Ifat Glassman

Actually, my point was that negative motivation is important at times. I was not going against negative motivation as such - just when it is employed in pursuit of values (rather than in protecting values - taking action to avoid destruction). There are many cases when it is the right and only possible and proper emotional motivation. For example, you don't move out of the way of a speeding truck by the emotion of pleasure. You properly do it out of fear (trying to resolve/avoid fear). You don't fill out your tax form out of delight - but out of a desire to avoid jail. In this case you employ your will power to motivate you to do it by focusing your mind on the long-term consequences rather on the short-term emotions. Using your will in this case is proper. Negative motivation is proper, because - the action amounts to avoiding a disaster (and not to pursuing a value). I'll answer the rest of your posts later (either in the weekend or on Monday). No time now. And thanks for all your compliments, I appreciate it.

This raises an interesting question - the relation between will and emotions. I don't yet know how to answer it. I can see however, that in those cases of using will to go despite short-term negative emotions there is still motivation of avoiding a stronger negative emotion. For example, if some small boring tasks are unavoidable by principle to your work, then not doing then means throwing away your work. Doing them despite negative emotions means to avoid the strong negative emotion of losing your job. I do see though that you have a point here about will being separate way to act than emotions (emotional motivation). I am not sure what is the relationship yet. I'll respond to the rest later.

Overall, there are two kinds of emotional motivations: pleasant (will be referred to as "positive") and painful (will be referred to as "negative"). Either a man acts to gain pleasure, or to avoid pain. These are essentially the two forms of emotional motivation man experiences. For example: we can be motivated to build a house out of a sense of pleasure. We can run away from a snake because of fear. We can give money to a beggar to avoid guilt, or we can buy a gift to a friend because of pleasure. We can study for a test because we are afraid to fail it, or we can read a book because we enjoy training ourselves in rational thinking. These examples illustrate an additional implicit understanding - that emotions are motivational force for action. The positive and the negative categories of emotional motivation are not meant to play an equal role in man's life. Negative motivation is meant to help us avoid damage - to deal with disaster and prevent it. To that extent, it is an excellent servant, and useful for our lives. Positive motivation is meant to motivate us for the rest of our actions in life, in the pursuit of values. Values such as food, house, entertainment, friends etc'. Take this opportunity to stop and think for a moment: Is the pursuit of such values in your life a result of positive motivation or negative one? Are you moved in your work by a sense of pleasure, or by a sense of duty? Do you do what you think is moral out of duty, or out of pleasure? Motivation in pursuit of values should be from positive emotions, not from negative ones. Assuming that the pursuit of values is the norm of every day life (what we do most of the time), and disasters are exceptional and rare, motivation from negative emotions should only be present in exceptional cases of correcting a mistake, or when you try to deal with some disaster - but not on the form of daily basis. It is important to keep in mind that negative emotions do have a significant role, too. Suppose you did something wrong, like, say, acting unjustly to a friend. You would feel guilt, and this will motivate you to correct the injustice. Acting on negative motivation in this case is proper. How do you decide what is proper? Reason is always the final arbiter. But listening to your emotions is an important first step to suggest an action. So let's look at an example of improper negative motivation: forcing oneself to do well at school, because of viewing it as an instance of the virtue of productivity. Doing well at school in most cases is NOT a matter of productivity at all (because school is not fully rational), studying becomes a constant action despite boredom and pain. "If you want to be good - you must try to be a good student. To be a good student - you must learn to endure pain". The result is going through years of putting an effort into school because of a desire to avoid a sense of guilt and failure. But the process of acquiring knowledge required for your career is pursuit of a value - not an attempt to avoid disaster or correct a mistake. Is it right that instead of pleasure, all one would feel is the pain of duty and self-repression? No. Such a clash is a call to look for a mistake in one's thinking (as I learned the hard way), not a call to continue things as the day before. This example demonstrates how rationalism leads to living one's life under negative motivation - out of a sense of duty to obey moral principles, not out of sense of acting selfishly to achieve one's pleasure. (The rationalist idea, in this case is to decide arbitrarily that success in school has to be, regardless of its actual nature, the virtue of productivity). Now what would be the long-term consequence of motivation from negative emotions in pursuits of values? Over time, it destroys everything it touches. In schools, kids are taught that they are good if they learn despite being bored. Over time the result is that they come to hate learning. Not just learning at school, but the act of putting mental effort into anything. As an adult, you may start with a job you dislike, training yourself over time not to notice your boredom. After enough time, you lose motivation to do any kind of work at all, even one you could have enjoyed before. How did this happen? you trained yourself to make your emotions irrelevant to your actions. You trained your subconscious to associate "work" with suffering and self-compulsion. If you view morality as a duty to hold yourself to - you will continually repress personal desires in order to be "in-line" with those principles. At the end of this road, you either lose sight of what "you" is, or you throw morality completely and attempt to live without principles at all. The pursuit of moral values, or virtues, or becoming the hero you have in your mind - should be from positive emotions. If it is not, that is the time to stop and think - make sure you really understand the principles you attempt to live by. Make sure you can see how those principles are good for you. There is only so much time that negative motivation can carry a man. This motivation is meant as a temporary assistant - not as fuel for every-day actions throughout life. This motivation is "crash and burn", its end result is always bad if used to pursue values. After 4 years of stress and repression I had in the technological institute I studied in, I know. To the extent that a society is irrational (like bad schooling system), some conflicts are bound to cross your way. In a dictatorship, one's actions are motivated by fear as the only possible way to function. But - Taking whatever existing conditions under account, try to pursue your values by the desire to gain pleasure. It is selfish. It is good. It is what makes life worth living. (Also available here)

