Early essay on Cyrenaic ethics and epistemology
I was looking through my old stuff and found this essay I wrote on the Cyrenaics. It was, I think, my first sustained attempt to write something on them, when I was intrigued by them but not yet quite a convert. I think its lack of rigor on some key points is amusing, but still I can't help but think something like this is on the right track, both as a reconstruction of the Cyrenaic position and in that it is the only ethics I've read that I've ever been able to take seriously as philosophically rigorous rather than merely evocative or wishful or reflective of current trends in human thought at large or within an academy.
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The Cyrenaic philosophers, led by Aristippus of Cyrene, are notorious for denying that there exists an overarching moral end, or telos, at which a successful human life must be aimed. They teach instead that individual goods are self-sufficing, and worthy of being sought for their own sake, rather than for their contribution to a higher goal such as eudaimonia; happiness can be nothing over and above the individual goods that make it up, and the former can only be sought for the sake of the latter, rather than vice-versa as is often assumed. The Cyrenaics are also “crude” hedonists, holding that particular conscious episodes of pleasure are the only good, and further that the attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain should not be sought as future goals requiring long-term planning. Finally, they hold the curious tenet that no one pleasure is better than any other. It has long been noted that these core ethical positions bear an interesting relationship to the Cyrenaics’ subjectivist epistemology, which restricts knowledge to the internal sensations, or path?, of the individual. In what follows I go further and argue that the Cyrenaics’ ethics are a direct consequence of their epistemology.
The path? are bodily motions that give rise to experiential affections in the individual perceiver. The Cyrenaics hold, first, that the perceiver has conscious sensation only of his or her own path?, and second, that the sole criterion of truth is conscious sensation; it follows that the perceiver has epistemic access only to his or her own path?. This means that the path? are unable to report on the nature of anything outside of themselves–if and when the path? are caused by external objects, the nature of those objects is utterly opaque, beyond the perceptual effects to which they give rise. The Cyrenaics arrive at this conclusion via a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that sensation grasps the qualities of sensed objects. Perceptual relativity gives differing reports of the external world, depending on the physical constitution of the perceiver: the same object appears red in the daylight and black at night; foods are simultaneously appetizing to one species and abhorrent to another. It follows that if the nature of the object is what it is perceived to be, then it possesses contradictory properties. Furthermore, because the properties that the senses report change depending on the physical makeup of the perceiver and how it interacts with the object, what is reported of the object is utterly dependent on and defined by the interaction between the two, and therefore the sensed qualities are nothing more than this interaction; that is, they are the bodily movement thereby engendered, which are the path?.
Because they are purely experiential, and conscious sensation is the criterion of truth, the experience of the path? is identical to the knowledge they provide. This means that unlike the nature of external objects, the path? cannot be coherently doubted, as to either their occurrence or their character, so long as one is experiencing them. It further means that all knowledge is a kind of self-knowledge of one’s current internal state, which the Cyrenaics emphasize by translating third-person reports into first-person parallels, so as to preserve the accuracy of their claims: thus, the unknowable “The object is sweet” is instead rendered “I am being sweetened.” This sort of locution is the paradigm of the Cyrenaic conception of knowledge because it preserves its epistemic authority by limiting itself to experience, while making clear that this experience is subjective, present, and temporary. In sum, the path? exhibit three key features: (1) they are private, meaning that they inherently belong to one individual, and that no individual can know the path? of any other; (2) they are incorrigible, and so the perceiver cannot possibly be mistaken about them; (3) they are immediate, in that they exist only so long as they are experienced, and are known only for the time in which they endure. Crucially, any Cyrenaic notion of the good must fall within these strict parameters: one can only know that something is good if it exemplifies the features of the path?, as the path? are the limit and the whole of knowledge.
The Cyrenaics therefore hold that if anything can be known to be good, its goodness must be contained within the experience of the path?. One might predict that this position would incline the Cyrenaics towards moral skepticism, on the grounds that goodness and badness are not consciously sensed. They instead adopt the intriguing position that as the path? themselves are either painful, neutral, or pleasant, and as the body in experiencing these three states senses them to be bad, indifferent, and good, respectively, one actually does sense goodness and badness. Hence, the good and the bad not only can be known, but as path? must be known incorrigibly, so long as pleasure and pain are experienced, since the goodness and the badness of pleasure and pain are nothing separate from the experience thereof. The Cyrenaics thus collapse pleasure and the good, and their doctrine of hedonism falls out of the following reconstructive syllogism: (1) Only what is consciously sensed can be known; (2) Pleasure is the only good that is consciously sensed; (3) Pleasure is the only good that can be known. The specifically Cyrenaic brand of hedonism also excludes the Epicurean notion of static pleasure, in principle–as pleasure is a pathos, it is a consciously experienced bodily movement, and therefore inherently kinetic, while the absence of pain is not experienced as being either pleasant or painful, and so it is indifferent.
The immediate nature of the path? prevents them, as particular goods, from acting in the service of a further or higher good. The goodness of the path? lies in the experience thereof, and since their existence is limited to the time in which they are experienced, they can no longer be good once they are temporally absent, either in their own right or for the sake of anything else–if another good comes along, it too must be an immediate pathos which is incorrigibly good for its own sake, and not because of any past pathos. Thus, a good pathos meets the twofold requirement for being a self-sufficing end: actions are undertaken for its sake, since it is unmistakably good in itself, and insofar as it is good it cannot be undertaken for the sake of anything else. The possibility of a good or telos that applies to life as a whole, towards which individual path? can or must point, is now thrown into question. If such a telos is only a collection of individual goods, then it can act as nothing more than a label for a series of particular path?, and so will add nothing to the path? that has not already been provided by the path? themselves. On the other hand, if this further telos is something new beyond the individual path?, then it too must be experienced immediately and incorrigibly: that is, it must be yet another pathos, and so a new particular good that will itself disappear when temporally absent. To posit an overarching good that encompasses all others therefore traps one in an infinite regress: that good will itself have to be particularized, and a new overarching good will need to be posited to encompass it and all the others, and so on ad infinitum. The Cyrenaics’ epistemology thus excludes the possibility of eudaimonia as a telos, insofar as the path? (and therefore goods) are immediate–it is nonsensical that a single temporally confined good should encompass a lifetime of other temporally confined goods.
The Cyrenaics’ insistence that the path? are private and immediate also relativizes goods to one’s preferences by precluding the possibility of assessing good and bad from any other standpoint than one’s own, in the present. We cannot know the good of another, as we cannot undergo another’s path?, and we cannot ponder our own path? from the perspective of the past, the future, or eternity, as they exist only for the time that they are experienced. This means that we can only make decisions, hold values, and seek ends that relate to our current desires, and so in each case that we perform an action for some purpose, we must have that purpose presently in mind, and desire its fulfillment as the end of that action. Even if we set our sights on a good such as eudaimonia, this will not allow us the privilege of a “God’s-eye view” of our life or anyone else’s, and so eudaimonia will take on the character of a particular good, wanted for its own sake, but only insofar as it can be preferred by some specific person at some specific time. What the Stoics, the Peripatetics, et al. want–an objective measure of success that depends on no preference whatsoever–is vaporous, in that one will never grasp an entire life in order to judge it as a whole, much less endow it with an essence that will make it happy even in the absence of an agent to live through it happily. In casting the quality of life as a completed whole rather than something to be understood in the present moment as it is lived, the eudaimonist puzzlingly seeks the temporal end of life in seeking its ethical end: “Are you doing well?” “Too soon to know–ask me when I’m dead,” appears to be his attitude. The Cyrenaic epistemology makes such a position unjustifiable, and instead comes to the descriptively powerful conclusion that we can want things for no reason beyond those things themselves, and that we need not evaluate life as a whole to know whether they are good. That something is experienced as good is what makes it good, not vice-versa, and so the goodness of the path? are always entangled with one’s current situation.
A major facet of Cyrenaic ethics is the Arsitippan aversion to long-term planning, which ties into the temporal immediacy of the path?. Arsitippus reportedly rebukes the Epicurean doctrine that life should be planned carefully by balancing future pleasures and pains, because he believes that the future is “unclear,” and so “neither the memory of past gratifications nor the expectation of future ones was anything to him, but he discerned the good by the single present time alone.” Further, the undergoing of current pains for the sake of future pleasures is “most disagreeable,” and so to be avoided. The grounding of this attitude in Cyrenaic epistemology is clear: in the first place, only the path? are known, and as the path? are temporally immediate, it follows that the future cannot be known, and future goods cannot be coherently valued; and in the second place, any attempt to plan a course of future pleasures must deviate from grabbing whatever individual pleasures are close at hand, and so necessitate forgoing present things known to be good for the sake of absent things not known to be good. But then arises the problem of how one is to seek particular pleasures at all: John Watson articulates the difficulty well when he says that to exclude planning from the enjoyment of particular pleasures causes us to “reach the dilemma; either (a) momentary pleasure is an end that cannot be reached, or (b) it is an end that comes without being sought.”
