How To Be Happy

[tadmjones]

14 hours ago, Boydstun said:

..That is neither rocket science nor obvious; it is a wide consilience of inductions to something as absolutely established as the existence of the hydrogen atom.

So Whitehead was correct that western philosophy is a footnote to Plato?

 

[Boydstun]

5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

So Whitehead was correct that western philosophy is a footnote to Plato?

 

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time.

By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

Edited April 12 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

So not just an Italian thing , lol.

[KyaryPamyu]

On 4/11/2024 at 11:48 PM, Boydstun said:

He is simply wrong and fudging, like so many philosophers before him, in trying to slip teleology into inanimate matter before the molecular machinery of life is on hand.*

He's not trying; he's going full tilt. And yet, he thinks that teleology is false. That's a rather odd thing: he claims that something untrue is, in fact, true. It's quite unintelligible, from an Objectivist framework, why someone would ever want to do that. But temporarily switching to Mainländer's standpoint might remove some of that unintelligibility.

I suspect that most people (but by no means all of them) would simply yawn if someone told them that atoms tend towards stability. This is because human beings are not computer chips; they are teleological beings, whose constitution is specialized toward value-based frameworks: "want", "avoid", "like", "dislike", "seek", "fight".

Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable." It's probably safe to assume that many listeners would find themselves involuntarily drawn to this story - even if they never cared about atoms before.

Now, consider the following:

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair; (*)

Here, it's quite obvious for all readers that the poet is not actually claiming that the earth is thirsty. Notice, however, that the poem is true all the same. Give some water to your plants, and you will observe that the earth is, truly: very, very thirsty. So thirsty!

Equipped with this new standpoint, here is Mainländer - the philosopher whose metaphysics is teleological - lambasting someone who took teleology to be literally true:

"You teach a teleology that cannot be thought of as more comprehensive and terrible. You assume millions and billions of miracles every minute, and you, cruel romantic, want to throw us back into the dark Middle Ages, i.e., forge us into the dreadful chains of the physico-theological proof of the existence of God. You philosophize as if Kant were yet to be born, as if we are not fortunate enough to possess the second part of his Critique of Judgment. Do you wish to be a serious man of science, an honest researcher of nature? Do you not know that absolute teleology is the grave of all natural science?" - Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Vol. II., p. 570)

And now we can revisit Mainländer's claim that the function of the world is to destroy all useful energy. Does the world really pursue that goal, or in fact, any goal? Probably not. Does everything unwittingly contribute to entropy, as if the world pursued its own demise? Yes. The judgement is true, just as the earth is, in fact, thirsty.

Long before I discovered Objectivism or Kant, I was spontaneously creating regulative explanations of the world for myself. At no time did I believe those explanations to be factual; their factuality was beside the point. They satisfied my soul -much more than any dry descriptions of facts.

Briefly put, a regulative judgement does not merely communicate facts; it makes those facts sink deep into your skin. It can turn something like entropy into a worldview that makes people be at peace with tension and chaos, and more mindful of what's worth pursuing and what isn't. And that's one way philosophy can contribute to human happiness.

Edited April 13 by KyaryPamyu

[KyaryPamyu]

Why live at all?

The canned Objectivist response to this question goes something like this: "A motive is a reason for doing something, and survival is the only reason for doing anything. If you don't want survival, motives are irrelevant to you."

The number of real-world people who find this answer useful is probably slim to none, so we can move on with our investigations. Why live at all? I think Objectivism somewhat indirectly answers this question through its distinction between "motivation by love" and "motivation by pain". Let us quickly concertize both.

"Why live at all?"

Answers motivated by fear of pain:

• Dying is painful or scary; plus, a botched suicide might leave me in a disabled condition.
• I fear that dying is not truly the end, and a worse fate will expect me.
• It would pain me to bring sadness or disillusionment to my loved ones.

