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You have already said that you weren't familiar with the strips, but you felt knowlegeable enough to comment that they were pessimistic.
You see, a truly wise man would have simply said "I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that work".
A wise man would not have made an uninformed comment, and then frantically tried to justify it.
You grow tiresome, my friend.
Well I was aware from an interview with the author of the comics, that Hobbes and Calvin were intentionally named after those two thinkers who both had a dark view of human nature.
And I DID provide facts from other sources backing up my claims. You simply dismissed them as copy and pasted. But I did that in order to provide evidence for my argument.
Although I agree this whole digression was rather irrelevant and tiresome.
Incidentally, isn't the word "nameSAKES" ? Wouldn't someone as "intelligent" as you know how to spell ??
Quote:
Originally Posted by enamdar
I said from my first post that I was not very familar with Calvin and Hobbes, but from the few strips I had read they matched up with the view of human nature from their namestakes.
Incidentally, isn't the word "nameSAKES" ? Wouldn't someone as "intelligent" as you know how to spell ??
Well I never claimed to be intelligent or a "wise man". It is true that the Darwinian survival mechanism is not first nature to me, and in that sense I'm more of a reflective thinker than the vast majority. But this isn't a measure of smarts. Since a perfect hedonistic-robot, could possess a vastly superior calculating machine, in order to maximize pleasure and advance the gene. And pure thinking without feeling would not lead to the same level of pessimism.
I used to go for that masculine BS. Although not a natural athlete, I worked hard on my body fitness, and played high school sports 2 years. I wanted a military career, and to some extent I still idealize military virtues of honor, duty, discipline. But my studies of human nature, both philosophically and from the Darwinian human naturists, has given me a strong hatred of manliness. The virtues of cruelty. I've grown quite sickened by toughness and struggle. And am proud to be laying over. I'm a misandrist in my hatred of men, and a misogynist in my hatred for women's rewarding of the worst quality in men. I'm a full misanthrope.
Am I going to say existence itself is evil? Its hard not to. since all the horrors of modern society are found in lesser form in the Darwinian struggle of even the lowest forms of life. On the other hand, does that mean all imaginable societies would be better not to exist? That I would tend to disagree with. I would not go so far as to say that there is no imaginable organization of society which would be better than the void. The implication of this is that a Robinson Crusoe existence, isolated from society and culture, might be better than nothingness, since as the only member of society, I'm free to shape the utopian laws in any way I see fit. To deny that my Republic of One, is better than
Nothing, would be to say that ALL possible societies are evil.
I feel very trapped. Surrounded on all sides, saturated even from within, by a culture that worships evil. There is no escaping it, it is the air we breathe. I don't even know if the science behind it is Fact, but it doesn't matter because Power is Truth.
HL Menken said that Puritanism was against people being happy. I started of as a Puritan. What does it mean to be anti-pleasure? As I said earlier, I think the real meaning is not against happiness and joy, but against the sadism that accompanies so much of human pleasure. But it is perhaps to grim to say that all human relations must be sadistic, although I will unabashedly say that in our society all human relations are sadistic and extract pleasure from other's pain. Atheism in our age has reverted back to a primitive form which combines a Christian reading of fallen human nature, with a Sadist-Nietzchean do as thou wilt. Like a child showing how bad he can be, because daddys not there to punish him.
So I've been thinking over the Hegel knight of virtue quote. Schopenhauer the prophet of pessimism, hated Hegel with fury. Hegel is the greatest theodist and optimist, because unlike Leibniz he doesn't gloss over evil, it is real, but it is part of an evolving process. At the same time his historicism is not a straight line of progress, but a spiral. The Hegelian necessity for evil, goes deeper than the social darwinist Nietzhcean slogan of "no pain, no gain". That is rather cold hearted considering what suffering actually is. Hegel is perhaps a middle ground between the cold rational logical Apollo Kant, and the wild exuberant, intoxicated, Dionysus Nietzsche. That is born out in Hegel's the real is rational.