From here the problem surfaces that if the Cyrenaic doctrine of immediacy, and so the Arsitippan remonstrance against planning pleasures, is taken at face value, then the Cyrenaic account of individual goods must either be self-defeating or contradictory. That is, it must either provide no guide whatsoever to action, or it must advise one to seek particular pleasures when they cannot be coherently sought, because they lie outside of pathic immediacy while not being experienced. Certainly any charitable interpretation of Cyrenaic ethics must allow for some modicum of planning, at least from the hand to the mouth–in the accounts of Diogenes Laërtius, Aristippus showcases the character of the model Cyrenaic by attending the court of Dionysius with the aim of acquiring money, while not entertaining any plans to spend it prudently. But it is difficult to say where this necessary modicum of planning comes from: it seems unacceptable either (1) to admit of knowledge beyond the scope of the path?, since if the future can be known, then the Epicurean notion of pleasure as an overarching telos again becomes tenable, or (2) to extend the scope of the path? themselves, since then the purpose of limiting knowledge to the path? alone will be severely weakened. Because Cyrenaic epistemology provides no answer as to how a medium between living completely irrationally and living with an overarching end in mind can be reached, the temporal immediacy of the path? renders the Cyrenaic attitude towards the future imprecise, and at best it can be said that the Cyrenaic must devote less energy to planning for future pleasures than is ordinarily thought sensible in order to remain consistent.
The Cyrenaic doctrine that the path? are private also encourages dispute among which kinds of goods are best. If one can only know one’s own path?, and the path? of different people cannot be compared, then how can one justify the claim that any one type of pleasure is superior to another? Further, how can substantive disagreement over what is the best kind of good be resolved? In response to the first question, the Cyrenaic must bid the inquirer to sample various goods for himself–how good each pathos is will then be known incorrigibly, and so anyone experiencing a favored pleasure will know that it is best. But then there comes a serious possibility of divergence between individuals. The Cyrenaics are fond of citing instances of perceptual relativity to demonstrate that even optimal observers (those that are sane and healthy) can be affected in different ways by the same object, depending on their physical constitution; this point easily spills over into the goodness of the path?. Such a divergence is exactly what we find in the history of Cyrenaic philosophy: Annicerus recognizes goods of the soul as well as those of the body, while Hegesias emphasizes the avoidance of pain, though both begin from the same epistemology. The Cyrenaics are then forced simply to admit the possibility of varying goods for varying people, and from this stems the recognition that no pleasure is inherently better than any other, but that each varies according to preference and frequency. In denying that there is a single overarching good for humans, the Cyrenaics are permitted such a viewpoint without contradiction. In fact, if the Cyrenaics are right to despair of determining a single good for all humans on epistemological grounds, then the conclusion that goods can be pluralistic is a marked advantage for their position, as no consensus on a superior kind of good is required for living well.
The strain of Cyrenaic epistemology is one that transforms self-knowledge into a sort of self-love, relative yet indubitably certain, isolating yet carefree, egoistic yet unpretentious. The Cyrenaic ethical system, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, is not a hodgepodge that “can hardly justify its claim to be considered an ethical System at all,” nor is it “merely a set of maxims to justify the careless manner of living of men whose chief aim in life was a pleasant time.” It is rather a rigorous and cogent ethics that follows from principled epistemological doctrines; the Cyrenaic philosophy forms a coherent whole, whose assumptions can be judged by their fruits, and vice-versa.
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The Cyrenaic philosophers, led by Aristippus of Cyrene, are notorious for denying that there exists an overarching moral end, or telos, at which a successful human life must be aimed. They teach instead that individual goods are self-sufficing, and worthy of being sought for their own sake, rather than for their contribution to a higher goal such as eudaimonia; happiness can be nothing over and above the individual goods that make it up, and the former can only be sought for the sake of the latter, rather than vice-versa as is often assumed. The Cyrenaics are also “crude” hedonists, holding that particular conscious episodes of pleasure are the only good, and further that the attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain should not be sought as future goals requiring long-term planning. Finally, they hold the curious tenet that no one pleasure is better than any other. It has long been noted that these core ethical positions bear an interesting relationship to the Cyrenaics’ subjectivist epistemology, which restricts knowledge to the internal sensations, or path?, of the individual. In what follows I go further and argue that the Cyrenaics’ ethics are a direct consequence of their epistemology.
The path? are bodily motions that give rise to experiential affections in the individual perceiver. The Cyrenaics hold, first, that the perceiver has conscious sensation only of his or her own path?, and second, that the sole criterion of truth is conscious sensation; it follows that the perceiver has epistemic access only to his or her own path?. This means that the path? are unable to report on the nature of anything outside of themselves–if and when the path? are caused by external objects, the nature of those objects is utterly opaque, beyond the perceptual effects to which they give rise. The Cyrenaics arrive at this conclusion via a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that sensation grasps the qualities of sensed objects. Perceptual relativity gives differing reports of the external world, depending on the physical constitution of the perceiver: the same object appears red in the daylight and black at night; foods are simultaneously appetizing to one species and abhorrent to another. It follows that if the nature of the object is what it is perceived to be, then it possesses contradictory properties. Furthermore, because the properties that the senses report change depending on the physical makeup of the perceiver and how it interacts with the object, what is reported of the object is utterly dependent on and defined by the interaction between the two, and therefore the sensed qualities are nothing more than this interaction; that is, they are the bodily movement thereby engendered, which are the path?.
Because they are purely experiential, and conscious sensation is the criterion of truth, the experience of the path? is identical to the knowledge they provide. This means that unlike the nature of external objects, the path? cannot be coherently doubted, as to either their occurrence or their character, so long as one is experiencing them. It further means that all knowledge is a kind of self-knowledge of one’s current internal state, which the Cyrenaics emphasize by translating third-person reports into first-person parallels, so as to preserve the accuracy of their claims: thus, the unknowable “The object is sweet” is instead rendered “I am being sweetened.” This sort of locution is the paradigm of the Cyrenaic conception of knowledge because it preserves its epistemic authority by limiting itself to experience, while making clear that this experience is subjective, present, and temporary. In sum, the path? exhibit three key features: (1) they are private, meaning that they inherently belong to one individual, and that no individual can know the path? of any other; (2) they are incorrigible, and so the perceiver cannot possibly be mistaken about them; (3) they are immediate, in that they exist only so long as they are experienced, and are known only for the time in which they endure. Crucially, any Cyrenaic notion of the good must fall within these strict parameters: one can only know that something is good if it exemplifies the features of the path?, as the path? are the limit and the whole of knowledge.
The Cyrenaics therefore hold that if anything can be known to be good, its goodness must be contained within the experience of the path?. One might predict that this position would incline the Cyrenaics towards moral skepticism, on the grounds that goodness and badness are not consciously sensed. They instead adopt the intriguing position that as the path? themselves are either painful, neutral, or pleasant, and as the body in experiencing these three states senses them to be bad, indifferent, and good, respectively, one actually does sense goodness and badness. Hence, the good and the bad not only can be known, but as path? must be known incorrigibly, so long as pleasure and pain are experienced, since the goodness and the badness of pleasure and pain are nothing separate from the experience thereof. The Cyrenaics thus collapse pleasure and the good, and their doctrine of hedonism falls out of the following reconstructive syllogism: (1) Only what is consciously sensed can be known; (2) Pleasure is the only good that is consciously sensed; (3) Pleasure is the only good that can be known. The specifically Cyrenaic brand of hedonism also excludes the Epicurean notion of static pleasure, in principle–as pleasure is a pathos, it is a consciously experienced bodily movement, and therefore inherently kinetic, while the absence of pain is not experienced as being either pleasant or painful, and so it is indifferent.
The immediate nature of the path? prevents them, as particular goods, from acting in the service of a further or higher good. The goodness of the path? lies in the experience thereof, and since their existence is limited to the time in which they are experienced, they can no longer be good once they are temporally absent, either in their own right or for the sake of anything else–if another good comes along, it too must be an immediate pathos which is incorrigibly good for its own sake, and not because of any past pathos. Thus, a good pathos meets the twofold requirement for being a self-sufficing end: actions are undertaken for its sake, since it is unmistakably good in itself, and insofar as it is good it cannot be undertaken for the sake of anything else. The possibility of a good or telos that applies to life as a whole, towards which individual path? can or must point, is now thrown into question. If such a telos is only a collection of individual goods, then it can act as nothing more than a label for a series of particular path?, and so will add nothing to the path? that has not already been provided by the path? themselves. On the other hand, if this further telos is something new beyond the individual path?, then it too must be experienced immediately and incorrigibly: that is, it must be yet another pathos, and so a new particular good that will itself disappear when temporally absent. To posit an overarching good that encompasses all others therefore traps one in an infinite regress: that good will itself have to be particularized, and a new overarching good will need to be posited to encompass it and all the others, and so on ad infinitum. The Cyrenaics’ epistemology thus excludes the possibility of eudaimonia as a telos, insofar as the path? (and therefore goods) are immediate–it is nonsensical that a single temporally confined good should encompass a lifetime of other temporally confined goods.
The Cyrenaics’ insistence that the path? are private and immediate also relativizes goods to one’s preferences by precluding the possibility of assessing good and bad from any other standpoint than one’s own, in the present. We cannot know the good of another, as we cannot undergo another’s path?, and we cannot ponder our own path? from the perspective of the past, the future, or eternity, as they exist only for the time that they are experienced. This means that we can only make decisions, hold values, and seek ends that relate to our current desires, and so in each case that we perform an action for some purpose, we must have that purpose presently in mind, and desire its fulfillment as the end of that action. Even if we set our sights on a good such as eudaimonia, this will not allow us the privilege of a “God’s-eye view” of our life or anyone else’s, and so eudaimonia will take on the character of a particular good, wanted for its own sake, but only insofar as it can be preferred by some specific person at some specific time. What the Stoics, the Peripatetics, et al. want–an objective measure of success that depends on no preference whatsoever–is vaporous, in that one will never grasp an entire life in order to judge it as a whole, much less endow it with an essence that will make it happy even in the absence of an agent to live through it happily. In casting the quality of life as a completed whole rather than something to be understood in the present moment as it is lived, the eudaimonist puzzlingly seeks the temporal end of life in seeking its ethical end: “Are you doing well?” “Too soon to know–ask me when I’m dead,” appears to be his attitude. The Cyrenaic epistemology makes such a position unjustifiable, and instead comes to the descriptively powerful conclusion that we can want things for no reason beyond those things themselves, and that we need not evaluate life as a whole to know whether they are good. That something is experienced as good is what makes it good, not vice-versa, and so the goodness of the path? are always entangled with one’s current situation.
