? These are the sorts of things I assume you meant when you said,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
An example of the latter I draw from an hypothetical scenario you gave in an earlier post of the loose-lipped girl whose hobby was killing stray cats. Most anyone else (ie, a normal person) would be ashamed of such behavior and not confess it, certainly not to just anyone, because of this:
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
For, if someone knows you kill animals for fun, they might report you to the SPCA.
But what if you have someone close to you that you feel you can confide in about such shameful things without fear of condemnation? Yet you lack such a person in your life, O Hedomenos, for, as you confess,
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Unlike most everyone else (maybe it’s different now in this day and age: maybe we have become so isolated that our closest connections are with anonymous ppl on the internet), you would rather confess your secrets to those you are furthest from.
But what does being close to someone mean if you hold something far away from them? If you say,”I am very close with my” mom, or sister or brother or best friend, but withhold secrets that would enable them to understand the character of your soul in its fullness, how close can you be? How can you be close to someone who knows the least about you?
I would say that you are close to people that you care about the most and would be willing to prioritize their interests over the interests of other people. This kind of closeness doesn’t seem to require to share secrets. In fact, you may wish to not share some of your secrets because you care about them and you don’t want to upset them. You also don’t want to share secrets with them because preserving a relationship with them matters to you.
I assume you are speaking of family and friends, of co-workers , of ppl who you personally know and meet with/talk to on a regular basis, like the guy who sells you the morning paper from his stand, your barber, old high school buddies...maybe the inhabitants of the nursing home you work at or visit, maybe the inmates of a prison, etc.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I totally agree. We may care very much about the welfare of these sorts of ppl, and by telling them our innermost secrets we may only succeed in upsetting them or driving them away. But what about YOU, O Hedomenos: you know your own deepest secrets, yet you cannot escape your own self; so you must do one of a few things: you must suppress the memory of your shameful thoughts or actions deep enough that they barely ever touch your consciousness (and conscience); or you must explain them to yourself (and, perhaps, to others) in a light that makes them look less reprehensible...
...My father-in-law was a distinguished professor at a major university; he was also rather good-looking, and cheated on his wife enough that they divorced. But he had no real qualms about his behavior, because he used a discovery of animal-behavioralism to explain his infidelity: to sum it up in crude terms, if baboons do it, then so do men;
or, you do neither of these, and your shameful memories regularly haunt you throughout your life, arising again and again to torment you on an almost daily basis.
Of these three sorts of ppl, 1) the suppressor, 2) the prevaricator or 3) the sufferer, which do you think you and me are? I have an idea about you, having gotten a taste of your soul through this dialogue, but I won’t divulge my opinion until you have answered the question.
Oh! I forgot a fourth alternative: the soul without a conscience, who never has a qualm about anything he does or imagines. He is someone who actually exists. Then there is a fifth possibility: the soul that never thinks nor does anything reprehensible...
...but he is a fiction, nicht wahr?
Quoting Todd Martin
Well, my deepest and darkest secrets aren’t actually things that I’m ashamed of. They are just things that would be most damaging to my reputation and my welfare if discovered. I tend to experience the greatest amount of shame from really mundane things like remembering times when I said something stupid or acted awkwardly. It would make more sense for me to be ashamed of the most reprehensible things about me from a social perspective but that’s just not how my emotions work for some reason. For some strange reason, I’m very obsessive compulsively embarrassed about mostly inconsequential matters that would do little to cause anyone to change their opinions about me and yet I just don’t feel bothered by facts about me that other people would find reprehensible. At the same time, I tend to think that the actual most reprehensible facts about me are things that I share with the vast majority of people like the fact that I eat meat products that are produced in factory farms and the fact that many products that I use have been produced by slave labor in 3rd world countries. At the same time, I don’t feel guilty or ashamed about that stuff either and sharing that I do those things does not hurt my reputation or welfare.
So, I’m kinda not sure what category you want to put me in but I’m kinda skeptical of your categories here because you really would need to analyze this on a secret to secret basis as not all dark secrets are the same and I kinda feel that you are bringing up things that seem to appeal to the existence of some kind of weird unconscious phenomena like repression and self-deceit. I’m skeptical of these phenomena because I think these so-called phenomena are at best examples of well understood cognitive biases like the confirmation bias and the tendency to believe things that we want to believe(which isn’t necessarily self-deceit or repression in my humble opinion as defining it as such would imply that people experience repression and self-deceit about things like their political opinions as well. Rather, I think it’s just ignorance caused by a cognitive bias.)