I really idealized the Athenian assembly. But what is that ideal form carried out? All it means is that all those who make and affected by a decision, come together and argue, debate, and discuss a course of action. And then carry it out. As a force in the world, it is heavily diluted in the political and economic spheres. But wherever there is civil society, the Athenian form is to be found. Aristotle said man is a social animal. And wherever there is social organization, there is discussion and a rough consensus majoritarianism. I often like to say that there is nothing more conformist than individuality. But Hegel is right to point out that the opposite is also true, there is nothing more individualistic than anti-individualism. Of course there is always the debate between the true and stated interests if the majority. Of course that conflict is the premise of representative democracy. So if one truly supports direct democracy, than that means accepting the will of the majority even in the face of manipulation by elites. If a man is legitimate as a demagogue, why not a clique as an elite? Then if accepting democratic majoritarianism means accepting their stated values, even if it is not actual, then I suppose by a system of democratic ethics, I'm immoral on my own terms for not seeking wine, women and song, or to modernize it drugs, sex and rock & roll. In a democratic twist asceticism becomes hedonism and hedonism becomes asceticism.
Hegel did say that stoicism, make sense in corrupt times, when freedom is nowhere to be found in the world, defining freedom entirely with personal virtue makes sense. That gets into the whole master-slave dialectic. The master values domination over life, the slave values life over freedom. This is the sense in which hierarchical relations can be called legitimate. Freedom comes with dire consequences. Still despite the doom it brings, I wouldn't call the rejection of slave status, illegitimate, irrational, cowardly or lazy.
At the end of the day, despite critically reexamining and reinterpreting everything, I'm still basically back where I started, square one. I mean I can question my values, and say well maybe it would be better if I had lived my life so and so. But on the present situation, nothing really changes. What does it mean to integrate into a toxic society? I just can't bear the cruelty of human nature and existence. If you want to take a sociobiological view, and say its just human nature or even life nature. And interpret it all in a social darwinist way, then ok I can accept those stakes. Raise it even higher, and say it goes beyond the amoeba, to existence itself. That simply to exist means the will to power, the conflict of domination and submission, master slave, cruelty. I have questioned everything. But it doesn't matter. Maybe I was wrong to form an essence, an I, a personality that rejects cruelty. Perhaps the universe was right to embrace cruelty. But that is my essence, my very I. To imagine an alternate biography, is simply to commit to cosmic nonbeing and have an Other take my place. Of course there is no need to create a "me" like that. Since there are already billions of such "mes" inhabiting this rock. This is the edge of the map. In which conversation, argument, debate, communication become impossible. Here stand I, here stand the universe. Language is stretched to the limit, and it is hard to use feeble words, to conveys such unthinkable thoughts. At such a point one can only utter the words of Martin Luther - "Here I stand, I can do no other!"
Remember Ivan Karamazov, how is any man, above the level of a brute, suppose to live contently in a world of misery and suffering. To close one's eyes is not to solve the problem. The tears of a single child can not be justified by any plan. I was but a man, a man who failed to save the world. I struggle hard when I could. But I never head the tools, the weapons to carry out the task. It was always lost. In the end despite it all, I was human, all too human. In a world such as this, what a curse to hear those words. Human. No worse epithet could be hurled at me. I knew the disgust Gulliver felt to know he was held in common with the brutish yahoos. Was he really mad, to prefer the friendship of his stable horses, oh what a piece of work is man! I'm a democratic man. And I will accept the will of the majority, even when it is grossly unacceptable to the spirit. But what does it mean to accept? I can carry no torch against it. But neither can I integrate. The universe and I have fought ourselves to a draw. Divine hubris! This worm, dares to claim that he has fought the universe to a draw? No the universe will crush me in the end. But we are of the same character. The universe is what it is, it is uncompromising and will not bend. In this we are the same. If the universe has the right to not bend to my wishes, then I claim the same.
I think Hegel's analysis of the "knight of virtue" is a pretty spot-on analysis of both where my worldview got it wrong and where I got it right. In my ethics I was very much on the side of the abstract and formal Kant, Plato and Stoics as opposed to the concrete and wordly Hegel and Aristotle. I hated Aristotle's idea of the golden mean, or Confucius's middle path. But now I have come to see in a Hegelian manner the truth in my opponents argument. And not even from the point of view of pleasure for pleasure's sake.