A major facet of Cyrenaic ethics is the Arsitippan aversion to long-term planning, which ties into the temporal immediacy of the path?. Arsitippus reportedly rebukes the Epicurean doctrine that life should be planned carefully by balancing future pleasures and pains, because he believes that the future is “unclear,” and so “neither the memory of past gratifications nor the expectation of future ones was anything to him, but he discerned the good by the single present time alone.” Further, the undergoing of current pains for the sake of future pleasures is “most disagreeable,” and so to be avoided. The grounding of this attitude in Cyrenaic epistemology is clear: in the first place, only the path? are known, and as the path? are temporally immediate, it follows that the future cannot be known, and future goods cannot be coherently valued; and in the second place, any attempt to plan a course of future pleasures must deviate from grabbing whatever individual pleasures are close at hand, and so necessitate forgoing present things known to be good for the sake of absent things not known to be good. But then arises the problem of how one is to seek particular pleasures at all: John Watson articulates the difficulty well when he says that to exclude planning from the enjoyment of particular pleasures causes us to “reach the dilemma; either (a) momentary pleasure is an end that cannot be reached, or (b) it is an end that comes without being sought.”
From here the problem surfaces that if the Cyrenaic doctrine of immediacy, and so the Arsitippan remonstrance against planning pleasures, is taken at face value, then the Cyrenaic account of individual goods must either be self-defeating or contradictory. That is, it must either provide no guide whatsoever to action, or it must advise one to seek particular pleasures when they cannot be coherently sought, because they lie outside of pathic immediacy while not being experienced. Certainly any charitable interpretation of Cyrenaic ethics must allow for some modicum of planning, at least from the hand to the mouth–in the accounts of Diogenes Laërtius, Aristippus showcases the character of the model Cyrenaic by attending the court of Dionysius with the aim of acquiring money, while not entertaining any plans to spend it prudently. But it is difficult to say where this necessary modicum of planning comes from: it seems unacceptable either (1) to admit of knowledge beyond the scope of the path?, since if the future can be known, then the Epicurean notion of pleasure as an overarching telos again becomes tenable, or (2) to extend the scope of the path? themselves, since then the purpose of limiting knowledge to the path? alone will be severely weakened. Because Cyrenaic epistemology provides no answer as to how a medium between living completely irrationally and living with an overarching end in mind can be reached, the temporal immediacy of the path? renders the Cyrenaic attitude towards the future imprecise, and at best it can be said that the Cyrenaic must devote less energy to planning for future pleasures than is ordinarily thought sensible in order to remain consistent.
The Cyrenaic doctrine that the path? are private also encourages dispute among which kinds of goods are best. If one can only know one’s own path?, and the path? of different people cannot be compared, then how can one justify the claim that any one type of pleasure is superior to another? Further, how can substantive disagreement over what is the best kind of good be resolved? In response to the first question, the Cyrenaic must bid the inquirer to sample various goods for himself–how good each pathos is will then be known incorrigibly, and so anyone experiencing a favored pleasure will know that it is best. But then there comes a serious possibility of divergence between individuals. The Cyrenaics are fond of citing instances of perceptual relativity to demonstrate that even optimal observers (those that are sane and healthy) can be affected in different ways by the same object, depending on their physical constitution; this point easily spills over into the goodness of the path?. Such a divergence is exactly what we find in the history of Cyrenaic philosophy: Annicerus recognizes goods of the soul as well as those of the body, while Hegesias emphasizes the avoidance of pain, though both begin from the same epistemology. The Cyrenaics are then forced simply to admit the possibility of varying goods for varying people, and from this stems the recognition that no pleasure is inherently better than any other, but that each varies according to preference and frequency. In denying that there is a single overarching good for humans, the Cyrenaics are permitted such a viewpoint without contradiction. In fact, if the Cyrenaics are right to despair of determining a single good for all humans on epistemological grounds, then the conclusion that goods can be pluralistic is a marked advantage for their position, as no consensus on a superior kind of good is required for living well.
The strain of Cyrenaic epistemology is one that transforms self-knowledge into a sort of self-love, relative yet indubitably certain, isolating yet carefree, egoistic yet unpretentious. The Cyrenaic ethical system, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, is not a hodgepodge that “can hardly justify its claim to be considered an ethical System at all,” nor is it “merely a set of maxims to justify the careless manner of living of men whose chief aim in life was a pleasant time.” It is rather a rigorous and cogent ethics that follows from principled epistemological doctrines; the Cyrenaic philosophy forms a coherent whole, whose assumptions can be judged by their fruits, and vice-versa.
Comments (104)
Would they allow some realm of the other which humans may correctly perceive to account for the correctnes of their outlook?
Thanks for posting that. Cool.
I'm curious, if the Cyrenaics thought that the only thing we know of are our pathe, how did they come to know of this general metaphysical principle?
Additionally, if all we can know are our own pathe, how can we know what others pathe are like in principle, i.e. pleasurable, painful, neutral?
How does the Cyrenaic epistemology avoid solipsism, and why does it posit the existence of an external world (one that cannot be arrived at by pathe alone) instead of adopting idealism a la Berkeley?
For the structure of the world of the Cyrenaics seems to be similar to that of the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon - and yet if all we know of are our own pathe, then any overarching principles (such as the principle that all we know are our own pathe, or the existence of an external reality) seems to be excluded from this analysis.
Maybe the only thing we can know for certain (pace Descartes) are our immediate experiences (I am experiencing a salty taste, I am experiencing heat, I am experiencing the color red, etc), but it would seem to be the case (unless we are idealists) that any epistemology that limits itself to these incorrigible experiences and yet postulates the existence of a structure to the world outside of our experiences is contradictory, or at least an unacceptable speculation.
So the existence of other people who have their own personal pathe, according to Cyrenaic epistemology, can only be seen as a sort of ancient behaviorism: "I am perceiving a person who acts as if they have desires of their own but I cannot know if they indeed have their own desires or are even mentally there to begin with". And so we arrive at Cartesian scepticism.
I think a related (and superior) view imo is that of Wittgenstein's "hinge" concepts, the concepts that cannot be rationally doubted without using these concepts in the first place. They are "extra-rational", providing the basis for rational thought to begin with.
Quoting Mongrel
I've thought a lot about this, and I think these meta-philosophical questions are important. While this is not contained anywhere in the ancient evidence (though the ancients themselves might have considered it, since we've lost almost everything from them), I think the correct thing to say is that philosophy does not grant one any new knowledge at all, and so a certain set of doctrines is espoused as the result of a systematic Socratic inquiry, but at the same time one shouldn't, and doesn't need to, claim that one knows these. There is nothing that philosophy, or theoretical science for that matter (the Cyrenaics were skeptics of physics) can teach you – but it can change the way that you live by performing a kind of Socratic boiling down of contradictions.
Party of the Socratic ethos is to refuse to live by mere belief and opinion, and to let life be governed by what one actually knows. One knows that particular things are good by virtue of experiencing them, and that sees to be all that is required. How then to state knowledge of the general thesis about the good? Surprisingly, it seems that one way of looking at the Cyrenaic tenets is to disavow that there is any such general thesis (that one would want to claim to know): in the Lives and Opinions, one formulation of their ethical position is that the good is 'this particular pleasure:' a rare formulation of an ethical doctrine in terms of an indexical, specific claim.
The practice of philosophy, then, is ultimately done ironically, in a sort of apotheosis of Socratic irony. The Cyrenaic responds to questions that are raised on their own terms, and accepting a premise for the sake of argument is not accepting it. In this sense they are close to the Skeptics, except that their different conception of knowledge causes them to conclude that the skeptical position is not possible.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The simple answer is, you can't. But I don't think there needs to be any common ground of faculties in order for there to be communication, and the sort of pluralism and skepticism we end up with is one with positive ethical content and not a disappointment that we need to try to circumvent.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Solipsism makes a positive claim about what exists, and Cyrenaic epistemology seems not to countenance any existential statements or denial of them at all. There may be a kind of epistemological solipsism to it, but this is not the kind of solipsism that people generally worry about.
It's also worth noting that in general Hellenistic ethics was not as concerned with societal behavior as modern ethics. It taught about the good life of the individual, and thought about society only in relation to this.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The Cyrenaics so far as I can tell postulate no such structure, and claim to be uninterested in it even if it could be posited, since by definition it would be external and therefore ethically irrelevant.
Quoting The Great Whatever
How does it end up in positive ethical content without going outside the bounds of pathe? Ethics is fundamentally concerned with what choices we should make, and this depends on others around us (what Cabrera calls the FEA - the non-manipulation and non-trangression of other people's interests). Without believing that we are justified in believing in the existence of other people, treating others with respect becomes rather empty, like treating your cardboard box with respect because it may or may not have consciousness. It would mean treating appearances as ethically valuable in themselves, which doesn't seem to have the same kind of obligation as would realist interpretations.
