Modern Man is Alienated from Production
No one person can ever in their lifetime know the mind bogglingly large number of factors that go into all the products that they encounter and use. This alienation from factors of production is a problem as we are atomized from the sources of production- reduced to a tiny infinitesimal fraction of the larger pie. Without grandiose notions of free-fettered capitalism's amazing invisible hand or the overblown notions of alienation from labor in Marx rhetoric, is this a problem for modern humans?
Comments (121)
I think it's probably inevitable. There's a discussion on "social capital" going on next door. I think the two subjects are related. The globalized, industrialized, alienated, atomized way we work destroys rather than replenishes social capital. I can't see any way of going back, short of world-wide catastrophe. I've started to think that the only way out is through, that, if there is a solution, it is in the evolution of what we have into something more humane. Maybe that's a pipe dream.
This isolation should not be a problem for modern man if his day-to-day is rich enough.
I think the problems with our general alienation from production are both manifold and dire. Just a few things off the top of my head:
1. The general public cares little about the origins of consumer items, which includes slave labor, unethical work practices, and environmental destruction.
2. The general public does not understand the actual worth of any given item and so is more easily influenced by capitalist propaganda (or, in their words, "marketing") so that the price of fresh produce seems exorbitant, while they happily pay hundreds to use a cell-phone (not buy, just use).
3. They have forgotten the power of their role in the system as consumers.
4. They don't realize they are potential producers of goods. Fewer and fewer people are capable of making something with their own hands nowadays.
Where others see efficiency, specialization, and the growth of goods and services I see an explosion of boredom and anomie spread around. You are so overwhelmed by the factors of production. Yes the invisible hand specializing the pin factory, yadayada. It's always fun to hear @Bitter Crank account though.
To talk about man being alienated from his production - that sounds bad (and probably is). Conjure a picture of someone in an amazon warehouse - bad news, guy seems miserable.
But what are they lacking? and why does the amazon warehouse strip them of that? and then, only then, what to do?
(a kind of pessimist methodology. Things are bad. Now assume things are always bad and have always been bad. Take that as a starting point (there's some truth to it). Now the burden is to show when things weren't bad, and why they weren't, and how we can maybe fix that. It's easy to decry things. It's very hard to explain how to make things better.)
Only inasmuch as ignorance of anything is a problem.
Ok, I'll bite, so what is the thing they're ignorant of, here
True enough, manufacturing has become extraordinarily complex. But that isn't "alienation" exactly. Edited, Marx said,
If a man builds his own house, cultivates food on his own land, hunts his own game for food and leather, etc. his work and life would be a unity. Since the industrial revolution, the expansion of the capitalist economic system, urbanization, and so on -- fewer and fewer people have had any opportunity to experience a unity of work and life.
Almost all of us work for others, because we must. Production of all that we need and want is pretty much centralized and highly organized. We work in order to obtain the means of life, as Marx said -- food, clothing, shelter, heat, etc. But our work is not our life. We don't work for the sake of the work we do; we work so that we can buy bread.
That is the kind of alienation Marx was talking about.
There is another meaning of alienation, and which is increasingly common, where people don't feel like they belong to the world they live in. They feel like outsiders. They don't feel needed, wanted, or loved. They don't feel they have any value in the world they live in. And worse, they might be right. Capitalism values people on their ability to produce wealth through their labor. Outside of that... what good are you, anyway?
The second meaning of alienation comes from, but perhaps not obviously, the fact of one's working in an office or factory that is private property and one is just a hired hand. It comes from the recognition that one, in fact, may not have a place in the world that can't be taken by someone else -- just about anybody else.
When we alienated, unhappy people have lost all our connections that bind us together, we are atomized. The next stage, after Alienation and Atomization, is Anomie, the lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group.
Quoting csalisbury
They are lacking an awareness of the products they use. The answer- there is none. We are just tiny recipients of billions of transactions of labor and resources. We specialize in our little niche and consume stuff. We are awash in "Stuff" but we don't know how it got here. We are alien to our surroundings. Many will praise this as "good" as it shows the invisible hand at work and man's ability to engage in markets that they only need to have a tiny fraction of knowledge of to participate in. There is something missing here to be alien from understanding all the technology that goes into the stuff we use every day or any day for that matter.
Nice summation of Marx concept of alienation.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I agree we are atomized. Bringing this idea to production itself- we are an infintesimally small part of production, yet we are dictated by the transactions of production. Here we are, working in our production settings (e.g. office spaces, manufacturing plants, warehouses, transport mode, etc.) using all these products which we have nothing to do with except possibly paying for or consuming it. The economy is the big MACHINE that we push a tiny sliver of the levers for to keep intact. You are not going to like this, but it all goes back to why we have new humans in the first place. Why bring more people into the world to keep the MACHINE afloat? We think it is for self-interest, but due to the fact that we are tied into this impersonal (invisible) behemoth of an economy- self-interest is simply just the inadvertent strengthening of the MACHINE. More level pushers alienated from the forces that keep them alive and as you explain well, possibly alienated socially from each other. It is a two-prong alienation then- from the factors of technology that keeps us alive and the socialization with others throughout the day (at least 8 hours of it for the usual workers). If this is just what reality is, then what makes reality that great? I still don't get that one. Because you go on rafting adventure trips, read books on the Philosophy of Science, attend religious events, and watch plays and movies? This is the big payoff of life? If reality is just plain reality why do people really prefer it? Is it just that we are alive, so we are predisposed to accepting it as good?
Marx stuffed a lot into the Manifesto. One of the points he covered was "the reproduction of labor". The folks who run and have run societies, be they pharaohs, oriental piss pots, caesars, shahs, brahmans, lords of the castle, viking raiders, tribal chieftains, bourgeois factory owners, top gestapo leaders, or multi-billionaires, understand that if people don't keep breeding, the market will suffer. Armies won't find fresh recruits. The fields won't get plowed. Production will be short-handed, and consumption will be short of buyers. The value of stocks will fall, which, horror of horrors, is the worst thing that can happen.
Oh, no -- wealth evaporates!!! Keep breeding, people. Breed, baby, breed. Fuck your brains out, and skip the b.c. pills and prophylactics. You might not be producing quality, but quantity counts too.
Marx wasn't the only person to think and write about alienation. In English, at least, the term "alienate" was coined about 300 years before Marx came along.
EDIT: ATOMIZATION, ANOMIE, PLUS ALIENATION CHARTED HERE
Just guessing, but perhaps the primary meaning in 1770 had more to do with the "alienation of property" rather than the "alienation of persons feeling like they were getting shat on", which is more the meaning today. Atomization and anomie haven't caught on, oddly enough. Let's all use these words more often. It's the least we can do.
At any rate...
During the period of high emigration from Europe to the US, 1840s through 1900, say, military and imperial apparatchiks were definitely concerned about the loss of population for the reasons stated above. Losing a million adult breeding pairs could give a crowned head throbbing pains. "Why, oh why don't the wretched peasants want to remain in their filthy hovels, spawning a brood of brats that will someday become excellent cannon fodder?"
The mass immigration to the US is well known; less well known is that a lot of wretched peasants found that life in the United States could be just as wretched or worse than the old world, and wretched without the familiar ties that bind and quirky festivals that peasants enjoy. Quite a few returned if they could, and resumed their more familiar wretched and quirky existence in Europe.
No doubt, the OT command to be fruitful and multiply was conceived at a time when the available personnel didn't seem to be sufficiently high. Given the death rate, biblical people probably never found themselves with too many people, unless you count the enemies occupying desirable plots of land.