But even for the higher good, a certain level of sensual material satisfaction is necessary, if one is to be an effective knight of pure virtue. At the same time I don't think my attacks on pleasure and hedonism were groundless. Mindless asceticism and puritanism is simply a mirror image of hedonism, without any depth. I think there is a great truth in the ascetic puritan standpoint. Mainly that at least since the birth of civilization, pleasure for the most part has been extracted through power, harm, domination and cruelty. And I think that the unconscious force of asceticism is the rejection of those power relations. I was to some extent aware of that, but not to the extent that I saw that as the ONLY problem of pleasure. I did hold to religious, theological, metaphysical ideas about evil and sin. Again those views were not wrong per se, just shallow and unsophisticated.
I studied a lot of history, but perhaps took the wrong lessons from it. I studied history as literature and moral education, not as a science of living process of matter in motion. And so things I admire like Athenian democracy, Roman virtue, English and American Puritanism, Jeffersonian populism. There was certainly truth in all of those forms. But those forms only have meaning in the sense that they represent an actual historical period. Progress is not an unbending straight line, and it suffers genuine defeats that no sophistic wordplay can explain away. At the same time it is important to understand the natural process of history, and how ideal virtuous periods breakdown into their "decadent" opposites, not just because of decadent schemers, but because of their own internal dynamics. In some sense the 21st century American World, is the realized truth of Cromwell and Jefferson. To the extent that some of the "bad guys" celebrate their current triumph, they themselves recognize their historic defeat. They know that the lifestyle they lead can only generate individualistic pleasure, but don't fool themselves into thinking that longterm hegemony can be achieved through their seductions. In the longterm they are pessimistic although they see in the fall of their historical consciousness, the fall of all western civilization, and perhaps from the ashes the restoration of their Arcadia.
I guess Hegel's mainpoint is that virtue becomes meaningless when it just becomes words like "do unto others". Virtue is only meaningful in the actual world, which the Knight claims to hate,despise, and be at war with. The Knight uses the same weapons as the Demon. So in the contest they are in fact equal. So to what can the Knight appeal to? That somehow Right is the truth of this real world. So the Knight himself recognizes that the Right he opposes to the real world, is only valid to the extent that it IS the actual world.
Thats a lot for me to chew on. It doesn't mean that my worldview was wrong.
But it does mean to the extent it was right, I was perhaps a less useful servant to it, precisely because of my qualities as a Don Quixote Knight ofvirtue. Of course in the end, this is all idle speculation. Since whatever the "truth", I did live my life as a Knight, and am now living in that world. And there is little "choice" now. And it would be just as speculative and airy to simply read my life as a series of wrong thoughts and choices. For we certainly live in a secular calvinist world, in which free will is an illusion. When one combines physical mechanics, biological genetics, behavioral rewards and punishments, and parental, education, and societal upbringing, there is little room for free-willed choice, and Calvin might as well be right even without Jehova. God or Nature. So to say I could have simply chosen to not be a Knight, ignores the factors that pre-determined it.
Even if I were to suddenly "See the darkness", and embrace vulgar hedonism, I would say that at this late date it would largely be out of hands, and not my decision to make, regardless of my "choice", I would say voluntary or involuntary at this point in time sensual pleasure has been forever closed to me.
Initially, I found you a bit boring. Schopenhauer is 200-level philosophy.
Then you brought out "Darwin and the other guy". Ok, you're getting closer to my neighborhood. Then you used the term "social Darwinism". Alright, still in a cerebral sense but I thought, "this automaton might be human. He might have real questions."
Next you actually made an argument for Calvin and Hobbes as more than a boy and his stuffed tiger. True, it's been done, but you advance the idea.
Somewhere you sing "Dawkins and the Selfish Gene". Yeah, I'm listening. I read it. He was already brilliant but not a great writer. You wanna talk Dawkins, let's talk A Devil's Chaplain or The Greatest Show on Earth.