Quoting The Great Whatever
But this epistemological solipsism is not pathe-based, or is it? The description of our epistemological and existential condition is necessarily outside of our immediate perceptions. Even if our perceptions gave us some sort of sign (like a divine hallucination that explained how everything works), this perception would still refer to something outside our own experiences - it could be falsely correlated, it could be correlated to fiction, it could be correlated to a half-truth, etc.
It's like saying we can only see colors - we certainly see red, blue, green, yellow, yada-yada but never do we see the concept "color". It's all appearances, and without prior knowlege (pace Meno's Paradox) we have no way of interpreting any of it, unless we're open to accepting radical subjectivism.
Quoting The Great Whatever
True. With the development of Macedonia came an emphasis in individuality. Before that time, though, there were the poleis of Greece, and political philosophy was much more prominent.
So anti-realist. Hmm.
Not at all. I think actually that any amount of planning is technically consistent with the position, because any action is consistent with any position, since belief is utterly impotent in that no belief implies any action whatsoever. What matters is whether the sorts of transformations that one goes through in philosophizing cause one to behave differently. A good Hellenistic philosophy amounts to a kind of lifestyle, and in the act of going through the motions of Socratic debate, the foibles of long-term planning might manifest themselves not as theoretical truths but as dispositions not to take part in them.
Certainly insofar as that planning is motivated by a notion of the good that is contradictory on its own terms, the sort of crash and burn that comes with the disappointment of inquiring into it can effect change. Certainly that's not guaranteed, but then nothing in life is guaranteed, and we don't expect a style of philosophizing to result in unanimous action by its practitioners. Nonetheless, there is a historical trend to the way the Cyrenaics behave, which is recognizable in style as traceable to the philosophy.
Although in my own life I have to say that in recent years the past and future have started mattering less to me – people can ask what I did last summer or what I will do on the weekend and I can't remember or don't care (so during small talk I just make things up). Maybe some people can't live like that, I don't know. But I don't think philosophy one takes up should be for anyone but oneself.
Quoting csalisbury
Is there anything wrong with that reasoning? Certainly you now look back at it and think there must be something outrageous about it, or wrong with it. But how is it different from eating when you're hungry and not wen you're full? Is that outrageous too? It seems like denying this sort of reasoning in effect nullifies the possibility of change or action, if taken seriously.
Addiction is unpleasant, and can't be escaped through reasoning. Better to refer yourself (while sober) to taste and habituation, by taking easy concrete steps that don't involve confronting the addiction itself: throw away the powder, or if you can't manage even that ask someone else to do it for you, etc.
Quoting csalisbury
I think that it doesn't manifest in anything the Cyrenaic knows that other people don't, but that this just demonstrates the impotence of quests for knowledge (and belief). Philosophizing in a certain style does, if the philosophy matters in any way, effect changes on how one acts, including how one decides to philosophize. I'm coming broadly to a meta-philosophical view of philosophy as ultimately ironic: a Cyrenaic responds only insofar as he is questioned, and defends himself on the terms of the debate that get set up, which doesn't involve (unironic) belief in those terms. This is in fact generally how the Cyrenaics literally behave in the stories: someone asks them something, and then they tie their opponent in knots on the opponents' own terms, or say something witty.
As Arristippus said in chastising Plato for indulging in metaphysics: "Well, our friend, anyway, never spoke like that." And when asked what good philosophy was, he never responded that it was to learn things, but so that "when in the theater, at the very least, you will not be one stone sitting on another." Education and philosophy are humanizing, and inquiry is a quest for skill and therapy, not a culmination in doctrines (except insofar as one is in the irony, whether knowingly or unknowingly).
If we see philosophy as ironic in the Socratic sense, then we only adopt the assumptions we need to on the terms the debate requires. Philosophy is a kind of game, but one that has real and deep urges and pains underlying it (well, some of the time). But we do not need to claim this about philosophy so much as come to embody it by playing the game better than anyone, on its own terms, and in so doing unwind the desire to take it seriously, because the passions that motivate it will have been dissipated by a kind of 'enlightenment' manifested in the Hellenistic approach of sagehood.
Quoting darthbarracuda
What the metaphysician typically is not, though, is a meta-philosopher. He doesn't understand why he inquires or what it means to inquire, or to get an answer. Usually, I think it has to do with anxiety and control. Once the desire for these things diminishes, and the practical incoherence of seeking them is seen to be contradictory on its own terms, the desire to be a metaphysician goes with it. Unless, like Peter Unger, you only do it as a kind of game or profession while thinking it's nonsense in your heart of hearts, which is possible (and I suspect many professional philosophers are like this).
Quoting darthbarracuda
I disagree, in that I think finding out what choices you should make does nothing to tell you about what choices you will make, which is all that matters.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It may, come the day that we have technology to mind-meld or mind-control. But until then, the closest you've got is coercion, and responding to coercion is after all not different from responding to threats from the natural world. And in that sense, when it comes time to make a choice, it really doesn't depend on anyone else, you're all alone. Sure you might have to make a choice based on another person's wants or needs, but you've still got to do that (and nothing guarantees you won't, insofar as this really is a choice).
Quoting darthbarracuda
No, I don't think so. If there is any existential condition at all, its got to be in your experiences. Or else, it literally wouldn't matter (to you). But then it is hard to see how it is an existential condition.
Aristippus, Arete, Theo the Atheist, Hegesias, and so on, all provide evocative portraits of ancient sages, who each had their reported virtues and bizarre quirks. They are all recognizably from the same school in their way, but no one would mistake one for the other. If the track record of a philosophical school is the people it produces, then it has a pretty solid lineup (as do many Hellenistic schools, in contrast to analytic and continental philosophy, which do not produce character of any identifiable sort).
There were undoubtedly many more such characters, whose lives have been lost to time.
Also regarding the temporal paradoxes, I guess I should say that time in this sense only matters insofar as it's lived time, and I seriously doubt lived time is actually linear in the way that seems to be required for these planning paradoxes to make sense. I'm sympathetic to the Husserlian idea that the temporal in the crude linear sense is derivative of a deeper atemporal lived moment, which 'changes' not in the sense of passing, but in the sense of a deeper undergoing. But this all appeals to notions outside the scope of the Cyrenaic philosophy.
I'm not so sure. Any instance planning occurs in the present, so I'd say it would be encompassed with pathe. I think the planning paradox is an illusion generated by considering life in terms of a "God's eye view." It's only the future gains which result from a plan which cannot that are an issue. Only when tell ourselves: "I planning only to obtain a future" is there a problem.
We've tricked ourselves into thinking the ethic and plan has nothing to do with our present, when it's entirely a response of the moment-- one only plans so long as they are in the present of doing do.
The idea that pleasure is the only "good" that is sought for its own sake seems entirely unconvincing; in fact I would go further; I don't think it even makes sense. Judging from your depiction of them, the Cyreniacs only allow for immediate pleasure as the good. But that begs the question as to what is immediate in this context? How long does, or can, immediacy last?
Hypothetically speaking, would the Cyreniac consent to being hooked up to a 'pleasure machine' that took care of all bodily needs and delivered a state of constant high pleasure? If not, why not? To anticipate a possible objection, you might say that the Cyreniac will not plan something like that because s/he does not allow for identity through time, and so will have no investment in securing constant pleasure for the future self. But then, if s/he were hooked up to such a machine it seems s/he would, to be consistent allow no thought that h/she might be wasting life to convince her/him to disconnect, as long as the state of great pleasure lasted.
It is more consistent with my observations of people that the only good that is sought for its own sake is rather eudamonia, considered simply as happiness, self-satisfaction, contentment or a general feeling of well-being and peace. If immediate pleasure were the "good' generally sought for its own sake; why would we not encounter many more hedonists than we do? In any case, a life of constant pleasure would seem to be, in most cases at least, entirely incompatible with eudamonia thus considered.
I don't know anything much at all about the Cyreniacs, so my criticisms are based entirely on the account you have given here.
Seriously??? Far greater what? Philosophers? Writers? Human beings?
Me???? Outraged?????? ;)
This rhetorical move is a little weird in that you have introduced the term 'immediate' and then demanded of me what to make of it. But I don't know, because you said it, not me.
To make things as clear as possible: pleasure is good because it feels good: to be pleasant is to feel good (these are semantically synonymous). So pleasure is good precisely as long as it's being experienced, but since pleasure is just that experience, it's good so long as it exists.
Yes, fair enough. I introduced "immediate" because my understanding (derived from something you have written previously I'm pretty sure) is that the Cyreniacs don't allow for any persistence of identity across time at all; which would seem to make the idea of seeking even momentary pleasure unintelligible unless you posit some kind of extended present (and even then??).
Once you allow that we can seek pleasure even across the shortest time frames; there would seem to be no reason, in principle, why the time frame could not be extended indefinitely allowing us to, more prudently, seek eudamonia across an entire lifetime; rather than fleeting momentary pleasures, the seeking of which may cause, not eudamonia, but dissatisfaction, to rule across the whole of life.
No, seriously, I just want to understand your thought process in considering those you mentioned to be "far greater", is all.
Some scholars have argued this, but I don't think there's any textual evidence for it. If you want to go that way, that's a possibility, but I don't think it's necessary. I think the deeper point is that time is kind of a red herring. At any given time, you'll have what you want to do, so the issue of how much time to allow for or strive for never really arises. Your whole live is lived in a single instant, basically.
