Truth vs Pleasure
Jacob Needleman in his book: "Lost Christianity" asked:
"does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure?"
It would seem to be the goal of a philosopher who prizes truth and knowledge above all things. The philosopher would be one who sacrifices pleasure in pursuit of the experience of truth.
Do such people exist anymore? Why bother with the need for truth when a person has easy access to pleasure.
Kant sked three essential questions: “What can I know?” “What must I do?” and “What may I hope?”
Is the sacrifice of pleasure worth becoming able to try to answer such questions?
"does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure?"
It would seem to be the goal of a philosopher who prizes truth and knowledge above all things. The philosopher would be one who sacrifices pleasure in pursuit of the experience of truth.
Do such people exist anymore? Why bother with the need for truth when a person has easy access to pleasure.
Kant sked three essential questions: “What can I know?” “What must I do?” and “What may I hope?”
Is the sacrifice of pleasure worth becoming able to try to answer such questions?
Comments (56)
Interesting question. Really. I think in this point we have to consider how far the pleasure goes in our lives. Some would consider that pleasure is selfish while others maybe think it is good because it drives us to human satisfaction.
Trying to answer your question I would say yes. Specifically in this one
When the word or verb must appears we need somehow sacrifice something. Probably our own pleasure to confront others. I guess this could be one of the steps to promote a community.
:clap: :fire: :100:
Is that the pursuit of truth and wisdom or a pleasurable action or opinion?
What is Philosophy? The term ‘philosophy’ was coined in ancient Greece by the philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras. 1 Pythagoras (c. 570-490BCE) needed a term for a certain kind of individual, one who prized truth and knowledge above all things. Accordingly, he combined the ancient Greek terms for love, philein and wisdom, sophia to produce philosophos, one who loves wisdom. Philosophy, then, is the love of wisdom.
Is wisdom more than eroticism?
Do you think that pleasure and truth should be seen as being in conflict with one another?This tension existed within Kant's philosophy, but it may have created a lot of difficulties for people. Of course, it is possible to differentiate between higher and lower pleasures, but even that is not absolute. I am not sure that pleasure has to be seen as an obstacle towards the finding of truth, and William Blake suggested that, 'Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.'
Our choices are not truth and pleasure. Truth and knowledge are instrumental - we look for them, we're built to look for them, because we need them in order to ask the only real question - What do I do now? I haven't thought much about it, but I guess pleasure is instrumental too. It's the signal our body sends us to let us know we're doing what we're supposed to do.
Truth smooth. What the heck am I supposed to do next?
Philosophy is "the love of wisdom", not wisdom itself; and love, at its most pleasurable, or ecstatic, is often erotic. (vide Plato ... Spinoza ... Nietzsche ... Iris Murdoch ...)
Knowledge can serve the pursuit of truth but the pursuit of pleasure obstructs the pursuit of wisdom. What keeps the prisoners in Plato's cave attached to the shadows on the wall? I believe it is being attached to what offers pleasure.
By pleasure I mean a standard dictionary definition: the state or feeling of being pleased. enjoyment or satisfaction derived from what is to one's liking; gratification; delight. worldly or frivolous enjoyment: the pursuit of pleasure.
Truth is objective reality which can lead to wisdom while pleasure serves our subjective desires. They do seem to be mutually exclusive.
There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of pleasure. It is the way of the world. I'm just suggesting that the world needs this minority willing to sacrifice the drive for pleasure in the cause of experiencing truth which philosophy should inspire
I don't think they are. I and many others often feel pleasure in the pursuit of truth, and so they are not incompatible. Reading the great philosophers, for example, can give many people great pleasure.
They may be incompatible for some people, but not for everybody.
You see things differently than I do.
It could be that rather than intentional sacrifice of pleasure being needed, as the starting point for the quest for truth, that the actual experience of its absence will lead individuals in that direction naturally. In other words, the misery of many individuals in our turbulent times may be enough to trigger the pursuit. Many are facing hardship as the comforts and pursuits of pleasure they have been used to are vanishing around them rapidly. Of course, I am not suggesting that all would follow this path, but it may be that certain individuals make the connection with some kind of deeper searching.
There is an important distinction between pleasure and joy
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-journal-best-practices/201305/the-pleasure-trap#:~:text=There%20is%20an%20important%20difference,within%2C%20and%20is%20therefore%20sustainable.
There is an important difference between pleasure and joy. Pleasure is like a Xanax; it’s a one-time hit that generates a good feeling, but the good feeling wears off when the dose expires. Joy, on the other hand, is achieved from within, and is therefore sustainable. That’s not to say that it’s permanent or automatic; we have to nurture and sometimes mindfully manufacture the joy, which is difficult to do these days..........................