But guess what? This conversation is just going to be a conversation unless you can get out of your head for a bit. Seen any good movies lately? (Movies, not documentaries!) What do you like to do for fun? (Besides think?!?) I know you're smart. Are you funny? Employed or employable? Addicted to anything? Do you listen to music or do you just hear a bunch of individual notes, next to each other? What kind of music do you like?
Are you gonna be any fun to spend time with?
I know, I know, humanity is flawed and doomed and we're devolving at unimaginable speed.
In the meantime, are you gonna ask me to dance, or what?
If you can handle yourself in a real conversation, maybe have a meal or two, I might invite you over to talk some Dawkins. Bring Chris Hitchens and we'll make it a foursome.
Well people, one cannot exactly refute his claim that people are inherently vicious. What I do see in the OP is someone who clearly sees and relates to the world differently. Its the same phenomenon I see with TVSG only in his case there is an apparent lack of depth(and no I don't spend time in his threads mocking him either). I can also generally surmise most people don't even know who Hobbes and Calvin were which precipitates into ego maintenance and hyper sensitivity to perceived arrogance in others . He just stated what he thinks.
Yet with such "odd balls" as these rather than attempt to relate, they are instinctively attacked and mocked. While he is a bit bookish for most tastes, did I really see any aggravating offense? They are actually people. Would kindness ever occur to some of you?
I used to go for that masculine BS. Although not a natural athlete, I worked hard on my body fitness, and played high school sports 2 years. I wanted a military career, and to some extent I still idealize military virtues of honor, duty, discipline. But my studies of human nature, both philosophically and from the Darwinian human naturists, has given me a strong hatred of manliness. The virtues of cruelty. I've grown quite sickened by toughness and struggle. And am proud to be laying over. I'm a misandrist in my hatred of men, and a misogynist in my hatred for women's rewarding of the worst quality in men. I'm a full misanthrope.
Am I going to say existence itself is evil? Its hard not to. since all the horrors of modern society are found in lesser form in the Darwinian struggle of even the lowest forms of life. On the other hand, does that mean all imaginable societies would be better not to exist? That I would tend to disagree with. I would not go so far as to say that there is no imaginable organization of society which would be better than the void. The implication of this is that a Robinson Crusoe existence, isolated from society and culture, might be better than nothingness, since as the only member of society, I'm free to shape the utopian laws in any way I see fit. To deny that my Republic of One, is better than
Nothing, would be to say that ALL possible societies are evil.
I feel very trapped. Surrounded on all sides, saturated even from within, by a culture that worships evil. There is no escaping it, it is the air we breathe. I don't even know if the science behind it is Fact, but it doesn't matter because Power is Truth.
HL Menken said that Puritanism was against people being happy. I started of as a Puritan. What does it mean to be anti-pleasure? As I said earlier, I think the real meaning is not against happiness and joy, but against the sadism that accompanies so much of human pleasure. But it is perhaps to grim to say that all human relations must be sadistic, although I will unabashedly say that in our society all human relations are sadistic and extract pleasure from other's pain. Atheism in our age has reverted back to a primitive form which combines a Christian reading of fallen human nature, with a Sadist-Nietzchean do as thou wilt. Like a child showing how bad he can be, because daddys not there to punish him.
So I've been thinking over the Hegel knight of virtue quote. Schopenhauer the prophet of pessimism, hated Hegel with fury. Hegel is the greatest theodist and optimist, because unlike Leibniz he doesn't gloss over evil, it is real, but it is part of an evolving process. At the same time his historicism is not a straight line of progress, but a spiral. The Hegelian necessity for evil, goes deeper than the social darwinist Nietzhcean slogan of "no pain, no gain". That is rather cold hearted considering what suffering actually is. Hegel is perhaps a middle ground between the cold rational logical Apollo Kant, and the wild exuberant, intoxicated, Dionysus Nietzsche. That is born out in Hegel's the real is rational.