Quoting John
You can do whatever you want, but your life won't be any better for it. How long you live doesn't matter, what matters is what's going on now, since that's where you always are. You can have an opinion that doing certain things in the past made you better somehow in the sum total, but that's just an opinion, which is equally good as the opposite opinion, with no evidence ever to show it was better. And in philosophy we're interested in knowing, not opinion (since anyone can have an opinion, and any opinion is as good as any other).
Fair enough, I suppose; but for me that's a one-sided psychologically based story; right enough from its own perspective, but severely limited by its own fashionable presuppositions.
So, I see the stances of those writers you mentioned as being very self-conscious postures (in the sense that they result from a more or less pathological state of self-consciousness, not in the sense that they are conscious of their own status as postures). This doesn't mean they are not great writers (I love Beckett's and Proust's works, although I haven't read the other one), but I certainly don't think they are masterful philosophers, by any stretch.
Although I don't think an adequate account of the urge to philosophize (or write poetry) can be given in psychological terms, when it comes to the kind of irony TGW refers to; I think that can be adequately accounted psychologically in terms of generalized pessimism and disaffection; it is a kind of offhanded pose of dismissive leveling that is motivated by self-protective impulses that contract rather than expand both the understanding and the being. Anyway that's my opinion, for what it's worth. :)
I wouldn't agree that those orientations "obscure what's really going on"; I think they both reveal aspects of whats going on that would otherwise not be seen as clearly, or perhaps not at all. But I would agree that they are both confined to being mere aspects of the whole picture.
But, again I suspect you are aiming at the psychological, at the unconscious, when you talk about "what's really going on". I would agree that the psychological perspective provides another limited window, but not that it could ever exhaustively give account of "what is really going on".
Apparently I was mistaken about getting the idea there is no identity across time for the Cyreniacs from you then.
It's true that at any time we have what we want to do; but that "wanting' can be more or less constrained by a more less comprehensive view of the whole life.
I don't believe there are any "single instants"; that is a myth of the analytic mind.
Also, I certainly agree that you can do what you like, but I disagree that your life cannot be any the better or worse depending on what you do; that proposition just seems absurd to me. I think we can certainly have more than mere arbitrary opinions about such things; we may have reliable intuitions. You can trust intuitions and temper their reliability by experiment and inquiry or you can simply reject the possibility that you could have reliable intuitions. Such a rejection, though, certainly would be merely an opinion. since it certainly could not be a reliable intuition. ;)
Surely according to the Cyreniacs there could not be any knowing, other than the brute knowing of immediate affect (and given that there seems to be good reason to think that affect itself is never brute, but is conceptually mediated, I would say that even that must be considered to be questionable).
Cheers :)
Even the best writers, in my view, are not really capable of this. They feel deeply and are aware of how to turn depth into form. But it usually doesn't amount to rigor, which can be emotionally satisfying in its own right in a way that no amount of writing will ever get you.
I agree with this; poetry is no substitute for philosophy. But it's also true that philosophy is no substitute for poetry. Poetic philosophy and philosophical poetry: the best of both worlds!
Likewise, I think Proust or Beckett would survive certain series of questions better than, idk, Ayers, & Ayers would survive another series of questions better than they.
I don't know what to make of your comment other than that people can better answer questions about the things they know most about, which is borderline tautologous.
(I'm assuming, charitably, that you don't think 'rigor' means simply 'rigorous understanding of analytic philosophy')
And you could say that people like Ligotti are writers at heart whose weakness shows through when they try to write as if philosophers when they don't have the chops. In other words, if Proust sat down and tried to write something like An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he might look like an idiot where before he looked brilliant. Suddenly in the harsh light of plain prose and open to the demands of questioning, what was profound looks banal.
I like this. Irony at the center, the laughter of the gods at our solemn assertions.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Exactly.
Well said. Though one might speak of their "deep" philosophy, which is a (joyful, stubborn) commitment to this irony, along with the ability to get their hands dirty when the problem can't be laughed off. I like the idea of peeling away the surface philosophy to see how it serves in the deep structure of life.
Quoting csalisbury
This is great. Yes, dimly understood desires, because understanding them almost requires a transition
from an earnest religion of pure reason or a righteous politics to something more ironic, something that transcends anything fixed (annihilating laughter). You mentioned likability. There's a gleam in the eye of likable people that lives at a higher altitude than anything they might have just said, and maybe a sense that any formulation of this irony or this gleam in the eye is always a little too solemn.
Nietzsche and Stirner have their faults, but they could soar for a little while now and then in that irony and laughter. Dostoevsky's humor breaks the scale.
I'm very glad to see someone else contemplation self-identifications explicitly. That seems to be the skeleton key. Master words, master images, from which the rest of the persona can be largely deduced, at least in its broad strokes.
To explain a bit more what I think I had in mind: I think it can be taken as read that writers of fiction, and particularly novelists, whether or not they manifest a more or less deliberately cultivated persona in their personal lives, are working through in a subjective way, their own peculiar difficulties of orientation; whether to the world or to society. Of course, if Nietzsche is right, philosophers can be understood in exactly the same way, but the difference is in the way the more specifically rational concerns (to whatever degree and in what manner we might think they are psychologically motivated ) of the latter are more rigorously treated in philosophical work, as TGW has already noted.
So, Proust is self-consciously concerned with the forms of human social and inner life and the interplay between the two; which is it seems fair to say is a universal theme in that it is also the preoccupation of most of us. We are all concerned with the "hell" of other people. I don't know, perhaps it can be said that stance of novelists is either psychological phenomenological, or at their best, both. It can be philosophical, but I don't think it can count as philosophy, in its more systematic mode, in any case.
I may have spouted a little bit of shit here in my attempt to wriggle out of the noose I had created for myself by exposing my rash and perhaps inflammatory thoughts. So, to answer your first question: I wasn't outraged, so much as inflamed, it seems.
But one might in their defense read their narrative, non-systematic vision of the world as a different way to do philosophy-as-worldview or philosophy-as-wisdom. Where does Notes from Underground fit in? Or Tropic of Cancer? In narratives we get words in context. It's not just what is said but who and in what situation. I find myself looking into people who write the philosophy I like. I want pictures, lifestyles before, during, and after their writing. For instance, Sartre and de Beauvoir had that unorthodox relationship. He was a small, ugly man with a lazy eye, raised as he was raised. I think of Kant and his clockwork walks, Schopenhauer and the guns by his bed, Stirner wandering around forgotten after a moment of fame, Descartes getting out on those cold mornings that killed him to tutor a hipster princess. Oh, yeah, and very good looking Derrida and his son with a women not his wife. Hegel knocked up a maid. Socrates learning philosophy from fighting with his wife. Good stuff.
Exactly. There's certainly nothing wrong with rigor or systematization, and constructing well-wrought arguments (as well as finding the chinks in the arguments of others) can be deeply rewarding in-and-of-itself. The problem is that most philosophers seem to labor under the pretense that they're developing (or contributing to) a profound understanding of reality or of knowledge or of x. The pretense that their philosophy is (or is a key part of) the understanding. But what typically happens is that they simply excise everything but what they're comfortable with (or what, despite being uncomfortable, is susceptible to a type of manipulation or explication which is comfortable) and then manipulate and explicate until everything is properly arranged. Again there's nothing wrong with that (it yields all sorts of insights in mathematics, physics, linguistics etc.) but the claims philosophers make for their highly-processed presentations are absurdly general. That's really the problem. Philosophers restrict their scope immensely while proclaiming essential truths about things as broad as 'reality' or 'experience' or 'subjectivity' or 'knowledge' or 'being.'
(TGW characterized socratic questioning as being 'sufficiently penetrating.' I'd characterize it as dealing with concepts broad enough (love, truth, justice, knowledge) that the defense of any positive proposition about them can be unraveled after n questions (where n is a function of the defendant's talent for deferral-through-qualification.) The point of socratic irony is aporia. Or, as TGW says, "Once the desire for these things diminishes, and the practical incoherence of seeking them is seen to be contradictory on its own terms, the desire to be a metaphysician goes with it." )
Intuitively, it feels silly to say, of Proust, 'Yes, profound in his own way, but lets see him write a tract on seismology.' But how is that any different than saying he wouldn't have been a good 17th century empiricist? I suppose the difference is that seismology requires acquaintance with certain facts while writing about understanding in a certain way is something one can spontaneously do. Yet I imagine it would have been quite challenging for Locke to have written what he wrote, without having read what he read.
You can get a vibe from a writer that, if they had so chosen, they could have learnt the literature and contributed to the field. They just didn't. I wouldn't infer any deficiency from Barthelme's not having written a book on consciousness building upon Husserl, any more than I would infer a deficiency from his not having mastered meteorology. It's clear, reading the guy, that he has the capacity.
That's fine; I am not wanting to deny that there can be more or less philosophical literature. But it was csalisbury's original statement that Beckett, Proust and Barthelme were "far greater" than all the philosophers apart from Socrates that caught my critical attention. He didn't say they might have been far greater but that they were. Now I doubt anyone will deny that they wrote far greater literature than most philosophers, but I don't think the claim that they wrote far greater philosophy is supportable at all; in fact I think that would just be an absurd claim.