There are things I don't get either. My thread on social capital, which I thought was a productive topic, has been waylaid by several posters who, for some perverted reason, have a reaction of fear and loathing to assessing the level of social capital in the thousands of US counties. In a way, good social capital is the opposite of alienation, but these people just seem to hate the idea of surveying social capital -- like they were making up a list of people to send to the gas chambers, or something. I don't get it. I would think everyone would be in favor of determining how healthy or sick various communities are, in terms of solid families, social interaction, low crime rates, etc.
Do you think there is something intractable in life itself which your main solutions of better community and more projects to focus on will not be able to fix? Essentially this is a watered down Maslows Hierarchy of needs. Is that whole self-actualization hope what makes more new people worth bringing into the world?
Yes, of course. We are not perfectible. We will always be not-quite-smart-enough primates with primitive emotions which will ever derail our best efforts. Our primitive emotions can be quite dark, too. We are pained by existence, sometimes quite pained, yet we are unable to alter our basic approaches to life.
Perhaps we could not guess what would happen at the time, but embarking on the Industrial Revolution and loving the glories that flowed from smoke-belching factories and pollution-spewing tailpipes has led us to the unpleasant place where we are now, contemplating our possibly slow, over-heated demise.
One of the obvious conclusions one should reach after recognizing that we will not stop global warming is that bearing more children makes no moral sense whatsoever. When, and/or if, later in this century, it becomes clear that human life will become unsustainable on earth, will people stop reproducing? Of course they won't. Some will refrain, but many will just go right ahead.
Rather, we must be talking about ”designed obselecance”, the strange range in the quality and functionality of products in correlation with their range in price. The millions of unbought washers, dryers, refrigerators, microwaves, toasters, power tools, computer chairs, sofas, television sets, computers and motor vehicles, all of the piece of shit bikes at Walmart... What the hell is it all doing there? Does it really all get purchased? And if so; how much of it ends up in the landfill within 10 years? 30%? 60%? 90%???
I don't know if I've failed to understand the concept of the opening post, but ^this shit; keeps me up at night.
I don't think the consumer's knowledge of a product's production method and sources is the issue.
I believe you mean the manufacturer's or worker's alienation from the product and the fact that they only participate in a figurative segment or link in a much larger, sometimes transnational chain of production. I think this stems from the centralization of private market power into large, multifaceted entities consisting of divided labor segments, each of which is manned by a large number of dedicated specialists of those segments, and thus confining and minimalizing the impact and power-reach of individual workers within those segments.
I think a big part of what makes work life satisfying is increased autonomy, sense of attachment to the business entity, intimacy with coworkers, and a sense of tangible impact and ownership. Those things are more available in small business settings and lost in larger, corporate ones. Even though it seems we're increasingly moving in that direction, I don't think it's going to end at some worst case worker-dystopia scenario. You must be a believer in the power of collective frustrations and volatility. Clearly there is suspicion of power concentration just see all these populist movements popping up and the political support they are garnering. I think we will have a push toward more regulatory policies that can help influence market structure in a healthy way -- promoting diverse and competitive market place with smaller business entities. And I think we will find ways to more efficiently organize workers to advocate for workplace autonomy and reshaping of workplace. There are many social platforms and major online communication highways, with enough frustration there will be some kind of push for positive changes. Let it evolve
Most of it gets purchased. THAT part is under control. After it leaves the store, most of it will end up in an open dump, a landfill, a municipal incinerator, or if we are very very lucky, a recycling operation. A lot of it is just scattered all over the place, or will go down the drain into the rivers, lakes, and oceans.
Most of the stuff we buy means nothing to us, and once it is used and disposed of, out of sight (however that is achieved), it is out of mind.
We do not seem to be able to fully grasp this basic truth: stuff doesn't disappear. The plastic packet from which I squeezed mustard will, for all practical purposes, never disappear. All the tiny pieces of it will be somewhere. In 100,000 years those tiny pieces will still be in existence. All of them.
No, in a way, I do mean just that about product's production. Consumers don't know much about the very technology they use. Most people praise this as a good thing as it shows that the industrial market economy creates such specialization and labor division, that we can be thousands of steps removed from the process of production/distribution. There are almost an infinite amount of factors that go into making any individual product or utility. Everything we touch and experience in society has some story that didn't involve us, yet we utilize it. We are aliens from the world we inhabit.
So what is the consequence of this? We are simply pushed along by the innovations of others. Empty vessels with no real connection to our own artificial environment.
How about these questions:
What if everyone in the world decided not to work?
What is it we are trying to get out of life in the first place?
The absurdity of both work and the silence of what we are getting out of life in the first place is telling.
Edit: You see, there is an ethos here that is implicit in this situation.
You want the STUFF (i.e. all the complex technologically created goods). > YOU must contribute now (since most people aren't technological pioneers through circumstance or lack of aptitude this means lever pushing for many). > You are beholden to the forces of technology because if you want the STUFF you need to contribute your bean counting and lever pushing > there is no way out except perhaps antinatalism
I don't know, if people like @Baden or someone else I haven't heard from in a while wan to comment feel free. Certainly, this is intended for @Bitter Crank. @aporiap and @andrewk also had some comments in this thread.
I don't think many people think much into the goods they've bought. And there are different kinds of products and different levels of value or connection given to products. There are ones simply used for convenience and practical relevance, there are ones we feel express or reflect aspects of ourselves or groups of which we feel apart or drawn to- clothes, merchandise, music. There are ones we feel connection to or have other personal significance - trinket from grandma, dad's old mustang. I don't think removal from production process removes these feelings. What do you think is lost by this lack of knowledge of a product's origin?
Again, I don't understand the jump from understanding of a product's origin to lack of connection to the product or the greater environment. Isn't that a prerequisite to purchasing a product - it having some significance or meaning to us? And that value can shift or change, grow or dissipate in time.
See the response above:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'll give another response too. Knowing how the products that we use works means we are an active participant in the very things that surround our economic world. We can't even fathom one part that goes into our car without going in literally a million directions (everything from the agricultural methods used to grow the foods that fed the autoworkers, to the actual engineers who designed the autopart). It is so intractably wide a network, that we are always on the outside of the "know". We are just passive recipients of market forces and not directly involved in that which we utilize. It is an odd sort of alienation that we are removed many fold from. Some might say this is just evidence of the goodness of the market system, but there is an alienation of the users and producers. Those who designed the complex systems and those who take it for granted once it is distributed to a large market for profit.
1. Do you mean if everyone decided not to work officially? I.e. they 'work' at home - cleaning their kitchens, flowering the garden, making food; but they refuse to work at their work places? I think if you mean that then probably we'd diverge into small working communities. Progress would slow, life expectancy would likely shorten.
If you mean stop work completely, including house work, then probably we'd all not last more than a few decades.
2. That's such a complex question and you will get different answers from different people. I think it's some kind of stability of mind and sense of life contentment.
[quoteThe absurdity of both work and the silence of what we are getting out of life in the first place is telling.
Edit: You see, there is an ethos here that is implicit in this situation.
It's not always so rote. There are so many job and career options, there are so many ways to feel connected to a given job or career. You might teach or do therapy because you love to work with people or mentor others. You might prefer a family oriented, balanced, low competition life - so you prefer to work in blue collar sector. Sometimes there are barriers to carving a career, some of those barriers are unjust and should not be there -- but I think if we lived in a society where career opportunity was freely accessible and without significant barriers, I don't think people would be so limited by their work options.
