The Implication of Social Contract on Social Relations
When we are born into any society, there is a sub-contract on top of any overriding political social contract. To explain- Social Contract Theory, as extemporized by people like Hobbes and Locke, focused on the origins and justification of governments- institutions that make and enforce laws. The sub-contract I speak of, is a bit more to do with our unstated agreement to live a certain "way" and have certain relations with others simply by living in a certain society. This sub-contract would be things like being forced into institutions and relations to peaceably live in civil society- living with disagreeable coworkers/managers, neighbors, etc. It can also be the "forced" interactions of work, government, non-profits, and consumption. It is forced not directly, but indirectly in that not participating in these institutions is a non-starter.
The claim here is the sub-contract is just as inviolable as the overarching political social contract, in that one gives up something for these microlevel relations. Though the social contract may govern the background institutions of laws and enforcement, it is at the microlevel of the sub-contract that we usually live our daily lives. We give up the right to have our ideal society in the light of the fact that, institutions cannot be created from scratch at the whim of any individual who wants to set up the relations differently to suit their ideal living experience. We must deal with the culture, institutions, relations, and society already in place and work within it.
Some might argue that the constraints/ individual compromises caused by social relations in a particular society are the necessary sacrifice we must make in order to promote the maximum of individual freedom within the constraints of a functioning civil society. However, one can argue that institutions are actually self-perpetuating and may not have the individual in mind so much as perpetuating the social contract.
When people are procreated into existence, they become automatic joiners of the social contract and sub-contracts at the microlevel. At this point of birth into a particular society, are the individuals truly their own person, or are the simply perpetuators of the social relations?
The claim here is the sub-contract is just as inviolable as the overarching political social contract, in that one gives up something for these microlevel relations. Though the social contract may govern the background institutions of laws and enforcement, it is at the microlevel of the sub-contract that we usually live our daily lives. We give up the right to have our ideal society in the light of the fact that, institutions cannot be created from scratch at the whim of any individual who wants to set up the relations differently to suit their ideal living experience. We must deal with the culture, institutions, relations, and society already in place and work within it.
Some might argue that the constraints/ individual compromises caused by social relations in a particular society are the necessary sacrifice we must make in order to promote the maximum of individual freedom within the constraints of a functioning civil society. However, one can argue that institutions are actually self-perpetuating and may not have the individual in mind so much as perpetuating the social contract.
When people are procreated into existence, they become automatic joiners of the social contract and sub-contracts at the microlevel. At this point of birth into a particular society, are the individuals truly their own person, or are the simply perpetuators of the social relations?
Comments (184)
I kept it neutral in the first post, but I will say that you cannot have an individual without society. Individual identity is by-and-large constructed within an already existing social framework. Now, as to your idea of CAPABLE individual- this is where I bring forth a possible begging of the question.
Once you put forth a certain KIND of individual that institutions want to produce and perpetuate, we now have a situation where the individual and his identity is to promote the institutions for the sake of the institution. But you see, besides the fact that the individual FINDS himself procreated within institutions that are a de facto necessity, how is it that the individual must perpetuate the agenda of the institutions by having more people that will perpetuate the institutions? What purpose does it serve? The end goal then seems to be to keep institutions going for the sake of keeping institutions going, however negatively this affects individuals who are procreated to keep the institutions going.
If you say that evolution has created humans that have minds that want to promote survival through a certain cultural means, then this is simply restating the idea that institutions are perpetuated, you are just throwing in the word survival which is essentially the same thing at the species level, but not addressing the fact that it is still begging-the-question as to why keep the institutions going.
Society's rules and laws are to a large extent based on religious conventions, what each culture believes is just and fair was prefigured in sacred script. The 'Protestant Ethic' has proved itself valuable to our form of society, it keeps us going, striving and progressing toward, that shining city on the hill.
Indeed. Is it the Protestant Work Ethic behind why we perpetuate more people, and continued institution? Is work for works sake a reason to continue? Isn't this absurd?
The role of grace in Catholicism, is associated with Calvin's Chosen. Salvation for Calvinism was not freely given as grace in the Catholic tradition, but which rather had to be firmly and independently believed by Calvinists, it was not guaranteed.
The 'city on the hill' refers to Governor John Winthrope's 1630 sermon to his 700 Puritan fellow colonists:
Wikipedia
Calls to the view this city are common in American politics: JFK, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, all used its metaphor, which leads to the concept of 'American exceptionalism'
Are we the individual, here to carry out some Protestant Work Ethic ethos? In more general terms, are we here to maintain institutions? To consume, to work, to live in a country is to maintain its institutions. Are we the maintenance crew of some sort of institutional perpetuation.
But if the institutions do shape the individual, then why wouldn't the individual - in at least a general way - not want that to continue? In wanting that from the institution, the individual is simply saying, if we are to have more, let them be like me. What would or could possess the individual to have a different desire.
Even nihilism and anti natalism are subcontracts or local institutions. They shape mindsets. And those individuals - yourself for instance - certainly seem to want to create more of just the same mind. So why do you perpetuate that agenda? Don't you find it logical as it ensures the longevity of your particular institution and increases thus the likelihood of ever more of you?
(Of course if this subcontract involves a quick suicide or a conscious failure to breed, then it will soon be a forgotten trope - defined by its production of the generically incapable.)
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's not question begging. It is logical for the individual to want more of much the same. Then evolution makes sure that sameness is tracking whatever actually works.
There is also the question of the trade-off between biological survival and intellectual survival. The latter has a longer reach. Socrates' suicide for example, certainly led to his immortalization, and of millions of others seeking to become like him. So spiritually - or better said intellectually - he begot more children than he could ever have begotten physically and biologically.
Quoting apokrisis
But an individual doesn't agree with many institutions from his society. Take me for example. There's many institutions, cultural trends, etc. which are very dominant, and yet I don't agree with, and I don't want to see perpetuated.
And so you demonstrate how entrenched an intolerance for difference can be. You really think yours should be the only institution handing out the subcontracts. You believe deeply in genericity. It just troubles you that your version has so little general hold.
How does that make me any different from anyone else in the cultural sphere? Everyone else wants to propagate themselves, and obviously not propagate what is opposed to them.
You said:
Quoting apokrisis
So this is wrong, and I disagree with it. The individual doesn't want all institutions which shape the individual to continue. Some institutions which shape the individual, he doesn't want to continue. I gave myself as an example for this point.
But you were right when you said:
Quoting apokrisis
Don't bother answering. I've already lost interest in your failed attempt at pedantry.
It is interesting that you ask "Are we the individual, here to carry out some Protestant Work ethos?" No, that ethos is embedded in our culture, in capitalism itself. The Reformation modernized capitalism, work became dignified, it became our way to salvation, it became part of how we approach and appreciate life. The secularization of salvation means that in order to be saved one must be successful in what one does, in work. This idolization of work led to Marx's complex notion of alienation (translates as 'sin' theologically), as a confusion of life with things, a confusion which I think supports Capitalism's progression. The worker satisfies preexisting values not in self development, but in the accumulation of wealth, which is the commodification of value.
No, but I think that we continually search for extended family, its safety and security, its laws, rules, and hierarchy. Institutions constitute a 'family' that we may be able to join, assume a role and play a part in something which decides how and what we do with a much of lives. As Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
You are assuming that the individual cannot self-reflect on their circumstances and be critical of it. Survival is the original reason for the institution's existence, while entertainment/pleasure is the leftover that our complex minds crave (and also sustained by the existence of these institutions). - this I get. However, in the West at least, we have the notion of individualism and being our own person. But if we think of our job here as merely instruments of the institutions- maintenance, upkeep, and toilers for its continuance, really our mission becomes rather bleak, as it becomes a nihilistic circular argument whereby humans are keeping institutions going for the sake of institutions. This circular argument leads to many problems, but two are:
1) The absurdity of humans being toilers for institutions.. Our mission is not OURS, but some OTHER which has no justification in and of itself. Survival at the species level itself is not a justification either, as this is its own circular argument. Why keep the species going in order to just keep it going?
2) The harm that it causes to be the maintenance keepers.. the harm of dealing with the other maintenance crew, the harm we cause ourselves, the harm that existence itself causes on the maintenance crew.
Yes. So this subcontracted notion has evolved because it works and we naturally seek to perpetuate it - even if it doesn't always make us happy.
But evolving to challenge elements of the subcontract - a conscious creation of variety that drives human cultural complexification - is not the same as challenging the contract at the general level. That would be unnatural and maladaptive.
This is more than a bit vague.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, this is vague.. with undefined concepts of "unnatural" and "maladaptive". Even if I was to take this at face value, why do individual humans care about the species' survival- especially for a human lifespan of about 80-100 years.
Why should the human not care that the institution perpetuates individual suffering any more than they should ignore their own harm to keep the institutions going? You do not seem to have a justification.
Quoting schopenhauer1
One can also go the path of questioning whether institutions, hierarchies, governments, etc are justified to begin with. Is any harm or manipulation or coercion of the Other ever truly, infinitely justified (here we see the hypocritical and aggressive nature of affirmative normative ethics)? Such a negative perspective on political theory and life in general is almost always tossed out immediately as a "non-starter", as you said, because "life" is considered "immutable", "self-evidently valuable", "obviously worth continuing", etc. You can't exactly have a political theory of life if you reject the innocuous ethical view of life, or so it is assumed.
Affirmative societies take Being to be intrinsically valuable (despite it being simply a hiccup in between non-Being), and yet simultaneously obscure it; in other words, to affirm Being requires the concealment of Being by these same institutions you are referring to. But life, Being, is indefensible. One must point to beings within life to justify life, or take the Nietzschean route and point out the contradiction inherent in rejecting the vital essence by use of the vital essence, "life's vengeance" so to speak, the way life affirms itself by denying the validity of the opposition.
We are thrown into living or Dasein; there is nothing we can do about our individual history; and because we take so long to develop as independent creatures, we are stuck with parental and other social arrangements for many childhood years.
We do however co-make culture, institutions, relations and society. They don't make themselves, and many idealists or pragmatists make new arrangements for themselves. I've made lots of art, engaged in many relationships, co-founded more than my share of mutual and cooperative groups; others more daring than me have created different forms of family so that their intimate lives have different forms. During my lifetime many aspects of the world around me have transformed, including the acceptance of homosexuality, for instance, and the gaining of women's equality.
If you give up the right to enter into transformative social relations, you are volunteering to do that, no-one is forcing you. Indeed, on the Sartreian model that an old git like me trapped himself in by enjoying existentialism as a young man, if one recognises the oppressive rationale for predominant social relations and doesn't act on that recognition, one is exhibiting bad faith.
I am trying to interpret this correctly. Do you mean to say Nietzsche believed that life-denying beliefs affirm life, because you have to live to deny life, and this is indirectly affirming it?
That's all you had to say. We are "thrown" into it. So, how is that good? Or rather, why is this good "for" somebody in the FIRST PLACE? Does this thrown need to take place? Why is this necessary? To continue what?
Quoting mcdoodle
Perhaps you are going too mico in your examples- the business structures, dwelling situations, consumption/production, government and organizational relationships are already baked in. Yes, over time this changes due to micro changes that add up, and yes, as you describe we have relative freedom "within" the civil society's already set framework, but by and large we are forced into certain relations with few exceptions, and even the exceptions are exceptions because the majority has to live a certain already-set way.
Even the "micro" examples you provide are not that independently chosen. Friendships, neighbors, coworkers, projects, social groups, are all phenomena created from the existing framework of civil society. These relations are really not of your choosing, but rather present themselves to you as if they are. What you think of as free, is really just a limited constraint that is very much what your society allows. Even the things that you think are opposite of your current society are opposite precisely because the society that is there is a certain way. This opposition will simply manifest as a tentacle of the current situation anyways. It won't even get subsumed, as it never was anything different than the current situation.
To sum it up with an analogy- you are the maintenance crew, but you can have some variety on your lunch break.. think of it like that. Anyways, why we have to maintain the social institutions simply to perpetuate them, is the question at hand, and it is a vicious circle. If you change the goal post to survival of the species (which along with entertainment are why institutions are there in the first place), the question remains.
Essentially, yes. Nietzsche's Will-to-Power, a supposed-denial of the Will is nevertheless a form of willing (even Schopenhauer recognized this when he argued that aesthetic sublimation submerges one in the wider will of the world in general). In order to argue against arguments, you have to use an argument. In order to argue against the vital impulse of life, you have to use a vital impulse of life.
They might say that they do, but the majority certainly don't act as they do.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Given you are arguing that there is a general contract as well as these subcontracts, there is no reason individuals couldn't find society generally ok but problematic in certain regards.
Of course if you now deny your own thesis...
This is also Schopenhauer's view of suicide. In order to commit suicide, you must use the Will against itself, which would still be using Will.
Anyways, I think you are getting at the point when you indicate that life qua life really has no justification in and of itself. We know there is non-life from the view of already-living true, but this does not negate the fact that the continuance of life itself does not simply justify itself because we already exist. It still begs the question of why. Why keep the institutions going in the first place? If it is because we survive to survive, this only makes sense as an inidividual human. As for a species, it becomes an ideology- but an odd one, because when pressed, those who claim to throw away grandiose purpose (i.e. religion), have no real answer other than the circular argument to survive to survive. Or, they may run into the naturalistic fallacy or poor analogies to other animals.. other animals survive for no reason, so therefore we do the same. This would be a false analogy being that we self-reflect, make deliberate actions, and try to find reasons and justifications.
Yes, I am aware of your interest in how we are going to consume the planet, especially through use of fossil fuels.
Quoting apokrisis
The argument is not that people don't currently find the contracts ok. Obviously they do, and indeed perpetuate it FOR others. However, I am providing a sort of change of perspective on our situation. In the OP, I suggest that institutions may be self-perpetuating and the individuals are simply instruments for the perpetuation of the institutions. They become a maintenance crew, but why the maintenance crew has to keep maintaining in the first place, is never really answered, especially in light of the possible harms on the maintenance crew. Thus, I provided two problems that arise from this perspective:
1) The absurdity of humans being toilers for institutions.. Our mission is not OURS, but some OTHER which has no justification in and of itself. Survival at the species level itself is not a justification either, as this is its own circular argument. Why keep the species going in order to just keep it going?
2) The harm that it causes to be the maintenance keepers.. the harm of dealing with the other maintenance crew, the harm we cause ourselves, the harm that existence itself causes on the maintenance crew.
But with the death of God, the only positive transcendent value a secular man has (to paraphrase Nietzsche) is the future. It's why "secular theodicies" inherently depend on positive predictions, even if these predictions are outlandish and far-in-the-future. So much of our value is dependent upon the future. Think of the children! Think of the possible accomplishments that we'll never actually get to enjoy! The deceptive nature of meaning seems to rest at least partly in the imaginative fulfillment of possible projects that never actually actualize. For the individual, this keeps them sane even though it is technically self-deception. For the society, though, this manifests as oppression and manipulation, as people are thrown away as expendable even if they agree to being thrown away.
But anyway, if you reject suicide in the way Schopenhauer rejects it as a manifestation of the Will, then you probably also should reject human or sentient extinction for the same reason. Things happen and persist for no reason and if we're going to change anything, it's going to have to be for more intra-worldly reasons than anything metaphysical.
Well I've already explained the reason why this is naturally logical. The whole arises from the parts it shapes. So of course the parts would have to feel aligned with the purpose of that which is their global cause. Yet constraints are about the limitation of the accidental. So the parts can only be approximately aligned. Some degree of variety or non-alignment is to be expected. A system could break down if its parts are too roughly formed and they begin to fail to reconstruct the context of constraints that are meant to be forming them correctly.
So to use your jargon, as long as overall the maintenance crew is happy in the world they are constructing, the system will self-perpetuate. And also harms are always possible as the accidental or the various can only be limited, not eliminated.
Another systems point is that parts are meant to have critical instabilty. The best parts are those that are the most perfectly poised in a conflicted manner - balanced at the point of going in completely opposite directions. This is what allows it to be the case that top down constraints can make the parts easily switchable - turned on or off in various directions.
So the usual presumption is that parts must have stability for the whole to function. But this is not natural at all. It is mechanical and not organic.
Check out humans, and you can see this is the case. Biologicallly we are evolved to be poised between dramatically different states of mind. Fight or flight. Anxious or calm. Active or passive. Dominant or submissive. Empathetic or cold. A lot of what you call harms is simply a requirement for this kind of quick switching between sharply different responses to circumstances. We are made to be unstable because that is the source of a system's power. A slight touch on the controls is all it takes to turn on a dime.
So yes, if you think about this philosophically, it may seem weird. But only because you are framing the situation mechanically and not organically. You are treating humanity like a mindless maintenance crew perpetuating some giant machine that exists for no apparent purpose.
But nature is organic, not mechanical. You are applying a model of things that has the fundamental flaws I've outlined often enough.
Well-stated. The idea of the individual deceiving themselves, being manipulated by the institutions to keep it going through hope and progress and similar ideals of future betterment seems to be a part of the unstated or unconscious factors for keeping institutions going despite the harm it does to individuals.
I don't think you really stated a solution to the circular argument here. To rephrase harm as "a requirement for this kind of quick switching between sharply different responses to circumstances. We are made to be unstable because that is the source of a system's power" does not make harm any less harmful to the individual. Just because humans respond to a system in dynamic ways, does not mean that this dynamism is not painful/harmful/negative for the individual involved in this negative dynamic reaction. In other words, you cannot "jargon" your way out of people experiencing negative experiences by simply switching the language to one of systems theory.
Here is an analogy. You can simply talk about a disease in terms of all the chemistry and mechanics involved (dynamic or mechanical or other), and you can talk about disease in terms of the individual experience of the disease. You keep changing the from the patient's experience of the disease to the chemistry involved. Another analogy would be the Pangloss "Best of all Possible Worlds" fallacy that was lampooned in Voltaire's Candide. If 30,000 people die in an earthquake and you start going on about how this is just what you expect from being a part of an organic, dynamic, natural system, there is something off about this. If you do not see how this is the case, and simply deny that there is personal experience, or individual perspective, again, there is something off about this. You are denying the very experience you are using to postulate systems theory. You are not simply this mind on the internet pontificating on systems theory- you are an organic individual human that interacts with the world, has emotions, experiences a range of things and not just a cog (organic or otherwise) in some natural system. It is again, getting caught up in the map and never recognizing the humanness of being human.
Anyways, to go back to your systems approach to the circular logic, you seem to agree in a weird way, that the system is here despite the individual and not necessarily for the individual. Rather the individual can benefit from being a part of it, but any one particular individual is not necessary to keep the whole system going. Why should the human not be more than a bit suspect of keeping a system going that has no reason for it to keep going in and of itself (no self-justification, if there is such a thing), and that does harm to the individuals that are keeping it going?
Hence positive psychology. Once you realise that it is all about contextual framing, then the obvious next step is to take charge of your own psychosocial framing. You stop belly aching about the life that has mechanically been forced upon you and take charge of creating a life as you want it.
Of course then if you think you can have a life of untroubled bliss, you don't understand the point of life at all. So there is no point making romantic transcendence your goal. The nature of nature is pragmatic. Suck it up. It ain't so bad once you do achieve that kind of harmonious flow.
Who is to say that this is not just one more manifestation of self-correction from the system- there to deceive me into future harm, and more future people into harm? Positive psychology is not a panacea, if it was, everyone would literally be promoting it all the time. It's like the 19th century cure-all.
Quoting apokrisis
The nature of nature is pragmatic? You are nature's prophet now? Even if this is so, you are an individual self-reflecting being who CAN see that there is no justification to keep the system going. Again, you have failed to provide a solution except to say that systems don't care about individual preferences. This I understand, but why do we actively have to WANT to perpetuate what already exists just because it exists? We are not here FOR life. And what is that anyways, that you bring up? Dynamic balance, and that gibberish does not really console the individual.. Positive psychology reminds me of "Serenity Now".. Should we gloss over the fact that there is no justification to keep institutions going? Again, you have provided no solution to the question and the bring up this "goal" of life. Besides the fact that you bring up a goal that probably does not exist, besides the fact that you put yourself in the place of a prophet translating for nature its goals to us misguided folks, besides the fact that you provide no solution as to why the system is justified..
Yes, indeed, one of the most deceptive aspects of positive psychology is the emphasis on the apparent compatibility between freedom and happiness (and, consequentially, one of the most emphasized aspects of cultural pessimistm is the incompatibility between the two). Especially since neither one is really attainable to any significant degree.
It's ridiculous to believe the universe was meant to make anyone happy, so the individual is expected to take up the reigns and bootstrap themselves into happiness - and this is expected of everyone, as anyone in dissent is seen as atypical. But the fact is that the Stoic advice contradicts its own metaphysics.
Neither do we have the freedom necessary to accomplish all our goals and aspirations. Fulfillment is not really about satisfying all your goals but of tailoring them to your environment, learning to swallow mediocrity. You have freedom to manipulate what is given to you in order to better suit your needs, but that's it.
And of course there's the oft-ignored issue of extreme situations. Natural disasters, catastrophes, horrible suffering and trauma - nobody wants these to happen, but they still do. Who is to blame? Are the victims simply supposed to accept that they're at fault?
Quoting apokrisis
And here we have, alongside your previous comment, the aggressive nature of affirmative ethics, specifically expansionary ethics like utilitarianism or pragmatic ethics. Instead of providing a reason satisfactory to the individual, you demand the dissent to suck it up and learn to deal with life. That's not answering the issue, that's just pushing it away as "unimportant" because it doesn't fit in whatever preconceived notion you're working under. It's strikingly similar to the bourgeoisie demanding the proletariat suck it up and keep working under such poor conditions. It's severely lacking in compassion and understanding.
Yeah, lets go for a proper 20th century cure like pharmaceuticals or ECT. Have a lobotomy while you're at it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's the beauty of it. We can each do our own thing. You can be miserable and die, leaving behind nothing. I can live a life expecting a mix of the rough and the smooth, bring up kids of a similar mind.
At the end, we would both fulfil our wishes. You would find the ultimate exit door and I would perpetuate something of like mind. So what's there to complain about?
Quoting darthbarracuda
How can that be so? Your life has to be a vale of tears or else your personal philosophy would be contradicted. I sometimes worry I'm not doing enough to confirm you in your pessimistic opinions.
So once more with feeling - suck it up.
Why is this, and why do you assume my life is not a vale of tears? And why is the existence of lives that are vales of tears not important?
I didn't say it was good. I said it was unalterable. Whether it was good for someone in the first place is neither here nor there (as it happens, I was a late mistake by Catholics where my father refused to adopt sensible methods of birth control, but that too is unalterable however much I contemplate it).
So, I find myself in this living situation. And over time I, for myself, have come to embrace this much of Stoicism: that I will try to understand those areas of life that I can have some effect on, and then have effects if I can, and that I will nod sadly and sagely towards those areas of life that I can have no effect on, and move on.
You wrote early in the thread of 'an ideal society'. But your criticism of what I put forward seems to be a criticism of anyone who attempts any kind of social change. Are there any social changes you admire? What is your ideal society, since you say you have one, and what would it take for it to be achieved? I take that sort of question as my starting-point. I don't know if you saw Mongrel's thread on 'slave morality', or have read any Nietzsche: it seems to me that to focus one's philosophical attention on irremediable injustice is a pointless circular exercise.
To be fair, my ideal society is a non-starter. First off, I frequently bring up the concept of "instrumentality". This is an immovable existential problem that does not change with differences in social arrangements. Instrumentality, as I define the term, is the emptiness felt at the end of enterprises. It is essentially the feeling of "doing to do to do" because one is alive and one needs to keep his/her complex mind entertained with things other than purely survival-related activities.
Any activity X only gets you so far before you question why any activity really matters other than your mind craves SOMETHING to care about at a particular time. With this as the core tenet, when this is taken to the social level, where we are confronted with disagreeable people, coworkers, managers, neighbors, and otherwise, where the social arrangements of work, consumption, and government provide negative experiences on top of the existential concept of instrumentality- you can see how the problem becomes a vicious circle. We have the existential emptiness, but we prop it up with all social institutions we are forced to maintain, and perpetuate.
I often feel very empty at the end of enterprises but I don't think that short-term result is a guide to what value they had in the medium term for me or for other people involved or the wider world around us. I stick with the claim that a multiplicity of 'micro' things I and people I know have done had and have value. If social changes remove some harm, enhance possibilities and are rewarding in themselves for some of the participants, then to me they have value. I don't feel that bouts of existential despair justify inertia. To be self-reflective about the fact that the human creature seems to need something, sometimes any old thing, to care about just doesn't strike me as an argument against social action. But this is indeed an existential thing - because I found Sartre at a critical age and lately have been reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger - I don't think of a sense of absurdity as a barrier to action, but a leap to made over a chasm. That's just how I am. One commits. Then, plonk, here one is.
But when one is forced into a negative situation due to social challenges of the existing structure, and then when one realizes that at the end of these challenges there are only vague notions of entertainment experiences- this is not very consoling. Maybe you really do have a magical life of flying into the abyss with abandon and enlightenment.. Many people are just trying to get over enough obstacles, whether they be self-caused, other-caused, or existential-caused.
Only if you don't have anything you care about. For many, the mind craving something to care about amounts to the destruction existential emptiness. More specifically, it quite literally the only reason to do anything. If one wasn't driven to care, it they were caused to not care, they would not act as they do. "Reasonless" they would be, for the mere fact of their existence would mean an absence of motivation or any worthwhile outcome in their mind.
It's not about obstacles either or the "ideal society." Frequently, obstacles are what the mind cares about. People love them, so they can care about overcoming them. A lot of the time people even care about them more than what's given to them without conflict.
You seem to view this arse about face for some reason. You appear to treat misery as an inescapable end rather than the escapable beginning.
So misery exists (in nature) as a signal to get changing. It says you are in the wrong place and need to head to a better place.
Of course pessimism thrives on the claim that misery (for us, in this era of history, due to the way we live) is inescapable.
But that is what makes it superficial as philosophy.
I wasn't quite sure what you were saying here. I already stated that our complex minds crave SOMETHING to care about, so you are preaching to the choir there.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes I can agree with this. However, some feel the acute feeling of emptiness- the instrumentality. Perhaps not everyone sees it.
Not really.. How is instrumentality being the core of the existential issue superficial? It may be ignored, or distracted from, but it is there. Society building social relations that cause conflict for the maintenance crew who keeps it going to but for no justification is a related problem that is not superficial. Quite the contrary, it gets to the heart why we are motivated to continue the human project in the first place. Systems theory is nothing without more humans willing to buttress the whole edifice so that you can entertain systems theory ideas.
No, I think what makes pessimism so idiosyncratic is how easy and obvious it is but how paradoxically difficult it is to accept. Whereas other philosophical projects are somewhat successful at solving problems, the issues pessimism brings up are not really all that solve-able. And that's probably the rub of it. It's only superficial if you expected anything more.
Actually I'd say pessimism can be deeply interactive. Quoting apokrisis
But of course this better place has to be existence, right? :-}
And that existence is what you make it.
Of course Pollyannaism is as superficial as Pessimism. There are limits to what any individual can change. So Pragmatism accepts the necessity of working within limits.
Yet in accepting responsibility for playing a part in the making of a better world, at least we start acting like a grown-up. And that responsibility starts at home with ourselves - hence positive psychology.
The point is you are discounting the very thing, and only thing that, from a person's point of view, makes anything worthwhile. To be pressured or moved is how we care. When one project finishes (be it competed or not), we need our minds to drive us in another (even if it is only basking in the glory of what we have already done), else we are caught in a world where nothing matters.
Take the simplest example where someone completes are project. Why do they feel like it wasn't worth the effort? Well, that's how they feel. Where they were once willed to care, they no longer do. After the project is all said and done, they only will that it was all a waste of time and there is nothing more than they could ever do in life. Their problem is they've stopped willing any project but their own failure and misery.
What they need is a new project, with its pressure to "be" something, its obstacles to overcome and (in some cases) pain and suffering which have to be endured to achieve the goal. For their misery to end, they must will and be content that such willing itself is the point.
Empowering, yet false. Again this comes back to the whole schpeel about the requirement of illusions for personal security and optimism.
Quoting apokrisis
Pessimism is pessimistic only in relationship to the very pollyanna optimism that is so widespread in the media and government and general public.
But it's not just blind pollyannaism but the general affirmative attitude towards life. Ever wonder why people are so resistant to suicide being legalized? It's because the existence of death is systematically obscured (oblivion!) and the non-Being of Being is forgotten and replaced by a delusion of permanence and progress.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm all for positive psychology if it makes us more productive. I'm not for positive psychology if it's seen as the Scientifically Correct way to deal with life.
So the problem with your pragmatic "solution" is that it's using a non-radical therapy to "solve" a radical problem that is not actually able to be solved, especially not by non-radical methods. You might as well just tell pessimists like me and Schop1 to go hit up the bong.
You smoke your first joint yesterday and today you talk like a seasoned stoner.
But I am not discounting it. I very much know that is a motivation factor along with survival itself.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I am not sure about that last part. You don't necessarily "Will" yourself to be content from existential empty feelings. You may will yourself to start another project, true. My point was the implication of this feeling. What this means. It's not hard to say, "well fill your time with more projects"..Of course, that is a temporary solution.. but it does not solve the problem that nothing is justified to keep the human project going in the first place.. Why there is this emptiness there in the first place. Why we humans can even have this self-reflection.
What?
This.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Then.
Quoting darthbarracuda
If you can't join the dots between the superficiality of Pessimism as a philosophy and the superficiality of pot as a solution to life's problems, then maybe you shouldn't risk knocking off even more neurons.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I don't see how this is relevant.
Quoting apokrisis
Dude, I did it once. It was alright. I'm not a pothead, sheesh.
It is relevant that in one breath you tout the mood enhancing benefits of pot, the next you imagine it as the very worst advice I might give you and Schop (when it is as far away from sensible as any advice from positive psychology would get.
So the protest is double, You both strawman me and also do that in a way that is inconsistent with your own expressed views.