Also, note that you say "non-systematic vision of the world" and in the part of what I wrote that you quoted is " in its more systematic mode, in any case " so I don't think we are actually disagreeing, and if anything looking at the possible implications for the issue under discussion of the difference between "non-systematic" and "more systematic" it might even appear that I am being more lenient than you are about the possibility that literature might qualify as more or less systematic philosophy. ( Probably not though ;) )
Right. Systems aren't bad. We want our concepts to work well together. But there's a trans-propsitional irony or "feel" that is perhaps more important than any proposition. There's maybe a place above propositions, even if it's just feeling and Nietzsche's "light feet."
Yes, philosophers often act as if they've finally, definitively tamed the totality, which includes the future. But their discourse revealing the Real adds to the very Real (itself structured by discourse) it hopes to explain or dominate. Itself it could not save, though the best moves in the game account for their own generation (I loved this in Kojeve, and I find this in pragmatism as a meta-tool by its own light). They increase complexity as they "reduce" it. They put another tool in the tool-box, opening up new vistas and the possibility of still newer tools.
Quoting csalisbury
It's as if they are offering a fascinating peep at life/reality/God/TruthQuoting csalisbury
Yes. The ladder is thrown away as we sit on the cloud of the ironic transcendence of yet-another-justification. The fire and the rose are one. But the earnest metaphysician wants this to be an empirical statement or the result of word-math or an objective truth. No, it's a joke or password
Quoting csalisbury
I don't know Bathelme, but I think of Kafka or the early Henry Miller as darkly humorous wisdom writers. Philosophers are often so solemn, so serious in their scientistic lab coats. Sartre is a twisted case. There's such a mix of insight and earnestness there. He's a poet of radical freedom in one breath and just another righteous political idealist in another. Infinite duty and infinite solemnity is just sad. I don't like to imagine a life with a space where one laughs with the gods beyond good and evil and the obsession with objective truth. It's like The Trial or The Castle, the haunting of the self by an invisible judge or law. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
I think we more or less agree. I'm just pointing at the space outside the space of philosophy's tendency to be solemnly objective. How often do see a "this works for me, so maybe you'll want to try it" attitude? It's so often depersonalized and anti-comic. I find it in politicians, too.
The history of philosophy may be seen as a series of attempts to orient to the world, to the actuality of existence. I think it's natural that the presumption has always (or at least mostly) been that humans share common moral, intellectual and spiritual natures and that philosophy ( as love of wisdom) is the attempt to become clear about those natures and to determine the best way to live in light of the nature of those natures. Of course it is we moderns that emphasize the differences between individuals (mostly or sometimes, at least).
Personally, I don't think comedy is very illuminating; it is essential to the good life, but its proper role is only to give light relief when we are fatigued, not to reveal anything philosophically significant. This is why Shakespeare's tragedies are so much greater than his comedies; and why all the greatest literature is tragic literature. Comedy becomes a kind of facile, mediocratic hubris when it takes itself seriously and begins to wear philosophical pretensions. As a prime example I think of the thinly veiled self-righteous superficiality of a Tim Mincheon. (BTW, not saying he's not creatively clever and even funny sometimes).
I had Louis C. K. in mind. The best comedians laugh off the worst and most absurd aspects of life. They're also especially authentic. They convert extra-ordinary self-honest into unpretentious, hard-to-systematize wisdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efqqCvUAgK4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akiVi1sR2rM
Of course, tragedy is and must be, when we are tired, in a sense the funniest thing; I won't deny that. But the profundity of tragedy does not lie in the fact that it is funny; that is merely its superficial mask; there for our own self-protection, so to speak. And I wouldn't dream of denying that the best comedy consciously embodies, and the worst comedy unconsciously embodies, the tragic; how could it be otherwise given the tragic nature of human life?
Its also true, as Hoo says below that we (sometimes at least) need to be able to "laugh off the worst and most absurd aspects of life", but even more importantly we need to be able to take them seriously without being consumed by them; and I think therein lies the greatest wisdom, for which comedy is only a refreshing aid or nimble assistant.
But for me taking them seriously more or less is being consumed by them. If you just mean that we have to step up and take care of business sometimes, then I completely agree. And then, yes, a sense of cosmic/comic distance is indeed a nimble assistant.
Yes, yes. If one's goal is a beautiful, joyful life, then everything is lit up by this goal. One can see various fundamental "poses" from the outside. Knowledge is secondary, unless one has committed to this narrowing down of the notion of beauty. I love the objective, if you'll call math objective, but as I writer I want to carve an image of the heroic, beautiful mind --just as I've pursued this image as a reader.
"The lecture was about the nature of mercy. As she often does, she argued that certain moral truths are best expressed in the form of a story. We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the “concerned reader of a novel,” understanding each person’s life as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.”
"For our first meeting, she suggested that I watch her sing: “It’s the actual singing that would give you insight into my personality and my emotional life, though of course I am very imperfect in my ability to express what I want to express.” She wrote that music allowed her to access a part of her personality that is “less defended, more receptive.” Last summer, we drove to the house of her singing teacher, Tambra Black, who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood with a view of the churches of the University of Chicago. It was ninety degrees and sunny, and although we were ten minutes early, Nussbaum pounded on the door until Black, her hair wet from the shower, let us inside."
No, I think philosophers do not always practice what they preach. My impression of Schopenhauer is that he was a vain, if not spoiled and insincere, arse, as well as somewhat of a hack (however brilliantly gifted). I don't get that impression when I read Kierkegaard, though; and the impression I get from reading Hegel is one of the greatest earnestness.
I agree with you about what seems to be your suggestion of Kant's and Husserls' pedantic, anally retentive tendencies (however brilliantly constructed they might be). On the other hand, I don't know too much about Husserl, but I think Kant genuinely cared about human freedom and the need to rationalize and preserve it. (Actually thinking about what I have heard, not having read it, about The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology probably Husserl cared about human freedom too).
Heidegger I think also had his sincere side, even if he perhaps saw himself as a prophet of 'real' thinking, but by all accounts he was an emotional idiot, (perhaps, in modern terms, a kind of sociopath or psychopath). Derrida, I am ambivalent about, because I find his work really impenetrable (and I have tried) and I honestly doubt he is really worth the effort. He certainly comes across as smug.
The probable fact that not all philosophers (or artists for that matter) tend to live best does not take away from the fact that the good ones have all contributed, in their own unique ways, to an overall understanding that should help to lead to at least the possibility for others to live best, even if only in the sense that their philosophies help others to recognize and avoid the very pitfalls or mistakes that may be embedded or embodied in them.
That's such a big goal though! I'm wary of beauty with a capital B. Or at least seeking it explicitly, keeping it in mind. When the vicissitudes of life are working in your favor then, I agree, everything is doubly lit up. But when things are going bad, that badness has one hell of a foil. "If beauty really did exist there, it meant that my own existence was a thing estranged from beauty." At least for the moment, I'm trying to be content with living by a modest set of malleable maxims (which are kinda meta-maxims, less about doing the right thing every time, but littles rules that let me recognize - and so bypass - certain habitual tendencies, in order to confront things I've been avoiding.) But it could just be that, for now, I need to focus on more mundane, life-structural things. (You've quoted Blake a few times. Problem might be that I've been too eager to soar without worrying about whether I actually wings.)
Quoting csalisbury
It's hard to write about in black and white with the proper irony. It may come across like some 'duty' to beauty, but really it's the abolition of duties that aren't personal, authentic. (We have no duty to be authentic. It's its own reward. It feels good.) If you love your wife, you're going to risk your serenity a little, for instance, to help her with a malfunction in her serenity, but probably by trying to talk her back up to the mountain-top where you both belong (creative play, smooth function, absorption in freely chosen projects). And maybe you get a wisdom tooth removed, but you try to lose as little "morale" as possible. "The spirit is a stomach." Sometimes you just can't avoid indigestion, but the idea/ideal is a cast-iron stomach for experience, that can usually turn the bad to good and the good to great. There's no question left about whether one should be happy in such an "evil" world. The accusation of that in the world that can't plausibly be fixed is viewed as an inferior form of digestion, an unstable pose. Though of course I'm always really just speaking from this strange little life and hoping for the pleasure of someone else "getting it" in the same particular but only optional way.
Quoting csalisbury
I relate. Pragmatism (and Kojeve) turned my Blakean Romanticism (I was an "experimental" musician with a dead-end day job) in a more worldly direction. I began to want to "spiritualize" the mundane by shaping a life where my job was my passion. I did play Icarus in my 20s. Angst (and boredom) is maybe in the divorce of the ideal from the mundane. We sew them together, so that everyday life really is more of an adventure.
I like "malleable maxims."
Take eating for example. The Cyrenaic might say that eating is pleasurable (for him), and so he eats. That the sensation of taste and eating is pleasurable. But I think in reality, what we are motivated by is hunger, and something like 'lack of nice mouth sensations'. We are driven to eat, the suffering entailed by hunger, lack of mouth flavour, etc, motivates our running from it. Intellectually we might say we ate because it tasted good, or something along those lines, but this was not the case in reality. What's good about this characterization is it avoids this 'future pleasures' issue. The suffering is presently felt, and we are presently striving from it, we are perpetually motivated away from it.
I think also there's a mischaraterisation about what pleasure actually is. Seems to me the Cyrenaic (note: I've never actually read any Cyrenaic work) sees pleasure as something far more valuable or positive, or 'pleasurable' than it actually is. A kind of pollyannaism about pleasure. Take the example above, where I've written "lack of nice mouth sensations". You might argue here that "ok, the lack of nice mouth sensations is a kind of suffering we are motivated by and strive away from. But those nice mouth sensations we experience (due to striving away from it's lack, and not as the Cyreanic says; because we positively strived towards it) are actually intrinsically good."