It seems to me that if the former suggestion was valid we would never have "progressed" to the advanced industrial societies we live in today. I build electrical installations, someone else arranges for me to have food and drink. Would I do a better job of providing all of these requirements myself? Emphatically no! I cannot be an expert in everything.
That is a perennial contradictions of anarchism: Organizations are inherently bad, but without organizations we all starve. Some people starve even with organizations, but with organization more people get fed.
Chomsky argues that anarchism is not disorganised, but is instead organisation without hierarchy. Fanciful as this may sound, it does offer a potential to alleviate the "inherently bad" aspect of (corporate) organisation without the wanton destruction of everything we rely on for our survival.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that this is at least theoretically true, is a consequence of this that alienation from production is not an important factor in our lives?
On a different note, are we really, relatively speaking, all that alienated? Does a monkey know how fruit is produced?
All lever pushing. That versus the person who invents a better processor or whole new systems which millions rely upon.
I saw this and thought of your thread-
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1018363788315773&id=574719552680201&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&_rdr
What do you think? Is this the sort of way of life you'd prefer people to live by?
Also I disagree with the equalizing and trivializing of the personal value and meaning of different forms of work you have to give me an argument for why they have the same meaning and end in despair for the individual
@
Apologies, this is the version of the video. What do you think? Is this the kind of connection to products you mean?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVCjb_9aj7M
I meant to say that most are lever pushing outside the very few who change processes for millions. They perhaps have a much greater stake in the production. Even this is one instance and since can't be a part of the whole process, is simply also a passive recipient like the rest.
I don't know if it ends in despair, but it ends with individuals being just very minuscule participants, and thus are essentially pinballs in the "given" of the environs which the behemoth of the world economy provides for the individuals.
Indeed. If not being alienated from production means slaving away on a farm to make ends meet, I probably would rather be alienated with all my consumer goods, unless I'm really into farming.
Let's not kid ourselves. Before capitalism there was feudalism, and that was not better for most people, despite there being a lot less alienation with production. And there are still parts of the world where people have to produce their own goods. They tend to be rather poor, and many of them would rather have access to the alienated labor and goods.
If being alienated means I have clean drinking water, abundance of food choices, access to healthcare, education, travel, etc. then that's magnitudes better than most humans had before me.
Indeed! Specialization (along with automation) has allowed the standard of living to go way up, for all of us unfortunate souls who get to be alienated. Not saying it's a perfect result, but I would say it's generally less bad than what came before.
Although I have no idea what life was a hunter/gatherer would be like, but at least with civilization, the standard of living is much better now, for those who have access.
The point of my post was to address the fact that we are mostly ignorant of the very processes and things we take utilize in daily life. We become passive participants and eventually become beholden to the given which is:
You want the STUFF (i.e. all the complex technologically created goods). > YOU must contribute now (since most people aren't technological pioneers through circumstance or lack of aptitude this means lever pushing for many). > You are beholden to the forces of technology because if you want the STUFF
Yes, and maybe there is something less than good about that. Thus the DIY movement, and all those shows about how STUFF gets made. But is it worse than what we had before?
Maybe a smith would know everything about how an object was made. Was their life better off overall?
I am not advocating going backwards in time. I am just pointing to our ignorance and how beholden we are to larger forces we had no hand in and did not create ourselves but certainly dictate modern life for us. I can't explain its significance more than there is an alienation or atomization to this.
I see. Well, it might get worse if AI becomes more generalized in capability.
"Being alienated from the products of one's labor" is not an obvious condition for industrial workers, let alone monkeys. "Alienation" in the case of products isn't "a bad feeling" like being alienated from one's parents, for instance, whose love once seemed secure. Rather, it's an insight into one's relationship to production which one might grasp alone, but will more quickly grasp if prompted by someone like Marx.
Workers in capitalist economies are definitely alienated from production. They may be, and probably are alienated in other ways too, where alienation is a psychological phenomenon.
Quoting Shatter
Yes, this is true. Anarchy is an-archy not helter-skelter. I love the idea of an-archical society but bringing about such a society is a daunting project. Ursula LeGuin, a science fiction writer, explored what an anarchical society might be like in her novel, The Dispossessed.
Quoting Shatter
Alienation from production is an important part of our lives the same way clean water and fresh air are. We may not notice that the water and air are dirty if we have tasted nothing else, but clean water and fresh air are definitely better for us, once we know what is what. And the cure for alienation isn't a pain killer, its a reorganization of the economy and society so that workers ARE NOT ALIENATED, which means the end of rich people owning everything.
Whether alienation is cured by socialism, syndicalism, or anarchism... the changes would be HUGE.
Chomsky is always worth reading; have you read Prince Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and more modern anarchists?
I've read very little anarchist literature, largely, as mentioned, because I consider it fanciful. This is not to say that I don't sympathise with the aims and principles elucidated.
In previous posts I think I have misunderstood what we mean by alienation. Or perhaps that there is considerable ambiguity in the concept itself. If we are discussing the ignorance and distance we all have from the production of what we consume, then this seems inevitable, though with troubling consequences. As you point out, how do we know that our air and water are clean?
Another interpretation of alienation is, again, as you say, the Marxist version. Workers are alienated from what they themselves produce. This is far more troubling. Even among the obscenely rich there are those (Soros, for example) who decry the vast, and in recent decades, widening, gulf between workers and owners wealth. However, I find the recognised alternatives, such as socialism or communism, to be worse than the problems they solve.
This, not least, because the various factions tend to collapse into mutual antagonism. The Communist Manifesto (which isn't a manifesto at all - it's a prophecy) provides a quintessential example. The final, and by far the longest, chapter consists of an aggressive refutation of various forms of socialism.
The French and Russian revolutions provide fair evidence of the flaws of their ideologies. In each case, temporary euphoria has rapidly given way to pragmatic concerns which proved insurmountable until the imposition of a brutal totalitarian regime.
Thank you for the recommendations, by the way, especially LeGuin. Haven't read a good political sci-fi in some time.
There are intermediate stops in-between where we are and a communist revolution. Like, progressive taxation. At the present time, we (the U.S.) has lapsed into a long phase of regressive taxation which is partially responsible for the chasm between the rich and everybody else. There is also progressive spending, where budgets support enduring future-oriented projects rather than short-term vanishing projects, like building highways which contribute to existing problems and will start fall apart at once (at least in cold-climate areas).
We can not regain the post WWII boom which really did lift a lot of boats, and enabled scores of millions of people to make gains in their quality-of-life. But there are certainly things that can be done, if progressive governments can be elected.
An historian I was reading a couple of months ago labeled Marx as a prophet, and his prophecy less revolution and more an eschatology. He was preaching salvation, a "kingdom of god" without god, of course...
The problem of assembly line production is that it turns man into mindless machine and it deprives man of his most basic human elements: the ability to think, decide, judge, and care. It's dehumanizing, and as society advances, more jobs are reduced to the employee performing mindless algorithmic steps in order to assure consistency, even should it be mediocre consistency. The individual no longer confers unique quality on his product.
This result arises from a need for more products and efficient production. Failure to adhere to these principles means perhaps more fulfilling work conditions but fewer goods and services.
The problem here is not Marx versus capitalism. In either we should expect the same goods and services, just brought about by different means. Whether the employee works the assembly line as co-owner of The People's Communal Motorcars or as a peon Ford Motor Company grunt, in either event, the employee goes equally unfulfilled.