Simone Weil really hits the nail on the head:
"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams." -- Gravity and Grace
Imagine a philosopher king who is capable of ruling as only a philosopher king can. He would experience the joy of wisdom and will have outgrown the addiction to pleasure
Genocides are the truth of the human condition. When humanity is caught up with its own pleasure we are completely oblivious of what happened to the Jews and the Armenians for example. To really feel the absurdity of what is going on in the world is suffering. But at the same time we know that Man is also capable of the greatest compassion. Being consumed with the attraction to pleasure makes it impossible to feel the contradiction between atrocities and compassion so life continues as is and we will worry about it tomorrow.
Perhaps it is a matter of many people needing a better understanding of pleasure. The people who are caught up in acts such as genocide are not necessarily the ones who are likely to be looking for truth.
However, it is complex because as I understand the picture of Hitler, he was interested in some spiritual teachings related to purity. However, he ended up with a whole emphasis on purging the world of people who he saw as less 'pure'. Even those who quest for 'truth' may make atrocious mistakes.
Hitler was expressing an opinion. The seeker of truth must learn how to transcend his own opinions in the cause of truth. It is the pursuit of pleasure that makes us call our opinions truth
On what basis do you think that it is pursuit of pleasure that makes us mistake our opinions for truth? I am not sure that the two are related in that way necessarily. Inflated sense of self is likely to be involved, but that could occur independently of pleasure. It may be that the pursuit of the denial of pleasure could lead to a sense of self righteousness, and, indirectly, to an inflated idea of one's perception of truth, so it is complex indeed.
If anything, it could be that awareness of one's own sensory pleasures allows for a more balanced perspective of self awareness. In some ways, we can only follow the path to greater conscious awareness, and that may be a more humble endeavor. Of course, we may wish to grasp 'truth', but that does depend on a whole set of epistemological and metaphysical assumptions, which are very difficult to establish.
Most people who search for truth, settle for the claims of known thinkers and teachers. To set out to search for 'truth' independently from reliance on established teachers, may involve a path with likely loss of everyday pleasure, but it would probably be more than that, and be a whole experience of going beyond the life that most people lead and not merely about self renunciation. I wonder if this is what you mean really in your thread introduction, but it is it may be that the discussion is a bit too esoteric to work properly on a thread of this site.
Can we agree on the distinction between knowledge and opinion as described by Plato?
"Plato drew a sharp distinction between knowledge, which is certain, and mere true opinion, which is not certain. Opinions derive from the shifting world of sensation; knowledge derives from the world of timeless Forms, or essences."
Sensory pleasures are subjective responses by our unique essence to the shifting world of sensation. It is what drives animal life. However human consciousness when awakened is attracted to the timeless forms and that is where truth bides.
I am not sure that Plato's ideas can be applied so easily to the life which many are expected to lead. You speak of the idea of striving not to be an animal. Perhaps, we have more the situation that we are expected to operate like machines. Certainly, when I have been working I felt that so much demands were placed on me that I ended up with stress and insomnia. I think that mindfulness is needed to help us balance our own physical and mental wellbeing and clarity of thinking.
I think that the quest for knowledge is so different in the time of Plato in this information age. I am not saying that Plato's ideas aren't important but that he was writing in a different time in history. The ancient teachers were aware of wisdom which is valuable but their ideas need to be seen in their historical context rather than in isolation. I don't think that it would be particularly helpful to expect a person to seek objective knowledge through detachment from sensory experiences now. Even Buddhism stressed the middle way. It seems to me that the biggest challenge of our time is not to go beyond the sensory but beyond the robotic level.
The challenge is not necessarily about finding objective truth but about increasing consciousness, and critical awareness, to see through the murkiness of the bombardment of information we have available before us. I suppose the pleasures available on the internet are a possibile source of distraction for some. Many people I know find that they spend so much time watching television. I prefer listening to music, but I think I would probably go crazy if I could not relax by listening to it.
It has to be acknowledged that Plato was an ancient philosopher, and that the ancients lived in a very different world to our own, as Jack Cummins says above. I agree on the distinction between 'truth and pleasure' but I would express more in terms of the distinction between intelligence or rationality, and sensation. Intelligence is refective and intepretive, where sense-pleasures are essentially physical and habitual. As Aristotle said, we share sensory pleasure with animals but rational intellect is unique to us. So, I subscribe to a form of Platonic dualism, but I think it has to be interpreted carefully.
And yet there are so many sense pleasures we need to learn to enjoy. Think about enjoying to drink coffee or smoking: those "pleasures" are learned.
And so many others the enjoyment of which is culturally conditioned.
I managed to give up smoking before it killed me. Still probably drink more than is good for me. Nothing philosophical or wise about it, I’m like any other of the hoi polloi.
. That is the most important question that can arise in anybody’s mind, but there is no answer for it. The most important question, the ultimate question, cannot have any answer; that’s why it is ultimate.
. When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Jesus remained silent. Not only that, the story says that when Pontius Pilate asked the question, “What is truth?” he did not wait to listen for the answer. He left the room and went away. This is very strange. Pontius Pilate also thinks that there cannot be an answer for it, so he didn’t wait for the answer. Jesus remained silent because he also knows it cannot be answered.