I really idealized the Athenian assembly. But what is that ideal form carried out? All it means is that all those who make and affected by a decision, come together and argue, debate, and discuss a course of action. And then carry it out. As a force in the world, it is heavily diluted in the political and economic spheres. But wherever there is civil society, the Athenian form is to be found. Aristotle said man is a social animal. And wherever there is social organization, there is discussion and a rough consensus majoritarianism. I often like to say that there is nothing more conformist than individuality. But Hegel is right to point out that the opposite is also true, there is nothing more individualistic than anti-individualism. Of course there is always the debate between the true and stated interests if the majority. Of course that conflict is the premise of representative democracy. So if one truly supports direct democracy, than that means accepting the will of the majority even in the face of manipulation by elites. If a man is legitimate as a demagogue, why not a clique as an elite? Then if accepting democratic majoritarianism means accepting their stated values, even if it is not actual, then I suppose by a system of democratic ethics, I'm immoral on my own terms for not seeking wine, women and song, or to modernize it drugs, sex and rock & roll. In a democratic twist asceticism becomes hedonism and hedonism becomes asceticism.
Hegel did say that stoicism, make sense in corrupt times, when freedom is nowhere to be found in the world, defining freedom entirely with personal virtue makes sense. That gets into the whole master-slave dialectic. The master values domination over life, the slave values life over freedom. This is the sense in which hierarchical relations can be called legitimate. Freedom comes with dire consequences. Still despite the doom it brings, I wouldn't call the rejection of slave status, illegitimate, irrational, cowardly or lazy.
At the end of the day, despite critically reexamining and reinterpreting everything, I'm still basically back where I started, square one. I mean I can question my values, and say well maybe it would be better if I had lived my life so and so. But on the present situation, nothing really changes. What does it mean to integrate into a toxic society? I just can't bear the cruelty of human nature and existence. If you want to take a sociobiological view, and say its just human nature or even life nature. And interpret it all in a social darwinist way, then ok I can accept those stakes. Raise it even higher, and say it goes beyond the amoeba, to existence itself. That simply to exist means the will to power, the conflict of domination and submission, master slave, cruelty. I have questioned everything. But it doesn't matter. Maybe I was wrong to form an essence, an I, a personality that rejects cruelty. Perhaps the universe was right to embrace cruelty. But that is my essence, my very I. To imagine an alternate biography, is simply to commit to cosmic nonbeing and have an Other take my place. Of course there is no need to create a "me" like that. Since there are already billions of such "mes" inhabiting this rock. This is the edge of the map. In which conversation, argument, debate, communication become impossible. Here stand I, here stand the universe. Language is stretched to the limit, and it is hard to use feeble words, to conveys such unthinkable thoughts. At such a point one can only utter the words of Martin Luther - "Here I stand, I can do no other!"
Remember Ivan Karamazov, how is any man, above the level of a brute, suppose to live contently in a world of misery and suffering. To close one's eyes is not to solve the problem. The tears of a single child can not be justified by any plan. I was but a man, a man who failed to save the world. I struggle hard when I could. But I never head the tools, the weapons to carry out the task. It was always lost. In the end despite it all, I was human, all too human. In a world such as this, what a curse to hear those words. Human. No worse epithet could be hurled at me. I knew the disgust Gulliver felt to know he was held in common with the brutish yahoos. Was he really mad, to prefer the friendship of his stable horses, oh what a piece of work is man! I'm a democratic man. And I will accept the will of the majority, even when it is grossly unacceptable to the spirit. But what does it mean to accept? I can carry no torch against it. But neither can I integrate. The universe and I have fought ourselves to a draw. Divine hubris! This worm, dares to claim that he has fought the universe to a draw? No the universe will crush me in the end. But we are of the same character. The universe is what it is, it is uncompromising and will not bend. In this we are the same. If the universe has the right to not bend to my wishes, then I claim the same.
I think Hegel's analysis of the "knight of virtue" is a pretty spot-on analysis of both where my worldview got it wrong and where I got it right. In my ethics I was very much on the side of the abstract and formal Kant, Plato and Stoics as opposed to the concrete and wordly Hegel and Aristotle. I hated Aristotle's idea of the golden mean, or Confucius's middle path. But now I have come to see in a Hegelian manner the truth in my opponents argument. And not even from the point of view of pleasure for pleasure's sake.