My point being that I don't see communism resolving anything, unless you suggest that under communism we should just get ready to accept much less and lesser overall quality goods as each person is handed a hammer and sickle and asked to forge goods one at a time like an old world craftsman. The alienation, it seems to me arises from being relegated to being a cog, not from lacking joint ownership in the enterprise.
This conflict of efficiency vs well-being has been somewhat addressed in private industry with certain progressive companies - google, venmo, tesla- designing their employment positions to include more worker freedom and project autonomy. This could quell the well being issue without unduly hampering efficient production, it just needs to be more widespread. Or, automating the algorithmic steps and creating new jobs that require critical input. I'm not sure the latter can do the same as the former but it's a start.
If the worker-owned and operated People's Communal Motorcars set up a dehumanizing assembly line on which they themselves or some other unfortunates, labored from dawn to dusk, it would be their own fault, their own most grievous fault.
Marx was preaching salvation, aside from political economy, and what was implemented in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China was Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Company's authoritarian state capitalism, where the state is the owner operator, and as likely to behave badly as any straightforward capitalist, only more so.
Quoting Hanover
There are two flavors of alienation. Being a cog on the assembly line or a cog in an office or a cog any where else, is one kind of alienation. A lot of people who are cogs on a wheel actually like their jobs. They are, none the less, "alienated" from the product of their work, even though they might like their jobs. This kind of alienation may not even be perceived, and is more of a philosophical concept than a specific experience.
Then there is another kind of alienation where one becomes a stranger in one's own land and is cut off from such comforts and joys as family, community, and faith can provide. This kind of alienation feels awful and isn't specifically related to economics.
There are many more factors contributing to the second kind of... 'existential alienation' than there are contributing to the alienation Marx was talking about.
More confusing and worse, one may be alienated in both senses of the word at the same time.
Marx's comments on alienation are in some scattered locations; what he had to say about it in the philosophical manuscripts are very resonant to what a lot of people are feeling in the second sense of the word (alienation).
But we don't have to rely on what Marx said. A lot of people have written cogently and perceptively about alienation.
Watch from 54 minutes for a discussion of Commodity fetishism:
As I see it, drudgery is drudgery. Was it good to dig in the dirt, even in one's own dirt when that was possible? I doubt it. It sounds boring, probably more boring than working in an Amazon warehouse.
It would be nice to not work for anyone, read, write, watch good TV, enjoy a variety of sex partners, never age, have lots of profound friendships, be admired for my creativity, and so on and so on. As I get some of this, it doesn't exactly keep me from wanting more of this. And if I could make a living strictly from my creativity, I still find something to gripe about (lack of immortality, the imperfection of friends and lovers, etc.) That monstrous, infinite hole of abstract appetite is just something one puts up with and is maybe even grateful for.
I anticipate a pessimistic response, and I grant that pessimists have noted the way that desire expands with possession. But this surplus desire or frustration isn't exactly unpleasant. It's the like the tension felt in trying to beat a video game or solve a puzzle.
Thanks for sharing the video.
What Schopenhauer called will. There is a bit of giddyness to some aspects of pessimism ironically. I've mentioned that before. To read a really good turn of phrase about the existential situation.
Quoting syntax
Interesting point and I think there is something to it. This is why there should be existential communities- we can call it "The Joy of Pessimism" akin to the Joy of Cooking or the Joy of Painting :D. I know there is the School of Life which does have a similar theme on YouTube. Even this though is a bit too self-helpy for my taste, but a good start.
As for the production idea of this thread, the point is that we can never have full knowledge of the very world we use to keep us alive. Hunter/gatherers know the man-made tools that they use. Our ancestors did at least. But here we are, using this computer, and I am sure most of us wouldn't know much except generalities about processors, RAM, binary code, source code, etc. that still wouldn't scratch the surface of all the functionalities. Of course, SOMEONE might know every piece of information that goes into how the computer functions (still doubtful because of the programming aspect), but they don't know about some other phenomena that they use in daily life. It is a very subtle point I am making that I think people have missed.
I still maintain that we have that right here. Out of curiosity, I've checked out forums of outside intellectual traditions. In my experience they tend to be sterile. Conflict is good. I think we get bored if we aren't allowed to scratch and bite and if we don't run the risk of being scratched and bitten.
But yeah, there's something sexy about pessimism. And it's the same kind of sex-appeal that goes with the cartoon version of existentialism. And then there's the even sexier of sophistication of being too profound for all of these. One starts to wear profundity itself ironically.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I do see what you're getting at. Yes, we are cogs in a machine that none of us understand. Some of us are highly trained in this or that area, but there is just too much specialized knowledge. No one sees the whole anymore, though some of us specialize in seeing the whole stripped of detail (an X-ray of the whole.) Of course such 'X-rays' tend to be biased and self-serving, or at least particular grand narrative tend to include explanations of how opposing grand narratives get it wrong.
This ignorance of the machine as a whole is still something that I think I would like more than digging in the dirt with tools I understand. Even in a simpler world, the presence of that world must remain mysterious.
There's a trade-off between the amount of alienation and the difficulty of the labour. Technological progress has made things easy (press a button and do what the labour of a dozen men would have been required for in the past), but that very ease is what distances the labourer from their product; on the other hand, our ancestors went in this direction because they were pissed off having to work so hard for a poor result. Nevertheless, we are not bound by their decisions going forward, we just have to keep in mind the baselines of unpleasantness they were trying to avoid with ingenuity and the strategem of progress.
Basically a lot of the problems the Left is canvassing - the Rousseauian element in the Left, one might say - comes from a recognition that we have a hankering for a natural, simpler life. And that's true, that's what Nature designed our bodies and brains for, our ancestral environment, and while we are slowly evolving to cope with modern life, and we may be able to engineer ourselves so that we are our "best bits", part of us still hankers for a life out in nature, confronting relatively simple tasks we can do with our whole bodies, that have relatively immediate feedback.
Our social mindset is also designed for a small group of people we know very well and are accustomed to, who are relatively closely genetically related (tribe, clan, ethnic group, race). That set of expectations being often thwarted by often impersonal modern living, is the kernel of much discontent in society - we need to find ways of satisfying those expectations and urges that don't necessarily indulge them, but at least neutralize any ill effects they might have in a modern context. There are many close-enough substitutes, and there are many different ways of coming to terms with those itches and hankerings intelligently.
We are born into the given- an accumulation of general processes over time. We can only work within that given and never create it whole out of cloth. Thus the demands of life are largely not ours to create, only work within. The demands of a particular economy is already there presented to us as well. The economy can only work within a particular physical reality that is also presented to us.
What I think is odd, is that we have to trick ourselves into certain habits of thought. We have to pretend to care about things until we actually might fully care about them. We subsume ourselves in the given, despite our (at least to us seeming) freedom of thought. We live in a society, but we must constantly subsume our thoughts with what the given economic and social system require. Why do we want more people to contribute to this system?
