Seem like accurate critiques. I have been wondering if we are living in late stage capitalism and if silent quieting is the beginning of the workers revolt? Have we begun to realize after sitting at home during the pandemic that we aren’t supposed to just spend our lives in cubicles in order to earn money so we can buy stuff we don’t really want or need?

Interesting. Well I came to this conclusion by thinking on what pain is. Pain has a dualistic quality to it consisting of physical and psychological aspects. It’s by this dualistic natural that I conclude it must be the only truly universal experience meaning that humans can always recognize physical or psychological pain across cultures. From this point the only other thing that has a dualistic universal quality to it that I could think of was light. Once I started to correlate the two idea of pain and light I began to understand that pain shouldn’t always be avoided and is a necessary part of our universe as it could be a source energy or entropy from the change and growth process or something else. But I realized it is indeed universal and it’s due to pains intrinsic qualities that there will be more pain then pleasure, but pain being more abundant then pleasure also makes sense if the of goal of this place is the accumulation of wisdom via the application of having experiences and adding those experiences to knowledge. Which I believe can’t be achieved without a first person perspective. Hope that was at all understandable of how I arrived to my position. I assumed antinatalism was a a bleak out look of what the universe is where I would say my outlook is not that at all even though it appears I have arrived at very similar conclusions.

If you ask a matrix chatbot whose mission is to blur that line further.

Chuckles

Satan is not evil per se. There is no water proof explanation of evil in the Bible. He does not just obey and serve God. It would be circular to think that everything diverging from the status quo is automatically evil.

Break the loops and fill the pig holes.

Not even that is actually sacred.

Thoughts on the book “Philosophers: Their lives and the nature of their thought” by Ben Scharfstein? I just picked up a copy and wanting to start reading soon.

>Pain appears to me as neutral because the pain being experienced must always be made relative to the one experiencing it, as it could be good if it eliciting beneficial changes and growth.

Thanks for your reply. Benatar addresses this point and he says that even if pain has instrumental value, because it can lead to positive change, it is still pain. He is interested in weather the totality of pain or pleasure is more in the course of the whole life.

It seems from your reply that you have arrived at the conclusion that there is more pain than pleasure in life. How did you arrive at that conclusion.

“We don’t have a current rational explanation for this phenomena” doesn’t mean “it was aliens/God/ghosts/anything else made up,” it means “something caused this and we don’t know what.” There’s no need to involve aliens there, and no scientific approach would consider aliens a possibility without a presupposition of aliens existing.

Schelling’s Freiheitschrift ‘freedom essays’ touches on evil in deep and I’d say, rather unconventional ways. He elevates evil to a status, unlike any philosopher before him in the western canon. While, evil, is not ‘the answer’ for him. It’s a part of the equation that in the least must be accounted for, if not incorporated into, the very idea of freedom itself. This work isn’t what I would call a ‘philosophy of life’, however, because the question of evil having absolute importance to the possibility of freedom in his eyes, then it might qualify. Although, as a warning, this work is enormously complicated and obscure. From the scale of the book, being, I don’t know, 60-75 pages? It’s probably the most dense book I’ve come across.

Pardon the brevity of the response, but, perhaps, I can touch on the ‘cliff notes’ to this subject as there is certainly much more to be said here, and I will undoubtedly leave lacunae. Now, I cannot speak to Deleuze, however, regarding Spinoza, it depends on what you mean by ‘act freely’. If by this you mean, ‘free will’ in the sense of the supposed ability of humans to make choices/actions independently of any antecedent -then, the answer is, you cannot, ‘act freely’. For this would still fall under the ‘imaginary’ form of knowledge within Spinoza’s epistemology. That is to say, the knowledge that one would have of the ‘notion of freedom’ would be a deformed one, of sorts. Strictly speaking, the only one, or thing, that can ‘act freely’ in an absolute sense, is God or nature. “that thing is said to be free which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone" (EID7). nature/god is the causa sui. The cause of itself I.e dependent upon nothing else, nor anything outside itself. Unlike a human being, who is dependent upon things outside itself and antecedents before itself.

For the human agent, the way to ‘act freely’ if one follows, or at least provisionally accept Spinoza’s argument hitherto, one would find freedom in increasing/expanding our ‘joy’=‘power of acting’. We do this by coming to understand the ‘adequate causes’, that is, the necessity of things within nature, or God. Naively, the answer is, the more you understand the adequate causes of things the more one ‘knows’ and from this increase in knowing, we are more able to ‘act’ freely in the first place.