Thanks. Oh, I see what you mean. Good idea, I think I'll update my profile though, not my signature. Thanks for the suggestion.

I would only post a link to something I think is clear enough as a guide to Objectivism. OO.net is not that. It has, among the good things, a lot of bad thinking and misleading ideas. It's a good place to practice your own thinking, after reading books and being familiar enough with Objectivism, but it is not a good place to study Objectivism. If you're studying Objectivism (like really, completely new to it) I think this is a good place to confuse the hell out of you. Why do you think it would be right for me to put a link to OO.net?

But from what I understand from you, you do those things anyway. It's great if you feel like climbing, and then you go and do it. It's not good, if you don't feel like doing something, and force yourself to do it anway and then most of the time you don't even enjoy it. While I don't know enough about you to conclude this is what you do most of the time, the advice still stands, and if it's applicable or not to you is up to you. My point was to train yourself to act from enjoyment and positive motivation, not from fear, guilt and duty. You can make a list of things you have done and enjoyed and made you proud. The first step is to find out what you like doing (not what others will like to buy or want). Once you have a list of past accomplishments, try to find what you like about them. For instance, try to explain to yourself what you like about programming. And just analyze to discover what is the right thing for you as a long term goal. Look at concrete cases and go from there.

To shortly illustrate the connection between the two (Psychology and Ethics), consider the two following things: The purpose of ethics is happiness, and emotions come from subconscious ideas - therefore, to be happy a man MUST untangle and straighten out his subconscious ideas. (an idea I elaborate on in my post "Ethics and emotions - How to achieve happiness"). Psychological health requires application of the right principles to one's life. What are the right principles? Those discovered by the science of Ethics. So part of psychological therapy requires knowledge in Ethics, and how to apply it to one's life. (I have not yet written about this idea, but I plan to in the future). http://ifat-glassman.blogspot.com/