But even for the higher good, a certain level of sensual material satisfaction is necessary, if one is to be an effective knight of pure virtue. At the same time I don't think my attacks on pleasure and hedonism were groundless. Mindless asceticism and puritanism is simply a mirror image of hedonism, without any depth. I think there is a great truth in the ascetic puritan standpoint. Mainly that at least since the birth of civilization, pleasure for the most part has been extracted through power, harm, domination and cruelty. And I think that the unconscious force of asceticism is the rejection of those power relations. I was to some extent aware of that, but not to the extent that I saw that as the ONLY problem of pleasure. I did hold to religious, theological, metaphysical ideas about evil and sin. Again those views were not wrong per se, just shallow and unsophisticated.
I studied a lot of history, but perhaps took the wrong lessons from it. I studied history as literature and moral education, not as a science of living process of matter in motion. And so things I admire like Athenian democracy, Roman virtue, English and American Puritanism, Jeffersonian populism. There was certainly truth in all of those forms. But those forms only have meaning in the sense that they represent an actual historical period. Progress is not an unbending straight line, and it suffers genuine defeats that no sophistic wordplay can explain away. At the same time it is important to understand the natural process of history, and how ideal virtuous periods breakdown into their "decadent" opposites, not just because of decadent schemers, but because of their own internal dynamics. In some sense the 21st century American World, is the realized truth of Cromwell and Jefferson. To the extent that some of the "bad guys" celebrate their current triumph, they themselves recognize their historic defeat. They know that the lifestyle they lead can only generate individualistic pleasure, but don't fool themselves into thinking that longterm hegemony can be achieved through their seductions. In the longterm they are pessimistic although they see in the fall of their historical consciousness, the fall of all western civilization, and perhaps from the ashes the restoration of their Arcadia.
I guess Hegel's mainpoint is that virtue becomes meaningless when it just becomes words like "do unto others". Virtue is only meaningful in the actual world, which the Knight claims to hate,despise, and be at war with. The Knight uses the same weapons as the Demon. So in the contest they are in fact equal. So to what can the Knight appeal to? That somehow Right is the truth of this real world. So the Knight himself recognizes that the Right he opposes to the real world, is only valid to the extent that it IS the actual world.
Thats a lot for me to chew on. It doesn't mean that my worldview was wrong.
But it does mean to the extent it was right, I was perhaps a less useful servant to it, precisely because of my qualities as a Don Quixote Knight ofvirtue. Of course in the end, this is all idle speculation. Since whatever the "truth", I did live my life as a Knight, and am now living in that world. And there is little "choice" now. And it would be just as speculative and airy to simply read my life as a series of wrong thoughts and choices. For we certainly live in a secular calvinist world, in which free will is an illusion. When one combines physical mechanics, biological genetics, behavioral rewards and punishments, and parental, education, and societal upbringing, there is little room for free-willed choice, and Calvin might as well be right even without Jehova. God or Nature. So to say I could have simply chosen to not be a Knight, ignores the factors that pre-determined it.
Even if I were to suddenly "See the darkness", and embrace vulgar hedonism, I would say that at this late date it would largely be out of hands, and not my decision to make, regardless of my "choice", I would say voluntary or involuntary at this point in time sensual pleasure has been forever closed to me.
Hi enamdar,
Well even I have not gotten around to The Brothers Karamazov. I am not sure this is the forum for you or that most people will understand your references. It seems that you have a need for the justification of your actions and that you heavily borrow established philosophical frameworks. Other creatures do not justify their actions ; they exist. If there were another author I would suggest, it would be Albert Camus. A full understanding is an absurdity and an impossibility.
I can even quantify it. A byte language, for example, cannot account for the raw bit structures that create it. The abstraction carries a cost. Do we even have enough brain power to really append even our own mind in its raw form let alone the rest? Your mind is not really the haven of rationality you think it is. Its just a survival organ. I would try to stop justifying your actions to the degree you do, and if you wish to relate, and you may not, use references most people understand or choose a place where they will.
As for me, idealism and justification is a poison, and you will drive yourself mad with it.
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When the wise men are considered Simpletons...