Thus the relevance is illustrating what awful arguments you make.
Mood enhancement is hardly a genuine solution to anything pessimism focuses on (or really anything for that matter, apart from maybe glaucoma or something), that's why I brought it up as an example. There's nothing incoherent in having a generally euthymic equilibrium while simultaneously having negative beliefs about life and existence. I've mentioned Leopardi's spontaneous explorer and Nietzsche's ubermensch before as examples. Leopardi's especially works well with what you implied elsewhere, the obvious aesthetic of the scientist (explorer of sorts).
For the record, I wouldn't get high again for the funnies. I'd do it to cope with the anxiety and tension I deal with on a daily basis, since years of therapy hasn't done much to ease my stress. There's a whole lot of ifs involved here, chances are I'll probably never get high again in the near future.
Quoting apokrisis
By planting a red herring and misdirecting the focus off my actual arguments and onto my so-called worship of weed.
Of course it is incoherent.
If you see the world is generically grey, you can't coherently claim it to be black on the grounds it is not white. Just as the pollyannaish reverse is also an incoherent claim.
Most children are just unthinkingly brought into the world by people who haven't given a single thought to examining the reasons or justifications for their actions.
Basically these institutions perpetuating themselves is more like an epiphenomenon resulting from an unexamined biological drive that the vast majority of humans posses, unexamined.
People never really reflect on why they are bringing children into to the world. They want children, it's a biological drive, children are born and these institutions perpetuate themselves as a byproduct of this.
Not many people seem to go further in their justifications for bringing children into the world than "I want a child". It's sad really. Suffering perpetuates itself for no reason other than selfish desire to satisfy ones biological drive to procreate (and probably to satisfy some sort of existential drive to 'create a legacy', or to continue ones existence beyond themselves as some sort of quest for life beyond death, something along these lines).
On my view having a child is highly immoral, based on the needless suffering the child will experience.
But I don't see the world as generically grey, I see it as structurally black.
How I act upon this belief is entirely different. There is nothing stopping me from appreciating the ambiguity, or vagueness as you so love to say, of sentient welfare and the irony that this cultivates. Part of the pessimistic, or even just plain old existentialist, literature is the focus on the apparent paradox of [s]human[/s] sentient existence. If you think the ways I cope with existence are not compatible with a belief that life is structurally unsound, then that's fine. Indeed it would be strange if the methods of coping were perfect, for there wouldn't be any reason to talk about the issues at hand.
So you're assuming pessimism has to be accompanied by a poor attitude. Not surprising, as I doubt you've actually read anything substantial in pessimistic literature, despite your ironic belligerence against it. If you had, you would have been familiar with the words of Camus, or Nietzsche, or Leopardi, who explicitly deny this assumption.
So you agree that your perceptions and conceptions are incoherent. Great.
You may not care, but the Protestant Work Ethic (as conceived by Luther) is that all work is holy and in the service of God and one another. Capitalism certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about work being holy, but it took over the PWE for it's own purposes.
On the topic of what we are here for, Jesus the Primo Protestant said
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’"
From a Christian POV (Protestant or Catholic) that is what we are here for.
As for the Protest Work Ethic, what the Protestant agitator himself (Luther) said was:
…the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks…all works are measured before God by faith alone.
All work is holy work, and it is through our work that we care for each other--love one another.
This is ONE VIEW of why we are here. I recommend it only to the extent that it beats whatever you've got.
The context of this was to ask why we perpetuate institutions. Cavacava mentioned the Protestant Work Ethic. I explained how this is not self-justifying. In the common interpretation of the Protestant Work Ethic (one less close to its origins perhaps as you point out), it is simply about working for the sake of work. This is about as appealing and self-justifying as surviving for the sake of surviving. It is NOT self-justifying and does NOT address why it is good to perpetuate these institutions, especially with negative experiences involved in both related activities of work and survival.
Your interpretation of the Protestant Work Ethic that you provided which is that we work to care for each other, is also not self-justifying. It is merely a mode of survival. I would say it's better than stomp on your neighbor to get ahead or simply "work for the sake of work", but it is still not answering the question of why perpetuate institutions through which we work to care for each other in the first place?
Your interpretation runs into other problems as well. Care or love for each other is a tricky thing anyways.. People's idiosyncratic personalities can make "caring" look very different. If someone was an asshole to me, but fed me.. I wouldn't know how to take that. Are they actually caring for me? How can people even begin to care for people in the way they want to be treated if their own version of how they want to be treated is way off? Someone raised in a "tough love" environment and directs people like a bully may think they are caring. Besides, the institutions THEMSELVES may force otherwise "nice" agreeable people to act like assholes due to the context of their position or how they have to work with others. Again, we are harmed by these institutions that we perpetuate.
We can all agree that material goods are good.. but we are forced into relations with people who don't necessarily have our view of how relations with others should work or simply have to act a certain way in order to conform to the institution.. We all may agree that it is not good for people to go hungry and be completely destitute. However, it is the actual minutiae of working with different personality types that strains human relations. This is compounded with the fact that often times we cannot get away from these negative relations since society demands of us to keep its institutions going and thus work with all different sorts and in negative scenarios that make life not that enjoyable.
Anyways, the bigger question is why perpetuate the cycle of work in the first place? If you say through it we care for each other, then why are we working so that through it we care for each other in the first place? It does not seem self-justifying. In fact, through work, often times I am confronted with why humans are not that great.. even if somehow the end result means an increased welfare from the product/service. What makes dealing with other people's negative idiosyncrasies through the forced institutions of life worth it? Why do we agree to continue being the maintenance crew on for the institutions and perpetuate them?
We are beings that are never satisfied for long, frequently harmed, and we keep institutions going that help us survive and keep our complex mind entertained . We are the maintenance crew for these institutions. We maintain these institutions simply to maintain them, just as we survive to survive.. But that is not a justification of why we continue to do it.
I was just trying to fill in background on "the Protestant work ethic". "All work is holy" is better than "work or die", but Luther (b. 1483) preceded the full realization of the industrial revolution and capitalism. He didn't have a theology of alienation of labor (which Marx provided). Our experience of alienated labor is not Luther's 15th-16th century experience.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's very basic: Human beings live by culture much more than instinct, and institutions are the means by which we transmit culture across generations. That doesn't mean that every piece of culture is good or that institutions transmit culture only beneficently. We develop bad as well as good elements in our culture, and human-inhabited institutions often twist culture into malignant forms.
We live more by culture than instinct, but instinct is definitely a player. Our bent towards individual self-preservation and enhancement, and our capacity for perfidiousness are one of the major factors in the twisting of culture and institutions into some of the horror shows that we know and love so well. Authoritarian regimes arise, again and again, because some people really like to be Boss and be obeyed, and some people like being bossed. Some institutions operate on S&M principles.
Work, play, eating, sleeping, and so on are not "institutions". They are elements of life. The elements of life (of which all animals partake) are given a particular shape and function in human institutions. All animals (and plants) expend effort to obtain food--work, in other words. But "jobs", "sports", and 3 star restaurants are purely human. The elements of life are given a cultural form, and are perpetuated by institutions, in our species.
So, therefore... we perpetuate institutions as part of our individual and collective efforts to survive.
If you see only grey, yet you claim that the world has black structure (and thus a complete lack of white structure) then this is an incoherent claim about the world. Your honest impression doesn't match your professed idea.
But I never said I see only grey. And I never said the world was black through and through. I said it was structurally negative.
Take, for example, how you presumably see human life as generally positive and worth continuing. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen. And so in the same vein, I see life as generally negative and not worth continuing, but recognize good things when they do happen.
You say you personally see no purpose. A greater number - those that actually put their back into strengthening those social institutions - certainly do see a purpose. So who are you to call them blind fools?
And as I asked earlier, where's the problem. Those who don't believe can refuse to perpetuate any cooperative system of survival and so remove themselves from the stage. Just doing that in itself will strengthen the identity of the institution that remains.
What you advocate - if it is antinatalism - is voluntary social eugenics. So the irony is that you serve the institutional purpose in seeking to deny it. Suicide is a logical thing to encourage biologically as a way to deal with the diseased or malfunctioning. Cells are built to destruct themselves for this reason - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis
So self perpetuation is no evolutionary mystery. Voluntary eugenics can only ensure the strengthened identity of what you claim to detest. You are only making yourself part of the process of institutionalised self perpetuation in trying to promote the self annihilating trope of anti natalism.
If you really want to bring down the system, then what you actually have to do is become a source of constant friction. You must be the silt that gums up the works, the accumulating waste that eventually kills the whole.
So aim for inefficiency, dependency and wasteful consumption if it is the institutions that you want to bring down. Have as many kids as possible and bring them up to be as entropic as they can manage. Hope that they grow fat, useless and deeply in debt, as frictional on society's maintenance system as can be imagined. That way everything will surely fall apart as is the goal.
(Wait, does this sound something like the world we know?)
I already explained this already, try to keep up.
False dichotomy.
This whole white-grey-black thing is an oversimplification. The good parts of life are not illusory (non-existent) themselves (rather, transitory), but they are a source of illusion. They give us the illusion of security, permanence, and meaning; they seem this way when they are not. The man wins the lottery and believes himself to be a happy man, yet less than a week later he will return to the equilibrium and perhaps even be disappointed by how little money he actually gets to keep. Previous good experiences are used as justification for an optimistic prediction of the future, yet curiously bad experiences tend to be marginalized and forgotten. And with the death of God, the secular man is left with nothing but the future to reassure him when his secular theodicy support structure fails to do so.
As I've already said before, there is nothing incoherent in accepting that life is not worth living yet continuing to live anyway. There's no logical connection here, even if you demand there to be. Existence is absurd. We're seduced into continuing living by some little novelty. The ennui emerges from the constant tension between this and other related realizations and the systematic covering-up of them by society at large. It's madness.
Once you swallow the absurdist pill, you can move on and start to make the best of the situation you're in. The false dichotomy you present is such because it simplifies the matter to suit your agenda. I can accept that happy people exist, no problem. That's not what's at stake, though. What's at stake is the fragile contingency of this happiness, and the looming threat of disorder that oftentimes puts people in situations of suffering above that which they can handle. And, in general, the observation that these people are happy oftentimes only due to a structure of illusions that provide comfort and security. Once you have this realization, it's hard to go back. You've transcended the immanent.
There's also no need to give life or existence "objective" value in the sense you seem to be demanding it be. Life is what it is. However, how it is experienced by those involved in it is inherently value-laden. To be conservative, then: life is bad for those involved, even if it takes a lifetime for them to realize it.
Antinatalism is never going to be accepted, so the next-best thing is to promote the legalization of assisted suicide for those who aren't satisfied with the lot they were forced to draw in life. But of course that's probably never going to happen, either, because people don't like to have the concept of non-being around in an affirmative society.
Quoting apokrisis
That's the sad thing - the world has and always will be inherited by the zombies.
Rubbish. The bar on what counts as being properly human has simply been set impractically high by institutionalised Romanticism. That is the subcontract causing all the problems.
If you expect your life should be Picasso, Einstein and Pele all rolled into one, you might indeed view your lot rather pessimistically.
Or if you expect reality ought to be heavenly bliss, no harm experienced by even a fish, a bacterium, a blade of grass, then again there is this silly belief in a transcendent value that rules from beyond the realm of the immanent.
One has the educated choice of either understanding the real structure of reality or perpetuating various socially institutionalised myths.
So the tropes or Romanticism are fun, even escapist. And also politically useful. They do underpin a certain way of life during a certain time (like right now in the blindly consumptionist West). But nature will always win in the end. It knows what is real in being the definition of reality.
Except your revisionary history leaves out the pessimists of the ancient world...try again I guess.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't expect it to be anything. That's you putting words in my mouth and assuming pessimism is merely a reaction of disillusionment.
You have yet to pull words out of your own mouth that would make a coherent case as to how a structurally black world could be quite fun and meaningful in practice.
Your best attempt was to label people who might have a different opinion "the inheriting zombies." Nice.
The point is that it's actually not all that fun or meaningful, but a certain aesthetic can be cultivated in the absurdity alongside the occasional moments of joy and excitation. A world need not be 100% doom and gloom and horror in order to be classified as structurally negative. It could be mediocre, like a B-rated movie that nevertheless has some cool action shots and a steamy sex scene.
Your objections continue to miss the mark.
Quoting apokrisis
Thanks, I call it as I see it. Those who disagree can either show me where I'm wrong (and I'll gladly take it!), or they can go about their merry way. But for some funny reason, people take it as a personal insult when other people don't like the stuff they do, as if everyone at the party (that nobody was invited to!) has to enjoy it.
Why is this? Why do dissidents have to be forcibly convinced to be optimistic? Why aren't they automatically optimistic, and why can't they just be left alone if optimists don't like them?
You don't have to agree with everything the pessimist says to understand the principle behind antinatalist arguments. Choice. Had I payed for a bad concert, it wouldn't be right for me to complain about its quality. I knew what I was getting into. Not so much for life.
Why must you keep misrepresenting what I say? I'm not arguing for optimism in place of pessimism, but instead pragmatism.
And also you can make your antinatalist choice if you wish. My reply to the OP was about why it would make no difference as that just creates more room for those with a wish to perpetuate their kind.
And once again, optimism and pessimism are comparative terms.
Quoting apokrisis
So your argument against antinatalism is based on a dubious empirical prediction about the consequences of adopting antinatalism in a non-ideal environment?
How does this affect the validity of the antinatalist view?
Try and keep different thoughts separate. I was addressing Schop's OP about the "puzzle" of self perpetuating social institutions and noting the irony that antinatalism would only strengthen what it hopes to end. So the actual strategy would have to focus on increasing the structural inefficiency of the social machine.
Stick around, act helpless, be a drag on the rest. Then the whole thing might indeed collapse (only to be reborn much the same - sorry, nature and the second law are relentless like that.)
If you think that's the best course of action for me, then I'm already doing that. Although I try not to be too much of a drag.
This is not a very relevant argument- it does not have an immanent enough impact on the current situation. If we focus on the current situation, then we would care more about how the procreation and the continuing of institutions (which is necessary but harmful to individuals) are affecting humans. If in some impersonal distant future generation, some unknown species has negative experiences (that seems to always correlate with life), then unfortunately it will be their problem. I guess it could be a bonus if we could also predict and prevent future suffering in some far off distant species, but just because we cannot predict this, does not mean that the goal of ending future suffering for the current situation is negated as useless. But, I'm sure you already knew that, you just like having a diet of red herrings :D.
Also, the slipperiness of "nothing" gets entangled in this. When comparing existing vs. not existing at all, what do we get? Well, it is impossible to describe nothingness; it eludes all description. Yes, antinatalists are still doing something to the system, if by subtraction (subtraction of experiencers for the sake of having them not suffer). It is not the fact that something somewhere may suffer, but the idea that one is rebelling- denying that which causes the suffering in the first place.