I think the only evil thing she does, from everything you stated, is: This one IS an act of evil. Because it is the only one that involves her choice. The rest, of trying to avoid pain by using psychiatric drugs, or absorbing intellectual poison, are not bad by themselves. You also need to take under account that her defense mechanisms become increasingly automatic the more years go by. So if at first, she had more control over shutting down her mind as a reaction to some truth - now it's probably more automatic - though it *always* involves her choice to some degree. Whether or not she is evil, I think you owe it to yourself and to your happiness to separate your life from theirs. At some point you have to realize, that if someone you value is beyond your help, you need to be able to let it go, and to move on. Not to let pity drag you down. Sticking around to watch spiritual death can only bring your own life down in agony. No amount of gratitude and gratefulness you feel for your mom can justify that. Perhaps, if you still think there is some hope, you can try finding your mom/brother a good Objectivist psychologist. But even with that make sure to keep your distance from them. Not to see them or talk to them. Also, you need to realize that by acting like this you actually help your mom. Sticking around, talking to her, reassures her in a way. But if you leave her, it might raise an alarm. It will remind her that things are NOT alright. That the way she lives *should* be changed. In contrast, if you act on your pity, and try to spare her pain, you will help perpetuate her destruction. If she has a chance at all, facing the truth is the only way to go about solving things.

Later on in the article -

I think you have a problem that goes deeper than that. Who people are should not matter as much to your ability to be happy as it seems to be for you. It can only become a major source of depression if there is already some negative starting point in you.

I think this is a great advice. If you (Mr. Cloogshicer) find it is satisfying for you to think, try a couple of different fields, until you find what is right for you. Once you do, a big project that can be broken down to parts sounds really good to me. Try finding something you need to take an active part in, something that gives you a sense of real self-expression. Use your emotions to find what works for you. Look for things that give you: 1. enjoyment as you work on them 2. pride when you succeed in them 3. A feeling of wanting more of the same thing 4. A feeling that this activity is personal - that it matches *you* and your specific abilities.

And to add to my previous post... I think these sort of activities give your mind an opportunity to relax and work to get an answer to some inner question or conflict. Also, I don't think they are bad as such. They are not always an escape from reality - they can be a very useful servant to pursue a productive life, allowing you to relax and just shoot something (well shooting stuff is not really for me, but for the sake of the example... this is good enough).

Well, consider what you are doing to your subconscious. You are training it to hate goals. By telling yourself you should pursue a goal despite how you feel, and then doing just that time and again, you program your emotions to do the following: Every time some goal is suggested, you would feel resentment. Because what does a goal mean to your subconscious? something that involves suffering, self-repression. The opposite of enjoyment. This is why kids can come to hate learning or reading because of attending school that forces them to learn things (or in methods) that they hate, that bore them. After a while their subconscious forms automatic association between learning and suffering. So what you need to do is to focus instead on discovering what are those things that you DO like and enjoy doing. And then just pursue them, invest in them. Replace self-repression with self-expression. Well, if there is a void something needs to fill it. If you cannot find anything productive to do that excites you (or if for some reason something is blocking your motivation from pursuing something that *could* excite and fulfil you) then you still need something for enjoyment, or at least something to distract you from having no enjoyment. In any case, doing those activities is not the problem, it's a "symptom" of the problem. The problem, as far as I can see, is that you didn't find a good purpose yet. By "purpose" I mean some sort of long-term productive activity, something that allows you to use every ounce of your ability, that allows constant move forward to improvement and further achievement. Like, say, programming, or painting, or writing, or inventing chemical products, or being a salesman, etc'. Not sure I answered the problem you pointed at though, so if not let me know.

I think SoftwareNerd gave an excellent reply. I just wrote a blog-post today about the connection between self esteem, confidence, ethical principles and motivation for action. One part explains the relation between motivation and confidence. If you're interested: http://ifat-glassman.blogspot.com/

__________________________________ And to add something I forgot... I think your roomate is obnoxious, and immoral. He thrives at damaging others - not just in his actions, but also self-esteem-wise (I'm referring to the whole pirate-idolizing as his answer to stealing people's stuff). What skill does he exhibit exactly when he steals people's stuff that are not there to defend themselves? Nothing but the skill of cowardice. In this case, unlike D/L-ing illegal music, it's very clear cut that you are taking away something a person worked hard for and earned. It is also a lot more tangible and real than stealing music because he can know first hand how it feels to have a radio taken away from you. He can understand the crappy feeling seeing your stuff were stolen. Unlike music - this is something he knows first hand, and still he does not mind stealing even though he knows what it will cause someone else. In my book, this is unforgiven (unless if and until he changes). I'd tell him everything I've told you above and also tell him off to someone (like the police or his boss) if it didn't take too much effort.