But I'm not so sure. If the taste sensation is actually positively pleasurable (over and above a cessation of suffering, or a kind of 'flow' distraction from suffering) and therefore good, shouldn't you want to constantly sense it? I like the taste of orange juice, but I wouldn't want to constantly experience the taste. Or take bodily sensations. I know for sure if given the choice I would want to never experience bodily suffering/pains again, but would I want to constantly experience bodily pleasures? Would I want to constantly orgasm? And if not, what does that say about how pleasurable the actual sensation is? People who orgasm like 100 times a day live in hell it seems. Note that pleasure is also extremely short lived. An orgasm is like 3 seconds, one only gets 'lost in the music' for a single song, at best. Food only tastes good until it's swallowed. A heroin rush fades pretty quickly into a sort of secure numbness, which eventually becomes sickness.
I think (what we call) pleasure really consists of, is a negation in some suffering in another, a relief essentially. An 'ahhh' I'm not being pained anymore. And if you're lucky, there's what I would characterize as a kind of self-less flow experience. Where one loses oneself into the sensation, and hence forgets ones suffering. I don't think pleasure ever actually gets into a genuinely positive thing, whereas suffering is genuinely negative, it has less than zero value, in that we aren't just indifferent to it, but are motivated to avoidance. Action is fundamentally avoidance, we are always striving from some suffering or another. And what we call "pleasure" is relief from suffering, and a loss of self into sensation. And not how I believe the Cyrenaic conceives of pleasure which is of an actual positively good thing, on the opposite side of the scale as pleasure, above neutral.
An analogy for how I conceive of suffering, is imagine say a fish tank, with only a beetle in it. Now someone is holding a heat lamp above the beetle (imagine the heat lamp being held at half the depth of the fish tank). The beetle feels the heat, and is pained, and so is motivated to strive away from the heat. Note he's not motivated towards something, rather he just goes in any aimless direction so long as he avoids the suffering. If he stops striving away from the heat, the heat lamp catches up and is held directly above it. He feels like he's burning and soon dries out to a painful death. If he strives too far away from the heat, so that he goes beyond the limit of the area it heats, he doesn't know what to do with himself. Where to go? What to do? He's in an empty fish tank, there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. He becomes bored and stops moving, and the heat lamp soon catches up, motivating him to strive from it again.
How I think of pleasure is that the beetle escapes the heat from the lamp, and then loses his sense of self by getting lost in a sensation. And not say, the beetle walks towards some corner of the fishtank where some positively valuable thing is. Think of it like the shower temperature thing. Every temperature is either too hot or too cold, except that perfect temperature. Does it make sense to think of this specific temperature as being an actually above neutral value positive sensation (whereas all the others aren't)? I believe this is how the Cyrenaic sees it, the sensation being a genuine good, something which one strives towards. I think rather we strive away from the too cold, and away from the too hot, until we find the perfect trade off between the two - and it is here where we find an opportunity to 'lose ourselves' into the sensation. The feeling of the water on your back. "Ahh, that feels good." - and then one loses their self into the sensation. But not for long, body parts out of the water soon become cold, and besides you're here to clean yourself.
So to summarize this rant, there are no genuine goods, and we strive away from, rather than towards something. Other than that I agreed with your essay and found it interesting.
Also, reading this thread it seems there's some confusion over thinking the Cyrenaic (would) still believe in this idea that one 'has' or possesses beliefs. As things which sort of persist through time. I think a belief is more a sort of lived expectation, rather than some thing which one holds or possesses. The belief is itself experiential. So eg, one doesn't posses a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, which sort of follows him round ephemerally. Rather, only when one is thinking about the next day, or future next days, one presently expects they'll be bright. It's a sort of lived expectation of future daylight. When one doesn't have this expectation (eg, when thinking about anything else), then one doesn't actually have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Intellectually that's how we speak, as if we have this large set of beliefs which constantly follow us around and are there regardless of our experience, but in reality it's not the case.
The beetle is like a river, trying to take the path of least resistance. The rivers course is guided by whatever forces conform it's direction.
Yes I realize that at this point the analogy has become far too complicated to be worthwhile and I might as well have just talked about suffering directly. Lol.
Secondly, we learn from a very young age that instant gratification in all things tends to lead to very bad results. I could empty my bank account right now, max out my credit cards, and have a rip roaring time today. But I know that I will be regretting and paying for that decision for weeks to come. So I employ some modicum of self-control.
Now I could die tonight, and miss out on one last opportunity for maximum pleasure. But that uncertainty about the future doesn't change my calculation to avoid weeks of regret.
So it would seem that consistent application of Cyrenaic ethics is psychopathic and highly irresponsible, leading to a very self-destructive life. The kind that someone with terrible impulse control and no empathy might want to live.
Now the Cyrenaics may not have lived that way, which tells me they either didn't fully embrace their philosophizing as a way of life, or there's so more nuance there than I'm allowing. I guess the admission that there had to be some planning for even the attainment of temporary pleasure is one such nuance, but there would need to be quite a bit more.
Most people find such an act abhorrent, and if I were given the choice of hooking myself up to a dream machine in which I get to live the most pleasurable life possible, but at the cost of horrible suffering for people I know, I would not do it, even if I forgot. It would be wrong, and most people throughout history would agree.
But the Cyrenaic philosophy does not allow for such ethical considerations. It's similar to making a will. Why bother worrying about others after you're gone? You won't get to enjoy it. But we do. If I knew with certainty I would die tonight, I would not maximize my pleasure, rather, I would make some plans for those who know me post-mortem.
But that would be a direct contradiction to what Cyrenaic philosophy proposes. There would be no highly successful people if everyone followed that philosophy. But they don't. Why not? Because I think plenty of people reject hedonism, certainly the "crude" kind of the Cyrenaics. They consider their long-term goal to be more worthy of pursuit than any short term pleasure, even though the future is uncertain for all of us.
This is a little tricky, because the Greeks don't typically speak in terms of 'my good' versus 'your good;' they just speak of the good. If pleasure is the good, it isn't my good, although it may be a good that I am undergoing rather than someone else, and so one that I have a special epistemic relation to.
What is true is that one individual thing may have good and bad consequences, i.e. may be instrumentally good in some ways and bad in others, and that these goods and bads may be the pleasures and pains of separate people. But the only things that are intrinsically good and bad are pleasures and pains, and here it makes no sense to say that someone's good is someone else's bad.
Quoting Marchesk
Goods are not subjective on the Cyrenaic view in any fundamental way: pleasure is good tout court. There is a subjectivity in that pleasure is dependent on the existence of what we might call a subject, i.e. an undergoer or mover experiencing the pleasure. But this does not mean that it is in any way a matter of opinion or subject to substantive faultless disagreement which things are good and which not, nor does it mean that anyone ever defines what is good.
Quoting Marchesk
It's important to remember that it most Greek ethics there is no 'as far as I'm concerned' as far as the good goes, though there may be goods or bads that disproportionately affect some people over others. Also, the term 'wrong,' or some equivalent, is not used to express these views.
The reason being hooked up to a machine horrifies some people is because there is a detectable difference between the two (which is why movies like the Matrix, in which Neo comes to find out about this situation, are coherent to us). But then, the experiment falls through because this detectable difference will allow us to coherently prefer being outside the machine rather than in, whether on hedonistic grounds or not.
If on the other hand we take the thought experiment seriously in claiming that we cannot tell the difference even in principle between these two situations, then we lose our ability to coherently imagine the situation that the thought experiment asks us to, and so we cannot claim that such an imagined situation would be bad, because we cannot imagine it ex hypothesi.
YES! Indeed, great spot. This is very close to what I have been saying about Descartes' evil demon hypothesis (and other global skepticism matters) for a long time. The very meaning our words have are conditioned by the context, and what such hypothetical situations do, is that they remove the context in which the words used to phrase the question have meaning, and then proceed to ask anyways - thus even their question, in truth, become meaningless.
But I can make perfect sense out of an episode of Star Trek where the crew ends up stuck inside a Holodeck program that goes wrong, where the program makes it look they exited the holodeck back to the ship, but are actually still inside the program, since the Holodeck is capable of fully fooling the senses.
I believe this was the plot of at least one episode.
But ultimately they found out no? So that defeats the whole point you're trying to make
Does this actually make sense though, to defer current pleasure for future ones?
The only time pleasure can ever be experienced is now. When you defer the possibility of experiencing pleasure now, so that you may experience greater pleasure in the future, I'm not sure you are actually better off. I think this kind of deferring is motivated by seeing pleasure as a sort of quantitative thing. Whereby drinking alcohol on Monday morning you experience say 5 pleasure units, but on Friday night you will experience 12 pleasure units. And so there's more intrinsic goodness on Friday than Monday. But, this is not the case. Pleasure = intrinsically good, and good is good. There can be no greater intrinsic 'goodness' when it's the very same thing in both cases (pleasure). Sure, you may prefer Heroin over Meth, but that doesn't mean Heroin is more intrinsically good. Intrinsic goodness is an all or nothing thing, and not a scale.
Life exists only presently, so pleasures are only experienced now. So to hold off on reaching one's goal (intrinsic 'goodness'), so that you can reach the exact same goal 4 days from now is nonsensical. You could have just not waited and reached the very same goal.
Also, you will never actually get to the future anyway as you never leave the present. The future pleasure you are deferring your possible current pleasurable experience towards will never actually be experienced by you. The future, where you think the greater pleasure experience will be perpetually remains ahead of you. You'll always be deferring towards it. The only time you can possibly experience pleasure is right now. It's like sitting on a donkey with a carrot in your hand ready to eat it, and then putting the carrot on a stick and holding it in front of the donkey because you think you'll be better off when you catch up to it. Intrinsic goodness is intrinsic goodness - it's all or nothing, and not a scale. Something is not more i intrinsically good than another intrinsically good thing.
So, an example. You find alcohol pleasurable, but it's Monday morning. You have the choice to a) drink the alcohol right now and feel pleasure, or b) defer the present experience of pleasurable drunkenness until Friday night because you believe it will be more pleasurable then (because eg, you might be with friends, or you wont have to worry about working hungover the next day). What do you pick?
You could have experienced what's intrinsically good right now, but you chose not to for 4 days so that you can experience what's intrinsically good then. All deferring pleasure is, is you choosing not to do a pleasurable action. Nothing is achieved, you don't actually gain anything.
It's seems warranted on the face of it to balk at this idea of not really planning ahead, but when analysed logically, it makes sense. All deferring to a future, greater experience of pleasure achieves, is to miss an opportunity to experience what's good in life. You missed out on experiencing pleasure for 4 days so that you can finally presently experience pleasure. Well what was the point of that, when you can just presently experience intrinsic goodness right now? Which is the only time you could ever feel pleasure anyway. Pleasure is always experienced presently, so deferring an opportunity for a present experience of pleasure until a future time is pointless, all you've done is chosen not to feel the good in life for 4 days. All so that you can in 4 days do nothing greater than what you could have done now - experience the good in life. Why wait?
Yes, if you don't want to end up homeless and bankrupt. Or not achieve any life goals. If you don't care about those things, then well go for it.
Quoting dukkha
Delay gratification is usually so you can achieve more pleasure, or whatever it is you value than you can in the moment. Or it's to avoid pain and undesirable ends later on.
Quoting dukkha
Well, it's late 2016 and I'm years older than when when as kid I wondered what the future would be like, so I would say you're wrong about that.
Quoting dukkha
How does anyone accomplish any goal that's the slightest bit unpleasurable if now is the only consideration? Imagine you wanted to win a marathon. You know that you need to train for it, and then pace yourself accordingly on that day, and then not give up when you're tired late in the race. You have to push yourself, but in a smart way. You do all that for the anticipated feeling of winning the race, or setting a personal best, or just the fact that you were able to run 26.2 miles.
How do you do that just living in the now? Lots of people do this sort of thing, btw. I would say almost everyone in life delay gratifies at some point to achieve something more desireable, or just to avoid disaster. You can't function beyond that of a spoiled child in this life without doing some delay gratification.
They did, because the main characters on Star Trek always find a way out of every predicament, but one character, the bad guy of the episode, didn't. He thought he escaped into the wider universe, but they were running him on simulator. Granted, he was a holodeck character who gained sentience, but he knew there was an external world, and was trying to get the crew to find a way for him to be transported to it. So the crew fooled him into thinking he had.
I don't think this objection works, because people could, if such a thing were available, choose to enter a simulation where they believed they would get to live far better lives, even under the condition that once in the simulation they could never find out it is a simulation. In fact if they could find out from within the simulation it would remove the very thing that makes the simulation attractive; a far better life that is not detectably illusory; that is, that is not subjectively distinguishable form the real thing.
Now, I don't personally believe such a thing could ever be possible, but it is not logically impossible; and therefore there is no contradiction in it as a thought experiment.
But to distinguish between the real world and the mateix always remains possible, only not from within the matrix. To distinguish you would have to leave the matrix; which you could not do yourself but which might happen if someone unplugs you.
This is similar to how the dreamer usually cannot distinguish (except in the case of lucid dreaming) between her dream and her waking life from within the dream, such as to able to know she is dreaming. When she is awake however, she can make the distinction.
I can see no logical contradiction in those conditions
But the imaginer (me) can tell the difference, and choose accordingly whether or not to enter the condition where I can no longer tell the difference. Once I become the imagined I can no longer choose between reality and matrix, but only within the matrix itself.
I can't see any reason to think that. The fact remains that we can, in principle, make an ethical decision about whether to choose to enter conditions wherein we will no longer be able to tell illusion from reality.
We could actually make such a decison if the conditions were available to us. It is no different in principle than choosing to be euthanased or put into an induced coma.
But it causes no such problem since, by the nature of the thought experiment, the experimenter access the distinction experientially so long as the experiment is coherent on its own terms.
Whether the person who would enter the situation could tell the difference or not is irrelevant.
What you are saying is that you could subtract minds from your experience of others and literally nothing would change experientially. And the only way this could be is if you exist in your own private 'experience world'. Which entails epistemological solipsism, because you can't know other minds exist.
And if the pleasure machine experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from real life experience, it therefore must go both ways - real life experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from simulated experience. And if that's the case, how do you even know you're in real life, and not the simulated experience world?
The problem here is thinking that your experience is caused by your brain.
I have absolutely no idea what you think you are trying to argue here.
In any case, I don't argue that such a scenario could ever actually exist. All I am arguing is that if for the sake of argument we grant that such a simulation, indistinguishable from real life were possible, then we would be able to choose whether to partake or not; and that the choices we make could arguably depend on our preferred model of ethics.
The experiment supposes it's impossible to distinguish between the machine and " real life," but for the question to have any force requires that very distinction.
If I am to care about "real life" over the machine, I must be able to tell the difference or else I have nothing to seek.The premise of the question: "Do you know the world you experience is real?" relies on being able to distinguish "real life" from the machine.
Let's say Neo did not understand the difference between the Matrix and the world outside. If that were the case, there is no "real life" for him to seek. He couldn't pick it out to prefer it to the Matrix.
We can certainly make the decision to forget the distinction between the machine and "the real world," but it requires we know about it in the first place.
But if it was truly subjectively indistinguishable, it would just be a choice between continuing to experience the suffering of real life, or for your real life experience to become far more pleasurable. Almost everyone would pick the latter. To know that it's a simulated world you're entering is for it to not be subjectively distinguishable (because the two worlds are distinguished into simulated and real).
I think you meant to say
Quoting dukkha
The point is that we can't experience both at the same time; so of course there is no possibility of comparing them one to other as real-time experience. But from the perspective of our everyday experience we can quite easily grasp that it is logically possible that we could be hooked into a simulated world of experience, that is so convincing that we could never tell the difference between it and the real world. Of course our memory of at least some of the conditions of our real life would need to be erased otherwise we could start spotting anomalies. Perhaps we would have to agree to having the entire memory of our real erased and a fake memory of our previous life installed.
Now, as I already said I don't believe any thing like that will ever be possible, or even that it could ever be really, as opposed to merely logically, possible. But there is no contradiction in the thought experiment, or if there is one, it is yet to be indicated, or at least it has yet to be explained such that I can see it.
How many times do I have to repeat that from the perspective of your present life you can tell the difference, And it's from there that the decision, as to whether to enter a simulation within which you will think it is your real life, and from within which there will be no possibility of telling that it is a actuality a simulation, will be made with full knowledge of the consequences.
The imaginer can tell the difference when choosing to enter the dream machine. The not being able to tell the difference afterward is just to maximize the experience. What's being lost here is the ethical consideration of entering, not the situation after.
Not if when choosing they knew it could cause great suffering to other people. You would have to not care about the fate of others. It doesn't matter that you won't care upon entering the machine. What matters is when making the decision.
Would a Cyrenaic choose to enter the machine? It's an odd question, in a way, since the Cyrenaic seems committed to thinking we already are in some such machine, and would deny that one could know that one was entering such a metaphysically-altered state, since one does not even know one's current metaphysical state.
If pleasure is the good, it might seem like the decision is mandated, but then, the Cyrenaics don't seem to care about mandates, and there is no ethical code that obligates them to maximize their own pleasure, present or future. So based on present whim, if entering the machine seemed distasteful, they could refuse, to the extent they understood this as a mere practical action, devoid of metaphysical implications. With metaphysical implications, they could deny that they can coherently imagine the situation Nozick asks us to imagine. And if we're to take Nozick seriously about the 'indistinguishability' of the experience machine from veridical life (that is, it is not just an accident, like there existing children being tortured behind a screen that by happenstance we just couldn't see), then we have the fallacy I mentioned above.
No, you are certainly not making yourself clear. :-}
Which renders this supposed conundrum incoherent. Since the difference is known, there is no "what if the world was illusion?" question to ask.
Then, once we choose to forget the difference, it has no relevance to our knowledge. It no longer makes sense to challenge the world as it appears. Since it's impossible for us to tell the difference, we can't use the "what if the world's illusion" argument to direct us to recognising the "real world" over the machine. The truth that such doubt seeks to defend is closed to us.
My main interest has been to use this kind of thought experiment to expose some of he commitments of the different ethical models; which I think would do quite well, if the respondents answered honestly instead of obfuscating to avoid revealing the true natures of their positions.
I am not going to respond unless you stop with the relentless bullshit. :-}
I don't know, but the questions not relevant since I'm not being disingenuous. I genuinely cannot make any sense at all of your objection to the though experiment, or of Willow's which seems to be in a similar vein of conveniently rejecting it as incoherent with no cogent supporting argument.
No worries mate.