Can philosophy do anything for better relationships between people?
Sartre said that “Hell is other people”, but this doesn’t seem helpful to me: it just sounds like a pessimistic conclusion. On the other hand, Levinas was optimistic, but in a way that seems confused to me. You might answer that if we love each other, we’ll have better relationships. My objection is: if the solution is so simple and clear, why isn’t it adopted, why is it difficult to practice? Can we think about some kind of practice that, if practiced, would favour better relationships? If you think that we are all “homo homini lupus“ (Hobbes, but others as well), why is that and what can we do?
Besides, the “other” can even be myself and this would open a lot of other questions connected to my opening one.
You can give your answer depending on what you think about the single words in the question and the concepts involved in it. For example, you might ask if “better” exists and what it is; in that case you can try to give an answer to the opening question according to your ideas about that, rather than making the question dispersed in side topics.
Besides, the “other” can even be myself and this would open a lot of other questions connected to my opening one.
You can give your answer depending on what you think about the single words in the question and the concepts involved in it. For example, you might ask if “better” exists and what it is; in that case you can try to give an answer to the opening question according to your ideas about that, rather than making the question dispersed in side topics.
Comments (7)
I think If philosophy is used as a therapy then it can help
Improve relations between people.
If its used as an ideology that may make things worse.
But,it cannot change the actual personality of the person involved. It can only help one to express better in a relation.
Off the top of my head ...
solitude
Confucian-Daoist "wu wei"
Hillel the Elder's "golden rule"
Epicurean "tetrapharmakos" (& "garden")
Yeshua's "agape"
Kropotkin's "mutual aid"
Buber's "Ich-Du"
Camus' "solidarity"
Schumacher's "human-scale economy"
Gilligan & Nodding's "care ethics".
Sen & Nussbaum's "capabilities approach"
Philippa Foot's "natural goodness"
I'm sure there's more ...
The key is, as you qualify in your question, Angelo, practice: not enough people do it and those who do don't (often enough) do so consistently. Atavistic habits – self-serving biases, anxieties/neuroses, inattention, win-lose games, scapegoat violence, etc – prevail because they are (largely) 'paths of least effort', so we struggle to collaboratively build social arrangements that as much as practically possible mitigate and constructively repurpose our 'antisocial' defects by leveraging our eusocial drives. Culture (e.g. philosophy) then regularizes(?) our higher aspirations to overcome ourselves (Nietzsche). The Hobbesian "state of nature" is, after all, a 'political myth' appropriate to the late medieval to early modern milieu of European civil & sectarian strife, particularly in Hobbes' England, and very much at odds with the greater share of anthropological observations of (non-European) indigenous, small-scale, societies that are more manifestly eusocial and, though by no means perfectly (contra that other political myth of "the noble savage"), altruistic/cooperative.
Quoting Angelo
Quoting Angelo
I wonder why Sartre would say that. If taken literally, being alone would be heavenly but then loneliness is its own hell. Perhaps Sartre means to say that simply being in a crowd of people, no matter how large, doesn't guarantee meaningful (better) relationships or that if one really examines the facts well, one is in fact truly alone (read lonely) and relationships no matter how deep or shallow they appear to us are at the end of the day illusory. Such a reading of Sartre's statement would square with what I said earlier, "being alone is heavenly" for the simple reason that we wouldn't have to put up with, deal with, the pain/dissatisfaction that are part and parcel of relationships, these negative effects originating in the optimistic attitude towards relationships.
Does that mean we should be pessimistic about relationships ("Hell is other people" - Sartre) ? That's the other extreme and prima facie seems to be the most reasonable course of action. However, in adopting pessimism in this regard completely ignores a crucial aspect about our beliefs regarding relationships - we want the illusion to be true, we want meaningful relationships to be real even though they're few and far between. If we want such, I suppose we can say that if given the opportunity, we will make an effort to achieve it.
Hence, my suggestion,
[quote=Mel Brooks]Hope for the best. Expect the worst[/quote]
Hoping for the best acknowledges our desire for meaningful (better) relationships and expecting the worst reflects reality as it is, disappointment after disappointment.
Quoting Angelo
As for love, it's a relationship and whatever I wrote above applies to it.
I suppose it all boils down to the simple fact that social existence, relationships, is/are not about being with someone (real relationship) but actually about not being alone (illusory relationship). :chin:
Yes: the practice of minding one's own business.
The majority of people trouble comes from people sticking their nose into things that are none of their business and from demanding from other people what they are unable or unwilling to give.
Minding one's own business doesn't necessarily mean solitude or isolation; although it entails some of that as well. It means that one interacts with others on the grounds of common and well thought through interests. Philosophy can help one clarify one's thoughts, esp. analytic philosophy.
Realize through philosophy that they have a fixed will (at the moment) and so they have to do what they do.