. But these two understandings are not the same, because these two persons are diametrically opposite. Pontius Pilate thinks that it cannot be answered because there is no truth; how can you answer it? That is the logical mind, the Roman mind. Jesus remains silent not because there is no truth, but because the truth is so vast, it is not definable. The truth is so huge, enormous, it cannot be confined in a word, it cannot be reduced to language. It is there. One can be it, but one cannot say it.
. For two different reasons they behaved almost in the same way: Pontius didn’t wait to hear the answer, he knew already that there is no truth. Jesus remains silent because he knows truth, and knows that it could not be said.
. Chidvilas has asked this question. The question is absolutely significant. There is no question higher than that, because there is no religion higher than truth. It has to be understood; the question has to be analyzed. Analyzing the question, trying to understand the question itself, you may have an insight into what truth is. I will not answer it, I cannot answer it; nobody can answer it. But we can go deep into the question. Going deep into the question, the question will start disappearing. When the question has disappeared you will find the answer there at the very core of your heart — you are truth, so how can you miss it? Maybe you have forgotten about it, maybe you have lost track of it, maybe you have forgotten how to enter into your own being, into your own truth.
. Truth is not an hypothesis, truth is not a dogma. Truth is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. Truth is neither mine nor yours. Truth belongs to nobody, but everybody belongs to truth. Truth means that which is: that is exactly the meaning of the word. It comes from a Latin root, verus. Verus means: that which is. In English there are a few words which are derivations of the Latin root verus: was, were — they come from verus. In German, war — that comes from verus. Verus means that which is, uninterpreted. Once the interpretation comes in, then what you know is reality, not truth. That is the difference between truth and reality. Reality is truth interpreted.
. So the moment you answer the question, “What is truth?” it becomes reality; it is no longer truth. Interpretation has entered into it, the mind has colored it. And realities are as many as there are minds; there are multi-realities. Truth is one because truth is known only when the mind is not there. It is mind that keeps you separate from me, separate from others, separate from existence. If you look through the mind, then the mind will give you a picture of truth. That will be only a picture, a photograph of that which is. And of course, the photograph depends on the camera, on the film used, on the chemicals, on how it has been developed, how it has been printed, who has done it. A thousand and one other things enter in; it becomes reality.
. The word reality is also beautiful to be understood. It comes from the root, res; it means thing or things. Truth is not a thing. Once interpreted, once the mind has grabbed it, defined it, demarked it, it becomes a thing.
. When you fall in love with a woman there is some truth — if you have fallen absolutely unaware, if you have not ‘done’ it in any way, if you have not acted, managed, if you have not even thought about it. Suddenly you see a woman, you look into her eyes, she looks into your eyes, and something clicks. You are not the doer of it, you are simply possessed by it, you simply fall into it. It has nothing to do with you. Your ego is not involved, at least not in the very, very beginning, when love is virgin. In that moment there is truth, but there is no interpretation. That’s why love remains indefinable.
. Soon the mind comes in, starts managing things, takes possession of you. You start thinking about the girl as your girlfriend, you start thinking of how to get married, you start thinking about the woman as your wife. Now these are things; the girlfriend, the wife — these are things. The truth is no longer there, it has receded back. Now things are becoming more important. The definable is more secure, the indefinable is insecure. You have started killing, poisoning the truth. Sooner or later there will be a wife and a husband, two things. But the beauty is gone, the joy has disappeared, the honeymoon is over.
. The honeymoon is over at that exact moment when truth becomes reality, when love becomes a relationship. The honeymoon is very short, unfortunately — I’m not talking about the honeymoon that you go for. The honeymoon is very short. Maybe for a single moment it was there, but the purity of it, the crystal purity of it, the divinity of it, the beyondness of it — it is from eternity, it is not of time. It is not part of this mundane world, it is like a ray coming into a dark hole. It comes from the transcendental. It is absolutely appropriate to call love God, because love is truth. The closest that you come to truth in ordinary life is love.
. Chidvilas asks: “What is truth?”
. Asking has to disappear; only then do you know. If you ask, “What is truth?” what are you asking? If I say A is truth, B is truth, C is truth, will that be the answer? If I say A is truth, then certainly A cannot be the truth: it is something else that I am using as synonymous with truth. If it is absolutely synonymous, then it will be a tautology. Then I can say, “Truth is truth,” but that is silly, meaningless. Nothing is solved by it. If it is exactly the same, if A is truth, then it will mean truth is truth. If A is different, is not exactly truth, then I am falsifying. Then to say A is truth will be only approximate. And remember, there cannot be anything approximate. Either truth is or it is not. So I cannot say A is truth.