Instead of talking about myself, I'll talk about the principles that are relevant here. First, I think you should be careful in judging people. Judge not their actions alone - but the actions in light of their ideas and morality. Are they doing something they fully understand to be evil? Or are they not clear on a subject (like downloading music), and therefore choose badly, though according to the best they understand? It's not an easy task at all. I bet if I did not understand the full idea behind the Objectivist ethics, I would not have been motivated enough to stop downloading illegal music. It is only after I understood how it works against me and against my best interest that I stopped. OK, so one principle here is - judge people, but judge carefully based on their ideas, not just their actions. Secondly - give yourself time to make the correct judgement. It can take a lot of time before you understand enough about a person's ideas to judge their actions correctly. You do not need to hold the friendship off until you discover those things. Third - Focus on the pleasure you get out of friendships. Judging your friends correctly should never be a moral obligation, rather a selfish need. A moral friend is a friend you respect (or even admire) and you know you can rely on (not to steal from you, lie to you and on the positive side to truly value you). This is what makes moral judgement a selfish need. Fourth - A man is a lot more than just his moral character. A person has his own specific interests, way of thinking, temperament, sense of humor, taste in art, people, etc'. You should take these things under account when looking for friends. #5 - Express yourself. Express your ideas, and opinions of people - good or bad. Self-expression is the best way to find like-minded people. If you shut your mouth you get yourself stuck in bad relationships. #6 - Use your emotions to guide you in search for friends. Your emotions are the summary of how someone matches who you are. These emotions come from huge amount of information stored in your subconscious - more vast than your conscious mind can evaluate in such a short amount of time as that required to decide which friend to spend time with. So listen to your emotions, and then back them up with a process of rational analysis of what your emotions suggest (and if it is correct or not).

This is a useless advice. First thing he must do when he faces such problem is understand the cause of it. Much like any other problem. Without understanding the cause, there is no chance to repair anything. Simply changing the behavior will be as effective as putting makeup on wounded skin, or trying to maintain good weight just by forcing oneself to eat less. It just won't work. The place for discipline (if needed) is only after you understand the problem (in this case, the reason for "blockage" in motivation to live) and understand the required steps to make to solve it. You are wrong. This guy is not refusing anything - he is helpless in solving his problem, because he does not understand it. That said, I think David Odden started in the right direction - with asking about a purpose in life.

It is not an obstacle to overcome, like, say, lifting weights. It is there as an expression of the intensity of the emotions the characters feel for one another. They want to "have" one another so much, and the pleasure sex gives them is so great that the act has a violent nature. Compare a simple, gentle hug that friends have to how Rearden would want to hold Dagny after wanting her for 2 years without any outlet or external expression of that. He wanted her like crazy, and because of that he would hold her very tightly and firmly, which may cause her some pain. The pain here is minor, none of the characters really care about it or even aware of it - all they are aware of is sexual pleasure as an expression of what they feel for one another.

'Pain is an agent of death' is a generality. It does not mean that ANY pain is bad for your health and must be avoided. Examples: When you work out, muscles hurt (but it's healthy for you). When you do some physical work, it might hurt. When you're in a life-saving surgery, you might feel pain, but it's good for you. Violent sex is not life-threatening. The pain is intensifier of pleasure and not life threatening. In my understanding it is an expression of the intensity of emotions involved in the act between the characters. To add: pain as a mechanism IS a warning mechanism of danger. (In the examples I gave there really IS some temporary damage done to the tissues of the body) Still it is the role of reason to take the warning under account and evaluate overall what is good or bad.

