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A sense of life seems like part of existence (“out there” to be proven) but it isn’t. It can’t really be proven, in the same sense and for the same reasons that colors can’t be explained to the blind. One man’s core can’t be taken out and shared with another, no matter how much he may wish to.
Agreed.
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So I’m sorry that all my sexy, sexy poetry interfered with that whole “truth” business. B)
LOL
I’m still not certain how much you ought apologize for (honest confusion has a rightful place in discourse), but if there is anything for me to forgive, you’re forgiven.
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On 12/27/2016 at 10:36 AM, DonAthos said:
I think that no one who has experienced pleasure does not want it. I think that no one who has experienced happiness does not want it.
These goods are “good” according to their nature (or more specifically, according to our nature); we derive our concept of good from them.
With regard to raw sensory values, such as the physical stimuli of pleasure or pain, yes. We’re all born with the evaluations of such sensations hardwired into our nervous systems (at least at first).
Exactly. We do not “choose” our fundamental orientation to pleasure or pain. This is what allows us to eventually conceive of things in terms of “good” and “evil.”
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With regard to conceptual values, I don’t think so. Values like truth, integrity, justice, productive work, pride, beauty and romance (which are so much more meaningful than any isolated sensation could ever be) aren’t universal or automatic, at all; they depend on volitional mental processes.
I agree with you that such conceptual values depend upon volitional mental processes, yet note that I did not refer to “truth, integrity, justice, productive work, pride, beauty and romance,” but happiness. And my point about happiness was not that it is automatic, or achieved in a non-volitional manner, but that “no one who has experienced happiness does not want it.”
What happiness is , is good. I’ve not yet worked out the position in full, either in my own mind or in argument, but I suspect that happiness is the emotional concomitant of the mental projection of pleasure over time. Consider the “roots” of happiness, as a child. When are you “happy”? When you know that, tonight, you’re getting ice cream after dinner; when you know that you’re going to Disney World for your birthday; when it’s the cusp of summer vacation, which means that you’re going to spend your days swimming and fishing instead of listening to boring lectures. (And what is “sadness”? When you expect a punishment tonight, when Dad gets home.) I’ve a long ways to go from here, potentially, but this is the avenue of thought I’m exploring.
In any case, such is fully volitional and not automatic. Is it “universal”? I suspect it is, or nearly so, at least. Insofar as all human beings are equipped to experience pleasure, and insofar all human beings develop the wherewithal (and make subconscious “choices”) such that they can predict the experience of some pleasure or pain over time, then I would expect them to experience the same fundamental emotional state.
This is why Rand can depend upon “happiness” as the purpose of ethics, philosophy, and life itself, without having to make an argument for happiness, as such. She knows that her audience will have some experience of/understanding of what happiness is like, and she knows that happiness argues for itself, just as pleasure does, in that our experience of it is the good.
(I think it likely that some – or even most – people never experience a full adult happiness, where the evaluation is based upon a projection over one’s entire lifetime; but then, the childhood experience is likely enough to compensate for this, at least in providing the “purpose” for adult ethical reasoning.)
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Even those of us who have experienced that Aristotelean sort of “happiness” which we (Objectivists) all seek so fervently, won’t necessarily continue to want it in the way we should; it depends on our thoughts and choices.
I agree that consciously we may not “continue to want it in the way we should.” We can convince ourselves that all manner of things are more important than our happiness. (Including, funnily enough, our own technical survival.)
And certainly our thoughts and choices are instrumental in one’s pursuit of happiness (even if, as I argue, right thought and choice does not guarantee it). We can prevent ourselves from achieving happiness in innumerable ways, and especially if we consciously reject the idea that happiness is of value (let alone our ultimate value), or place something above it.
But the “wanting of happiness” I mean is not true wanting, in the full sense of the term. Maybe it’s my turn for poetry now? But I mean to point at the root of what allows for wanting in the first place. It is as “the choice to focus” is to actual, conscious, volitional choice. It is in the same sense as “liking” pleasure. (Pleasure is what enables us to “like”; we cannot opt not to “like” pleasure. “Liking” pleasure and “liking” happiness are both redundant, and insipid.)
In a metaphorical way of thinking, I would hold that the (actual) experience of happiness is utterly seductive to the human mind. Whatever thoughts a person holds about why he doesn’t care for happiness would melt utterly away in the face of the real McCoy, because just like pleasure, happiness cannot be denied.*
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* More poetry, perhaps. The experience of happiness could yet be denied on a conscious level, just like a person may tell himself “this is not pleasurable” when experiencing pleasure, or “this is not painful” when experiencing pain – but such fundamentally dishonest denials can only get a man so far.
How deep can evasion run? That’s an interesting question…
Edited to add: Just as the above with respect to pleasure, try to imagine someone experiencing happiness (or something like it – perhaps some variant of “joy”), like, say, a young child on Christmas morning, unwrapping his presents. Imagine that child saying to himself something like, “I do not like this experience of ‘joy’; I do not like this feeling, and I do not want it again.”
Does such a scenario seem realistic – at all? If you could picture such a thing, such a child saying that to himself (maybe because he’s been taught to do so), could he say so honestly?
If we could imagine some early-twenties philosophy student saying the same thing on a Christmas morn, smiling despite himself in a feeling of earnest joy that he otherwise, and as a matter of principle, would resent, maybe that’s a touch truer to reality. I’m sure that people talk themselves out of pleasures all the time.
Yet I believe that the evasion of one’s own actual experience can only run so deep. And where and when someone experiences happiness, I believe it beyond our ability to (honestly) say that we do not like it – because happiness is good of our nature.
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You underestimate the flexibility of the human mind.
Maybe I do.
But I believe that even the mind has a nature; that it is not infinitely malleable (just as happiness is not).
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I believe I’ve already mentioned it elsewhere but at one point, when I was a little Mormon, I realized that God was demanding (via the scriptures I read) my own self-induced blindness and the unconditional surrender of my critical faculty. I didn’t have those words for it, of course; all I knew was that the universe would give me infinite joy for doing what was obviously wrong, and infinite pain if I tried to do what was right.
So if you can’t imagine anyone who, when offered eternal bliss by God Himself, would spit in his eye… c’est moi!
Yes, but look.
Look at where you are now. Look at what you believe now. Even if you believe that at one point you committed yourself to “unconditional surrender,” apparently the surrender was not, in fact, unconditional.
I don’t doubt that a person can believe himself to reject all good, but I do doubt whether a person can actually reject all good.
It could be as you say that I underestimate the flexibility of the human mind, but insofar as I believe that we cannot “choose against pleasure” (in that we experience it as good, of our nature), and insofar as I believe that happiness finds its own roots in pleasure, then I believe that there must remain within a human mind, howsoever twisted, some capacity to yet recognize and respond to that which is in fact good. (This is what allows those who have “surrendered unconditionally” to yet overcome it; it is what allows people who have made themselves “blind” able to see.)
What the good is (including pleasure, including happiness), is not up for debate. It is not a matter of subjective choice. It is not arbitrary. It is a fact of our nature. And any individual may believe himself to be outside of that nature or not subject to it, or to be the one radical for whom “the bad is the good” and “the good the bad,” and he may act accordingly (to his own woe), but he cannot actually excuse himself from his own nature.
) Such a person is already so benighted and so lost that further self harm isn’t possible.