. I cannot even say, “God is truth,” because if God is truth then it is a tautology — “Truth is truth.” Then I’m not saying anything. If God is different from truth, then I am saying something, but then I am saying something wrong. Then God is different, then how can he be truth? If I say it is approximate, linguistically it looks alright, but it is not right. ‘Approximately’ means some lie is there, something false is there. Otherwise, why is it not a hundred percent truth? If it is ninety-nine percent truth then something is there which is not true. And truth and untruth cannot exist together, just as darkness and light cannot exist together — because darkness is nothing but absence. Absence and presence cannot exist together, truth and untruth cannot exist together. Untruth is nothing but the absence of truth.
. So no answer is possible, hence Jesus remained silent. But if you look at it with deep sympathy, if you look into the silence of Jesus, you will have an answer. Silence is the answer. Jesus is saying, “Be silent, as I am silent, and you will know” — not saying it in words. It is a gesture, it is very, very Zen-like. In that moment when Jesus remained silent, he comes very close to the Zen approach, to the Buddhist approach. He is a Buddha in that moment. Buddha never answered these questions. He had eleven questions listed: wherever he would move his disciples would go around and declare to people, “Never ask these eleven questions of Buddha” — questions which are fundamental, questions which are really significant. You could ask anything else, and Buddha was always ready to answer. But don’t ask the fundamental, because the fundamental can only be experienced. And truth is the most fundamental; the very substance of existence is what truth is.
. Go into the question. The question is significant, it is arising in your heart: “What is truth?” — a desire to know that which is, is arising. Don’t push it aside, go into it. Chidvilas, whenever it happens again, close your eyes, go into the question. Let the question become very, very focussed — “What… is… truth?” Let there arise a great concentration. Forget everything, as if your whole life depends on this simple question, “What is truth?” Let it become a matter of life and death. And don’t try to answer it, because you don’t know the answer.
You've alluded to several deep ideas but there are three that could initially help us to explain the relationship between the experience of the process of truth and the drive for pleasure. The first is the assertion that Man is a tripartite soul or three parts making one whole.
https://philosophycourse.info/platosite/3schart.html
[i]Sometimes Plato's division of the psyche into its three main elements can be easily misunderstood. Some who read about it for the first time think it is the same as Freud's division of the psyche into the ego (das Ich), id (das Es), and superego (das Über-Ich), but it isn't the same as Freud's division. Others think it's the same as the old adult-parent-child division, but it's not that either. Nor is it the same as the conscious-subconscious-supraconscious division.
Plato's identification of these three distinct elements of a person's inner life is unique, and can be validated by directly turning inward to one's own experience of the self.
Plato's three elements of the psyche are
The appetites, which includes all our myriad desires for various pleasures, comforts, physical satisfactions, and bodily ease. There are so many of these appetites that Plato does not bother to enumerate them, but he does note that they can often be in conflict even with each other. This element of the soul is represented by the ugly black horse on the left.
The spirited, or hot-blooded, part, i.e., the part that gets angry when it perceives (for example) an injustice being done. This is the part of us that loves to face and overcome great challenges, the part that can steel itself to adversity, and that loves victory, winning, challenge, and honor. (Note that Plato's use of the term "spirited" here is not the same as "spiritual." He means "spirited" in the same sense that we speak of a high-spirited horse, for example, one with lots of energy and power.) This element of the soul is represented by the noble white horse on the right.
The mind (nous), our conscious awareness, is represented by the charioteer who is guiding (or who at least should be guiding) the horses and chariot. This is the part of us that thinks, analyzes, looks ahead, rationally weighs options, and tries to gauge what is best and truest overall.[/i]
The author doesn't include anamnesis explained by Plato or higher mind sometimes called noesis. Modern philosophy limits itself to dianoia but opening to the process of truth or the vertical conscious potential to discriminate between qualities of now or the quality of a moment. The line of opinion is a horizontal line on a cross which is experienced by remembering the past and anticipating the future. The vertical line of being is the line of now on a cross which intersects the horizontal line of opinion and when taken together produces our understanding: what we are with what we know..
Modern life is so rapid that Man has become more oblivious of the vertical line of now and remains caught up in the horizontal line of before and after so everything repeats
[i]noesis (immediate intuition, apprehension, or mental 'seeing' of principles)
dianoia (discursive thought)
pistis (belief or confidence)
eikasia (delusion or sheer conjecture)[/i]
The psych of Normal balanced man would be governed by the rational mind. The spirited part would serve the rational mind and the sensations can not only be enjoyed but providing the ability to accomplish something in the world.
However fallen Man, in the world has become upside down. As a whole we are governed by our appetites which are supported by our negative emotions and rationalized by partial truths. This problem know as the human condition assures everything will remain the same for the majority.
Dr. Needleman isn't suggesting that sensory pleasures are evil but for those attracted to experiencing the process of truth, the rational mind leading to higher mind must become dominant where the body serves the mind rather than the mind serving bodily appetites at the expense of the potentials for the mind as popular in these times.
I don't think it's truth versus pleasure. I think its power versus truth. I think there is an innate attraction to truth as a consequence of evolution. The organism has to be correct to reality; physiologically, behaviourally, and with us, intellectually - or it dies out.