@apokrisis seems to think there is this smooth balance of the individual with the whole- as if human social relations are simply a machine. I do not agree about how smooth this balance is. It is a constant realigning one's values with the social ones. It is not a complete subjugation of one's own will to the economic/social demands. It is a constant need to create habits to work with the group. This is not a smooth process. Individuals have an inclination for freedom of their own thought. Thus, not recognizing people's tendency for their own freedom of thought, is tacitly just putting the "is" of group dynamics as the "ought" of individuals conforming to demands of the given. Rather, though people must acquiesce to the given, the situation is still the given. Why create more situations where individuals must encounter the given? @apokrisis suggests that this is something that should be done, but other than describing how individuals and groups have to negotiate, the reasoning for why it should be done is not explained. Again, it is not a smooth process. Either there is a denial of this bumpiness, or there is a preference-writ-large to make new people experience this bumpiness. Again though, this has no justification other than this is a preference- a preference for seeing the same thing continue into the future.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree. We are thrown into a contingency that some of us end up recognizing as contingency. Or let's say that some of us can't help but end up understanding ourselves as having been thrown into contingency and fragility. Some of us can't help but to understand ourselves as having seen through 'positive theologies' as tools that finally serve the dark human heart. Sometimes disgust with life dominates and (as I see it) finds pessimism more accurate. At other times, the 'lust of the eyes' and the 'pride of life' dominate and an irrational affirmation is possible.
One tension I find in pessimism is between its willingness to look behind theory at motive with its desire to be a 'rational' theory. The Dionysian position 'knows' that it is a noble lie or a leap of faith. It sees pessimism as another leap of faith that won't admit as much.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree with you here. Beneath all the rationalizations, theodicies, systems...boos and hoorays.
Trying to drag me into yet another of your scab picking pessimism sessions? ;)
For the record, I would say organismic rather than mechanical. And so you are off track thinking I would need a frictionless mechanism.
What is important from a pragamatic and semiotic view of nature is a capacity to ignore the differences that don’t make a difference. Identity or autonomy is defined by what matters to an organism, and thus what also is a matter of generalised indifference.
That is what is balanced. Things don’t need to be magically smooth or frictionless. The system just needs to be smart enough that it knows when not to care.
Your rants about the structural intolerability of existence don’t get that. You complain about every bump in the road, no matter how insignificant.
It is you who desire the smooth and frictionless existence here. Funny that. Folk are always projecting.
No no, you are right in that I desire smooth and frictionless, but you are wrong that I think you want frictionless. I'll rephrase the qualifier of "smooth" and just say that you think this should be the way of things (i.e. individual bumping against the given). In fact, my point was that because it is not frictionless, why do you want to see it perpetuated? Well, it is simply a preference of yours. What is it about individuasl bumping up against "the given" dynamic that you like to see carried out generation after generation? Just remember, whatever X reason you provide will simply be your preference, and not the world-writ-large. What you tend to do is take your preference for seeing X phenomena and say that this is what should be. It is subtle but a tendency you have, unwittingly perhaps.
Look what I said again:
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is an empirical account so it stands or falls on the evidence.
I don't deny that, we agree on the bumpiness. The preference to continue it though is yours.
It is your pessimism that demands the perfection of a frictionless existence. Or have you now abandoned that?
My point was about acquiescing freedom of thought to the demands of the given. Here we are with a personality (granted it is created from group interaction, but exists as a phenomenon nonetheless), and this personality has preferences, beliefs, values, and ideas that must aquiesce to the given. You say this is a good thing and should be carried out because that is just what happens. Again, this is an is ought problem that you have not managed to justify yet other than rhetorical moves that go back and forth from one to the other without the bridge. Your bridge usually comes in the form of talking about your metaphysics/epistemology of symbolic triadism/ information theory but explaining a theory is not a justification for why something should continue. Rather, even if it was the ultimate theory (which is a different matter), that informs little about ethics, values, etc. for what should be carried out, especially in light of the fact that people can make decisions and are not impelled by anything other than social norms, their own decision making heuristics, and perhaps biological brain tendencies (which would be very hard to pinpoint for each individual).
Nope. My actual argument starts pragmatically with the preference to be achieved - the purpose you might have in mind. You want life to be x. And so what would be the steps to reach that?
It is a given, a scientific fact, that we are social creatures who flourish through the give and take of some balance of competitive and co-operative behaviours. We must be both sufficiently differentiated and integrated to thrive as ... social creatures. And everything else I say follows from this basic picture of the human situation.
Now you can dispute that scientific account of things. But I am asking what is it that you hope to achieve, and what are the given conditions from which that preference would have to be expressed. Some reasonable plan of action then follows.
So nope. That is the advantage of pragmatism. It takes both the preference and the situation seriously enough that reason can operate properly. A path can be found without the kind of collapse into helpless absolutism your approach always leads you.
So basically this argument is about antinatalism and whether to expose new people into this dynamic of individual vs. group (or individual being integrated/subjegated into group roles/expectations/demands). Now, we both agree on what is the case, mainly (in your words):
Quoting apokrisis
Now from here, you take this IS and make it an OUGHT by PREFERRING to have future people that experience this dynamic of the individual and society. However, just because it is the case that there is this individual/group dynamic does not mean there SHOULD be more future people that experience this dynamic. That is what I mean by bridging the IS/OUGHT gap. You cannot presume or assume, you must justify why what is, is what ought to be or what ought to continue to be.
What I tried to say for justification was thus:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Huh? I am asking you to justify why your personal preference ought to be the metaphysically general preference. You are the one claiming that the reality is structurally intolerable and therefore all of us ought not to reproduce as an ethical fact.
I instead start with situational choices and end with them. We can each make our own personal choices on the issue. And collectively, as a society, we will make some general choice. Who could complain about that?
But the other issue here is what to do practically if you are personally miserable and depressed about life. That is where you need the psychology rather than the philosophy. You keep mixing the two up.
Because there is always tension between the individual and society (unless society's givens/expectations/roles are EXACTLY what the individual wants, which I would dare to say is never really the situation). Of course we conform to society's expectations/roles/givens, etc. We eventually learn to integrate. But why do we want this process to continue? What is it about this process that we want future people to experience it? Why force people into having to confront the given? Why force them to make situational choices in the first place?
I see the fact that individual needs/wants/goals, though being wrapped up in the social world, are also thwarted by the givens of the social world. There is always a negotiation. I say that to make people negotiate is a reality once born. To have new people that need to constantly negotiate through the world of the give, is questionable. What is it about seeing new people navigate the social/physical world that is valuable to you that this needs to be procreated to a next generation? It is a legitimate question, but so fundamental you seem to think it should not be asked. You will always "LOOK" the wiser in your "this is just how things are", but that is simply a rhetorical shell. The good questions come from fundamental question-asking. To question why procreate in the face of X, Y, Z (in this case individual-group dynamic) should not be shunned out of hand, as you seem to do.
Yep. Life never runs smooth. There is always friction. And yet at some sensible level, we are indifferent to that. It ceases to matter ... probably because we have goals and hence a balanced and reasonable view of what it would take to negotiate their achievement.
If you want to take some other simplistic/absolutist position on the structural intolerability of existence, that's your personal choice. I merely point out that is bad psychology and thus a philosophy constructed on faulty premisses.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why always stuck with the one side of what I say? We also conform to an expectation that we are differentiated as well. And it is precisely that modern Romantic/Existential social expectation - you are a special flower - which is a primary source of much of the angst (for the average person in a developed country with food in their bellies, a roof over their heads, time to waste on the internet).
I say rebel against that conformist role! Rebel against being a rebel. Wise up to the self-absolving meme that is antinatalism. Fight back against the expectations of differentiation. :)
Quoting schopenhauer1
You might not. But why should I want what you want? Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?
Quoting schopenhauer1
You just never listen to the answers. I don't think there is an ought involved. I've said it is fine as a personal choice. My reply to the OP was that one justification is that having kids makes you less selfish, more socially responsible and involved. And that in itself is fun and healthy for good natural reasons.