Though, I think the sinister part about psychoanalytic concepts like that of repression and self-deceit is that it’s often invented and confabulated by the psychoanalyst himself as he wants to portray all humans through the lenses of his ideological worldview. For example, with someone like Sigmund Freud, human behavior was mostly explained by weird sexual/animalistic stuff like penis envy, anal retention, and the Oedipus Complex. For someone like Carl Jung, it was religious and spiritual stuff. I think both of these fathers of psychoanalysis and of concepts like repression and self-deceit, made the same sort of mistake and they had the same kind of bias. They wanted to take their interests and their way of looking at the world and they wanted to explain away people that didn’t think like them as being repressed and as people who truly are interested in their interests who just can’t acknowledge that they are interested in those interests because of their self-deception. For example, imagine if I believed in psychoanalysis and I was a psychoanalyst. I would probably be trying to argue that the physical pain that you have experienced in your life was the worst kind of suffering in your life and you are just repressing your memories about all the terrible pain that you have experienced from your physical injuries in the past. You would likely call me out on my bullshit if I tried to say something like this about you. Yet, how is my hypothetical psychoanalytic narratives about you any less credible than the psychoanalytic narratives that you seem to have about me or the psychoanalytic narratives of the so-called psychoanalytic masters like Freud and Jung. I personally don’t see how someone could reasonably distinguish good psychoanalysis from bad psychoanalysis in a way that doesn’t just seem blatantly biased on some philosophical worldview or a set of interests.
Well, here’s something else we can add to the list of things we have in common! Fear and shame of doing stupid laughable things is characteristic of young men in the bloom of their manhood, and typically plagues teenagers. That’s probably why young boys tend to adopt a “cool” or “tough” persona and a rigid mindset that conforms to whatever clique they join or find themselves a member of, in order to protect themselves against ridicule.
When I was that young man, I secretly longed to belong to some such group, to gain the identity that belonging to it promised, but I just never fit in; for I also had a fiercely independent nature, and an unwillingness to “go along” with beliefs or behaviors simply because they were sanctioned by a group.
But I digress. The most mortifying experience of my life happened at this age. I went to the prom with “the pageant queen”, a tall fair-skinned beauty with curly blonde hair. How I won that honor I cannot say. I was a good-looking boy, just come into the first bloom of manhood, but with no social connections to recommend him...
...the evening of the prom, she and I drove into the city to have supper with another couple she knew, and we ate at Ruby Tuesday. After we were seated the waiter came to our table...
...now, city, and small-town or country ppl, are just different: if you’re a town boy and unacquainted with city life, you encounter a lot of ppl there that look very different from what you’re familiar with. Our waiter was rather openly effeminate, obviously gay, had on earrings (unusual for a man in 1980), and spoke with a lisp. Between the times he came to our table, my male companion, older than me and a wise-cracker, would make jokes about him, and because I was nervous, being the beautiful pageant-queen’s date, I vented my nervousness in giggly laughter at his jokes...
...finally the waiter came to take our order. By now I had had a drink or two, and was in a state of pure hilarity, but had composed myself (or so I thought) enough to behave like a man in possession of his faculties. The waiter asked someone’s order and stood there in silence. Suddenly, no longer able to control myself, I burst out laughing...
...well, I didn’t exactly burst out laughing (that’s what I WANTED to do): I checked it, but in doing so, I caused it to come out at the other end, as a loud fart. I immediately grabbed my nose, hoping by doing so I would make everyone think the noise emanated from there, then ran to the bathroom. Once in the bathroom, I found myself alone, and began pacing back and forth, repeating to myself, “I can’t believe I just did that!” Once I had composed myself enough to return to my companions, I saw that everyone was smiling...except for my date. Of course, the wise-cracker had to make things worse: “Hey Todd, did that noise really come out of your nose?”
You can imagine what the rest of the night was like, O Hedomenos. I have little memory of it. I just remember taking my pageant queen back to her house, inviting myself in to sit up late watching tv, hoping for a kiss, which I had to ask for before acquiring, then departing. We never went out on another date after that.
Take tomorrow off, O Hedomenos, and I will respond to the more substantive issues you raised. I just wanted to share a humiliating experience with you for your entertainment. I have lived a long life and have experienced many things that I can view from a perspective you can’t. As you grow older, farting in public is not such a mortifying thing; but then again, you are unlikely to do it in the presence of a beautiful woman you think is the meaning of your life.