We built power structures based on supposed truths i.e. God, and then discovered science - and power prevented science being recognised as (the means to establish) truth. We all now live in the shadow of that mistake, and are doomed unless we correct it.
Science can establish the objective truth of facts in the world. However it can't reveal the objective truth of values. The human condition prevents it. Since it cannot, society values pleasure over the pursuit of truth. That is the problem: can facts and values become reconciled as a quality of truth normal for balanced Man? It can IMO but it requires a quality of consciousness rejected by the world as a whole which glorifies its imbalance described by Plato as cave life.
My point is that many pleasures are actually learned, they don't come naturally, contrary to your earlier claim. You, too, probably had to learn to enjoy smoking and drinking. That first puff or sip couldn't have been enjoyable.
(The hoi polloi? /blush/)
I can't imagine anything more pleasurable than the truth.
I can't imagine that other people could be different in this regard.
Right, but...
Quoting Nikolas
...I don't see how this follows.
Quoting Nikolas
I think so too. Human reason naturally bridges the "is" and the "ought"
Quoting Nikolas
I don't know what that means, but the reason I think truth is not valued, is not about pleasure seeking as such. It's about power - particularly religious power that lacks the modesty to set aside dogma in favour of reason. Think of the trail of Galileo - where he proved the earth orbits the sun and was put on trial for heresy. It undermined the truth value of science; such that science was used, but not observed. We developed and applied technology for power and profit - and live, as pleasure seekers in that false technocracy.
I agree with you as far as the attraction to power and the prestige and its effect on human higher values. But IYO what is the source of higher values like justice? Does Man create them by trial and error or are they remembered as Plato suggests? Remembrance is called anamnesis and the purpose of philosophy is to help Man remember through the ability to experience objective conscience. So does man create objective values or are they remembered as universal perennial knowledge?
I do feel that what you have said about denial of pleasure as the path to truth is so wrong. Not on the basis of Plato, but when I was going to a fundamentalist church, I began to try to live in the way that you describe and it brought me to a state of deep depression and despair.
My own experience of wishing to sacrifice pleasure in favour of truth at one stage in my life brought me to the point in life where I felt that there was no point in getting out of bed at all. I found that the experiences of trying to deny myself all pleasure simply brought me misery and hell as 'truth'. I would say that it was not a form of 'healing' truth at all. In fact, it felt like the opposite of truth.
You will probably say that that is because I am looking at it from the wrong perspective and should not have felt negative, but I am simply describing the way it worked out when I tried the ascetic path for a few weeks when I was studying, In contrast, when I have some pleasures, I feel able to think and function positively, and explore creativity. Have you abandoned all physical pleasures? What would living without pleasure be? Would it be just spent reading and meditating all day, although I expect one would still be expected to work?Presumably, any form of sexual pleasure would be completely out of the question, and any other forms of enjoyment. I am really not sure that would be the way to finding any kind of truth. You may feel that I am exaggerating but I am trying to think through what the life of sacrificing pleasure would be in the full sense, and it is probably how some monks have lived.
Plato is closer. Concepts like justice are expressions of an innate moral sense that developed within hunter gatherer tribes that we homo sapiens lived in for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. It can be shown that Chimpanzees have a proto-morality, so it's difficult to imagine humans were much different.
Chimps share food, and groom each other - and remember who reciprocates, and withhold such favours accordingly in future. This is where the moral sense begins - but of course, we became intellectually intelligent - and increasingly able to express ideas in words.
The idea of objective values came about only when hunter gatherer tribes joined together, and needed explicit social rules with an objective source of authority i.e. God, to prevent any small dispute splitting the multitribal social group into its original tribal components. This is the origin of religion, and political power.
When science was discovered, religious political power supressed it - and so it is power that is opposed to truth, not pleasure. Pleasure is effectively a bribe - to not oppose power with truth; like Descartes - who withdrew his thesis 'The World' from publication while Galileo was on trial, wrote to flatter the Church, and landed a cushy job in the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden. It didn't go well - and he died soon after, but that's beside the point.
You misunderstood the idea and it is not what I meant. It is psychologically dangerous just to give up pleasure without an aim for something better and knowing what the aim is rather than imagining it..
If a person wants to be a concert pianist they will have to sacrifice other lesser pleasures from going out in order to practice. Before sacrificing pleasure one needs a verified aim. In this case the aim is to experience the truth of what we are by becoming a balanced whole. That takes a lot of practice and the willingness to sacrifice our acquired imaginations that keep us within Plato's cave. If I can verify that I am out of balance my aim must be to acquire balance so I can receive from above and give to below.
Consider Plato's Chariot. The dark horse on the left representing the lower parts of our collective essence has become corrupt and the driver must contend with it in order for the chariot to become normal.
It seems that when you were in this depressing period of your life, you had no verified aim replacing pleasure leaving yourself vulnerable to imagination. This is psychologically dangerous.