There is no need to learn biology. The fact is that if anybody wants to achieve any kind of goal, he first must survive. The achievement of any long-term goal requires one to learn and abide by the correct principles that would keep him alive long term. A philosopher does not need to look into the functions of the human body to identify the fact that human life is not automatic - a man needs to act in a certain way to stay alive. In any case, I personally do not yet see the relevance of the above observation (life being, metaphysically, an end in itself) to the necessity of building ethics around the purpose of achieving life. By that I don't mean that I think there is no connection, but that I think there is but I don't understand it yet. About your question and my answer (and its relevance to ethics): What you asked is about the nature of human beings specifically - you asked what we are, and how metaphysically, our highest value is life. So that is what I answered, and to give a detailed answer you do venture into biology to some degree. However, it is not necessary to go through all the details to know that life is a phenomenon of a certain kind, and that since we are a living organism, the same principle that applies and can be observed about other creatures is true for us too. Of course, this still leaves out the specific details of how humans (vs. other living things) achieve the end of life. Let me explain by a simpler example: Suppose you see a few tables, you learn that their function is such that they provide a steady surface on which to place items, that they are composed of a top and some sort of base. Then when someone tells you about a table for sale, you already know what to expect of this object. Just like since man is a living thing, you know what to expect from it, even if all you studied are other animals. Man is an animal and therefore you know what to expect. So you don't need to learn ALL the specific details about human beings to know that they have metabolism, that they reproduce, or that the ultimate end to our "design" is continuation of life. This is a fact that was clear to savages as well - only they did not know all the details that we do (like the function of blood circulation, the existence of a brain etc').

What is your purpose of judging a work of art? I ask this because I think the answer to this question lays at the base of what you "must" or "must not" do in regard to esthetic evaluation.

I quoted Ayn Rand giving an answer to exactly this question (what a "goal" is). Did you not read it, or did you not understand it?

I don't think such actions are limited to life. A star may be self-regenerating (I don't know enough about starts to say though), or you could build a robot that self-maintains itself. However, unlike life, such entities would not have that as their theme and underlying state of existence. A robot is likely to ultimately serve human life - a star simply exists. Both entities acts in ways that do not lead to their "survival" or "reproduction". It just happens, that among the many processes that the entity performs, some of them are self-regenerative. But not so with living entities. All automatic actions of living entities serve life and its continuation. Everything about the nature of a living thing exists because it serves its survival and continuation. So just because a single process of an entity does X, does not make the entity X. Otherwise, a lake is an entity that self-regenerates as well (because its water keep coming back to it).

Ah yeah, and I should also say, Peikoff talks about this very problem in his course "Understanding Objectivism" (available at the Ayn Rand bookstore). It is because of first hearing it from him that I could see the problem here.

"goal directed, self regenerative action" is not ALL that life is. It is simple one essential part of it. You should not omit the rest of the things that "life" is. Like D'kian keeps bringing up - the concept of life contains a lot more details than just the definition. Details which you should not ignore while comparing a plant to a star. I think this whole topic demonstrates the absurdity of using JUST the definition to compare between entities. You end up saying that a lake, a star, is alive just like a human. Everything in your brain screams that this is nonsense, but because you only work with the definition, you are forced to accept it as true. (A lake, for example maintains its shape: if you take water out with a cup, they quickly return to the lake as you flip the cup - thus, the elements of the lake act to maintain its existence). The right way to go about things is to start by observing reality. NOT by looking at the definition. and when yu observe reality, you see that there are tremendous differences between a star and a plant. A plant reproduces. It has many different processes all aimed at its survival and reproduction. A star, on the other hand, does not have all of these. It may have a single process that achieves the maintenance of its physical shape, but this cannot be said about ALL its processes that they achieve the maintenance of its shape. Some do, and some don't (which is different than a living thing where EVERY process achieves either survival or reproduction). To show another difference: If a star cools down and becomes inactive (like the moon), it is still a star, nothing much changed. But with a living thing, if its processes stop - something fundamental about the entity disappears from existence. In the case of an animals, for example - it no longer moves, feels or thinks. A star just lays there, hot or cold. No. See this explanation by Ayn Rand: