Element
-
Posts
80 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Posts posted by Element
-
-
So this is an ancient chinese philosopher that I am intereseted in right now. He is an egoist and his name is Yangzi (Master Yang).
http://www.rodneyohebsion.com/yang-chu.htm
He seems to be more pessimistic than Rand, and less focused on production as a virtue. It also seems that he thinks that politics is pointless. His argument seems to rely on the idea that politics is self destructive for most people. I am not sure what the political implications of this are. It could be apathy, or a sort of federalism where people who are involved in politicis are doing it part time and don't really care about it.
Anyways a quote from one of his works.
Yang Chu, when traveling in Lu, put up at Meng Sun Yang’s.
Meng said to him, “A person is a person—so why do people still trouble themselves about fame/reputation?”
Yang Chu answered, “If they do so, it is in order to become rich.”
“But when they have become rich, why do they not stop?”
“They aim at getting honors/rank.”
“Why then do they not stop when they have attained them?”
“On account of their death.”
“But what can they desire still after their death?”
“They think of their posterity.”
“How can their fame/reputation be available to their posterity?”
Yang Chu said, “For fame’s sake they endure all kinds of bodily hardship and mental pain. They dispose of their glory for the benefit of their clan, and even their fellow-citizens profit by it. How much more so do their descendants! Howbeit becomes those desirous of real fame to be disinterested, and disisterestedness means poverty; and likewise they must be unostentatious, and this is equivalent to humble condition. How then can fame be disregarded, and how can fame come of itself? The ignorant, while seeking to maintain fame, sacrifice reality. By doing so they will have to regret that nothing can rescue them from danger and death, and not only learn to know the difference between ease and pleasure and sorrow and grief.”
One hundred years is at the heights of a long life. Less than one in a thousand people attain it.
Let us take an example [typical] of someone who does. Much of it is taken up by infancy and old age. Much of the rest is taken up by sleep ans wasted time. And much of what’s left is filled up with pain and sickness, sorrow and grief/death/loss/fear/toil/misfortune/suffering, ruin/actual-losses/death and loss/missed-opportunities, and anxieties/worry and fears.
This perhaps leaves several years—and of this, I reckon that the time he is truly content and liberated barely amounts to much at all.
So what is human existence for, and what/where makes it pleasant/is its joy/find happiness?
Only comfort/clothing/beauty/wealth and elegance/good-food/wealth/luxury? Only music/color and beauty/sound/senses/beautiful-women?
Ah, but we cannot always be satisfied by comfort/beauty and elegance/wealth, nor incessantly enjoy beauty/color and music/sound.
Besides, there is the stimulus/extortion/seduction of rewards and the warning/check of punishments/penalties, the urging of fame/reputation and the repelling of laws. People are constantly rendered anxious/nervous/busy competing/striving/arranging/struggling for one vain/hollow moment of glory/praise/fame, and providing/scheming for the splendor/glory that is to survive/outlast/be-remembered-after their death—even in solitude, they contemplate/careful and abide by /comply with what they think/see others want them to see, hear, think, feel, and do, and they discredit/repent what their own selves feel and think. They vainly lose/miss the realest enjoyments of life’s time, and cannot really give way for a moment. How different is this from being a chained in prison?
-
This argument boils down to "Institutions exist, there for Rand is wrong". Institutions are just activities that individuals participate in. Yes Howard Roark probably participated in a in a somewhat decent family, but he had to be there and learn from it himself, he could just have easily not gotten anything out of it.
-
I just go back at these people now and go "so what?" "You have no bases to show why that is wrong other than your feelings, give me an idea why you think that is wrong and then we will talk about it".
-
At Politicalforums.com this post contains the following paragraph:
Is this a commonly held view among any libertarians that you know? Isn't this precisely the kind of view that has eventually led us to our present mixed economy?
Absolutely not, libertarians tend to have the opposite problem of calling America totalitarian because of the fact that we have a military. Classical Liberals on the other hand may have had this problem.
The Libertarian Party is a joke. They had a pro-prohibition candidate run for president last time around. The only serious "Libertarian" is a republican ironically, and that is Ron Paul.
-
If anything, in my experience, collectivism has been about total fear of the judgments of people.
-
Interesting. This is a quote from that site, I assume quoting her:
"Until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in the field of music . . .
No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it’s every man for himself—and only for himself."
It does leave me wondering what a conceptual vocabulary means...
This is complicated, because Ayn Rand didn't did not think that Art and Music are identical. Art is supposed to concertize metaphysical value judgments, music does not do that, but used concretes to invoke evaluations, sort of like reverse art. That is my understanding of it at least.
Conceptual vocabulary means that we need some theory, tools of analysis to talk about the subject. So in novels we have things like plot, characters, theme etc.
About Lyndon Larouche: He isn't the first leftist nut job to hate Jazz, Che thought Jazz was "the music of imperialism" but that is about as valid as saying Rock is "the music of the devil".
-
Would you mind at least giving your own opinion or posing a question? Why are you posting this? What is the point of this thread?
The post got replies, that is enough.
-
Roger Ebert regularly reviews movies in a more positive light if they have a message he considers socially redeeming. A recent example is "For Colored Girls," which 70% of critics (even though most of them share Ebert's ignorance or enthusiasm for social responsibility... Hello, "Capitalism, A Love Story") reviewed negatively (rottentomatoes.com), but which he reviewed lukewarm to positively. Based on his review here, I would say he's doing the same thing on the flipside.
I used to be a big Ebert fan, as I believed his claim that he reviews a movie based on what it is trying to accomplish. He does that to a degree, but increasingly slants it with his political and social views. Eventually, I had to stop reading him as he just couldn't help me predict anymore if I would enjoy a movie.
Yeah his criticism comes down too "I found it boring". I mean, 1 star for boring? That doesn't seem right.
-
I stopped being a Christian because one day I though "Even if I could prove God existed, the rest I could never prove, its all too absurd".
-
Well benevolence is a good thing. Sadly some otherwise rational virtue ethicists such as Megnzi (a Confucian philosopher) put benevolence as the primary thing which makes us human instead of rationality (which is the argument of Aristotle, Rand, and the Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu, another egoist). Benevolence is a good thing, but it is meaningless if it isn't accompanied by rationality.
-
I have my doubts to whether or not this story is true. First of all it doesn't seem very realistic that someone would write about their child hood trauma like that out in public. Its hard to get people to criticize their parents at all after they are 20. When I here people talk about their parents its usually "I love them to death (KEY PHRASE), but (insert complaint)".
In addition to this, the father figure seems suspiciously like all the straw-men brought up against selfishness.
Oh, and Peikoff raised a kid, and she is fine as far as I know. In fact Peikoff would be abhorred by a lot of what is in this article.
Another thing, this was the only article published by this journalism student at salon. Nice and sensational, but no credentials.
-
We aren't engaged in total war with anyone. This is the problem. People knock Sherman for being a war criminal, which is arguably true. But if he hadn't done what he did in the south Grant would have waited millions of more lives in pointless pitched battles involving only soldiers. Total war is bad, but it ends quickly. Protracted wars with no clear goals against undefined enemies are not total war at all.
-
I don't know what makes someone want to be a soldier. Most people I speak to at my University who are in ROTC say they are doing it out of greed (financial reasons basically).
I always wondered though if there was some sort of urge to engage in warfare that they wanted to satisfy. This is a perfectly legitimate urge in any other business, we would prefer engineers who wanted to be engineers. So I think that we would want soldiers who wanted to do what soldiers did. Now I know soldiers do more than kill people, but I am saying that that is a huge part of it. Its like math to an engineer.
I think that this is fine, the only problem is that we need to deal with it. An analogy is sexuality. If people repress their sexuality, all sorts of weird things can happen because they can't introspect about their desires without feeling guilty. I am sure everyone is familiar of the tale where the puritan ends up to be more of a pervert than any given deviant. I think the same is with soldiers, if we tell them all this altruistic and repressive non-sense, we are only going to end up with mentally ill people.
-
Please explain.
A large part of being a soldier is killing people for a living. I think if this fact isn't put in the proper frame of mind soldiers will have a hard time. Consider that the the military is supposed to be filled with nice, kind, domesticated, self-sacrificial men and women. In reality not only is this unrealistic, but can only end in disaster. They need a different view of what it means to be a soldier or the institution needs to be rid of altogether.
-
The military has no coherent ethical system, its no wonder that things like this happen.
-
I wasn't aware that pedophilia was a movement comparable to feminism. Could you provide some examples for what you are talking about?
-
I think that this concept of happiness focuses on negativity too much.
-
Although the points have been made...
1. Atlas Shrugged is about certain rich people, intellectuals, and politicians embracing corrupt philosophies and destroying society buy that means, and some (a rare few) of the producing peoples resisting that. Jesus why do people think Atlas Shrugged or The Fountain Head are elitest? Elites are the main villains, not the "working class".
2. Islam, which the Arab world is dominate by, is a barbarian religion, and sadly enough it is still taken seriously, unlike Christianity in the west.
3. One doesn't follow from the other, you have to prove the philosophy wrong, you can't just say "Ayn Rand is x, there for here ideas are wrong". Apparently you do not understand how to avoid basic logical fallacies.
4. Read Confucius, in it he has this idea of Filial Piety, which is a really good example of altruism. It is also his idea of the basis for the ideal feudal system. Although the specific word slavery may be a slight stretch, it is quite easy to see why altruism leads to the oppression of people.
This guy is obviously a troll though, I doubt any of us will get a response.
-
I agree. But that doesn't answer my question really. We can say that there is nothing in life that makes suffering unavoidable off the bat. But some people deal with suffering, that is in their context, outside of their control. I am just talking about what the proper attitude is towards this kind of suffering given that you can not do anything about it.
-
Suffering is a problem and it's not trivial, it's just that there is not the expectation of suffering as normal to life, or as metaphysically to be expected of existence. (Investigate more Rand's conception of a benevolent versus malevolent universe.) Suffering is caused by impotence at dealing with reality, philosophy is supposed to help give you practical guidance for succeeding at dealing with reality, so that's Rand's response to suffering. People experience failure, frustration, loss of values, injustices, and so on, but the point is that only applied reason can investigate the causes and solutions to the problem of suffering.
I have been trying to make a counter argument to this, and I have to say that after attempting to write several posts I can not. It seems like even "four signs" (death, age, disease, and meditation) that Buddha saw are refuted by a proper use of reason, and that although suffering is extremely likely in some quantity in people's lives, this is only due to human error and not to some existential problem.
So a question remains though, how do we respond to suffering that we can't control? Terminal Illnesses, The collapse of a nation etc.
There are few options I see
1) Fight it tooth and nail anyways, and seek comfort in that. <--- Seems like the Objectivist choice, but this is how some versions of existentialists seem to portray all of life.
2) Embrace suffering, learn to enjoy it, make it yours, masochism. <--- Other existentialists treat life this way also.
3) Detachment (Zen/Taoism/Yogic Action) <---- SO yeah nihilistic philosophy.
-
I think a lot of Anime presents Objectivish themes. Its strange, the absolute commitment of the death worshiping samurai has been turned into someone's absolute commitment to their own values. I think this is do to a Nietzsche influence in some Japanese philosophy (Kyoto School).
-
Haha so true about the final fantasy comment.
1) The dude is a moral nihilists. He claims to be at least. He just sees his choies as arbitrary, even though he chose a utilitarian belief system. Some moral nihilists are practically individualists.
2) My question is how one should respond to the problem of suffering. Maybe the response is "suffering is not a problem", which seems to be the Objectivist response. Nietzsche wrote about this extensively, and I was wondering if Ayn Rand agreed with Nietzsche, or really did think that suffering was trivial (even though it is a part of many peoples lives).
3) Another alternative to nihilistic philosophies is existentialism. They tend to say things like "sure, life is full of pain, and there isn't any meaning to this pain, so I will make up a reason, cause thats okay." Existentialists are douche-bags though.
-
What is the Objectivist response to nihilism? Not moral nihilism, but the Nihilism Nietzsche was talking about in The Antichrist.
This is a link to a video of a Nihilist arguing with a moral nihilist (kind of a utilitarian/hedonist).
So the above guy is probably the most vulgar example of nihilism, where as the taoists might be the least hardcore nihilists. Now these philosophies are evil, but I would like to provide an adequate issue to the problem of suffering.
I mean, Ayn Rand treats it as a non-issue.... I do not know why she does though. Can someone explain why Nihlism is wrong. I have some ideas on solutions, but I was curious on what Ayn rand though.
-
Rorschach was insane, and was more of a kantian than anything. Plus the write of the original story, Alan Moore, hated Ayn Rand.
My pick would be Slum Dog Millionaire. Probably the most Objectivist movie I have ever seen other than the obvious.
Obama a nihilist?
in Political Philosophy
Posted
I don't think so, egalitarian nihilist would only make sense if Obama was one of those life-haters who are obsessed with suffering. If he meant "amoral" then maybe, but one can not be consistently egalitarian and amoral (positively).