I didn't think that you meant that one should just abandon pleasure arbitrarily. I think that what happens when I read these sort of ideas they collude with my own Catholic guilt. My own guilt makes me think that I should give up all forms of pleasure as a punishment for my many imperfections. I also know quite a few people who get into that form of thinking at times.
When I spoke about the time when I did try to live some kind of ascetic life, it was at the time I was questioning religion and searching for truth. However, I was also speeding on 'Pro Plus' caffeine tablets, so a bit chaotic. However, I did come out of the dark tunnel. I do have lapses of feelings of guilt and depression, but usually only brief dark nights of the soul, often if I can't sleep.
Probably, the reason why I wrote the reply which I wrote is because I do think that the whole emphasis on striving to overcome pleasure is one that can be so easily misconstrued. I think that I came to the verge of mental illness over it, but probably just managed to think my way out of it on the excess caffeine. However, I have seen quite a few people who have gone down that direction into full episodes of mental illness.
So, what I am saying is that guilt and self hatred, combined with an emphasis on overcoming pleasure can be extremely toxic. Getting back to churches and monks, I do believe that the reason people were meant to sit and kneel on hard surfaces was because it is uncomfortable. And, the idea idea of lent involved an emphasis on fasting and purging oneself.
This may come across as crazy since you seem to subscribe to the notion that non-human animals are about pleasure and humans are about truth, in line, of course, with Aristotle.
However, the situation may actually be the other way round. Non-human animals have or seem to have one objective to wit, to live, and equally important, to live in this world. Naturally then knowing truths is paramount for the simple reason that this will extend their lifespans and make their lives easier. Think of it, how do predators get close enough to their prey to make a kill? By lying of course and by that I refer to the many ingenious ways hunter-killers camouflage themselves and blend into the background. A similar argument can be made for prey that have similar abilities with the ultimate goal of starving their predators. In short, if there's any living organism that puts truth above all else, it has to fall into the category of non-human animals.
On the flip side we have humans and the relevant dissimilarity between humans and non-human animals is that we, with our powerful imagination, look to beyond this world - paradise, heaven, nirvana, are all conclusive proof of this fact and notice how all of these are essentially about pleasure. Since we've lost interest in this world, truths no longer matter to us for truths are important only to the extent that they allow us to live to see another day. The world beyond, a place of pure pleasure is what drives, what motivates us.
To sum up then, contrary to how Aristotle thought it was - non-human animals being about pleasure and humans being about truth - it appears that the "truth" of the matter is actually the exact opposite.
See how Jacob Needleman responds:
[i]Of course it had been stupid of me to express it in quite that way, but nevertheless the point was worth pondering: does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure? The history of religion in the west seems by and large to rest on the assumption that the answer is no. Therefore, externally induced emotions of egoistic fear (hellfire), anticipation of pleasure (heaven), vengeance, etc., have been marshaled to keep people in the faith.
The whole notion of sainthood, both in the East and in the West, has contributed to this notion. the saint is often presented as though he were a being with an unnaturally strong impulse towards truth. The picture of the saint's sacrifices and asceticism are so presented as to assure the rest of us that what he attained is impossible for us. This of course, easily supports human passivity and wishful thinking, for at the same time that one is endowing the saint with an unnaturally strong impulse toward truth one might as well endow him, in the bargain, with a miraculous power to help the seeker without the latter making any real efforts of inner questioning and search.[/i]
He is suggesting that the attraction to truth is natural but this need for power and all the negativity that has become associated with it has made it appear unnatural. But with a little effort it can be remembered because it is the natural state of the soul to experience truth. This remembering is the source of the human aim to experience the truth of the human condition evenat the risk of avoiding the pleasures that mask this need.
But what of these rare ones who have felt in the depth of their being that the needs of the heart are not satisfied by what the world offers:
[i]"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©[/i]
Are they misguided for needing what the world cannot offer or are we misguided for believing that it can and continue to fight over the power of partial truths?
You unfortunately had a bad experience with man made secularized religion. Trying to heal oneself is not self hatred but the recognition of human potential. Sitting and kneeling on hard surfaces is an exercise for the mind and the will to dominate the drive for pleasure or as Plato called it, our appetites. Read how it is explained to Jacob Needleman in his book Lost Christianity:
[i]Metropolitan Anthony," I began, "five years ago when I visited you I attended services which you yourself conducted and I remarked to you how struck I was by the absence of emotion in your voice. Today, in the same way where it was not you but the choir, I was struck by the same thing, the almost complete lack of emotion in the voices of the singers."
Yes he said, "this is quite true, it has taken years for that, but they are finally beginning to understand...."