You focus too much on the efficacy of antinatalism, and not what it provides as consolation- that one can at least do one thing to prevent future suffering. It is a change in perspective. Rather than take for granted that institutions are just "here" we see it as simply a self-perpetuating process; you can call it "The Human Project". This project causes 100% causalities, and 100% fatality, 100% guarantee of harm for all, is something forced on 100% of participants, and is only around due to a viscous circle (surviving to survive, maintaining to maintain, experience to experience).
Yep. I've been pointing out the self-defeating nature of anti-natalism in that it in fact must result in the eugenic strengthening of the pool of willing breeders. So it really blows as a practical philosophy in that sense.
But yes, it is a consoling thought, that antinatalists might inflict their pessimism on everyone they possibly can, but at least not on their own kids. That counts as a small blessing I guess.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Oh alas, alack. Render the clothes, tear the hair.
I have to laugh as life is interesting because it is complex, both in terms of its responsibilities and its delights. Yet you choose to be as crudely reductionist as possible so as see it as structurally black.
This is the actual philosophical sin here. Mistaking absolutism for profundity.
Yet you don't address the solution to the problem of the vicious circle.
As have I, when I said the zombies will inherit the Earth. But you didn't like that description that much...
Even if antinatalism is pragmatically self-defeating (which I doubt, of course), this does not change the formal, ideal value of it. Non-ideal bullshit shouldn't affect the validity of a formal argument.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't get it. If you don't like pessimism, and if you don't think pessimism is a "real" philosophy or something, then why are you wasting so much time and energy on what you see to be a failed cause?
Quoting apokrisis
This hand-waves the issues away by trying to make life seem like a mixed bag of goods and bads. We've been saying it from the start, we are not meant to be happy, we are not meant to be secure. We are meant to survive and survival requires us to suffer. Suffering is the structural integrity of life as experienced by those involved in it, i.e. the phenomenological natural-ontology.
So you're coming from the perspective that being is generally, if not intrinsically, good. Yet when asked to justify this, you must appeal to the ontic complexities of life. Naked being cannot be defended, it must be concealed by appealing to the transitory ontic intra-worldly beings, while systematically obscuring/denying the reality of non-being, i.e. the non-being of being. Being-towards-death.
To affirm being is not to find something about being that is good, but to point fingers at the stuff within being to justify being. Ironically enough, the being that is apparently so good is the same being we have to protect ourselves against.
Must I keep repeating myself endlessly for your pleasure? Just do some reading on hierarchical organisation.
Alternatively, we are meant to flourish. Or same thing, flourishing would be what would be meaningful. (Try and deny it.)
So you are simply building your conclusion into your premises, which is why you make such bad arguments.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Why do you keep trying to make out that I say things I don't say? Is it because your argument is otherwise so weak?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Hah. I hear your discomfort and note you have no counter-argument on that point. You are promoting a philosophy that is self-defeating in only securing what it hopes to avoid. And that fact exposes a basic failure of analysis.
You are opposing pessimism against optimism. Yet nature is structurally a mixed bag in the end.
Alright, I'll try. We're "meant" to survive in a hostile world, as I've already said. Flourishing is contingent and transitory with no guarantees of success. You can marginalize the failures all you want, this doesn't mean they don't exist or haven't existed for the past countless eons.
Quoting apokrisis
I love anonymous internet belligerence so much.
Whether you said it or not is irrelevant, it is implicit in your position. Affirmation of life; i.e. "it's worth it". It may be a mixed bag under your view, but the contents favor overall positive value. Otherwise there'd be no reason not to be a pessimist.
Quoting apokrisis
You didn't even really give much of an argument. Something about antinatalists giving more population room for breeders, or something. Either way, someone gets born. Okay...?
Quoting apokrisis
Depends on what you mean by nature. I'm clearly not meaning nature by the entirety of existence, as I've already stated as such. If that's what you mean, then my position in accordance to this would be that life is one of the negative bits in the mix.
But you are again straying from nature's own logic. Failure spells non survival. So the ability to persist is definitional of what it is to flourish. That is the actual structure of the world.
It isn't me who marginalises failure. Failure marginalises itself. And thus antinatalism is simply being unwittingly proactive in stepping up to the plate, putting its head on the block sooner rather than later.
Quoting darthbarracuda
When I say I didn't say it, perhaps you ought to take note?
I would say you're equivocating here and getting dangerously close to the naturalistic fallacy. Being able to live long enough to pass on one's genes is not the only requirement for something to "flourish". Clearly the satisfaction of preferences is an integral part.
One of the pessimistic points, then, would be that the biology of humans and the environment humans live in are not sufficient to maintain a prolonged eudaimonic, flourishing life. We persist not because we enjoy it or because it's good for us to persist, but because we don't really have any other choice. Well. actually, we do have a choice, but it's an unspeakable choice under an affirmative framework.
Quoting apokrisis
...victim blaming? Those who can't cope with the demands the universe puts on them are failures...
Quoting apokrisis
...but then again, we're only failures under your affirmative framework. If you value being more than non-being, then of course antinatalists are going to be seen as failures. But if you value non-being more than being, or even just a more conservative ethical appreciation of free will, antinatalism could be seen as the height of success. To break out of the cycle of life. That takes real guts.
Quoting apokrisis
And like I said before, you don't have to say something to imply it.
If we are part of nature, then all that asks of us is a pragmatic response.
Instead you want to make some kind of transcendentally absolute deal out of suffering. The least amount of pain or effort is sufficient reason to wish for non-existence. Which is riidiculous of course.
One problem I see with your argument is the false dichotomy of Romanticism and your version of systems theory. If there was a benefit of the influence of Existentialism, it is the idea that people do not have to play the role social institutions have already preordained as proper. No one has to play a role for survival's sake, for their country's sake, or for an institution's sake. One is as free as one can be within the bounds of one's encultred environmental context. In other words, one has the free will to choose an avenue of action and belief but must deal with the consequences of those choices within the framework of one's socialized and cultural setting. You can say that it is not "wise" to lash out against certain roles due to a likelihood of negative consequences, but nevertheless, there is no obligation to follow preordained social roles. One is free to fulfill a role if they so choose or not to if they so choose. There is no obligation to keep the institutions going, the system going, or nature going (whatever that means).
Now, what you do, is a clever sleight of hand. Instead of focusing on the individual human's choice, you focus on the inevitability (or at least your theory of inevitability) that life will always persist. This is not the question- whether nature will eventually form complex organisms again or in parallel to us before the universe dies in the Heat Death. Rather, the question is what we, the individual experiencing human with choices, are going to choose to do in the face of the situation we are in. Do we keep the project that was bequeathed going? The Maintenance and Continuance of the Human Project is the largest contract- the political social contracts are a major sub-category, and the civil society of daily life are the numerous sub-sub-contracts. You can question the need to continue each of these categories- whether they are here as a result of human's need for survival using linguistic-cultural reasoning or not. It does not matter that institutions, the human project, the sub contracts are here due to survival- we all know that is the origin. It is the decision to continue them that the question demands. Why are we choosing to be part of the maintenance crew?
So - to use the dichotomy that seems most relevant to the pessimist's position - the complaint is that the world contains the bad. And yet the world ought to be good. Therefore the world is fundamentally imperfect and bad. Goodness now counts for nothing in the reductionist calculus that the pessimistic thinker constructs as his cocoon of thought.
But for me - just phenomenologically - that stance is ridiculous. I experience pleasure and pain as inextricably intwinned. I exercise hard because that produces the most exquisite mix of these two things. Likewise, I would live life hard for the same reason. Effort is intrinsically a pain and yet intrinsically a delight.
Reductionist thinking can make a paradox of this basic psychological fact. But holism instead demands its truth. It is natural that the coin of existence has its two complementary faces and the value of each is maximised when we are most truly alive.
So this is what you and DC signally fail to understand - the logic of nature.
You instead have become enslaved to the logic of machines. You think about existence in terms of monadic reduction. Life has to be either all the one or the other. So therefore any bad counts as a blemish on the perfect good, making the whole thing irredeemably bad as the only remaining option.
Yet this is simply to ignore the evidence of your own experience. It is to misunderstand your own nature by imposing on yourself the notion that you are a machine - a notion you then want to violently, romantically, transcendently, reject ... leaving you then with no rational position at all.
I instead understand my nature because I can see why pleasure and pain are psychically joined at the hip. Perfection in the real world lies not in one reigning absolute, the other banished from the kingdom. Instead to flourish is to live with that exquisite balance where you thrash yourself up mountains (both literal and metaphoric) as living hard is living best.
Of course pain can become overwhelming in life. Shit happens. Likewise you can "suffer" from an excess of ease and satisfaction. So imbalance is perfectly possible - indeed it is a given if balance is a goal that relies on the constraint of the accidental.
The standard ethics of the enlightenment should be coming into sight now - as the enlightenment was about humanity waking up to existence of nature (with the sharp understanding of the mechanical being the ironical handmaiden to this larger psychological awakening).
That is, humanistic ethics is focused on creating the opportunity to thrive. Society needs to be organised to remove the accidental sources of the good and the bad in the life of the individual. That way, the individual has the greatest opportunity to be the source of their own exquisite mix of joy and sorrow - to be actually fully alive and not one of DC's monotone zombies or your mechanical maintenance crew.
So pessimism is based on the completely faulty notion of ending the pain inherent in living. But you can see how naturalism only wants to remove the accidental pain - so as to maximise the scope for purposive pain. And likewise, naturalism would want to remove accidental pleasures, to make pleasure properly purposive.
It all makes sense once you have a proper theory of life and nature. You can see what is hollow and pointless about taking drugs - they are accidental sources of pleasure. Although people often take drugs as a crutch to aid socialisation. And so it gets complicated. Socialisation is a natural and purposeful thing - the context that our efforts at individuation require. Social interaction - done right, done hard - hits that exquisite balance of pain and pleasure.
Thus there is a crisp choice when it comes to the metaphysics underlying ethics and aesthetics.
You can go reductionist and view existence in brutely mechanical terms. Which itself must engender the dualistic reaction of the inarticulate howl of Romanticism's transcendental protest. Something has clearly been left out. But now there are no resources with which to think about it.
The alternative is the immanent holism of natural philosophy. Now we see that existence has irreducible complexity. It is meant to be dichotomous and thus about arriving at fruitful balances. And living hard sums that up as that means we are living the life that is the least accidental, the most individuated or personally meaningful. Life is meant to be a deliberate mix of pleasure and pain - the exquisite contrast which we ride so hard that any accidents that do occur are going to be ... spectacular.
Of course a further point in all this is that naturalism is also about nested hierarchies, so "living hard" becomes an imperative now to be balanced across all its many scales. This is where what is best for the individual may exceed what is best for a family, a village, a region, a nation, a planet.
Naturalism - as opposed to romantic/mechanical reductionism - grants mindfulness or semiotic meaning to all these levels of being too. So that larger balancing act, that larger definition of flourishing, has to be worked into the ethical and aethetic story too.
What did I say about irreducible complexity? Heh, heh.
Nope, once again you fail to grasp the simplicity of my position. It's not supposed to be metaphysical.
But not the sort of metaphysics you seem to be invested in or expect from this discussion. Phenomenology is front-and-center here. How humans are affected by their environment from the perspective of those involved.
What's your point, exactly? You haven't refuted shit. I have very little respect for your obsessive devotion to a metaphysics that has not relevance to half the things you claim it to be relevant to.
Because people are going to procreate whether you like or not. It's all well and good to point out the contingency of civilization and our existence, but it's also objectively pointless. I agree with you, but the agreement changes nothing, for there isn't a live option between continuing and not continuing as a species that this thread is going to settle. The best we can do is make peace with this fact and try to live accordingly.
An issue I see with this is that is seems to require a nostalgia for pre-Industrial history, before there were such things as nukes and pandemics. Now that we have the capability of destroying the planet, what side should the pessimist be on? They no longer have the convenience to sit back from the world as they did before when there literally was no method of ending the suffering.
I'm not saying we should launch the nukes. I think that might be flexing our muscles too much; I dont' know if we have that sort of authority to make that decision. But certainly we can still approach an Armageddon with open arms. Technology has shown its ability to change something that seemed to be metaphysically un-changeable.
And neither would I. This is the side the pessimist should be on.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It depends on what kind and how it occurs.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I don't think it has done any such thing.
Yes but it's the questioning that is important. Getting people to at least see beyond what we tend to do, and question why we do it. It is to see it as the striving-but-for-nothing that it is. In other words, to get to the bottom of all pursuits. Again, the efficacy is not the issue I care about as much. As you point out, procreation will continue whether one likes it or not.
Why is the questioning important if your answer is that nothing matters?
As usual, pessimism makes no sense. You complain about the pain and futility of existence and then complain about people not appreciating that "fact" as if it could then matter.
If existence is meaningless, then who cares if the majority are delusional? What beneficial meaning is being withheld from them?
And how does it add up that you would seek to make the delusionally comfortable discomforted? If pessimism is so bothered by life's discomforts, why would it have a goal of adding to them?
As usual, nothing has really been thought through.
Right, I'm just the meany pessmist over here while the sweet innocents are procreating and living without any concern. I'm the serpent tempting them to doubt their very reason for doing anything >:) :-} . They were living in an ideal state of pure bliss, until this dark notion came along.
I don't see it as adding discomfort. Rather it is pointing out our existential situation. Perhaps, initially to those who have not given it much thought, but what comes out is the consolation that the harms of life are not necessary. It is an act of rebellion. We have seen through the facade of the institutions given to us.. That being to be, is all that is going on here, nothing more.. All else is an edifice of obfuscation pointing to anything but this fact. It is the core of the problem- the limit of it as far as our own existential striving is concerned. Why shouldn't people see this for what it is? Are you advocating for Plato's Noble Lie?
Nope. I'm asking what is consistent about claiming existence is essentially meaningless and then getting so het up about people who don't appear to believe your truth. How could it matter if you are being true to your own professed belief here?
I'm not so sure about this. It seems this way, but that doesn't mean it is. Schopenhauer, for example, is ambiguous on this point. Perhaps you have shifted to a more full blooded nihilism, though.
I really don't have to give a shit about whether people see it or not.. It is a catharsis more than anything. It is staring it face down.
Using Schopenhauer's metaphysics, the Will's nature is to strive for nothing- no telos. Although, I think your interpretation is that the phenomena is Will's teleology of trying to satisfy itself, but of course, never succeeding, and we are but one aspect of the collateral damage. Thus, ascetic denial of Will, somehow breaks the cycle for the will-less hero.. Even if his metaphysics was true.. do you believe someone has the ability to deny their will to such a degree? Would you say a yogi in India or the truly enlightened Buddha? What does that even look like? Is this Ego-Death? Is it truly not caring about anything or anyone? That is the most ambiguous.
Modern culture is only interested in optimizing power, in the simplistic objectivist way advocated by Rand. As a consequence the mere notion of a theistic contract is considered revolting. This is rather unfortunate, as the social contract in the USA is theistic, whether they like it or not. Hence values such as
'life'
'liberty'
'pursuit of happiness'
are repeatedly espoused on a daily basis by those leading the USA, without any integrity, and with total hypocrisy, frequently backed with naive notions of altruism, denial of learning as a source of authority, and militaristic revenge that only disguise a fear of death in the Godless and unconscious world they have made for themselves.