Answers motivated by love of life:

• The suffering I am going through will soon end, then I'll be rocking a good life again.
• I'm having fun. There's still plenty of movies to see, lots of sex to have, many spiritual heights to unlock.
• My life is decent but I'm expecting a breakthrough. In the future, there lies the X I'm looking for: spiritual triumph over distress and dissatisfaction of all kinds.

For now, I'll skip over the "motivation by pain" part and jump straight to motivation by love. As far as the latter goes, what can Objectivism do for:

• People for whom pleasure is no longer impressive or attractive enough to justify the purchase of an entire life.
• Individuals who feel like their accomplishments so far have not gotten them closer to happiness, but have merely changed the specifics of their lifestyle (and so it will continue).

I'd say that there's not much the Objectivist ethics can do for such people, because ethics presupposes that: a). pleasure is blowing your mind, and b). you see the future with rose-tinted glasses. By contrast, if you think that pleasure is not all it's cracked up to be, or that the future is nothing special (when the dust eventually settles), you may start to feel as Fichte said:

"Shall I eat and drink only that I may hunger and thirst and eat and drink again, till the grave which is open beneath my feet shall swallow me up, and I myself become the food of worms? Shall I beget beings like myself, that they too may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves to do the same that I have done? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this ceaseless and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to pass away, and pass away only that they may re-appear unaltered; — this monster continually devouring itself that it may again bring itself forth, and bringing itself forth only that it may again devour itself?" (*, p. 53)

___

There is one further area in which the Objectivist ethics probably falls flat. Consider the words of the staunch atheist Mainländer:

"One day, I witnessed how an old good lady visited an acquaintance, who had lost her husband a few days ago and was in a depressed state. As the old, withered, silver-haired lady said goodbye, she spoke: “Stay calm. God does not forsake the widows and orphans.”

Not these words themselves moved and shook me: it was the sound of the voice, the tone of great determination, of the most unshakable faith, of unconditional trust; it was the glance of the blue eyes, that flashed light and then glowed calmly, brightly, mildly, peacefully again. (...)

As religion gives the individual the marvelous trust, it gives it in the cloak of pretty delusion. It lures humans with a sweet image, which awakens in them the passionate desire and with the embrace of the marvelous illusion it crushes the fear of death away from his breast. He has contempt for the earthly life, to maintain a more beautiful heavenly life. (...)

We live now in a period, where the blissful internalization by the continual decrease of faith becomes more and more rare, the unhappy groundlessness and peacelessness become more and more common: it is the period of inconsolable unbelief.

Only the philosophy remains. Can she help? Can she, without a personal God and without a Kingdom of Heaven on the other side of the grave, give a motive, which internalizes, concentrates and thereby sprouts the blossom of the real trust, the unshakable peace of mind? Yes, she can; certainly, she can do it. She bases the trust upon pure knowledge, like religion grounded it upon faith." (*)

Clearly, Leonard Peikoff does not agree with the words I bolded out, because in OPAR he says:

"The ability to achieve values, I must add, is useless if one is stopped from exercising that ability—e.g., if an individual is caught in a dictatorship; or is suffering from a terminal illness; or loses an irreplaceable person essential to his very existence as a valuer, as may occur in the death of a beloved wife or husband. In such situations, suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible." (Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man)

So, it's safe to say that the Objectivist ethics does not advertise itself as something able to help you find happiness and meaning even at your worst. (For many people in the West and East, that aspect is still currently handled by religion.)

Upon hearing about Leonard Peikoff's announcement that he has finally, after 8 decades of life, found true happiness, one member of this forum commented:

"Peikoff describes himself as finally fully happy at age 81 (though I'm certain he must have enjoyed himself to some extent throughout his life), and he attributes this to having discovered what he "really wants to do in life" (as opposed to at least some portion of his work theretofore, which he "dreaded"). To me, in my life, such a thing is simply unacceptable. I would not want to wait until I'm 81 to be able to describe myself as "finally fully happy" and in fact I have not waited. Though I have challenges and setbacks from day to day, as I expect everyone must, and sometimes severe or lasting ones, I consider myself happy in all of the major areas of life."

The takeaway of today's installment is that there are at least two areas where Objectivism openly does not promise much power: a). blows of fate, and b). overly-stringent personal criteria for happiness.

Those whose ethics is based on the "pursuit of happiness" and "non-lifeboat scenarios", should remember the words of this Mesopotamian poem written 3 millennia ago:

He who was alive yesterday is dead today.
For a minute someone is downcast,
then suddenly full of cheer.
One moment he sings in exaltation,
Another he groans like a professional mourner.
The people's condition changes like opening and shutting [i.e. in a twinkling].
When starving they become like corpses,
When sated they rival their gods.
In good times they speak of scaling heaven
When it goes badly, they complain of going down to hell. (*)

Edited April 18 by KyaryPamyu

[Boydstun]

6 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Why live at all?

. . .

Why and why and why.

A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide.*

The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects, though not ones I most treasured and aimed for as a youth. And I have been happy.

"I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice . . . I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of these things." –Dr. Fried

–S

 

Edited April 19 by Boydstun

[KyaryPamyu]

Sex, cigars, and Jesus. What do they have in common? Leonard Peikoff says:

"One schizophrenic in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital routinely equated sex, cigars, and Jesus Christ. He regarded all these existents, both in his thought and in his feelings about them, as interchangeable members of a single class, on the grounds that all had an attribute in common, “encirclement.”. . . Imagine studying cigars and then applying one’s conclusions to Jesus!" (OPAR, Definition as the Final Step In Concept-Formation)

Just imagine! But wait a minute...

"The units of the concepts “existence” and “identity” are every entity, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist." (ITOE, p. 56)

In other words, "existence" is not an entity, but a shorthand way of referring to sex, cigarettes, Jesus, and everything I left out due to space-related reasons.

And yet, neither Rand nor Peikoff have any problem with statements like "existence is X', "existence is Y". This indicates that, in a certain context, applying your conclusion about cigars to Jesus is A-OK, and not schizophrenic at all. But how? Under which conditions is it possible to generalize from cigars to everything else? (Guys, I promise this is related to achieving happiness!)

Let's start with the wrong answer: the basis of this wondrous generalization cannot be relations. Relations between what? I can see how one apple can be to the right of a tomato, but I can't envision a spatial "relation" without the apple and orange. Ditto for any other kind of relation.

Let us continue with the proper answer: sex, cigars and Jesus must share some concrete quality. In another thread, I wrote about Spinoza's observation that:

"two existents can't be classified into the same class (world) if they're radically different. For example, in popular culture we say that god is not situated on the Moon or in the Andromeda galaxy - he's located in another dimension entirely. That's an intuitive grasp of Spinoza's observation: god is too different to be classified into the same world as the objects we know.

With this, a famous problem enters the philosophical scene. A basketball has weight, size, rigidity, and as a consequence it can hit or push other objects (that likewise have weight, size, rigidity). In contrast, the mind totally lacks any of those qualities, so it's impotent to hit or push material objects. Its impotence extents to the entirety of the vast material universe, with the sole exception of one's physical body."

In other words, we can envision a basketball smashing a window, because the basketball and the window are fundamentally alike. Conversely, we can't imagine our minds smashing a window Jedi-style, because the mind has no weight, no rigidity, it cannot fly from one position in spacetime to another. The question then arises: how does the mind interact with physical existents? Harry Binswanger is on the right track:

"Since your consciousness causes your voluntary action, and since the physiological cause of your action is a process in the brain, it follows that your consciousness has the power to change the physical state of your brain.

This conclusion may appear to contradict the primacy of existence, since it means that consciousness alters the state of something in the physical world — the brain. But that worry is unfounded. The primacy of existence holds that a state of awareness neither creates nor alters its object." (H. Binswanger - How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, ch. 1)

Many Objectivists will seethe at Binswanger's separation of mind and brain; this is because they're under the false impression that Ayn Rand has condoned their own spiritually bankrupt materialism. But let's move on.

Philipp Mainländer concurs with Rand that similar objects can be classified together - which simply means: to speak of one member of the class, is to speak of all others. However, unlike Rand (which is silent on this), he saw "similarity" naturalistically, as the offshoot of genetic development. Simply put: when two chemicals combine, what will result from that? That's right, another chemical. "Chip off the old block"; from chemicals, only more chemicals can emerge.

So far, we can tell Mr. Spinoza that sex, cigars and Jesus can be classified togheter on the basic of genetic kinship: all three are derived from a small number of basic chemical elements.

• About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.
• The complex mixture of chemicals in tobacco smoke includes carbon monoxide [oxygen, carbon], benzene [hydrogen, carbon] and others.

Now, if the kinship between humans and cigars is explained by their reliance on the basic elements, then what about those basic elements themselves? Why do they look as if they were "cut from the same cloth"?

That cloth is no more, replies the sober Mainlander. It's not rocket science: if two elements are needed to beget a third one, then a single, lonely element wouldn't have anything to combine with in order to generate the diversity in the world. The "cloth" had to break down, leaving behind those kindred chemicals.

(Henceforth, I will refer to the "cloth" as the Overbeing)

Us humans are, in many respects, at the mercy of external factors. By contrast, the Overbeing was the sole existent; nothing else was around to set it in motion. It contained all motion within itself, so to speak. Therefore (regulatively speaking), when the Overbeing split itself up into parts, it merely followed the impulse within the innermost core of its own being.

What does "speaking regulatively" mean? It means that we are in a situation where how we describe something is irrelevant. Suppose that someone turns on the TV, and the newscaster says: "A meteorite is heading toward Antarctica!" The viewer quips: "Well, actually! Its not heading toward Antarctica, like a human might head to Walmart. It's just following the laws of physics!" No, Mr. TV Watcher, at the most profound level, the meteorite is indeed heading toward Antarctica. This is not the time for nitpicking. To believe in your heart of hearts that the meteorite wants to go to Antarctica accords with existential fact. And now, good luck.

As a reminder, we were talking about how the Overbeing disintegrated into parts, into a collective (i.e. what Objectivists call "existence"). In this collective, everything interlocks. Leonard Peikoff's, in his lecture titled Unity in Epistemology and Ethics, describes how a change in one atom ends up producing an effect in all other atoms, from one corner of the Universe to the other. Mainländer echoes:

"Lichtenberg once said that a pea thrown into the North Sea raises the level of the sea on the Japanese coast, even though the change in level cannot be perceived by the human eye. Likewise, it is logically certain that a pistol shot fired on our earth will have its effect on Sirius, indeed on the outermost limits of the immeasurable universe; for this universe is always in the most violent tension and is not a limp, lame, pathetic so-called infinite." (P. Mainländer - The Philosophy of Redemption, Metaphysics)

You, the reader, are just one individual among a finite, but unimaginably vast collective of individuals. Of course, you are not conscious of how every atom in the universe has an influence on you; this subterranean influence might feel as if an inexplicable, invisible hand is sometimes guiding you toward some things and away from others, as if fate is at play. Here's an area where religionists intuitively grasp something about their existence, but don't know how to explain it except by personifying nature into gods.

For our next step, observe how bitterly people regret the mistakes they make, how remorsefully they hit themselves in the head over bygones. It doesn't require a genius to see that, had they known in advance what they were about to do, they would have instantly avoided that course of action, like one avoids the Bubonic plague. People do not voluntarily throw themselves into the fiery pits of hell, but do so out of ignorance and various conjectures. When people get burned to a crisp, they naturally learn their lesson, and have no need for snarky remarks from moralizing priests and Objectivists. In some cases, said individuals might even begin to overthink to the point of choice-paralysis. And overthinking is a common malady of our modern culture, stripping away people's will-to-live as we speak.

In short, in the innermost kernel of our actual day-to-day lives (abstractions be damned), we are faced with something very strange: our own mistakes paradoxically happen to us. We can learn from our mistakes, and are quite eager to do so when things go south; but we are also, in all things and matters, guided by that invisible, supernatural hand (we are always speaking metaphorically).

But what if this invisible hand chooses to make my life miserable? Well, Mainlander tells us to look at Christianity: according to its adherents, the Heavenly Father wants bliss and joy for his children, and the children want bliss and joy for themselves too! A happier concordance of desires could not be imagined. Thus, when things get messy, they are consoled by the thought that whatever the invisible hand (God) does, he does it in order to guide people toward a Kindom of absolute bliss, where everyone will be reunited with their friends and lovers, and there's going to be happiness and revelry throughout, and no existential crises will ever arise. What is the atheist Mainländer going to make of this? Well, those religionists are again intuitively grasping a profound truth, and yet again, they lack the means to explain it without inventing pretty delusions.

If it wasn't clear from the preceding, people cling to Christianity because religion offers a coping mechanism; a way to deal with the blows of fate, contra Peikoff's talk of "suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible." Mainländer looked at Schopenhauer's philosophy, and thought: "wow, if this philosophy is purified from errors, it could provide people with that unwavering fearlesness that religion provides - but on the basis of knowledge, not faith." Let's see what he was up to.

In our daily lives, we experience a more "colloquial" form of entropy. If we don't clean our houses regularly, things will get messy. If we don't drink water over and over again, we will die of dehidration.

"we continually die, our life is a slow death struggle, every day death gains, against every human, more might, until it extinguishes of everyone the light of life." (P. Mainländer - The True Trust)

It is no different for the Universe. Like us, the Universe is growing old; with each day that passes, it is growing closer to its ultimate fate: all life on Earth will vanish, the Sun's hydrogen supply will run out, stars and planets will be yanked out of their orbits, everything will decay until only black holes are left, and the last black hole will evaporate. The Universe will continue to expand further and further away, spreading sub-atomic particles so thin that they will never interact with another particle ever again. And then, just a cold, black void for eternity, as time loses meaning. Continuing:

"Could such an organization of the things be possible at all, if in essence, man, in the primordial core of his being, would not want death?"

(By "primordial core", he is referring to the Overbeing; the impulse of destruction originated from within it, resulting in its disintegration. [It will be a looong disintegration, lasting something like one googol (1x10¹⁰⁰) years].)

All of the matter composing our bodies was in the Overbeing, so that destructive impulse was metaphorically "our" impulse as well, in the "primordial core" of our being.

"Ethics is eudaemonics or the doctrine of happiness: an explanation that has been challenged for thousands of years without being shaken. The task of ethics is to examine happiness, i.e. the state of satisfaction of the human heart, in all its phases, to grasp it in its most perfect form and to place it on a firm foundation, i.e. to indicate the means by which man can attain full peace of heart, the highest happiness." (Philosophy of Redemption, Ethics)

In light of all of the preceding, what could bring us full peace of heart, the highest happiness? Before completing today's investigations, let's see if we can attune ourselves, for a moment, to Goethe's wavelength:

"I have always been praised as someone particularly favored by good fortune; nor do I want to complain or criticize the course of my life. But basically it has been nothing but toil and labor, and I can well say that in my seventy-five years I have not had four weeks of real pleasure. It was the eternal rolling of a stone that always wanted to be lifted anew." (Conversations with Eckermann)

It seems like Goethe is saying that success is an uphill battle; and of course, he is right, because the natural tendency of the Universe is entropic (the dirty house!) and consequently nothing is secure: reputation, jobs, fame, social harmony and everything else are a ticking time bomb. Now, what if, unlike Goethe, you become thoroughly fed up with your distress? Is the answer not already obvious?

Stop caring! Stop deriving your happiness from external conditions, whenever possible. Remember the Mesopotamian poem I quoted in the previous installment: good and bad alternate like flapping your legs when you walk; don't allow yourself to have "only four weeks of real pleasure", and shout:

• "I don't mind experiencing [bad outcome]!"
• "I don't mind missing out on [good thing]!"

With those words, you're not saying that you want bad things to happen, but rather that you don't mind it if, in spite of your sensible efforts, they do.

(I'm not placing Peikoff on the same level as Goethe, but his discovery of happiness at age 81 seems to be in the same vein. As for Rand: my view of her is that she can was like a raging storm, rather than a calm and blissful lake.)

In this thread, I chose to bring up Mainländer's newly translated work because of: a) the Nietzsche-Rand connection, and b). the remarkable similarity between Rand and Mainländer's epistemology. The latter's immortal contribution (tongue-in-cheek, since he empathized the mortality of the universe) was his insight that philosophizing regulatively (yet based on real knowledge) can give religion a run for its money. And the idea of such philosophical poetry came from Kant, of all people, who was so rigid and dutiful to holy Reason that people set their clocks by his daily walks.

This aesthetic and teleological bridging-tactic thereby emotionally super-charges the personal and social practice of natural scientific research by conferring upon it the collectively-felt solidarity of a coherent, meaningful, and intersubjectively valid rational enterprise. In this sense, Kant is the original discoverer of the aesthetics of science. (Hanna, Robert, "Kant’s Theory of Judgment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Edited April 20 by KyaryPamyu

[KyaryPamyu]

Apparently, this was one of Ayn Rand's favorite paintings.

Salvador Dali, Corpus Hypercubus, oil on canvas, 29" by 23", 1954. Rand's favorite painting - she spent hours contemplating it at the Metropolitan Musuem of art. She even felt a kinship between her personal view of John Galt's defiance over his torture in Atlas Shrugged and Dali's depiction of the suffering of Jesus. (Jeff Britting- Ayn Rand)

 

 

Remember that part where John Galt explains to his tormentors how to fix the torture device that had broken? I guess Rand really liked men who don't back down.

While I was reading The Fountainhead, I distinctly remember starting to feel physically sick on more than one occasion. I felt as if the author wanted to subject Roark to every possible misfortune. Needless to say, reading until the end took some willpower.

Consider here a moral man who has not yet reached professional or romantic fulfillment—an Ayn Rand hero, say, like Roark or Galt, at the point when he is alone against the world, barred from his work, destitute. In existential terms, such a man has not “achieved his values”; he is beset by problems and difficulties. Nevertheless, if he is an Ayn Rand hero, he is confident, at peace with himself, serene; he is a happy person even when living through an unhappy period. (...)

A man of this kind has “achieved his values”—not his existential values, but the philosophical values that are their precondition. He has achieved not success, but the ability to succeed, the right relationship to reality. The emotional leitmotif of such a person is a unique and enduring form of pleasure: the pleasure that derives from the sheer fact of a man’s being alive—if he is a man who feels able to live. We may describe this emotion as “metaphysical pleasure,” in contrast to the more specific pleasures of work, friendship, and the rest. Metaphysical pleasure does not erase the pains incident to daily life, but, by providing a positively toned context for them, it does blunt them; in the same manner, it intensifies one’s daily pleasures. (OPAR, Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man)

I can't say I'm too inspired by this "metaphysical pleasure," but I can say what I personally see in Dali's painting.

Christ is liberated from suffering, without being liberated from the cross (which represents hardship). This is why he appears fixed to the cross, but not fixed at the same time; the four nails float in front of him, not making contact with their targets. In a certain sense, we are all on that cross, and we too can discover that we don't need to remove the cross in order to be happy.

Edited April 22 by KyaryPamyu

[KyaryPamyu]

Man's Craving for Nothingness

According to Schopenhauer, pleasure does not come to us originally and of itself; instead, pleasure is only able to exist as a removal of a pre-existing pain or want, while pain (which signals a threat to survival) directly and immediately proclaims itself to our perception. This is mirrored in Objectivist theory:

"Pleasure—using the term for a moment to designate any form of enjoyment—is an effect. Its cause is the gaining of a value, whether it be a meal when one is hungry, an invitation to a party, a diamond necklace, or a long-sought promotion at work. The root of values, in turn, is the requirements of survival. Self-preservation, in other words, entails goal-directed action, success at which leads (in conscious organisms) to pleasure." (OPAR, Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man)

We could also state this idea as follows: the constant entropic pull, which wants to disintegrate our bodies, is the root of all pleasure. And we certainly like pleasure, so it's no surprise that the most desirable life for us is the one least troubled by debilitating sickness, distracting pain, mental over-strain, hunger, social conflict and the like.

Thus, man's deepest desire, his most sought-after jewel, is Invincibility; he wants the ability to act purely for acquiring pleasure (motivation from love), without worrying that, in his pursuit of joy, he might mess something up and bring Nature's wrath upon his head (motivation from pain). To be invincible then, is to be worry-less, like a child that has not yet been acquainted with the realities of life.

Like sleeping infants the gods
   breathe without plan or purpose;
      the spirit flowers
         continually within them,
            chastely cherished,
               as in a small bud,
                  and their holy eyes
                     look out in still
                        eternal clearness.

(Friedrich Hölderlin - Hyperion's Song of Fate)

Yet this kind of Invincibility is impossible to man:

But to us no resting
   place is given. As
      suffering humans we
         decline and blindly fall
            from one hour to the next,
               like water thrown
                  from cliff to cliff,
                     year after year, down
                        into the Unknown.

Before he decided that philosophy can't compete with poetry, the celebrated German poet Friedrich Hölderlin studied philosophy at the Tübinger Stift, where he was friends and roommates with two giants of philosophy, Hegel and Schelling. In his philosophical thought, Hölderlin was primarily reacting to the then-trending philosophy of Fichte.

According to Fichte, "I act" literally means "I am disrupting the current state", and that current state is obviously inert matter. Regardless of whether Nature truly exists or not, human cognition needs it in order to make possible the consciousness of free agency. Apart from that, Nature has no other value, thought Fichte.

Hölderlin was not a fan of this. After all, things like scientific and poetic talent are generously offered by Nature, and are not generated by us ex nihilo. Fichte's theory also worsens the rift between free beings and mechanistic "nature", by turning Nature into a mere instrument for human projects. Furthermore, since:

no external inhibition = no possibility of freedom

Fichte declared that "freedom from limitations" is an infinite goal of morality, an imaginary ideal we can only approach step by step, with no end in sight. This did not go well with the younger generation, which was just recovering from the failure of the French Revolution to deliver its promised utopia.

Riffing on the same theme, Hölderlin held that the human condition is characterized by two opposing drives:

• 1) the desire to be Myself, as against "That";
• 2) the desire to attain "That", precisely because it is separate from Myself, therefore threatening my autonomy and Invincibility

As Hölderlin's preference for poetry over philosophy suggests, he locates the resolution of this conflict in the feeling of Beauty. In Aesthetic contemplation, we (spiritually) attain the end-goal of all moral striving, i.e. we feel both infinite and determinate (limited) at the same time.

It is different for the real world. Here, "survival" and "life" are synonymous. The day this impossible Indestructibility is achieved is the day where "survival/life" is no longer a thing. Thus, the striving for our most sought-after jewel, for Invincibility, is paradoxically an open striving for destruction.