"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew what he meant but I wanted to hear him speak about this - this most unexpected aspect of the Christianity I never knew, and perhaps very few modern people ever knew. I put the question further: "The average person hearing this service - and of course the average Westerner having to stand up for several hours it took - might not be able to distinguish it from the mechanical routine that has become so predominant in the performance of the Christian liturgy in the West. He might come wanting to be lifted, inspired,moved to joy or sadness - and this the churches in the West are trying to produce because many leaders of the Church are turning away from the mechanical, the routine.."
He gently waved aside what I was saying and I stopped in mid sentence. "There was a pause, then he said: "No. Emotion must be destroyed."
He stopped, reflected, and started again, speaking in his husky Russian accent: "We have to get rid of emotions....in order to reach.....feeling."
Again he paused, looking at me, weighing the effect his words were having. I said nothing. but inside I was alive with expectancy. I waited.
Very tentatively, I nodded my head.
He continued: "You ask about the liturgy in the West and in the East. it is precisely the same issue. the sermons, the Holy Days - you don't why one comes after the other. or why this one now and the other one later. Even if you read everything about it you still wouldn't know, believe me.
"And yet . . . there is a profound logic in them, in the sequence of the Holy Days. And this sequence leads people somewhere - without their knowing it intellectually. Actually, it is impossible for anyone to understand the sequence of rituals and Holy Days intellectually. it is not meant for that. It is meant for something else, something higher.
For this you have to be in a state of prayer, otherwise it passes you by-"
"What is prayer?" I asked.
He did not seem to mind my interrupting with this question. Quite the contrary. "In a state of prayer one is vulnerable." He emphasized the last word and then waited until he was sure I had not taken it in an ordinary way.
"In prayer one is vulnerable, not enthusiastic. and then these rituals have such force. they hit you like a locomotive. You must be not enthusiastic, nor rejecting - but only open. This is the whole idea of asceticism: to become open."[/i]
I was surprised to experience how much my negative emotions were responsible for producing pleasure. We are not born with negative emotions but they are acquired in life but they rule our lives. Do they have to?
The question of negative emotions is interesting. I find guilt to be the most difficult to handle, and probably fear. I do find that rage and jealousy can be turned into pleasure through rock and metal music. I do think that each one of us has a history of emotional scars and probably pleasant ones too. I think that we can work to reframe them, to some extent.
One thing which I do wonder is if emotions we experience are not just ones arising in the individual psyche, but the collective one too. Even with my own demons related to the negative side of religion, I sometimes feel that it goes much deeper than my own experience and I am actually dealing with the dark side, or shadow in Jungian language, of Christianity. I am also thinking about the dark aspects which can arise in mystical experience, and that is why I can relate to the idea of the dark night of the soul.
When I studied art therapy I did find it beneficial to do drawings of my own inner monsters and gargoyles. Also when I went to creative writing classes I experimented with writing from the point of view of being a fallen angel. So, I do think that we can work with the negative symbolic experiences and emotions in a creative way, and that can be a way of healing the wounds.
Jacob Needleman you say? I'll have to look out for him. Because that seems broadly correct to me - although I say that, cautious of where he's going with it.
In my own philosophical search for truth - I've gone down a lot of dead ends; and then had to retrace my steps to find out where I went wrong. That's a painful process - but necessary. I love my country, and while I'm agnostic, I respect religion - for its role as the central coordinating mechanism of civilisation through thousands of years.
I take no joy in the suggestion the Church particularly, and Western civilisation in general made a similar mistake in relation to science - 400 years ago, and we haven't recognised the error, and retraced our steps, even as we approach upon extinction, we continue - as if science were naught but a tool to be used and cast aside on a whim. Science is also an increasingly valid and coherent understanding of reality we need to observe, and act in relation to - particularly with regard to the application of technology, or we are doomed.
You will probably appreciate Jacob Needleman's book: Lost Christianity. He was an atheist with a great dislike for Christianity and Judaism. He had to teach a course on religion but discovered some of the ideas most are unaware of are as deep as any philosophy. He bean to realize his preconceptions were wrong.
https://tiferetjournal.com/lost-christianity/
[i][b].................What is needed is a either a new understanding of God or a new understanding
of Man: an understanding of God that does not insult the scientific
mind, while offering bread, not a stone, to the deepest hunger of the
heart; or an understanding of Man that squarely faces the criminal
weakness of our moral will while holding out to us the knowledge of how we can strive within ourselves to become the fully human being we are meant to be– both for ourselves and as instruments of a higher purpose.[/b]
But, this is not an either/or. The premise –or, rather, the proposal—of this
book is that at the heart of the Christian religion there exists and
has always existed just such a vision of both God and Man. I call it
“lost Christianity” not because it is a matter of doctrines and concepts
that may have been lost or forgotten; nor even a matter of methods of
spiritual practice that may need to be recovered from ancient sources.