But your angry language shows you do in fact care. As does your endless reposting of the one argument. Your actions give the game away. In your own words, you are a paid up member of another of those social institiutions performing some meaningless sub-contract.
There...is...no...escape. Heh, heh. It is all quite natural.
A belief or cultural institution that doesn't get out and sell itself is going to shrivel up and die. The church of nihilism is stuck in the same old game of claiming its essential truth.
The only question then is what pragmatic goods does it deliver to its cult followers? It has to be beneficial to their lives in some practical sense.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Oh I see. Sounds rather manly and romantic. So the benefit is to one's self-esteem?
So you think I have trapped myself in a self-refuting argument.. The pessimist argument, if you want to cast it as an institution (which is contestable in itself), has the goal of broadening people to the idea that they are forced by other institutions for the sake of nothing. That in itself is nefarious. Pessimism simply shows it for what it is.. cast into institutions that self-perpetuate for its own survival cause.
Quoting apokrisis
I mean c'mon apokrisis- are you picking up a playbook from the politician's book of strawmen and red herrings? How many can you commit in a post?
You frame the argument as if "pragmatic goods" are already the default goal! Anyways, if there is a "pragmatic goal" it is what I stated earlier.. catharsis.. Not just for me but for anyone who is caught in the harms of this or that situation of life. The challenges and "pragmatic solutions" are necessary because we were put in the situation in the first place. But we see that the harms of life, the striving-after-nothing underlying it, the survival for survival's sake, damned be the individuals who maintain the Project.. is not NECESSARY.. It is bringing to the fore what the existential situation is.. It need not pragmatically do anything. It is simply what the case of the matter is. Now, by talking about once you SEE what is going, by living your day out with this in mind, you can CONSOLE with others and have more understanding about the harms that befall us all.. The institutions which are necessary for survival, but which also harm us all, the self-inflicted pains, the other inflicted pains, the biological, social, and all the rest that befall individuals. It consoles us of the fact that we are presented with challenges which we MUST overcome in the first place.. It is not a given, it was FORCED on us.. and has no reason of its own other than we have gotten in the habit of continuing the project.
However, I see you as in fact the callous one. Here you are.. prophet of the SYSTEM.. professing to know what it wants.. it wants perpetuation by strengthening through challenges presented to the individual and individual's collectively coming together to strengthen society to create more individuals etc.. Whether the individual experiences harm in all this challenge strengthening does not matter to you.. Who is the cult leader here?
You sound upset at being accused of vicious circularity. And yet only a few posts back....
Quoting schopenhauer1
...right. So now we are on the same page in agreeing that hierarchies escape circularity. There is the more general view.
Yet now you need to deal with the naturalness of hierarchies - the way they must emerge in nature as chaos or contingency already speaks to order or regulation. Only the notion of the meaningful can produce counterfactually the notion of the meaningless. And this is the bind for your position.
Nihilism is reductionist about physical existence. God is dead. Humans are meat machines. The Cosmos is without a point. The second law seems to confirm it all. Ahead lies only the nullity of a Heat Death, the curtain brought down on a meaningless fluttering of complex existence.
So as you climb to your higher level view of reality, it all counts for nothing. That is reality's big secret. And only a select few are brave enough to confront it face on. (Wait, is that the institutional figure of the solipsistic romantic already sneaking into the room?)
But again, half the story is only half the story. Reductionism says nothing on its lonely ownsome. And dividing the story into two - mechanical physics and romantic spirit - is only dualism. A doubling down on the reductionism. So you need a story that binds everything into an organic whole - one that can show how material/efficient cause and formal/final cause are systematically ... that is, hierarchically ... related.
Now the meaningful and the meaningless can be related in formal, even measureable, terms.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or rather, the inevitable outcome. Existence is whatever works. I mean you haven't even tried to argue against the evolutionary points I've made. You already accept the basic logic of pragmatism. Your claim is instead that you can transcend reality in romantic fashion to scoff at its illusions of doing anything worthwhile.
But that in itself is contradictory as I have pointed out - the anti-naturalistic fallacy.
It is as bad to judge reality wrong as right just for simply being what it is. I don't think you have got the force of that yet.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah, now back to harms again. We speak of the negative values that themselves demand the counterfactuality that which would have been the good. We are doubling down on the self-contradiction so that first existence is meaningless, now it is structurally black. Yet if we are weighing harms in the balance, we have already admitted the issue is about balance. And for normies or zombies, the phenomenological truth is that pain and pleasure are intwinned in the way I describe as the desire to "live hard".
Your failure to argue back I took as acceptance you had no useful counter. And now we are back to just repeating assertions about existence being obviously meaningless and obviously bad.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well you understand why I object to this pragmatic interest in consolation - lets all get in a dark room and have a wee cry together. It smacks too much of wanting a socially acceptable excuse for not engaging in the gift of life that has been given to you.
I'm not heartless. I agree that the modern world is fairly shit in some key aspects of its organisation. It can be a struggle to find a place in a consumer society that demands a higher level of individualisation and self-actualisation than is naturally comfortable for many people. Yes, we can certainly see how a fancier wristwatch or faster car is in the end quite a pointless measure of anything so far as human nature is concerned.
But you can't diagnose or correct imbalance unless you have a workable theory about a life in balance.
So while pessimism likes to frame matters in terms of absolutes, pragmatism says the way things are must work in some sense - otherwise it couldn't exist. And yet also - taking the hierarchical view that gets us out of vicious circularity - we can see that what works in the short run might count as failure in the long run. And in seeing the precise nature of the imbalance, we already can see how it might be corrected.
It's not rocket science.
But again, talk of consolation is talk of learnt helplessness. It is getting comfortable with failure. And I can't see the point of that as a supposed ethical system. It is not the intelligent response.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I thought I said I in fact value pain as part of the deal. But I also made a careful distinction between accidental pain and pain that is indeed part of some valued deal.
These are the kind of subtleties of my position that you hurry past so as not to be disturbed from your dogmatic slumbers.
I think the ambiguity lies in what the denial of the will means. Does it mean the destruction or annihilation of the will? That can't be it, since the will as thing-in-itself cannot be destroyed, only its phenomenon, the body, can. To will to deny the will is also a contradictory impossibility. Does it mean the alleviation of suffering resultant from the quieting of desire? Possibly, and Robert Wicks in the secondary literature argues this, but this could never be permanent, and so hardly qualifies as salvation. So too does it conflict with Schopenhauer's frequent declarations as to its "permanent" and "annihilatory" nature. Schopenhauer is thus not only ambiguous but inconsistent. It seems to me that the denial of the will, or salvation, cannot be achieved in this life, despite Schopenhauer suggesting that it can through the use of examples from Hinduism and Buddhism.
Notwithstanding the probable heresy in my uttering the following remarks, I will say that it is for the reason just given that I have come to see Christianity as a possible solution to the problems in Schopenhauer's system. Only by placing one's faith and hope in salvation in the hereafter, while in the meantime directing one's will to God, the transcendent, can one find any modicum of peace or bear living in this sad little world. If the will cannot be destroyed, then it must affirm something when it is denied. It can't very well affirm itself, for that is just the phenomenal world. So what does it affirm? God is the only answer I can give. Schopenhauer, in his immanentizing, never goes this far, but it doesn't follow that because the principle of sufficient reason is the basis of all the teloi we know of, that there isn't one for the will itself. Not to worry, for I have as of yet done nothing, nor changed my beliefs, but I do feel a pull in the direction just now sketched.
So you present a straw man? I never said that we can transcend reality- you characterized what I said that way to present your argument a certain way. I only said we can self-reflect on our situation and prevent future suffering. The knowing and discussing of our situation can be a catharsis. How does that translate to "transcending reality"? Is it because you need a straw man to set up and knock down; you clearly rehearsed the "Romantic vs. Organic" spiel, so you need to pigeon-hole my argument in your scheme so you can lazily fit it into your usual anti-Romantic routine and not have to look at it at face value. I never stated that we can transcend reality- simply cope with our situation and prevent future suffering. Coping does not mean flinching or sugar-coating though.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, the straw mans are flying out of your metaphorical mouth so profusely, it is exasperating to correct your errors. What do you mean by "structurally meaningless"? Instrumentality is the empty feeling after all pursuits... That is the underlying dissatisfaction and restlessness of animals with complex self-reflecting minds.. If that's what you mean ..ok. "Structurally black".. If you mean by that the contingent harms that we encounter, then obviously I don't think everything is agonizing pain at all moments nor can it be since there is always a counterfactual imagining to contrast our feelings. So, two straw mans there..
Also, the only positive claim you made "to live hard" has NO justification.
Quoting apokrisis
And here we can see your bias poking through.. Life is a gift.. there we go. No justification.. just experience for experience sake.. Non-existence does not need gifts though- that does not even make sense. A gift is not something that is forced nor can it be said to be "good" for anyone, since that is a circularity; you would need to exist prior to existence for it to be good.. Non-existence was never "bad" for anyone to begin with.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Why do you keep insisting on the naturalistic fallacy.. Your secular Taoism, though charming, has no justification. It is trying to say "the world needs us to do A and we need the world to do B." No one needs anything in terms of being the purveyors of being. We do not owe the world, nor does it owe us. We may be wrapped up in the course of events, but we do not need to be worshippers of the events because that happens to be what is. This seems like religious thinking.. magical thinking actually. Let's not tempt fate.. the universe can always be worse.. it happens to produce butterflies and books by Gregory Bateson.
Maturidi claimed that the human mind could know of the existence of God and the major forms of 'good' and 'evil' without the help of revelation. Al-Maturidi gives the example of stealing, which is known to be evil by reason alone due to man's working hard for his property. Killing, fornication, and drinking alcohol were all 'evils' the human mind could know of according to al-Maturidi.
Aquinas fit the idea into Western ideas of the time as follows: "Wherefore as the type of the Divine Wisdom, inasmuch as by It all things are created, has the character of art, exemplar or idea; so the type of Divine Wisdom, as moving all things to their due end, bears the character of law. Accordingly the eternal law is nothing else than the type of Divine Wisdom, as directing all actions and movements...so then no one can know the eternal law, as it is in itself, except the blessed who see God in His Essence. But every rational creature knows it in its reflection, greater or less. For every knowledge of truth is a kind of reflection and participation of the eternal law, which is the unchangeable truth. ( Summa Theologica, III.4,90-96, Venice, 1274).
To explain, this claims that rationality is a reflection of the divine law that is understood by us through reason independently, because, as the universe is ordered by divine law, we have the capacity of rationality to deduce the same principles of order without needing reference to divine law in order to create it. The point of this 13th century argument is to counter the belief that human beings are capable of reason without the pre-existence of the divine law of God. In fact, the argument goes, that is a delusion, and in fact, our concept of human law is a PROMULGATION from the divine. No naturalistic fallacy.
If that was all you said - making that pragmatic point - then of course I agree. But I don't see where you have argued that society is a natural phenomenon, or that nature - and so the cosmos - might have a proper non-contingent purpose.
Your framework sets up existence as mechanistic and contingent. I argue instead that it is organic and telic - with the proviso that this does then explain how existence also does have accidental and machine-like aspects as part of the deal.
So what I have objected to is the reductionist simplicity of your ethical conclusions and I have opposed them with the irreducible complexity of a holistic or systems view of existence.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But I justified that in detail. You are simply asserting that I'm wrong without countering my actual argument.
Quoting schopenhauer1
My little joke. You exaggerate by calling life a burden. I say hey no, its a gift. But clearly - in saying that I am opposed to any transcendental framing of the human condition - I think the whole notion of life being "given" as either a burden or a gift is nonsensical in its invocation of some external telos.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So do you understand the fallacy? It applies just as much to taking the undesirable in terms of feelings to be "the bad".
I certainly take the naturalistic view. But that is something different.
It cannot be considered in isolation from the human condition. Some consider it divine, and some object to that. The necessity of God's existence, or not, is rather a red herring in my opinion, that has persistently clouded the judgment of many much better minds. It is a reasonable inference, as we have no choice in the human condition, that we have equally no choice in our ability to reason that which is right and wrong. That is a condition which has been referred to as promulgation of the divine law for some 10 centuries. One may disagree with the inference. One cannot disagree with the human condition.
Non-contingent purpose? I'm not sure what that even means. Whatever your answer is going to be..jargon-laden and all, what does that matter? Are you saying we have a necessary obligation to this non-contingent purpose?
Quoting apokrisis
No, I saw no justification to "live hard". But if I'm missing something, feel free to copy and paste it.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. All this really translates to is just deal with it.. And I already am.
Quoting apokrisis
It is already "given" as a burden de facto by having challenges that must be overcome. Every person, no matter what, has to deal. There is no invocation of external telos.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, you think we must follow what nature wants.. which is ludicrous on many fronts, not least of which is "knowing" what nature "wants"- its "necessary telos".. and then to believe that because we supposedly can "know" this telos, we should follow it.
As far as undesirable in terms of feelings to be "the bad".. Yeah, if the bad is not for the individual, then you have some bizarre impersonal view of the good at the expense of the individual. Of course the individual sees harm done to him/her as bad, whether or it strengthens the system or not.
That is non-contingent purpose resulting in social relations based on the even older social contract defined by Socrates, and first transferred into legal terms by Cicero.
So your claim was either/or. Either we are truly our own person, or we are simply helpless perpetuators. No middle ground. No interaction. Just a dualism cashed out in the familiar way - a mechanical and mindless world vs the Romantic "other" of the transcendent self.
My reply - expressing the holistic systems point of view where nature is an immanent whole - was...
I've been perfectly happy to argue my end. Selfhood is inextricably intertwined with social being. Social being is inextricably intertwined with biological and then physical being. So yes, nature is divided, but still a whole. There is a unity of opposites that underpins everything in immanent fashion.
My organicism - in being semiotic - even recognises the distinct grades of autonomy of purpose or interests that then arise within this overall connectedness. So it does count that there are "accidents of mechanism", such as a hierarchy of codes - DNA, followed by neurons, followed by words, followed by numbers. Each is generally constrained by nature in terms of the laws of thermodynamics - the globalised imperative to entropify. Yet each is a level of mechanism for achieving negentropic autonomy - localised purpose, localised interests.
So within this naturalistic framework, it is possible to see how words made a difference to Homo sapiens - we did become self-representational individuals working within a sphere of social relations. And with numbers, we became scientific creatures, living within machine-like economic worlds.
Thus there is plenty about how we have become that can be questioned and criticised.
But my point is that I have a framework that makes sense of such an inquiry. It reflects the actual structure of reality. Whereas you are recycling the machine vs spirit dichotomy that divides the natural world towards two unreal conceptions of existence - the material world as being brutely mechanical and the mental world as being transcendentally "other". And no good ethics can come from a faulty model of reality.
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.
But you keep overlooking the fact that I don't really believe there is an either or. Of course it is society and the individual- there cannot be a separation. It is not the origins or the fact of this intertwining of the two. Rather it is a stance or perspective to take on the situation. I am simply calling your idea secular Taoism. These naturalistic philosophies irk me for partly the same reason Stoicism irks me. It's the idea that the stance we take must be one of bear and grin it. Rather, the rebellious stance is not rejecting the intertwined nature of society and the individual, but sees the situation for the raw deal it can be. We are the maintenance crew.. we cannot become untethered from the situation, of course, but we do not have to grin and accept it. Rather, we can see it as the furtherance of the survival cause which we are a part of.. We are not separated from it, but we can seek an attitude of non-compliance. So to reiterate, we do not disagree that humans are a part of the system, but rather, our STANCE towards the system can be one where we preserve our dignity as people who understand the situation for what it is, do not flinch from it, and prevent it for future people. We do not have to be willing vessels of the system even though we must be a part of it while alive. It is a difference on perspective of the system, not a difference of metaphysical position.
Indeed Schopenhauer even thought we are a part of the system- all aspects of will. Schopenhauer's stance was one of rebellion- not just bear and grin it. As Thorongil and I pointed out, the will-denying hero in this conception will probably never accomplish his goal, but his stance here is what matters.
I. I. I, I. I.
Please excuse the intrusion. Other matters will be more important.
Well I don't say that except to ridicule the idea that we have the choice implied.
Naturalism would be about accepting our natural condition as the necessary starting point for any personal meaning. It doesn't say we then have to accept the starting point as the place we stay. But it does encourage us to inquire into the reasons why nature is the way it is - which then tells us something about the reasonableness of our own further acceptances or departures as a matter of personal choice.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is a difference at the basic level. It relies on the claim that there is this mythical "we" who "exist" in ontically separate fashion. Whereas I am saying that "we" is a social and biological construction. Romanticism literally was an idea whose history can be traced through modern culture. You can see people constructing the image and then trying to live the part.
And it wasn't a wrong response in itself. It was quite natural in that it was the social construction of individuals stripped down to devote themselves creatively to abstractions - like being heroes on a battlefield or economic self-starters. This notion of the outsider, the rebel, the uncompliant, the one who resists out of personal dignity - its all a bunch of social imagery dedicated to the furtherance of the cause that is modern society. Everything you so "celebrate" is the script being handed out to today's maintenance crew. That's the irony.
Quoting schopenhauer1
And there you go. The transcendent bit that completes your dualistic metaphysics. They can do everything to you ... but break your will. You can have the ultimate revenge ... of not believing the bastards. The self is ultimately not part of the world. It can stand outside and pass its (admittedly impotent) judgement. And for the Romantic, that is what counts. The inalienability of the subjective. The helpless martyrdom becomes the very proof of the metaphysics. They could do everything to control your being ... but they couldn't force you not to suffer! :)
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yep. I've read the book, seen the picture, heard the song. Impotence in the face of social conformism is not a sign of failure. Instead, it is the resulting degree of suffering that proves this metaphysics of the transcendent self right.
But it is bad metaphysics even if cathartic as light entertainment. Whereas naturalism supports a culture of self actualisation and positive psychology - the cultivation of the habits of potency, the ability to engage with the world in socially fruitful fashion.
Yeah. You have already embraced failure. So one less thing to worry about I guess.
This is kind of full of shit.. You are not above the fray.. You betray your own Romanticism- it's just of a different kind, "the reasonableness of the system". It's as if you drank the Kool-Aid Bateson et al was passing out and you went off the deep end.. turning the circularity in on itself.. Romanticizing Peirce.. You don't even know what you mean anymore except you don't like the sound of pessimism because its dark and scary to you.
Quoting apokrisis
The double irony is the ironic fashion whereby you speak for some sort of reasonableness that you do not define.. All you have done is made an edifice that you call Romanticism and went full throttle. The maintenance crew is that which keeps itself going. I don't see how the scrip of the "uncompliant" who does not further the position would be of much benefit.. If anything, it gunks up the works. You even said that.. and then sleight of hand-like tried to say it will start again, thus diverting the attention. Clever, but diversionary.
Quoting apokrisis
How is this even an argument? Calling it transcendent, Romantic, dualistic, does not prove it wrong. You haven't even shown how. I'd like to see you make an argument without simply throwing out labels and letting that be its own justification. You barely showed anything beyond the idea that the rebel stance is labeled as Romantic and transcendent, thus advancing nothing to dispel its efficacy in consolation against he existential situations of instrumentality, suffering, and dissatisfaction. By saying Positive Psychology, you show your own Romanticism- but this one is real.. The quixotic elixir of life.. Stoicism for the new age. More grin and bear it techniques..
Quoting apokrisis
And here you go again.. Habits of potency, fruitful fashion.. all preloaded statements. That solves nothing of instrumentality.. we already do that in any task where we try to get better at achieving a goal. Getting better at achieving goals has nothing to do with the existential questions I have outlined. It is simply distracting, ignoring, or trying to replace the problem with an unrelated one in order to have something that can be more managed in place of one that cannot. This is not putting the problem front and center. Pessimism does this- it recognizes you don't need a solvable problem, as these were never solvable to begin with.
So I'm suppose to mistake this for an argument? Blah, blah, blah, you're the real romantic, take that and no returns. ;)
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's not a problem if its just a phase. Toddlers can be very uncompliant. But we expect them to grow up. Same with teenagers. And on the whole, noncompliance is superficial - a hairstyle, a dress code, a collection of slogans.
There is nothing as restrictive on your freedom as being a punk, emo, hacktivist, gender fluid, or whatever. Genres are particularly intolerance of true difference. Again a familiar irony of modern life.
You are ridiculous yet again. Here you go with your false dichotomies and naturalistic fallacy. You've been accused of it many a time, maybe you should actually take heed. To assume what we tend to do as a culture is what is right because it is what the culture expects us to do, is a circularity. I'm not sure if you care or know this.. It is also part of the naturalistic fallacy.
Unfortunately, since you can't really think outside the little box you made for yourself, you don't realize "rebelling" is not simply doing the "opposite" but rather the idea of not even considering it as the assumed position in the first place.
You're Brady (the bald guy) here.. Instead of the Bible, it is Systems theory.. The System speaks through apokrisis, apokrisis tells the world.. the prophet from Weeping Waters, Nebraska.. let us have a book of apokrisis!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYfuTlTiixA&list=PLX4_3lO6guPMS7R93Qq-pi8UrWHkdqo0b&index=36
You will interpret what you think right by appealing to some ideal version of social norms (first fallacy- no justification) and by what we already do (naturalistic fallacy), then make false accusations about dichotomies (strawman), and label interlocutors arguments as something perceived as negative (red herring).
The logical presumption is that what a culture does must be pragmatically reasonable in some sense. It has to work in self perpetuating fashion. And therefore if as you claim, individuals are free to dissent. to be non-compliant, on the whole, individuals must be agreeing with the world they are collectively creating.
So if you actually apply logic to the situation, then cultures have to be doing something right. They are the expression of the collective behaviour of a lot of individuals who could instead dissent.
And this natural reasonableness is why you have to resort to extraordinary claims - like regular folk are all operating under some kind of illusion. If only they would open their eyes (like you) they would see its all a heaping pile of shit.
Of course I criticise the developed world's current cultural settings. I say they are focused on short-term gain at the expense of long-term costs. We have become entrained to the imperatives of fossil fuels in indeed quite a blind fashion. Oh if only the normies would open their eyes. :)
But that criticism accepts that the way things are must in some sense work for people - who after all, have some degree of choice. My worldview doesn't just say existence itself is meaninglessly shit. There is the very real possibility of living a life in positive fashion. We can all aim higher than consolation, catharsis, and other justifications for assuming attitudes of helplessness.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Sadly, your whole position is based on dichotomies of opposition, which is why your arguments turn dualistic. I am advocating dichotomies of the complementary - so yes, Taoism is one of the philosophies that gets that.
You want to divide the world up into opposing absolutes. The world being completely "the bad" is how you can - tragically/heroically - imagine yourself as the entrapped "good". The basic Romantic trope. Liberate me from this constraining world.
But I make the other case. There is no good and bad. There are instead only the complementary limits on being that seek their equilibrium. So at the level of human social being, those complementary limits on free action are the instincts towards competition and co-operation. Living well is doing both in the right way. Hit the balance and life feels great.
And the psycho-social sciences show that is the correct evolutionary view of course.
Quoting schopenhauer1
A quite fascinating glimpse inside your power fantasies. But isn't it odd that you are pleased by the triumph of evolutionary reasonableness in that clip?
I mean, this has been a major topic investigated by existentialists and phenomenologists. Levinas, for example, specifically analyzes transcendence as an attempt to escape.
You keep trying to nudge these phenomenal experiences out of the picture as if they're not important or relevant to the discussion. So what if the world isn't actually divided up into these absolutes? How is that relevant to how we ordinarily approach the world in everyday life (what we might call "nature")?
But of course I can go about things from a different angle. Hypothetically speaking, if you had such godlike powers, would you start life on Earth all over again? Would you try to prevent it from developing? None of your hand-waving now: if you were God, would you do it again? This thought experiment is intentionally made to put phenomenal value back on the drawing board.
Quoting apokrisis
First you say there is no good and bad, and then try to recommend a lifestyle of equilibrium (how incredibly novel! wow I never thought about that before...) that inevitably spirals back to hedonic satisfaction. Scienced-up taoism. Sounds great on paper!
So sure, you can trim your sails and tailor your life to equilibrium - until something inevitably disturbs this equilibrium in the form of accidents, pain, disease, aging, and death. You can tune a guitar only so much until the strings just break and the whole thing is fucked.
Schopenhauer1's (and others') point has been the absurdity of being forced to do this to begin with. The environmental and biological system we live in places constraints that, for a self-conscious, time-conscious being like us, can be coercive. Analyzing it objectively and removing any sort of anthropomorphism does not just magically woosh the oppression away, as if this knowledge correlates to calm tranquility in the face of danger. So yes, describing life in the textbook-manner style you prefer can be emotionless and passive, but life is not lived in this textbook-like manner (unless of course you are extraordinarily lucky or just blind). The biologist may recognize that death is the natural and eventual outcome of any biological system, but nevertheless retain a fear of it.
It's also helpful when you happened to get a lucky roll of the die. Far from being determined by reason, lives are dictated by chance and fortune. So you drew a comparatively good lot in life. At least have the decency to recognize when other people didn't and cannot raise themselves up to your unrealistic, dogmatic and coercive expectations.
A population of organisms (not just r-selected) is sustained by an implicit emphasis on the species rather than the individual. Individuality is tolerated only so long as it is beneficial to the survival of the species as as whole. As I'm sure you are aware, human's ability to "transcend the immanent" is an important part of existential and phenomenological analysis. Now that we are capable to reflecting upon our condition and the world at large, we can wonder whether we want to keep going. We can understand that individuality came from social interactions without making the mistake of valuing is less because of it. If we value individuality, and if this individuality puts us into conflict against the wider cosmic entropic "plan", then so be it. Maybe we were meant all along to go extinct. This rhymes well with Zapffe, Freud, Nietzsche and Unamuno's analysis of the tragedy of consciousness. As you said before elsewhere, the mind must find the right "balance" between seeing enough to survive but not too much to be overwhelmed. I'm obviously coming from the perspective that we see too much and that this inevitable disposition is the cause of the majority of our problems.
The sad thing is that the comparatively optimistic perspective you espouse inherently has to either ignore or forget about those like Mr. Feltham, myself, Schop1, Thorongil, and others who can't seem to figure out how to enjoy life like you seem to be able to. You play by nature's rules and you get to survive. You go rogue or fail to meet expectations and you're purged. And the train keep chugging.
But in fact I said that the phenomenology as I experience it is that pain and pleasure go together. They appear inextricably intertwined in everything I find meaningful. Sport, love, kids, work, study - its got to hurt or feel like an effort as part of it being rewarding and worthwhile.
So the phenomenology is irreducibly complex. And that is indeed the important and relevant fact in this discussion so far as I'm concerned.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Sorry, I looked hard but couldn't discover any actual counter-arguments in the rest, just a lot of laughably lame ad homs.
I mean "scienced-up taoism"? In what world is that going to hurt?
mkay, as I suspected you respond to nothing and redirect the blame onto others. Good job!
As to the rest of your post, it was your usual lament that I'm not taking your personal feelings seriously. But then this is a philosophy forum, not a mental health support forum.
http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/59160
"Naturalism" is the buzzword you use to describe anything you personally advocate. It's not as if all naturalists automatically believe everything you do regarding politics and ethics.
And no, pessimism is not based on the desire to end all pain. It's focused on the possibility of ending all purpose-less pain. Give us a good reason why pain has to exist. If, for example, you could enter a hedonic machine that would give you pure enjoyment without fail - would you hook yourself up? Of course you would. Why stick around in a world of both pain and pleasure when you could experience a world of simply pleasure? If you would take an aspirin for a headache, why not take the hedonic experience machine for relieving the stress of life?
So this whole "you can't have the good without the bad" rhetoric only applies so long as you keep this crypto-theological notion that life, and humanity, is "supposed" to be some way. It's a pretty sneaky aesthetic.
Quoting apokrisis
That's it? Once again we have this sneaky aesthetic of the gritty survivor as a demonstration of your so-called naturalist ethics. Living hard is living best - but why? Certainly going to the supermarket is easier than growing your own food or hunting for meat. Guess you should stop going to the supermarket, since apparently living hard is living best...
Living creatures are almost always in a state of discomfort or stress. It's not enjoyable. It's tedious, annoying, frustrating and difficult. It's in the brief intermissions when you're able to relax, and in this relaxation you basically forget what it was like to go through the day. You mistake the intermission for the play.
It is also much easier to deal with life when you live it "again" through other people. Hence why so many people have children, those ultimately useless additions to the world. People like to see other people live life, so long as they don't have to live it themselves.
So why don't we stop beating around the bush and admit and agree on this: life was never meant to be enjoyable and it's childishly absurd to believe the universe was meant to make us happy or comfortable. It does not care for our well-being - we are given this responsibility from the genesis of our existence and it's a real pain in the ass. I didn't want this, and the irritating part is how people like you are so willing to hold a blindingly obvious double standard and ignore this fact. It's just as I've been saying from the beginning - affirmative morality is inherently aggressive and hypocritical, especially in regards to the edges of its domain.
LOL. Says the guy who fantasises about pessimism having the responsibility, because there is the capability, of wiping humanity out with nukes.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You keep making claims I don't make. Everything winds up back with your personal neuroses.
I mean, I am a consequentialist. I'm not exactly going to endorse paradoxical agent-centered restrictions.
That's terrific. But the said moral agent has to be actually rational, not neurotic, psychopathic, autistic, etc. Which in turn means the agent must have values that are "natural" under my definition of them.
I mean, solipsism is one of those annoying philosophical positions that get in the way of affirmative progress. Even if they're wrong, it says a lot about your priorities that you're willing to deny their validity without any real argument. Instead of refuting solipsism, you use it as a threat.
It also says a lot about your powers of observation that you're willing to accuse me of solipsism when, for a very long while now, I've been articulating the point that ethics, fundamentally speaking, is about the relationship between the self and the other, and the harm and manipulation of the latter in particular.
But carry on with your repetitive affirmative narrative.
So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative?
I think this debate only makes sense if both sides recognize the same definitions and then go from there.
I think darthbarracuda's point, and mine as well, is that you cannot remove yourself from the muck of the experience by hand waving it as good/bad and therefore above evaluation. There are experiences which are simply not pleasant and would not have been experienced otherwise had one not been put into that situation. However, life, social relations, environment, and sometimes INEVITABLE poor predictions or underestimation of consequences lead us to harm. Also, better options that were never even open to the individual (e.g. COULD not occur to them due to unknowability at the time) or personal pathologies, lead us to these negative experiences.
But the things listed above are CONTINGENT harms- or what you seem to call "accidental" harms. They are not necessary to being a living being, but 99% of the time will inevitably occur in some way due to the circumstances of events of the individual interacting with the environment. There are also NECESSARY harms. This is my Schopenhauer influence coming out. The necessary harms are ones that are built into the system. One such harm is the striving-but-for-nothing, the instrumentality of being. We can concretize this in more scientific terms to "survival for survival's sake". This is not as much a problem until you get to self-reflecting beings such as ourselves. Then, we experience this harm in feelings such as existential boredom, world-weariness, the anguish of having to push the boulder up the hill and struggle, and find entertainments and fake struggles to overcome the feeling of time itself without a goal. Of course there are long-term goods- relationships, learning, art, music.. I am not denying we can and do pursue this. What I am saying is that these harms can be overwhelming and are pervasive. Contingent harms are not easily solved, and necessary harms are never solved. You can whistle Dixie through your teeth, and pretend that this all goes away by simple apokrisis-branded techniques, but it does not go away easily.
Further, to put more people in existence for certain long-term goods- relationships, learning, art, music, etc. seems to be putting these goods as just so compelling, that harms experienced by the individual, both necessary and contingent, are denied, repressed, Pollyainaized (forgotten for the past or underestimated for the future), ignored. It is a bit of trickery to have people brought into life, and then say "Well, you have to be part of the maintenance crew because you want to keep experiencing good things, don't you!!". That is unfair, as being alive is the default. There is nothing to compare it to other than the "scary" notion of dying/death. This dying or death is not the same as never being, we can never experience death. Thus there is an asymmetry, as we cannot compare living with the experience of death, that is never an option for the already-born. Thus, no shit, someone will simply take what is known- life good and bad, and obviously want to live so they can have more of the good. That is the ONLY option to him/her once they already exist. And good here, can be your little pleasure/pain mix that you like to tout as counterexample of bad that is "good".. Yes, we all agree that things like games, exercise, learning can cause pain as but also be in some sense "good" because it has an element of excitement, or appeals to our sensibilities, or is part of achieving a goal.
Yet life as normal people experience it is a mix of ups and downs. As I said, once you get into the lived complexity of our feelings about events and meanings, then you can start to see that what has most value is efforts in the name of purposes. It's a sad fact for you (as it destroys your excuse to whinge) but constructed meanings are fine. Why climb a mountain? Well it hurts in a way that is fun. Who cares if a pessimistic neuroscientist says that is an endorphic delusion.
But I'm wasting my breath. The way you have constructed the meaning for your own life is that it utterly lacks purpose. So every effort or action is a harm and a pain. Congratulations for adopting such a dull one note socially constructed idea. You may have biological level depression. So your personal umwelt may chime with this one-noteness you want to claim as existentially universal. But I am happy to get on with a more complex level of ethical analysis when talking philosophically about the human condition.
I'll quote at length before adding my own thoughts:
[quote=Julio Cabrera] Someone once considered the Introduction to Formal Logic of the Spanish Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book A Critique of Affirmative Morality will be considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions -often exasperating –this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc., and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to surpass the stage of the children?s questions and to analyze “the serious moral crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These "adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the “naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times.[/quote]
[...]
[quote=Julio Cabrera]The lack of radical reflection in the current ethics of beings (both classical and modern, of Kantian or, specially, Utilitarian inspiration) consists of the fact the crucial question has been, throughout the history of philosophy, how one should live, without considering in a positive way the possible ethical character of dying and abstention. Asking, in the ethical field, how to live is admitting ab initio there is not and there cannot be any moral problem in the very fact of being; that all moral problems arise "afterwards", in the domain of how. If the initial ethical question is how to live, it is assumed beforehand that living has not, in itself, any moral problems, or that living is, per se, ethically good, or that, for some motive that should still be clarified, the matter of good and evil does not concern to being, but only to beings. Affirmativeness is the historical form taken by the lack of radical character of the ethical reflection. (Indeed, a reflection that would answer "no" to theinitial question would not be radical either). [b]But what is the philosophical-rational justification of living as ethically good (valuable) per se, and of the idea the
only thing that ethically matters is how to live, that is, how to turn into ethically good this or that ontic human life, excepting life itself from any questioning whatsoever?[/b][/quote]
[...]
[quote=Julio Cabrera]Since the beginning of this book, I have taken an attitude of that kind (which, in my view, is not “skeptical” in any pejorative sense, nor “nihilistic”), presenting the argumentations on the first chapters as of “a radical and anti-skeptical moralist” (using there Habermas? conception of skepticism), but disposed to argue until the end, employing the same conceptual tools supplied by the moral cognitivist. I will call “empty skeptic” the skeptic who refuses to argue, and “plenary skeptic” this who accepts to argue infinitely and radically. Perhaps the “skepticism” is maintained in the negative conviction of the plenary skeptic that it is not necessary, in argumentation, to destroy concepts and theories, but only put them in movement, let them live. From a negative point of view, the most appropriate way of denying a concept is not killing it, but –on the contrary –letting it die naturally.[/quote]
[...]
[quote=Julio Cabrera]One of the most employed terms in the previous reflection has been “affirmative” and its derivatives. What has been understood as such? I understand by “affirmative”:
(a)The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense -as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.
(b) In the second place, affirmative means assuming the task of thinking as “insuring” or “supportive” (and, maybe, as a solace, as a certain type of “conceptual edification”), in the sense that the conceptualization of the world shall protect us, for example, against relativism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism and, in general, against all that may threat the continuity of the life of thinking. For affirmative thinking, it is not the case of pure and simple “looking for truth”, but of looking for all truth compatible with the continuity of life, with the enterprise of not allowing that thinking get blocked so it could keep developing itself indefinitely (I have used the word “affirmative” because it has, in Spanish, precisely these two meanings: “affirmative” as opposed to negative [in the sense of“positive”, of “saying yes”, of “assenting”], and “affirmative” as “affirming”, “supporting”, “finding something firm, or firming” [as in expressions of the kind: “It is necessary to firm on something, on some belief”, etc.].).[/quote]
[...]
[quote=Julio Cabrera]From the optic of the present book, what is interesting in those theories is they all are “affirmative” theories, in the explained sense (contemporary north-American Pragmatism is perhaps the philosophy which has most openly assumed the “affirmative” character –in the dual sense mentioned –of ethical reflection, through a pragmatist theory of truth [vide, for example, the attempt of reconstruction of moral theory proposed by John Dewey]: true is what protects us from danger, what can be used as an adequate instrument for successful survival. What pragmatism has openly exposed remains implicit, I think,in the rest of moral philosophies in general, including Kantian ethics).
“Affirmative” are theories in which the movement of the quest for truth is conceived as a vital process (even when this “Nietzchean” interpretation might seem offensive to many of theauthors of these theories), in which the hypothesis that the quest for truth may lead us to an anti-vital result is rejected beforehand and not critically. The basic affirmative meta-thesis would be the following: life and truth go (or should go) on the same path, they never get in conflict; discovering truth is (or should be), at the same time, to discover the continuity of life, the uninterrupted process –however arduous –of vitality. There are not (or there should not be) anti-vital truths.[/quote]
___________________________________________________________________
The affirmative narrative is the historical-social-political-ethical bias towards continued existence. That there is something good, or at least nothing wrong, with life and existence and that there is some reason to continue the whole thing. If you dive into the ethical literature, you'll be amazed by how conservative and non-radical ethics tends to be, often manifesting as appeals to absurdity - something threatens the existence of society and this is taken as evidence of an ideas' falseness.
The term "affirmative" is not only referring to the affirmation of life but also the suppression of dissent. It's non-radical because it cannot exist if it is questioned all the way down. Children wonder why anything exists, why they have to do anything, why they have to die, and are looked down upon with the patronizing smug smiles of the adults who have "figured it all out" - but they haven't, they have just suppressed these ideas (if they had, we wouldn't be having this discussion!). It's as if part of the coming-of-age ritual and the subsequent assimilation into society is the systematic suppression of radical questioning. You don't do it, because it threatens everything that exists. We have places to go and people to meet and things to do and we don't have time for any of this radical philosophical bullshit. Why do you think philosophy in general, these days, is so frowned upon? Because it doesn't "fit" with the social mode of operation. Capitalism is literally a symbol of affirmativity.
Part of the negative dialectic here is to show how banal some of these questions objectively tend to be. If approached unabashedly head-on, the answers to these sorts of questions are relatively obvious. It's not as if the negative thinker believes they are handing wisdom down from above - rather, they are simply pointing out the obvious. Everyone else just has to "catch up" a bit. Deep down, most people realize life is not that great, that the manner in which we live and the relationship we have with the world at large is absurd, and that we're all going to die someday. Every now and then this manifests in little cracks in the affirmative system, and become wildly popular for their cathartic nature. But as soon as this crack begins to spread as the realization sets in that it's not just a phase, people go batshit and panic and try to pretend there's something "else" that will save them. Like Nietzsche said, only so much truth can be lived.
Negative ethics, in this case, simply takes the concepts affirmative ethics uses and applies them universally and consistently.
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life. - Cioran
They keep selling, we don't want it
So close to it almost found a way
Two steps closer, they keep coming
We keep yelling, we don't want it
Almost better, this things about to break.[/i]
Thank you for explaining- those were some good quotes. As far as what I read, I definitely agree that life itself is assumed to be "obviously" good. It reminds me of the neoplatonoic idea that more existence must be better existence.
Do you have examples where he applies this negative ethics to certain ethical questions? It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with.
Edit: I'm reading a bit of his work, but only at the beginning. From what I can see, he probably would not go over applied ethics as much as that would be participating in the "intra-wordly" ethics rather than looking at Being as a whole.
I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved?
As an addendum, does non-being ever have its own metaphysics by itself, or must it always be in relation to being? If it must always be in relation to being, does that mean, that non-being is not even a possibility and therefore an ethics surrounding it is moot?
My answer might be that the closest we can get is antinatalism, as it is an ethics preventing future being. There is the possibility of pure non-existence of being. The ideal of antinatalism would be to remain pure possibility without actuality. The possibility of actuality should not be actualized.
Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure.
Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe.
And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels.
So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness".
Honestly, do you have the ability to not use jargon? Either you are obfuscating a real argument or you do not have the ability to easily explain your ideas.. If I was to interpret this into something comprehensible and relevant to this argument, you are trying to somehow justify why living things exist with "negentropic structure" in an otherwise "entropic" universe. But what this has to do with Cabrera's point is lost on me. If I was to try to stitch this together as somehow relevant, you may be trying to say that the goals of survival are inherent in the universe or something of that sort. Even if that was the case, you seem to continually make the is/ought fallacy over and over again. You take (your version of) a description of what is going on and try to justify it as prescription. You cannot keep doing this and think that no one will see it. What is currently the case, and what we ought to do, or what our reaction to the case may be, are two different things. This should not even have to be stated. So, survival is the outcome of evolutionary pressures of the organism and the environment. Humans can self-reflect though, and make deliberate actions- ones that even prevent the very actions that lead to more survival (at a species level). Thus, your argument is moot there. The inevitability of human actions are not "written in the stars" if I was to be poetic. Again, that is the naturalistic fallacy. It may be this way for non-reflective, non-deliberative animals.. but we are both reflective and deliberative.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't know I was disputing a new metaphysics. Again, this is vague, but this seems like your other area of creating a strawman false dichotomy so that you can set up your Romantic vs. Apokrisis theory again. This is something that seems shoved into the argument that doesn't need to be there. I have yet to see how your metaphysics has much to do with the ethics we are discussing.
Quoting apokrisis
This also makes little sense how it fits with the argument. You are shoehorning this into the picture it seems. Maybe because you are trying to show that we have not planned our energy consumption in a responsible manner to protect the future of the species.. So, it unintentionally is making survival less likely. Okay, but what does that have to do with whether survival of the species itself, SHOULD be the goal of individuals? That was really the problem that Cabrera seemed to have with pragmatism- the idea that what is "logical" is that which "works" to achieve ends.. But those ends (things as seemingly basic as survival) may be questioned.. His notion was that ethics focuses on "intra-worldly" goals and evaluations, but does not question the assumption that Being itself should be a goal.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. This seems to be the naturalistic fallacy again. You are denying that we are self-reflecting and deliberative. We can look about our situation and know what we are doing, assess it, and take actions about it. Oddly, your "organicism" approach seems to deny this, thus making humans more mechanical- the very thing you accuse me of doing. In other words, we can question why we continue to put forth more people into the world. We can evaluate structural harms of coming into existence (with its necessary and contingent harms). In Cabrera's terms, we can question whether we should pursue the goal of more Being in the first place. But, if you think I don't interpret your "organicism" right, it is because you are using jargon-heavy philosophy where it is not needed.
Now if you want to debate whether you need Being in the first place for the "salvation" for non-Being, because non-being cannot metaphysically be apart from being, then we can have an interesting discussion.
This distinction between government and human nature was anathema to Spinoza and, later, Diderot and other thinkers of the Republican Democratic persuasion, who, while agreeing with the Contractarianists that it was in humanity's best interest to join together to form a government (albeit a republican one, contra Hobbes), argued that such a socio-political configuration was an extension of human nature, rather than apart from it.
What is correct in schopenhauer's opening analysis, is that, assuming a Contractarianism framework, it would be perfectly acceptable for individuals or minority groups to sacrifice their rights or their "nature" (think LBGTQ, or religious or ethical minorities) in order to maintain a wider group cohesion. This is how Locke is able to argue for intra-toleration between Christian sects only, rather than wider, full toleration that includes Jews, Atheists, and other religious minorities, as Spinoza argued for.
Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar.
Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology.
Or you could get used to the fact that academia uses technical language for the sake of precise thinking.
Cabrera cites Nietzsche as an example of a negative philosopher who nevertheless "affirms" life, but not through rationalist argumentation. Nietzsche criticized morality, in particular Christian morality, as having a queer valuation of salvation that is required for it to even work. Essentially, God created man in order to save man. It's very...strange.
Cabrera uses this same criticism when he talks about non-Being and Being; initially, everyone "exists" in non-Being. Then some of us get thrust into Being only to return back to non-Being. And so we have to wonder what the whole point of it all was. Being is just a little "bloop" from non-Being.
I can see, if Being "did not exist" or something like that, how it might be difficult to see non-Being as "good". And I guess I would say we have two different paths we could take: we could swallow the literalist pill and grant that non-Being is simply a fiction and that immanent Being is all there is (which might be technically correct but is difficult to work into language and general intuitions), or we could see non-Being and Being as inherently intertwined (as you were saying, I think) and that Being, from the perspective of conscious beings like us (Dasein), is always less preferable than non-Being.