___

(My source for Hölderlin's metaphysics was Edward Kanterian's excellent recorded lecture delivered at the University of Kent, 23 November 2012.)

Edited April 25 by KyaryPamyu

[KyaryPamyu]

According to some Objectivists, "Identity" presupposes that the Universe is comprised of more than one single existent. That is, no doubt, an observation from experience. When we say that an object is "finite", we mean that it has a boundary; precisely where that object ends, another one begins. So we say, for example, that the US "ends" where Canada begins (in the north), or where Mexico begins (in the south), etc.

People seem to intuitively grasp this concept. Suppose that someone is experiencing an existential crisis. His friend asks "What are you so anxious about?" to which the other replies "Nothing in particular". In other words, there's no particular offending "thing" or "object" to narrow down, because everything is the issue. By contrast, a determinate "thing" is a delimitation, a narrowing down from the "All".

Keeping this metaphysical preamble in mind, we can now turn to the fate of humanity.

In the beginning stages of humanity, the difference between man and beast was not very pronounced; it's almost impossible to imagine primitive people committing suicide over existential angst. On the contrary: the more difficult life was, the stronger people clung to it. Fast forward to our current times, and we've climbed to a stage where being eaten by animals or getting bashed in the head with a rock is a lot less common. By all metrics, life today is better than it used to be. But if Schopenhauer's observation is correct, then:

When life is free of problems, our mind compensates by turning trifles into big issues. (*)

So long as we are determinate beings (finite), there is always something external to us that can potentially cause trouble for ourselves. Therefore, there is no end to "progress". When we successfully solve a pressing problem, there is a brief period of celebration, after which we begin to notice another crack in the wall. In truth, that crack was always there, but we were too busy with other things to notice it:

What real value is there for a man
In all the gains he makes beneath the sun?
(...)
The eye never has enough of seeing,
Nor the ear enough of hearing.
Only that shall happen
Which has happened,
Only that occur
Which has occurred;
There is nothing new
Beneath the sun!

(Ecclesiastes)

At our stage of history, most people do not have the luxury to ponder existential questions. But if at some point in the future, humanity at large becomes disappointed with the futility of problem-solving, people might change their strategy and pour all of their efforts into a new project: the mind. After all, happiness is in the brain, so to speak.

If scientists discover a way to modify the human brain in such a way that unhappiness becomes physically impossible to experience, it's quite likely that many people will opt for this modification. At this hypothetical stage of history, we'd see a grim spectacle: billions of people standing still, in their synthetic bodies made of very resilient materials, enjoying continuous bliss for millions of years until the Sun finally swallows up the Earth. In essence, human progress might not be a "straight line" which extends into infinity, but rather an "arch" that begins with a rise to glory and ends with a descent into non-life.

In the previous installment, we explored Fichte's claim that Nature fulfills a formal role: to make us aware of our freedom. We, speaking regulatively, can modify Fichte's theory, and say that futility fulfills a formal role in the human soul:

Only in a world where "doing a good job" is not necessarily followed by a just reward, can we stop acting for "rewards" and instead, pursue excellence because it's enjoyable.

 

"Those who [are] always looking ahead and impatiently anticipating what is coming, as something which will make them happy when they get it, are, in spite of their very clever airs, exactly like those donkeys one sees in Italy, whose pace may be hurried by fixing a stick on their heads with a wisp of hay at the end of it; this is always just in front of them, and they keep on trying to get it. Such people are in a constant state of illusion as to their whole existence; they go on living ad interim, until at last they die." (Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, §5).

 

Edited April 27 by KyaryPamyu

[KyaryPamyu]

On 4/13/2024 at 10:03 PM, KyaryPamyu said:

Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable."

Why Life Originated (And Why it Continues)

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[The Lord to Mephistopheles:]

Man is too apt to sink into mere satisfaction,
A total standstill is his constant wish:
Therefore your company, busily devilish,
Serves well to stimulate him into action.

(Goethe - Faust)