It is not as if there is some world shortage of humans. In the end, we can shrug our shoulders at antinatalism as a moral philosophy. So the only thing to object to is that it is a bad idea from a psychological health viewpoint. It becomes a rationale to hide behind.
My outcome leads to no negative outcome for a future individual.
Quoting apokrisis
Can't one do this without kids? Anyways, what makes these three things you mention valuable/worthwhile/good? This is indeed your preference, as you admitted. Preferences aren't necessarily good ethical justifications. But, I'll see if perhaps you do have a justification that your preference for some outcome (which may or may not happen from someone being born, but that's a different argument) of less selfish/more socially responsible/ and involved is good enough reasons to start a new life for someone new. What is it about putting forth a new life that you value? X reason= Achievement? X reason = Accomplishment? X reason = relationships? Etc. etc. With structural and contingent sufferings what possibly justifies any X reason as a justification for starting another person's life? Nothing is lost. Nothing misses out. Nothing even existed to deal with whatever burdens of life there are whether structural or contingent.
Or do you propose it about power? The power to see some sort of outcome from your efforts? Or perhaps it was unthinking- just a simple outcome from one act.
What are we really trying to achieve here by procreating an individual's life? Do you see yourself as a vessel for continuing society through progeny? Do you see this as a necessity? What possible reason is it justified other than its possible to procreate? What is it about the word "flourishing" that draws people like a moth to a flame? Is this word and concept really the nail you hang your hat on for why it is good to put forth a future person? What is it about life that needs to be carried forth by another individual? If we know of the sufferings, why are the "positives" worth it when nothing had to be created at all? Is it an ideation of a future without a person to experience the positives?
....is not an answer to the question: "Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?"
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah. Why on earth would flourishing be a preference? Why would you want anything standing in the way of misery?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, you have simply failed to answer on the issue. Why should your personal "is" be society's collective "ought"?
Again, my preference leads to no negative outcomes for a future individual. No structural or contingent suffering experienced by a future person. De facto, the outcomes of AN don't harm a new person. More precisely, there is no new person to be harmed. Also, more to the OP's point @Thorongil, by having the new person, there is no reason prior to their birth that would be a justified reason for the child's sake. The child didn't exist to need any X, Y, Z projection that is hoped for it. It has to be created first and then, would those X, Y, Z projections apply. Even you mentioned, the self-interested reasons of less selfish and more socially responsible would simply be a self-interested reason and thus not for the child's sake (again, because the child doesn't exist to need interests taken care of in the first place).
Now, you could make a sidestep move and say having children in general promotes the continuation of scientific discoveries, keeps the economy going/developing, keeps the concept of human "flourishing" alive. These would all be using the individual for a means to another end. Being that the individual didn't even need to exist in the first place, you are directly affecting an individual to carry out a third-party consequence that you want to see carried out (whatever general social welfare reason you chose).
Now, you say that the child will flourish. I say that this is perhaps misinterpretation of what is going on. Perhaps it is systemic futility, aggressive circularity, instrumentality, deprivation of needs and wants, bumpiness of individual vs. the physical/social givens, and the myriad of innumerable and unpredictable contingent harms that befall an individual. Are the positive goods worth these ideas? Even if we were in a situation where it is unknown whether my perspective or your perspective was right, my outcome lead to no actual suffering for a new person.
Thus, whereby my preference literally leads to no loss (no human to have loss), yours would be
a) Creating a situation where systemic and contingent harm would take place in the first place
b) Using the new person for self-interested means
c) Using the person for a third-party means
If my perspective is "wrong" no ONE is hurt by it. If your perspective is wrong, someone is always hurt by it.
Yes, in the absence of a soteriological or metaphysical framework in which procreation would be viewed as a supererogatory good (which I myself don't rule out but don't presently believe in fully), this is an irrefutable piece of metanormative reasoning, it seems to me. I say "metanormative," as it doesn't presuppose or commit one to the normative position of antinatalism and yet still conforms to the praxeological implications of antinatalism, namely, childlessness. It is the precautious, morally humble stance to take.
And being reasonable, it would be on average rather than absolutely. Practical reason also includes the principle of indifference. Near enough is good enough. We don’t have to be fanatics about these things.
It's not fanatical to abstain from having children. People do it all the time.
And I think you are using the term "reasonable" illicitly here, in that you effectively monopolize the term to refer to anything you agree with. I can just as easily say that reasonable people do not take unnecessary risks, especially when other people (who cannot consent) are directly involved. In this form antinatalism is the logical extension of the common ethical categories (common-sense morality), and it's only because of the affirmative assumption that life and reason must never intersect that antinatalism is seen as unreasonable.
The reason as to why this assumption is so prevalent is probably evolution and the basic biological drive to survive.
What I said was that it is fanatical to take up absolutist positions. Not having kids can be a perfectly reasonable choice - "reasonable" meaning "on the balance of probabilities".
Quoting darthbarracuda
Huh? I used a general definition of reasonable - the pragmatist one.
Quoting darthbarracuda
And that is what I actually said. We make pragmatic risk/reward choices based on a balance of probabilities.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No. It is unreasonable because the facts are that the majority of people don't go through life wishing they had never been born.
Antinatalism is only logical to those who take a black and white absolutist stance on things. Any pain or suffering - even a papercut - makes existence structurally intolerable.
For most people, life is a mixed bag. And yet overall, they don't regret living. So if you are going to take on moral guardianship for the unborn, deal with the facts as they actually are out there in the world.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No. Most folk can just see that antinatalism is another of those extremist points of view that are essentially unreasonable.
Yes. The arguments are made with black and white logic. But no. That is not reasonable.
If one can face the situation without holding on to the unlikelihood that everything will turn out just fine in the end, it seems obvious that we are doomed -- not tonight, not next week, not in a few years. But also not thousands of years into the future. Doom will arrive for many in this century, and more (maybe most) in the century after.
The combination of excess heat, erratic and previously unseen weather patterns, rising oceans, and much more will kill off hundreds of millions--and billions--through starvation, heat stroke, dehydration, illnesses, and such like.
What is the point of having children as we approach the cliff off of which we will collectively fall?
I think Meyer Hillman is right. We are doomed, and no one wants to acknowledge our eminent demise as a species with a future, never mind a bright one. We will take a lot of other species with us. Our legacy will be unvisited cultural shrines, unread books, unheard music, undiscussed philosophical questions, like, "Was this wretched conclusion to our history worth the glory we achieved by burning all the coal and oil?"
It wasn't, and now it's too late to do much about it.
Now you are talking about the actual world - the one where we would take a pragmatic decision. :up:
Just as the torturer could make reasonable predictions about whether, on average, his victims will develop a Stockholm Syndrome such that they feel grateful to him. You dodge the salient point pessimists make about the world and which leads them to conclusions like antinatalism.
Finish the thought. What would that reasonable prediction actually be in real life?
10%?
1%?
0.001%?
And then ask yourself how good is an argument that must rely on extravagant hyperbole? Surely it must be facing desperate times if that is the best it can manage.
Once again, the fact that the majority of people do not often wish they had never been born (but actually claims about being glad you were born are often not about being born but continuing living) is not a counterargument to antinatalism. And once again antinatalism is not concerned about paper cuts and minor boo-boos.