I see Buddhism as an example of a pessimistically-inclined religion/philosophy that nevertheless has an overall positive undertone. Nirvana is achievable. It's not all doom-and-gloom. Existence is suffering but there is a way out, and in fact the ultimate reality is "good". Put this sort of thinking in lines of what you were saying and we get the perspective of non-Being as not necessarily "salvation" but more like "going back home". We're exiled in that Cioran-esque sense, for whatever reason. This is, I think, part of the reason why Buddhist philosophers put so little value in intra-worldly things.
But like I've said elsewhere, I don't know how much I buy into all this talk of non-Being apart from fictional discourse. It's useful but ultimately does not represent reality as it actually is. As far as I understand his work, Cabrera explicitly denies any substantial metaphysical structure in his theorizing. He works under what he calls "natural ontology" or "nature" which he describes as the way the world "naturally" appears to humans and not how it literally is. Hence how he claims he can talk coherently about value while simultaneously agreeing with Wittgenstein that there is absolutely no value in the mind-independent world. So straight-up it seems like he accepts that non-Being is not necessarily legitimately a real concept but more of a useful heuristic or fiction.
If you didn't notice I tried interpreting your "pleonastisms" anyways, thus trying to be charitable to your content. I just thought it comes of as bloviating (i.e. talking at length, especially in an inflated or empty way). That is where YOU have to not be lazy and actually put context to your term dropping and self-referential jargon. I use a word like "instrumentality" or "Will", and somewhere in the argument, I will explain what these mean, so not to confuse the reader with other interpretations. It's just being courteous to the audience and making sure we are on the same page as far as the language of neologisms, jargon, or non-common usages of words. It also ensures that I am not simply trying to use academic or fanciful language simply to try to show off some knowledge of terms but not really say anything of substance or clarity. If it makes you feel that you are "winning" an argument by using such terms, I won't stop you, I'll just let you know what it looks like. Anyways, you still haven't addressed my response to your content of the last substantive post.. so I'll wait here, and patiently wade through the jargon as well.
But given your rhetorical strategy is to keep tooting "naturalistic fallacy", there's not much to say. One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine.
Here are some things that should be explained more clearly:
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
This also has to be explained without using Romantic, or labeling, or general ad hominems.. In other words real analysis:
Quoting apokrisis
I am especially interested in what you mean by "not interested in being a part of nature". How does that not fall in line directly with the naturalistic fallacy? This is what nature does, so it must be good, seems to be what you are saying.
Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics.
If you ask me what is the good, I would have to say look to nature and see what it is doing. It seems to like entropification but also negenentropic stucture (as you can't have one without the other in fact). It seems to like homeostatic enduring balances (as what else could exist?).
So we can look to nature and see its basic necessary logic when it comes to the question of Being. And clearly my naturalism doesn't attach any superfluous human valuation to what nature "likes" - even as it does turn the metaphysical conversation around to now grant existence its own "mind" in terms of formal and final purpose.
So the difference between our perspectives is that I say Being has to be a story of hierarchically-organised structural constraints on material freedoms. That simply is the definition of Being.
And within that metaphysics, talk of non-Being makes no sense. It wasn't an alternative possibility. If there is Being, the only alternative (the state from which things begun) would be the everythingness of disorganised possibility - a Vagueness, Firstness, Apeiron or Chaos, to use the various technical metaphysical terms.
Well you can in fact have non-Being as a finality. Where existence is all ending up is in the crisp emptiness of a Heat Death universe. An utterly generic structure with utterly reduced freedoms. So nature is heading there - and we would call that "good" if we were still trying to play your game of applying transcendental valuations to a tale of immanent self-organisation.
But clearly, that isn't how I would think about the good. My argument is that - naturalistically - the good itself is going to be a dichotomy. So that is why it makes some naturalistic sense that both negentropy and entropy feel good to us humans...and also feel bad.
We are surfing a wave of entropification. It is exhilarating to carve out shapes on a crashing wall of water. And so that seems a metaphor to me for how to live life.
But you refuse to engage with that other way of looking at things. You insist that you can start apart from nature and judge it transcendentally. You can focus on suffering and burdens and every other thing that already takes your own notion of the good as its reference point, so as to justify the claim that living is irretrievably shit.
None of what you argue rings true to my science-informed view even though I can see why you would say it.
For example, it is no surprise that "consciousness" - that is attentional level processing - seems to be full of the negative. Attention is what is reserved for dealing with the uncertain, the unstable, the threatening, the unsolved. So if you focus on what mostly catches your attention while living, mostly it is another problem to solve walking in through the door.
Yet psychology will tell you that most of life is lived as a matter or habit or automaticism. Like an iceberg, the bulk of life is assimilated smoothly with barely making a ripple. That is, if we are well-adjusted. Life just flows and suffering or effort feels minimal.
So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help.
Sure, I agree that the world isn't perfect and actually does have some deep issues that require critical thought. I continually point out the clash that has arisen between a humanity adapted to live at the pace of the daily solar flux and our recent switch to a life predicated on blowing up fossil fuels instead. Humanity has adjusted rather too successfully to blowing up the planet. We have a real life problem and it is quite right to step back and question that (especially if you have kids to be concerned about).
So my objection to your pessimism is that it is not just shallow metaphysics but an actual distraction from facing the realities of nature. You can't fight global warming if you have some pollyannish view that what humans are doing in wanting to surf this really collossal wave is somehow unnatural, so everyone is suddenly just going to come to their senses and fix things for the environment.
Again, you are fighting battles that are already out of date because the response follows on a generation after the emergence of the new possibility.
Romanticism was the natural reaction to the Enlightenment. Existentialism was the natural reaction to Industrialisation. Even anti-natalism is some kind of delayed reaction ... kill me now as I reject your relentless Consumerist affirmation of life as an exponential trajectory of entropy production.
Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain.
What we have here is yet another false dichotomy you've set up. You don't need any sort of Platonic "good" to reject your version of naturalism. Nowhere "out there" is there "goodness" or any sort of value at all. All your talk of entropic structures and whatnot does not capture the essence of what people know as "good". You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong.
In a Wittgensteinian/Heideggerian way, although the world does not have any value itself, Being-in-the-world and its various modalities do. The universe does not give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about its perpetual entropic expansion?
And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s.
Quoting apokrisis
...and we see absolutely nothing resembling what anyone typically would see as "good", unless we're talking aesthetic value or something. This is what we call equivocation. Nobody here is denying that objective "goodness" value is "spooky". This changes absolutely nothing. We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. You just go further and neuter the whole concept of goodness to fit your metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
No, your cherry-picked "science-informed" bullshit is handwaving the problem away. Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? Maybe it's because they don't seem to fit your narrative of how reality is supposed to be.
Sorry, Chief, but the psychology of humans is oftentimes in direct opposition to the overall direction of the universe. You approach this problem by advocating a kind of Heraclitian Taoism, just go with the flow, immerse yourself in the world and understand its processes and you're good to go. We're going about it by pointing out this is nothing more than a l'esquive, an escape mechanism, something that has been going on since day one and is represented fully by organized religion. Consciousness is a sort of "exile" from the rest of the world. Once you know, you can't go back. This is literally the whole point of the Adam and Eve narrative, a myth that has been replicated across civilizations since the dawn of time.
Quoting apokrisis
Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious. - Cioran
Yeah. Look at all this talk about naturalistic fallacies and false dichotomies. Who knows what these crazy folk are talking about. Why can't they speak plain english.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Are you deliberately spouting gobbledegook now to make some clever point? It's all way over my head.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But ... but ... but ... I just said that is exactly the only place any valuation is taking place.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Goodness gracious. All this jargon I'm meant to know.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Zzzzzzzzz....
So you've reverted to full-blown childish comebacks to avoid answering any question that makes you uncomfortable or strays away from your little hermetically sealed philosophy patterns.. You mine as well say, "No, you're stupid!". Anyways, I'll get back to your last post soon. I'm just thinking it will be in vain.
It's some form of the is-ought problem.. If this is what "nature" does, it must be good, because nature does it.. This is a circular argument. It even applies to goals- because person A has goal B, means that he can achieve it with C, so C must be good because it causes him to achieve it. Of course, the goal is not justified, simply how to attain it is identified. In your case, this problem applies because continued survival is not justified simply because it is a preference or because nature tends to produce creatures that continue to survive.
Humans have self-reflection (ability to reflect on our existential situation with conceptual thought) and deliberation (ability to choose out of a variety of choices). Though humans were caused by natural forces, and are a part of nature, we are different from other parts of nature in the abilities to self-reflect and deliberate. Do you dispute that we have these abilities? If we both agree, humans are part of nature, but different than other parts in at least these abilities, it can be argued that humans can reflect on their existential situation, evaluate it its positive or negative value (or nature), and deliberate on what action to take on this evaluation.
You claim that Quoting apokrisis
This right here is an example of the is-ought.. "Looks to nature see what it is doing". Before I go further, first, I must say you don't connect your scientific-laden jargon with the context of evaluation of life, which is the question we are debating- "Is human life (along with its institutions) worth maintaining/continuing"? You talk of "entropification/negentropic structure" and and "homeostatic enduring balances". You leave too much to the reader to misinterpret your intention here. I can try myself, but if you come back and say that I have misinterpreted it, then you have failed to convey your meaning to your audience.. and would rather name-call than actually write concisely and clearly (possibly hiding a weakness in your claim).
[quote=dictionary.com]Entropy- Thermodynamics.
(on a macroscopic scale) a function of thermodynamic variables, as temperature, pressure, or composition, that is a measure of the energy that is not available for work during a thermodynamic process. A closed system evolves toward a state of maximum entropy.
(in statistical mechanics) a measure of the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system. Symbol: S.
2.
(in data transmission and information theory) a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message.
3.
(in cosmology) a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature (heat death)[/quote]
[quote=Negentropy in Wikipedia]In a biological context, the negentropy (also negative entropy, syntropy, extropy, ectropy or entaxy[1]) of a living system is the entropy that it exports to keep its own entropy low; it lies at the intersection of entropy and life. In other words Negentropy is reverse entropy. It means things becoming more in order. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos.[/quote]
So by this definition, I can only extrapolate that what you mean is that humans, having the ability for negentropy, are trying to maintain this negentropy among a backdrop of the general tendency towards entropification. If I was to take this interpretation as true I see the following flaw:
1) This lacks much efficacy for ethics. This in no way entails a justification of ethics simply because biological systems tend to be negentropic.
1a) To extrapolate an ethical meaning from this would be committing the is-ought error, as your claim takes an observable physical fact of systems, and raise it to the level of ethical heuristic for human guidance. In a very roundabout way, it's like saying "The Eagle flies swift to catch its prey..so I must fly swift to catch my prey" or some such thing.
1b) The concept of negentropy does not entail a Taoist-like ethics that you promulgate. You are conflating human psychology and behavior with a concept of physics making a category error. The burden of proof is on you to explain how human behavior MUST achieve this or that goal. The problem here is that you are equating human concepts, goals, preferences, and motivations with some sort of natural principle of negentropy. Just because the outcome of what we do is negentropic does not mean our goals, preferences, and motivations HAVE to somehow "help this outcome along" or "not help this outcome along" (whatever direction you theory wants to say). This again, is unjustified, a category error, and is committing the is-ought problem.
Now, what I propose would have little to do with your negentropy/entropy based ethics altogether- as it is a non-sequitor in the realm of human ethical/aesthetic/value judgements in terms of what one MUST do. It really does not fit and is shoehorned into the equation. Rather, what is the case is that humans are self-reflective and deliberative beings. We can evaluate our very own existence, and judge it accordingly.
If we look at human life- we see that there are necessary harms entailed in being self-reflective. We can feel an emptiness at the end of pursuits, a disappointment, a world-weariness. If you have never felt this way, I cannot dispute it, but I know others have. It goes away with yet other pursuits and goals and pleasures to evade and distract, but it is the feeling when none of this is stimulating the body/mind. It is the feeling that we are pursuing to pursue, maintaining to maintain, doing to do. This is the structural harm of instrumentality. Our minds are complex and need more entertainments and novelties, but it cannot simply BE. Being itself is not enough and thus we pursue all these "intra-worldly" pursuits but the problem of Being itself- the never being satisfied is still there. This is compounded by contingent harms. These are harms produced by the intra-worldly things. It can be internal (pathology) or it could be external (harmful experiences and situations). These contingent harms ride on top of the already harmful nature of the dissatisfaction we have as complex self-reflecting animals. We are dissatisfied and harmed, yet we maintain it and continue it. We maintain to maintain.
Sure. And we can feel the opposite. So from which "is" should we derive the "ought" here?
You are saying because you, in the end, experience "nothing but harms", then that ought to be the outcome of everyone's "self reflection". If it isn't, you get angry and tell them that they are fooling themselves and not being honest with you.
But if it is natural to feel mixed feelings upon reflection, and we can see a pattern to what feels better, what feels worse, then why shouldn't that be the real deal? Why can't we use our self-awareness to make sense of our world in that fashion?
You want to argue from an is to an ought, and that's fine. But it is just the wrong "is". The way people feel is at least mixed.
Then likewise you employ an outdated mechanical characterisation of nature. You talk in reductionist terms about a nature without purpose or order. So your is-ought argument there becomes nature has no meaning, therefore our personal existence can have no natural meaning.
So your argument is rife with naturalistic reasoning. You simply have an overly simplistic model of nature. Just as you have an overly simplistic account of what it is to experience being alive.
By rejecting an organicist metaphysics which sees nature as reasonable and the only possible source of telos, you do the Romantic thing of making meaning and purpose transcendent. That used to mean God moving in His mysterious ways. Since God died, the standing outside of nature is now left to your own good self - Schop who must judge his existence and finds it wanting.
But again, I say that comes down to a particular cultural way of looking at things. You didn't actually figure out anything new. You just read some books and decided nature is mechanical and so any "submission" to nature is bogus. Life has been thrust upon you without giving you a choice. Feelings of harm have been thrust upon you without any choice.
You see the appeal to transcendence that soaks your argument through and through? There is this "me" that is forever retreating from the advances of the world. Hey world, you force life on me, you force feelings on me. But in the end, what is this "me" doing all the complaining?
Clearly it claims to stand outside nature. Yet I would say - from a naturalist point of view - that it is just a cultural habit making its particular noise. It's a meme. A trope. An example of brain washing. We just don't get to stand outside nature or reality in this way.
This meme that has invaded your head of course fears greatly for its own preservation. That is why it flinches every time the words "positive psychology" is mentioned. The pessimist's meme has a horror of being re-written and goes on the attack.
It's nature at work as usual. Pessimism works to ensure its survival by resisting its annihalation. Do you ever wonder why you feel forced to keep saying and thinking the things you do?
So you defend yourself by attacking my argument? I don't think I should defend my arguments until you actually come to grips with the critiques I laid out in the previous post. That seems only fair in this debate. Then, maybe I can address some points here. Why even put time into the previous post if we are going to do a switch based on the affirmative claim that I made and ignore the critiques of your claims?