As I said, I’m no expert, and no doubt much more could be added here, but, I hope at the very least this may shed some clarity on your query.

Moreover,the subject of Freedom in Spinoza is a deeply rich and fascinating subject with varying degrees of scholarly discordance.

If you are looking for a supremely clear, erudite and authoritative account on Spinoza, I urge you to read essentially any book by Steven Nadler.

https://philosophy.wisc.edu/staff/nadler-steven/

However, for your seeming immediate purposes, his book entitled: Spinoza's 'Ethics': An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts), is likely the way to go. I cannot think of a better ‘trail guide’ to take into the magnificent labyrinth of the Ethics.

Happy reading/learning, and remember: “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”. Cheers

Wonderfully articulated. Thank you for this. It’s interesting; examining one’s “self” through the perception of others. It makes you really consider what you’re expressing, and how you go about it

I do as well, and much like an addiction, your first course of action is having the self-awareness to k ow you do

I have a minor in philosophy, and the classical philosophers are my favourites

Habermas covers a lot of topics. He was part of the Frankfurt School when they were active. The Frankfurt School were very interesting and worth looking into. What I like about Habermas is his critique of how the legal system, the economy, and modern bureaucracies have become overgrown, autonomous and self-referential and now crowd out basic human communication and social life. It's a helpful lens for understanding a lot of the alienation we see today.

Never heard of this but after doing some reading about it I can dig it!! Does he discuss or purpose a universal idea or experience from which all spoken conversation could be built from? I have a theory around this idea. Thanks for sharing!

I think I see capitalism more as pessimistic rather than evil, but I get it lol

It’s called capitalism lol

If we believe the whole of our consciousness is just the sum of our desires and behaviors and react accordingly to the internal and external stimuli of the world our ego then we only have the illusion of free will. Ie if you know some one who has a “temper or “short fuse” and you know what to say to set the person of or lose control they are acting in a pre determined way. However someone who chooses how to respond to something because they have recognized that the only thing that is in our control is ourselves is now acting freely or exercising there free will. This is why all world religions speak about start by looking within in order to understand our true nature and work on gaining mastery over ourselves. There was a phrase at the entrance of the Temple of Delphi which read, "Homo Nosce Te Ipsum," which means, "Man, know yourself, and you will know the universe, and its gods."

Finally nature at least in the view of these philosophers does not have awareness and thus has no ability of free will and must act in a predetermined way.. At least this is how I would interpret what these philosophers at trying to say at this point in my own journey.

One a desire is fulfilled we are ultimately unsatisfied by its fulfillment and either move the goal post by creating a new desire to fulfill or attempt to repeat fulfillment process. Both create a hamster wheel for us to run both lewd to the experience of some pain. IMO antinatalism works if someone accepts that the whole of who they are are just there desires and behaviors and cant exercise control over these things. It also falls apart if we view pain as just something bad or to be avoid and not merely as an unavoidable human experience that is universal. Pain appears to me as neutral because the pain being experienced must always be made relative to the one experiencing it, as it could be good if it eliciting beneficial changes and growth. But perhaps if we view pain as the best way to learn something (fear learning) it may actually be good if viewed this way.

Definitely the right thread for this post.

If you view the physical universe farthest from the one true source that all things emanate from then speaking a world gives it a physical manifestation moving that spoken word farther from the one true source. Viewed in this framework of the world I can see how this statement might make sense.

I think all world religions are first for the people in the time and place it was formed via some person who has leveled up or become enlightened to the true nature of our universe. This is why the meta message of the main world religions are roughly the same and speak to being born ignorant to our true nature and that we should all endeavor to figure it. Once this becomes apparent then it becomes obvious how we are to act in this world and treat others. So I would agree with your statement.

The most important thing is always be aware of the self, and how others perceive you. Always be thinking of why you’re saying what you’re saying, and how it will effect the perceiver. Understand you are a product of this world, and everything you know is because of you’re own personal experience. We’re all individuals on this magical plane of existence, and nobody really knows any more than that for sure.

Evil as a nature is itself, evil. The opposite of perceived good. So in itself, evil, can never be good. They are opposing ideologies, literal opposites. As long as you’re a good person with morals, evil will never be the answer. Evil may be the answer for an evil person, it may be the most logical/reasonable solution, but it’s still wrong.