Yes, it is true that many people irrationally find life to be something positive. Yet people can be profoundly misled. And there are many people who do not find life to be something positive. The latter are those whom I am most concerned with here. If you procreate, you make possible the existence of a suicidal person. The claim is that the possible good that may come from bringing someone into existence (such as their happiness, fulfillment, or whatever) does not justify the possible evil that may (and often does) come from doing the same.
Really, then, this particular argument is that the extinction of the human race is preferable to the existence of agony. Pain is the most real thing a person can experience. A billion happy people has no value when it depends on a single victim of torture. You may call that absolutist, and if that is so, then so be it. Every single person who exists is a possible suicide. That's a fact.
Elsewhere I have tried to emphasize how antinatalism is but one perspective on procreation - an ethical perspective. Procreation can be seen in other perspectives that are more favorable to it, such as from the perspective of the continuation of the human species, or the perspective of a prospective parent who wishes to have an intimate relationship with their young. I don't think I'm being absolutist when I say procreation is morally wrong. I'm merely pronouncing a perspective on procreation that is based on moral categories. Feel free to take a different perspective - the argument is not that birth is absolutely bad from all perspectives, but rather that it is bad from the moral perspective.
Quite reasonable.
When I was a full throated antinatalist, I was concerned with such things, however ridiculous they may seem. Even the most remote and minute amount of suffering in the world is enough to ignite the problem of evil. An antinatalism based on the notion of a strict duty to reduce suffering in toto cannot countenance even trivial examples thereof.
Minor boo-boos like paper cuts are so trivial that they can form a problem of evil in themselves. Forget the Holocaust for a second - what possible benefit would a person get from stubbing their toe? Is stubbing a toe a necessary part of God's great plan? Do papers cuts actually refine our moral character? Or are these "minor evils", as minor as they may be, simply useless?
These minor evils are still very minor and so are not something we ought to worry about. Instead they act more as indicators of the overall absurd quality of life.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Quoting darthbarracuda
No words.
Indeed.
One thing that seems to separate you and I are our views on the nature of reality. You seem to take reality to be a creative and ultimately playful process of development - a few cuts and burns here and there but who cares?, the world and the synergistic melody of the universe plays on. This is completely alien to me. Reason and life do not always parallel each other, and when they intersect it's not always beautiful. Probably the biggest obstacle antinatalism faces is providing people with a sense of beauty and meaning in the absence of a future society. Samuel Scheffler has a good take on the importance of the "afterlife" (future society that remembers us after we die).
Yep. It does come down to me being happy to let nauture tell us what reality is. You have some invented image of rationality that you won’t even questioin. You know the right answers despite what nature might say.
You give up on your lines of argument rather easily.
Seems to me YOU'RE the one who thinks they have special privilege to the whisperings of nature. The modern day prophet/soothsayer/NATURE whisperer. I've quoted this before, but I'll say it again, a quote from Inherit the Wind (with one minor change):
[s]God[/s]Nature speaks to [s]Brady[/s]apokrisis, and aporkisis tells the world! aporkisis, aporkisis, aporkisis, Almighty!
Funny, I saw the same hubris there :grin:
LOL. I listen to the science. Sue me.
Yep. You believe that what you think is what is reasonable. The simplicity of the circular argument.
Oh c'mon apo, what does that even mean? That's like religions using "Natural Law" to justify their religion. How do you "divine" Natural Law would be the first question. Your appeal to the majority as science is rather weak.
1) That is all your argument stands on. Argumentum ad populum.
2) You constantly make the is/ought fallacy. Here, maybe brush up on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
3) You constantly make the appeal to nature fallacy. Here, maybe brush up on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
4) You constantly abuse the word "nature" and conflate human decisions with appeals to nature in a 1-1 ratio as if human decisions were instinctual rather than multicausational
It's not that you're listening to what science is saying more than it's that you're interpreting certain cherry-picked scientific theories in a particular way and claiming this interpretation is what necessarily holds when this interpretation is exactly what's in question. This modern scientific Taoism of yours may be aesthetically pleasing but it certainly doesn't provide the theodicy we're looking for.
As I agreed with Darth, in the end there is a choice. Either you go with the subjectivity being expressed by all you anti-natalists - where your personal preferences are treated as a self-evident moral ought - or you are prepared to follow the natural philosophy route that became the pragmatic scientific method.
So mine is the evidence-demanding approach that stands against your subjective articles of faith. :)
And yours also is the one that frames things in terms of laws - natural or otherwise. I keep telling you how my position is a natural philosophy one in that it depends on constraints and freedoms. Mine is the systems logic which has that inherent balance.
Yet the choice to commit to the "pragmatic route" must also be subjectively motivated, no? As I said before, there are multiple perspectives on procreation. I'm fine with you going the pragmatic route, so long as you recognize that this isn't a moral avenue. Your decision to pursue the "scientific" route here is not a God-given decree but probably something to do with your character and background.
Quoting apokrisis
But again this is a false dichotomy, your favorite straw man between romanticism and science. I dislike how you claim to speak for all scientists on matters outside of the domain of science.
I thought it funny that you again wheel out a theory about the extremes that people will go to to avoid confronting an end to their lives when you are so busy trying to claim folk would universally be happier never to have been born.
Well, they wouldn't actually be happier since they wouldn't be alive. But yeah I think if people were a little more observant and candid about their own lives to themselves, birthday parties wouldn't be so common. Actually things like birthdays parties are effective ways of reinforcing the "life is good" mantra that is so ball-numbingly repetitive.
Pragmatism is about collectively demonstrated truths - what a community of rational inquirers would believe in the end.
So it both accepts the subjectivity of phenomenality, and it then sets out the method that can achieve the most objectivity in the light of that constraint.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But why should I accept your dualism? You can propose it. I simply show its incoherence.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Sure. I hope it has everything to do with my character and background. God certainly had nothing to do with it.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yet you are fine telling all natalists how they are simply irrational in their delusions about life having a value for them.
There must be a fallacy which is the fallacy of posters hoping to win debates by claiming every possible fallacy that springs to mind once all their other arguments have disintegrated.
You don't have to, but then we wouldn't have much to talk about, then. None of this pragmatism talk looks anything like ethics or value theory to me at all.
So yes, if we go your pragmatism route then many ethical categories don't make sense. I'm saying that's an argument against your pragmatism, and a very powerful one too given your apparent inability to shrug off what you claim is romantic nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
There's no equivalency here. On either end we are using science to help support our views. I'm being more honest, though, when I say science merely supports my views instead of claiming that science just is my view. I don't use science as a trump card like that.
And I'm sure you are aware that disagreement abounds in science, so much so that broad sweeping claims about "positive psychology" being the only relevant authority cannot possibly be taken for granted, since there are competing scientific theories that are contradictory to the nauseating feel-good paradigm leaking around the psychology departments.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I think it has something to do with making false dichotomies...
In the end, I'm not religious. I don't believe in transcendent being. Naturalism is the position that there is only nature and its immanent meaning.
So there is a stark choice when it comes to metaphysics. You can be like me, or be like you.
But I can show you my workings-out. I can point to the pragmatist metaphysics and their resulting history of successful empirical inquiry.
God is dead. He never lived. Moral dilemmas can only find a grounding context in Nature itself. Get used to it. ;)
A dualism??? :gasp:
Quoting apokrisis
Bullshit, God lived in the hearts of countless human beings over the course of millennia. God was said to have grounded morality, and the death of God is typically seen as a threat to this morality. But really I would argue that God didn't ground morality so much as he limited it. Morality already existed without God. When God is real, humans have a limited responsibility and don't have to ask too many questions - the big guy will figure out the details, and in the end everything will be alright and make sense (theodicy).
When God is dead, humans are confronted with a vast sense of moral responsibility, being the sole reservoirs with any moral sense in the universe. No God to help, no God to alleviate this burden. The post-modern moral view isn't necessarily relativism, but can rather be a sense of infinite responsibility and a radical devaluing of existence. I'm saying the only way life continues is by its responsive devaluing of philosophy, just as Nietzsche articulated. Life can only continue if we stop thinking so much.
A constraint??? :gasp:
Quoting darthbarracuda
Alternatively, there is Naturalism. Wave goodbye to the Big Daddy in the sky, say hello Mama Nature.
Why wouldn't we want to understand life and mind, hence even morality, as natural phenomena? What good argument do you have on that?
Yeah a constraint might be a good word for it, although it's imposed by a supernatural rather than a natural entity.
God constrained morality, enough so that society may operate effectively (so that religion was and is an essential feature of capitalism). It was really just humans all along.
Quoting apokrisis
Soooo ..... rejecting a mistaken impression of monotheism for an environmental chad pantheism?
Mama Nature rejected us.
Quoting apokrisis
Because morality is oftentimes diametrically opposed to the natural. With the advancements in the biological sciences came a renewed fervor for the problem of evil based on the sheer magnitude of suffering in the natural world.
I've said this already, secular societies inherit the problem of evil from their theological ancestors. A morality based on the natural world would be a non-morality, akin to basing morality on a deity that, by any modern standard of morality, is a twisted psycho.
No I haven't. You never really addressed what I said. If you can't carry a big stick, at least speak clearly and softly.
You avoided a direct answer.
Yeah. And what would Nature be diametrically opposed to here. The Artificial? The Unnatural? The Supernatural? Which of these is your chosen basis for moral imperatives? What makes them better, exactly?
Quoting darthbarracuda
But you are the one who seems to hate or dread the very notion of life, of existence. You want to wish it all away, regardless of what the more general wishes of folk might be.
Shouldn’t society be able to decide on the morality of its own being? Who are you to deny that?
Oh, sure....
I might ask the same of your naturalism. There's a common trend in philosophical trends around the globe that see the Good as transcending the material and/or natural realm, often in a spiritual way. Morality is a system of imperatives that manifest as commands from afar and beyond. I think there is something atomically inescapable about this phenomenology, that it has not from what we consider to be the natural world around us. As I see it, if morality doesn't come from beyond the world, it certainly aims at it.
Antinatalism, in a philosophical pessimistic sense, is a spiritual position in that it tries to deny the immanent, natural world in favor of an alternate reality - typically Nothing. The world is bad, says the pessimist, but there is a good thing we can do, a right thing to do. The soteriology is to cease reproduction, and thus escape and stop the cycle of suffering. This helps form the basis of the antinatalist's rationale.
You'll never understand something like antinatalism if you refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of a moral criticism of life. Do you ever think all the suffering on Earth since day uno of its inception maybe isn't a good thing? Do you ever wonder what a God might say in his defense if asked why he made the world?
Now, of course, Schopenhauer's philosophy I regard as possibly leaving open a backdoor to God, who, in turn, would ground the goodness of procreation. But this is the only feasible way that I would ever change my mind. The attempts of apokrisis are therefore quite futile, since he doesn't understand that his fundamental assumption of the goodness of nature is precisely what naturalism is incapable of grounding, according to the pessimist and, tacitly, by the atheist as well, if he employs the problem of evil and suffering in his rejection of God. This claim of the pessimist is the one to dispute. Antinatalism is peripheral to it, though related.
In my experience, it's not antinatalism that makes people queasy, but its pessimistic undertones. Antinatalism reminds us of the awfulness of existence. Some form of asceticism or melancholic life seems to me to be the obvious consequence.
Apokrisis has failed to provide a convincing reason why we should see nature as fundamentally agreeable and right.
Sure. And the point about it being a metaphysics of immanent being is that it is founded on its dichotomies, not founded on a transcendent negating. Nature doesn't have to be the fallen to your moral purity. It doesn't have to be the imperfect to your Platonic good. So even if good and evil were in play here - your basic argument - nature would be the separation into good and evil as the limits on being, and then some rational balance as the existence defined by those diametrically opposed limits.
But good and evil don't really feature as they are not a good candidate dichotomy for a realistic model of nature. They lack the causal complementarity that is a defining feature of a functional system - one that actually encodes a goal of some kind.
Think again about the systems view of sociology. Civilisation is not about good vs evil. It is about the complementary dynamic that is competition and co-operation. Both the extremes are "good" because together they are synergistic.
You can work away on "good and evil" to try to hone them into that kind of complementary dynamic. You can go the Hegelian route of saying evil needs to exist, so that it can be overcome. The good can't actually be good unless it was challenged and won. But again, that is just giving a nod to immanence on the way to arriving back at a transcendent aesthetic. The claim that there is only one true absolute, not instead the one irreducibly complex dynamic.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Exactly. And antinatalism is the heir to that. Theism based itself on the idea that our everyday world represents the fallen state. Therefore the truth of being had to be transcendent of that. Romanticism was then the reaction to Enlightenment science. It actually quite suited that new theology to believe Newton and Darwin may have dis-enchanted the material world, but the individual human spirit and its purest feelings then represented the actually transcendent. Nothing essential need change, even if God was dead.
Existentialism, pessimism and anti-natalism are the continued working out of that theology. But one that gradually turns the hopefulness of the Romantics into the tragedy of the lost souls doomed to wander in mortal guise until some final decisive act of release.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yeah. The Romantic turns around to Science and says you have proved everything is in fact nothing. Existence is random and meaningless. Therefore - as a disappointed child addressing its cold-hearted parent - I want to die! I want my revenge of taking your nothingness and demanding it right now for everyone!
Quoting darthbarracuda
What are you talking about? Is the Earth tormented by the heat of its molten interior. Is it in agony with the ripping and tearing of its crust. Is the rain of asteroids an unbearable torment?
It is unbelievable how you and the other anti-natalists think hyperbole makes your philosophising anything else but comical.
How we should live life - especially right now when on the ecological brink - is a serious matter. There really ain't time to waste on this anti-natalist pissing about.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You mean you simply fail to see that my position - based on the immanence of self-organising systems - wouldn't even seek to make one extreme of existence fundamental. What is fundamental is the triadic thing of two complementary limits and their self-perpetuating balance.
Again, I never said Nature is fundamentally good. It is what it is. And we get to make it what it is - for us - to an increasing extent.
Nietzsche in the natural flesh...
Well, you didn't really address the problems I pointed out with your argument, but that's to be expected.
What this statement here shows is what I'll call a "hidden false dichotomy". You set this up as to pit Romantics vs. Science. Subtly, you are aligning the general (breeding) populous (which is somehow conflated with Science because they are not demanding nothingness) and antinatalists (conflated with Romanticism and demanding nothingness). This conflating of the general populous with Science is comically ludicrous. People's reasons for having children are multicausational, and certainly most have nothing to do with balance or competition nor is it purely instinctual in some natural balance. Rather, it is combined forces of individual preferences taken from culture, personality, personal heuristics or lack thereof, expectations, etc. etc.
So essentially, you have not gotten passed your own problem of conflating people's (often arbitrary) decisions to have children with Nature (with a capital N) and then calling it good. It's a silly house of cards you play.
No you don't.
Guess this discussion is over.