It is all that, to be sure, but what is lost in the whole of our modern
life, including our understanding of religion, is something even more fundamental, without
which religious ideas and practices lose their meaning and all too
easily become the instruments of ignorance, fear and hatred. What
is lost is the experience of oneself, just oneself—myself, the personal
being who is here, now, living, breathing, yearning for meaning, for
goodness; just this person here, now, squarely confronting one’s own
existential weaknesses and pretensions while yet aware, however
tentatively, of a higher current of life and identity calling to us from
within ourselves. This presence to oneself is the missing element in
the whole of the life of Man, the intermediate state of consciousness
between what we are meant to be and what we actually are.
It is, perhaps, the one bridge that can lead us from our inhuman past
toward the human future.[/i]
Can our species ever reach a quality of understanding of God and Man that does not insult the scientific
mind, while offering bread, not a stone, to the deepest hunger of the
heart? If we cannot, our species may not survive
Simone Weil and his ilk of similar thinkers are precisely what I'm talking about. Truths about this world don't matter to them because to them truths about this world are, in their own words, "...finite and limited and radically incapable of staisfying the desire which burns perpetually within us for an infinite and perfect good..."
As a matter of clarification, by "truths about this world" I refer to facts such as which berries are edible, which poisonous going all the way up to those about the universe itself. It's to be distinguished from any and all claims about "truths" beyond this world i.e. claims like heaven, nirvana, moksha, salvation, etc. which take place in different realms.
That out of the way, let's pick up where we left off. As far as I can tell, Simone Weil's "...infinite and perfect good..." (above) is just another way of saying pleasure. It's difficult to say whether Simone Weil and others who share his sentiments are aware of this or not but to be fair, the clever disguise pleasure uses to fool people that it's something else viz. "...infinite and perfect good..." is very convincing and hard to see through. Good whether one conceives of it as "...infinite and perfect..." or not is, after all, ultimately associated with pleasure (heaven, nirvana, etc.).
Now, some may say that, congruent with Simone Weil's thoughts, that "...infinite and perfect good..." is truth of the highest order, an ultimate truth and thus that we, humans, are not actually pleasure-seeking as I'm positing by actually truth-seeking. The apparent disdain and rejection of truths about [I]this world[/i] being simply a natural response arising from the realization that there are greater truths like the "...infinite and perfect good..."
This, however, is again deception at a grand scale. Pleasure has once again managed to pull the wool over our eyes by masquerading itself as not just truth but now as ultimate truth, "...infinite and perfect good..." This scam if I may refer to it as such is so good that it makes people irrational to the point where to them one bird in the hand (truths about this world) is no longer worth two in the bush ([s]truths[/s] pleasure beyond this world)".
Let me first say that Simone Weil was a highly intelligent woman totally dedicted to the experience of truth. She practiced her philosophy. Susan Sontag wrote in book review on Simone:
Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.
Which philosophers live. their ideas? It is an insult to the practice of hypocrisy. She was admired by Leon Trotsky, the head of the Frence Marxist party yet died a Christian mystic and intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1.
The infinite and perfect good refers to objective values. The depths of the seed of the human soul is attracted to objective values initiated by the forms rather than pleasure initiated by our senses.
We know that science reveals the objective facts of the world. Only a few are aware of the human ability to experience universal objective values through remembrance or anamnesis. Awakening to the complimentary relationship between objective facts and objective values can save the world.
The complimentary relationship between objective facts and objective values experienced through objective conscience is not the same as the relationship between facts and pleasure.
I believe that one identical thought is to be found—expressed very precisely and with only slight differences of modality—in. . .Pythagoras, Plato, and the Greek Stoics. . .in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita; in the Chinese Taoist writings and. . .Buddhism. . .in the dogmas of the Christian faith and in the writings of the greatest Christian mystics. . .I believe that this thought is the truth, and that it today requires a modern and Western form of expression. That is to say, it should be expressed through the only approximately good thing we can call our own, namely science. This is all the less difficult because it is itself the origin of science. Simone Weil….Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, Random House, 1976, p. 488
Is Simone referring to the benefits of the pursuit of truth and objective facts or the pursuit of pleasure? Which comes first in the balanced human psych; truth or pleasure. Since humanity lives out of balance in Plato's cave, pleasure comes first.
The Four Noble Truths is the basis of Buddhism. The First Truth is that life consists of suffering, pain, and misery.
Yet somehow you believe this first noble truth is really pleasure by definition. Please explain
Buddhism says Suffering is truth. You say truth is pleasure. So what is truth?
Suffering is one side of the coin and pleasure is the other. What reconciles this duality as ONE? That is truth
When you e suffering it isn't pleasurable. When you are experiencing pleasure you are not suffering: the duality of yin and yang. Yet there is a higher level of reality in which they can be reconciled and experienced as ONE. That is the direction leading to truth. They are not all the same.
Women can sometimes give a man an experience similar to the effects of Hemorrhoids. So if nothing else, women prove the relationship between truth and pleasure.
We can bring this down to practical matters. One of the things to ask yourself about being let go from your job is "Was I treated fairly?" Instead, many people would like the positive narrative of exit interview with words like, "We'll provide you with good references".
Quoting tim wood
:ok: