Celebration of the banning of a bad actor like Bartricks reflects badly on no one. — DingoJones

‘Bad actor’. Big deal, so he was obnoxious. Personally, insults get my competitive juices flowing and seem
to bring out my best arguments. Maybe we should use a metric like ‘percentage of insults to arguments’ to decide who gets booted, to make sure our delicate sensibilities don’t blind us to whatever substantive contributions are intertwined with a nasty delivery.

You are in the majority here in terms of your thinking. I only know of three writers other than Kelly who deconstruct concepts of cultural sedimentation to reveal a more intricate process of meaning-making( Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin).

Here’s a bit more about Gendlin, whose work shares much with Heidegger, from a paper of mine.

While Gendlin agrees that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches mentioned in this paper leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency .

This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty's notion of intercorporeality.

By contrast , Gendlin's occurring into implying grounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.

“There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies.” (Gendlin 2009c)

Gendlin's re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger's Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.

“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”

“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”

personal construct theory is a meta-theory of psychology. It concerns itself with the terms and dimensions by which the individual understands themself and other people.

The usual tool is called a repertory grid. Imagine a grid of squares; down the side is a list of people y — unenlightened

I’d be careful in relying too much on the rep grid in trying to understand the main thrust of Kelly’s work. Here’s what Kelly had to say to an interviewer.

“In 1966 I asked him how he would have changed those two volumes, now that he had the perspective of over a decade later. After indicating that he probably would delete the section on the rep-grid, because it seemed to him that methodologically-oriented researchers had let it obscure the contribution of the theory, he added wistfully

"At the time I was already concerned that it might be too far from the mainstream to be recognized as psychology, but now-yes-I think I would have written it more honestly."

Not too many today are willing to deny that we can be swayed in one direction or another through influences we are not conscious of.
— Joshs

I don't see anything in Kelly's theory to suggest this type of influence doesn't obtain at least to some degree (and I don't think any major theorist post WWII suggests this). …the fact that the self is negotiated with the social in different ways according to its particular make-up does not preclude it being swayed by social influences in a way it's not conscious of, not least because our interpetative mechanisms naturally confabulate reasons for our behaviour compatible with self-understandings that are by their nature subjective methods of social coping rather than objective truths. — Baden

Kelly understands the notion of the unconscious in terms of levels of awareness, or the distinction between implicit
and explicit consciousness , rather than in terms of
an unconscious that is completely unavailable to awareness.

“We do not use the conscious-unconscious dichotomy, but we do recognize that some of the personal constructs a person seeks to subsume within his system prove to be fleeting or elusive. Sometimes this is because they are loose rather than tight, as in the first phase of the creative cycle. Sometimes it is because they are not bound by the symbolisms of words or other acts. But of this we are sure, if they are important in a person's life it is a mistake to say they are unconscious or that he is unaware of them. Every day he experiences them, often all too poignantly, except he cannot put his finger on them nor tell for sure whether they are at the spot the therapist has probed for them.”

Kelly explains that repression is not a useful construct in personal construct theory

“ Our theoretical position would not lead us to place so much emphasis upon what is presumably ‘repressed'. Our concern is more with the constructs which are being used by the client to structure his world. If certain elements have dropped out of his memory it may be simply that he has ceased to use the structures which imbued these elements with sense. We do not see these abandoned elements as covertly operating stimuli in the client's life.”

I understand Kelly as proposing that personal construct systems are formed over time in a manner whereby the integration of new constructs is expected to occur proportionately to their compatibility with the modalities inherent in the system already developed. But this is not fully determinative of their directionality. What determines their directionality is circumscribed by available stimuli. We can easily imagine starting points for construct systems that become self-propelling according to dominant discourses which present themselves as validatory tools.

A self that contextualizes itself according to dominant discourses of self and social relations tends to set for itself a direction that reinforces such discourses regardless of whether the process is self-negotiated because the construct system gradually fulfils the logic of the context in which it is constructed. — Baden

You’re assuming that there is a content inherent in discourse which has the power to dominate. This further presumes that we can separate this discursive content from the personal construct system which is embracing it, as though 10 people with 10 different construct systems are influenced by the same discursive meaning which imposes itself on all of them and propels them in its direction.

But for Kelly we all live in different worlds. It is not the same dominant discourse which 10 people embrace but 10 different interpretations. It is not the discourse which propels the direction of the construct system but the construct system which propels the direction of interpretation of the discourse Put differently , intrinsic qualitative content of meaning plays a very minor role in Kelly’s approach. The specific content of a discourse serves a barely more than a placemarker. internal valuative content beyond what is necessary to distinguish it from other meanings. Everything that we associate with affectively and cognitively relevant and significant meaning is dependent on process, on how intimately, multidimensionally and assimilatively we embrace new experience, and very little of it on content.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

In Kelly’s 1200 page Psychology of Personal Constructs, there is not a single note of concern for the supposed biasing and dominating influence of social
discursive structures on individual behavior. In the contrary, the book can be read as a critique of such thinking. Again. and again, Kelly attacks push and pull psychologies as being beholden to inner and outer demons. “...to allow ourselves to become preoccupied with independent forces, socio-dynamics, psychodynamics, leprechaun theory, demonology, or stimulus-response mechanics, is to lose sight of the essential feature of the whole human enterprise.”
His opposite to such thinking is reflected in a central element of his psychotherapeutic approach, his concept of hostility. For Kelly, hostility ( anger, resentment, etc) is our tendency to blame the content of events for our inability to make sense of them. So he views models which assume a construct system whose direction can be reinforced by external influences as forms of blame. We blame the ‘harmful, dominating influence’ of the discourse on people rather than construing how each person is interpreting the meaning of the discourse in their own way, relative to their own aims.

At the time of production, Van Gogh's works were considered unfiinished childish rubbish by virtually everyone. But they were not. By your lights they would be, given that you think that the fact they would cause similarly dismissive judgements if produced today is evidence that they would not be graet if produced today. Some people do not learn, it seems.

The sunflower flower series, if produced today, would be received with teh same indifference it was at the time. And it'd be just as great — Bartricks

The difference between the indifference Van Gogh’s subjectivist art evoked in the late 19th century and the underwhelming response it would receive now is the difference between a phenomenon too radical for its time to be fully understood ( subjective expressivist painting) and that same phenomenon already well understood a century later. Contemporaries of Van Gogh couldn't grasp the new concept of subjectivism, so they likely saw his work as sloppy, immature, undisciplined, lacking in skill. Today, no discerning art critic would view a subjectivist style painting in those terms. They would instead recognize and appreciate all those elements which were missed by Van Gogh’s contemporaries. But today’s great artworks are the products not only of impressionism and subjectivism, but many artistic developments that have built upon these movements. A great art work indicates in its structure a consciousness by the artist of the sedimented history of art up through their time.
A Van gogh first appearing today would expose the artist as someone whose art fails to take into account what has been learned since the late 19th century in the history of art. That would make it of lesser interest to current critics and collectors than art which tips its hat to the sedimented history of 20th and 21at century art, and in so doing tells something about who we are today and how we have changed since the 19th and 20th centuries.

you can simply take a well illustrated history of art book, break its spine, and rearrange the paintings in it so that Van Gogh's works appear at a quite different point or distributed throughout. Now, the sunflowers will stand out as great works wherever they happen to turn up in this now random collection of reproductions. (The same will be true of the other great works contained in that work). — Bartricks

Every new phase in the history of Western art involved the discovery of a dimension of seeing that built on what came before ( the rendering of a proportionately accurate sculptural figure in Greece, mastery of light source and perspective in the Rennaisance, secularizing of narrative themes in Holland, discovery of nature as a system in Romantic painting. discovery of perceptual relarionality in Impressionism, discovery of Kantian categorical framing in abstract art, etc.). Once each of these insights were made( simultaneously painterly and philosophical), it became impossible to see the world without them, to simply go back to what had been done prior, without offering something boring and predictable in comparison with the daring of the new artistic discovery.
One could take any page randomly from a history of art book and appreciate it as beautiful , but to be considered great it would have to be seen as in some way conveying something new and innovative in the ways of thinking and valuing of the time in which it was produced.

If the will to power were more than a fairy story, it would have a prominent place in psychology. As things stand, it's a footnote. — Banno

To be fair, you would need to include those approaches within psychotherapy and general psychology which have borrowed from , or have much in common with, Nietzsche’s Will to Power concept but talk about it using their own vocabulary. This would include Freudian psychodynamics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, social constructionism and existential psychotherapy, among others.

↪Joshs Thanks. I understand he doesn't posit the distinction between sensory and rational as such, but it is still implicit in his analysis, no? — Wayfarer

The sensory is never treated as having a component absolutely independent of rational processes.



“But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness?”

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

That's why I introduced the distinction between 'phenomena' and 'noumena', and pointing out that there's a fundamental distinction made in philosophy between the sensory and rational faculties, which I understand still exists in Husserl, although I'm not conversant with the details. — Wayfarer

Husserl’s distinction is not between phenomenon and noumenon , but between the subjective ( noetic) and objective (noematic) poles of an intentional act. When we see a chair , the object wee see simply as an enduring self-same thing is the noema , and the synthesizing of memory, presentation and anticipation that allows us to produce this idealization we call ‘chair’ ( or any natural empiricalobject) is the noetic contribution to the intentional experience. There is no noumenon behind phenomena, there is nothing but appearances.

Do you think someone can sincerely try and do something that they at the same time believe - really believe - they will fail to succeed at? — Bartricks

With regard to the creator of a painting, a novel or a work of philosophy I think we have to break down the motivation into stages, not of simultaneous confidence and doubt( one only has one feeling at a time) , but of sequentially varying moods and beliefs , from confidence to doubt and back again.
A creative product doesn’t just land fully completed in the lap of a writer or artist, with a sign attached to it saying ‘great work’. A great idea often comes first as an inkling, an intuition, a feeling or impression It may surprise us, seeming to come as a muse from outside us, as if we channel something we do not control. Our first thought is that we like what we have conjured but we need to see if it is robust rather than a fluke. Were we
mistaken in believing we were onto something substantial?

Once we convince ourselves that our delicate kernel of an idea is worth pursuing further all sorts of self-doubts arise as to whether and how we will be able to elaborate on what we have begun, and whether it is worth elaborating. Some ideas remain at the drawing board stage permanently , some we abandon for years before getting back to them and finding a way to complete. We simply have no way of knowing ahead of time which of these possibilities lies in store for our new project. Only in retrospect , or at least a certain ways down the road, do we look at the mature or maturing work and recognize it as substantial.

Kant wrote fast - ludicrously fast - precisely becuase he was worried he was going to die and wanted to get his ideas down for posterity. He was in no doubt about their importance — Bartricks

That’s right, he was trying to make up for lost time. For all you know he was piecing together fragments of ideas he began earlier in his life that he originally abandoned in a mood of failure.

So the feeling of failure is a constant accompaniment for many creative people as they go through the process of creation. Whether their effort will end in failure or success they won’t know till its well on that way to completion. The feeling of confidence or failure for many is tentative and changes day to day in the creative
process.
Ernest Hemmingway said “There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein.”

I am sure there are those authors who look back on earlier works of theirs and no longer consider them worthy, even consider them failures.A number of famous writers have committed suicide or drunk themselves to death, believing themselves to have been frauds.

So, you have a well developed enough personal immune system not to be taken in by aspects of media that may be damaging or undesirable. If this were the case with everyone, such media would no longer exist and a large part of the problem I identified would be solved! :party: — Baden

According to current models of immunity, our body remembers and then detects and attacks specific contentful markers belonging to foreign particles. The features of invaders it recognizes are assumed to be independent of the nature of the immune system itself. The system mirrors or represents to itself what it looks for as harmful or benign in its environment. The harm or neutrality is in the foreign content that the system internally represents. Harmful entities have different characteristics in themselves than benign ones.

For Kelly, the harm is not in the stimulus , but in the relation between the stimulus and the interpretive structure of the construer. Specifically, one doesn’t first recognize a stimulus and then determine it as harmful or benign. Something is only experienced as harmful to the cognitive system to the extent that it is not coherently and intelligibly recognizable. Harmful stimulation can never evade detection. Such a stimulus would simply go unnoticed and have no effect on our thinking or feeling. Something is only felt as harmful to the extent that our attempts to integrate it fails , and it is experienced as confused , chaotic, unpredictable. Harm from a cognitive perspective is a breakdown in effective construing, not a characteristic of a stimulus in itself.

I should add that Kelly’s constructivist approach runs into a lot of opposition , not just from critical theory but postmodern, post structuralist theory. Not too many today are willing to deny that we can be swayed in one direction or another through influences we are not conscious of. An interesting g difference between poststructuralists and Frankfurt school types is that the former don’t believe that power is invested in individuals or groups but circulates among us. The stability of social formations and epistemes works reciprocally with the stability of self-identity, each determining, reinforcing and altering the other. Subjects and identities are temporary nodes or intersections of the circulation of power within the wider community.

If the body fails in the Will to Power they become meaninglessly irrational and their oppression becomes even greater, and systems of oppression that subvert Will to Power into rational agents of 'the system' become stronger….
Descartes moves from the absurd premise of a demon to an antithetical rationalist philosophy opposed to the Will to Power..
Socrates exhibits an irrational Will to Power that becomes rational through a complex process — introbert

Can you give me an example of how the irrational becomes rational?Nietzsche would say that the rationality is one of the forms that Will to Power takes (the will to knowledge), not its opposite.

“I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive, here as elsewhere, used knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) merely as a tool.”( Beyond Good and Evil)

If Kant or Van Gogh were to appear for the fist time today they would not likely be considered ( or consider themselves ) great because their creative content is now commonplace.
— Joshs

Another ignorant assertion.


if Van Gogh didn't come into existence in 1853, then his art would not have come into being in the late 19th century and exerted the huge influence it did throughout the 20th century. And so his influence would yet to have made itself known, because it has yet to exist. Thus he could make it known by bringing it into existence. — Bartricks

Art works dont emerge in a vacuum. They belong to larger artistic movements , which belong to even larger trends that unite the arts , literature , music and other creative fields. Impressionism , Romanticism , Renaissance, Symbolism, Realism, Mannerism, Mondernism, Surrealism and Dadaism are just some examples of movements that pertained to visual art as well as literature and other creative domains. Van Gogh’s paintings arose of of the milieu of impressionism and pointed the way to post-impressionist directions in art. If we think of the impressionist artists Mamet, Monet, Renoir, Seurat and Degas there is no question each of them had their own unique style and contribution to make to impressionism.

But in terms of the innovations involved, each of their work had more in common within each other than any of them had with , say, Renaissance art. The impressionists shocked the art world because of the movement they had in common that had never been seen before , the idea that color and texture interaffected such that supposed monochromatic objects actually were composed of every color on the spectrum. As a post-impressionist, Van Gogh was among the first to show how inner feeling shapes what and how we see the world.


But he was not only one to do this, he just did it in his own unique and brilliant way. But now the art world has fully assimilated the impressionist idea of the interpenetration of color and the post-impressionist idea of the influence of inner feeling on the look of things. These ideas are no longer new or in the least bit shocking. If a Van Gogh or Monet were to emerge today for the first time, they would be seen as belonging to larger artistic movements that are no longer fresh, even if their version of it is unique. The movement they would be recognized as creating within (impressionist or post-impressionist) would now be labeled ‘retro’; it would appear familiar due to the other artists of their era who established that movement. There are plenty of retro artists on the scene. How many of these do you think are ever considered ‘great’?

Great people know they're great. And if Van Gogh turned up again today, he'd produce new masterpieces — Bartricks

Let’s use Kant as another example. Kant has been widely read and many believe his ideas have been surpassed today. Most philosophers consider him old hat, and critiques of his work abound.
To think in strictly Kantian terms today is to be considered old-fashioned , a traditionalist or conservative. If Kant had not produced his writings in the late 18th century there would still have been a Romantic Idealist philosophical movement in Germany, because movements of thought are more than just individuals . Not every great thinker who came after him depended on his work directly. We still would have had the movements that followed his era and which put his kind of thinking into question.
As a result , if a Kant were to emerge today for the first time, his work would be recognized as belonging to an older era of thought which many in the field have surpassed. What made Kant great was that he was the originator of a movement, the fact that he was among the first to arrive at a new conception of philosophy. That movement , which included many others beside Kant , is no longer original, and so any ‘new’ contributions that adhere to it today are not likely to be considered great.

Was Frank Sinatra great? Many think so , but since the crooning style of popular music has been out of fashion for 60 years, a Sinatra emerging for the first time today is not likely to get much more notice than a Harry Connick, Jr.

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. Are you in marketing and advertising yourself by any chance? :lol: — Baden

Absolutely. I am marketing, packaging and advertising my brand of philosophy to you. Will it get under your skin or will it be deemed inconsistent with the identity of your sense-making system?

I'm the reverse - I don't have a TV, have no social media, avoid the news, and only socialize if I have to. I shut out the world - and noise - wherever I can. :wink: — Tom Storm

. Actually, I’m pretty similar. I have a tv but only use it to watch old
movies, and completely avoid social media and news except for top headlines. But that’s consistentn with what I was saying. I welcome attempts by the world to knock on my door and offer me their wares, and I selectively pick and choose what works within my life and what doesn’t.

So, if we accept the need for a stable and strong self is more sustainably and organically met through effortful cognitive engagement with social forces--such that the result is more skewed towards character in its general sense--rather than through quick easy fixes facilitated by the endless roles/characters that media try to sell us then the curent situation is at best well short of what we should be aiming for and at worst a self-fulfilling process that may have very negative consequences for social cohesion. — Baden

Everyone is a salesman Everyone wants us to embrace what they’re offering: religion , political ideology, their art, music, science, toilet paper products. We are bombarded on all sides by those whispering in our ear or shouting at us, taking us by the hand , bribing or threatening us , or even lying to us. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. The more the merrier. Human beings are very good at filtering, selecting and interpreting. We already do this at the most basic perceptual level. Every moment we are deluged with sensory stimulation of all kinds begging us to pay attention to them. Imagine how alienated and confused we would become if each stimulus that knocked at the door of consciousness was embraced as a new self-identity. We would be nothing but a series of random and conflicting selves.

But we are pattern-forming creatures, and this means that we either discard or dont even see most of what impinges on us from the sensory world. Only what can be assimilated to pre-existing pattens we have constructed exists for us. So everything that we do take notice of at either a conscious or pre-conscious level is assimilated to a self , enriching, strengthening and diversifying its bounds.

In order for our self-identity to evolve we need to encourage ever more sophisticated forms of social
influence from all quarters , including entreaties to buy, buy, buy from profit-making interests as their pitches evolve along with the rest of culture. I want them to try and convince , cajole , seduce, condition and manipulate me in every way they can think of. To the extent they are successful, it will be for the same reasons that a piece of music or philosophy convinces me to embrace it, because it is assimilated into a meaningful pattern for me and therefore enhances the health of my identity.

Even within Kelly's framework, identity is dependent on external reinforcement so far as that the external social segments provide a person with validation material, rather than alienation. — PhilosophyRunner

Yes, but keep in mind that for Kelly it’s not the events themselves that are validating or invalidating. They only provide the raw substrate of our experience.We are always in motion. That is, our experience is always changing , so there is always validation material for us to make something of. Our challenge is to make sense of the new in ways that are intelligible to us , that are consistent on some level with our identity. It’s what we are able to make of events , how we construe them that determines whether they are validating or alienating, not what they supposedly are ‘in themselves’, and that varies from person to person within the ‘same’ consumerist society.

One example is when social groups are polarized to the point where you are told "pick a side - if you are not with us, you are against us." A person may soon find that groups that shared their identity alienate them, and the opposite polarized group are even worse. Thus leading to a confusion about identity influenced by external sources. — PhilosophyRunner

Let’s say we find that members of our family support a political orientation that puts them in an opposite camp from us. They may feel alienated from us based on this political difference, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we feel alienated from them. It’s not the political difference in itself that causes feelings of alienation but the inability to understand why the other person believes what they believe . In other words, our discovery of their outlook disturbs us because the person we thought we knew is now someone we no longer recognize. Our former scheme of understand has been invalidated We feel that we know longer understand them and no longer trust them. But it is possible for us to empathize with their viewpoint from their perspective, without coming over to their side. In this case we can maintain our political difference without feeling alienated from them. Our construal of them has not been invalidated. We get why, given their framework of understanding, they had no choice but to embrace the political position they did.

et's take this in small steps. Do you think someone can sincerely try and do something that they at the same time believe - really believe - they will fail to succeed at? — Bartricks

Isnt the question what it is they think they are trying to do rather than whether they are succeeding at it? When we first create our own art or philosophy we don’t necessarily have a sense of how many others are out there doing something similar to us. What we know is that no one in our immediate vicinity is doing what we set out to do, so our initial motivation isn’t going to be ‘doing something great’ , it will be doing something that is unique relative to our immediate surroundings. Only later, by seeing how many others , if any, come out of the woodwork with a similar creative product, ca. we determine if what we have done is ‘great’, that is, absolutely unique in the world at that time.

It's not a scale it is a dichotomy.

Everyone is a unique individual with a profound personal inner life.

Are you referring to a scale of stereotypes? A scale of disorders of development? A genetic scale. — Andrew4Handel

Arent you arguing that there is such a thing as masculine and feminine behavior , and that these are based in biology, which is what allows dog owners to distinguish between male and female dogs based on their behavior?

If you believe this, then dont you accept the possibility of intermediate forms of biologically-formed gender ( like hermaphroditism is an intermediate form of genetic sexual identity)? If biology can produce intermediate sexes , why shouldn’t it be able to produce intermediate genders?

: social validation becomes a game of online identity formation that encourages a view of our identities as a means to attract positive social responses — Baden

the impetus for taking on the role is a real psychological and physiological reward, and this reward, the hit we receive from being socially validated imprints on us the means whereby we achieved such social validation, i.e the actions in the form of engagement activities that caused it, in a self-reinforcing manner. Where behaviours are self-reinforcing, they form patterns, which are interpreted consciously through the lens of identity. We become what we are conditioned to do — Baden

Character, if anything, allows for the resistance of identity structures that offer temporary physiological validation. — Baden

I want to distinguish my view of validation from a reinforcement approach in which validation takes place via a physiological reward mechanism.
George Kelly writes “ “In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.”

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

Social validation for Kelly is not a physiological hit, an imprinting , a conditioning, but the result of a match between our expectations and events. It is only important to fit into a group that we already identify with in some manner , on some basis. What is validated or invalidated for us takes place on the basis of its relevance for our own purposes and goals. Our identity has a functional unity to it based on meaningful relevance, rather than being glued together by jolts of externalized reinforcements

There are reasons to expect, as with other living things, sexually dichotomous behaviour. — Andrew4Handel

Do you think a profoundly effeminate gay male or ‘butch duke’ fits neatly onto a dichotomous scale , or are you are arguing for a scale that expresses a masculine-feminine continuum?

I conclude, then, that great people 'know' that they are great and will typically know it a long time before anyone else does. — Bartricks

What they know is that they have found their way into a territory of thinking-creativity that seems to be virgin ground. As far as they know they are the first to arrive there. Their motivation for pursing their work is that they believe it to be true/valuable ( not just for them) and if they don’t produce it they will not be able to find it anywhere else. To the extent that they consider what they do ‘great’ it is not because of the intrinsic content of the work, which they may very well consider to be obvious or even ‘commonsensical’, but because of the failure of others to produce similar content. When probed, they may confess that it didn’t seem to them to be a matter of their specialness so much as a certain relative stupidity on the part of their contemporaries. So only by comparison could they consider themselves ‘great’.

If i write a philosophical treatise that at first appears the only one of its kind, I may feel ‘great’ for a while, that is, until l discover an entire community of philosophers , previously unknown to me, that has been producing almost identical content to mine. Nothing has changed about my work except my knowledge that it is not unique. Greatness is just this experience of the apparent distance separating one’s valid ideas from others.

If Kant or Van Gogh were to appear for the fist time today they would not likely be considered ( or consider themselves ) great because their creative content is now commonplace.

there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself — Baden

This is a common theme in contemporary philosophy. Some articulate it in terms of social power hegemonies which entrap us in their mechanics of thought( Foucault , Critical theory) , and some focus on ingrained personal habits (James). Either way, finding a way to step outside of the frame we are enmeshed in , or. at least to see the frame as a frame, is a necessary pre-condition for envisioning truly new possibilities for oneself.

What is your justification for making an absolute separation between the concepts of identity and role? i.e. How do you define each so that there is no overlap and what is your justification for such a definition? We better get that out of the way first — Baden

I missed your inclusion of the word role in the context of identity. Let me share psychologist George Kelly’s understanding of role , which is where I’m
getting mine.


”We have insisted that the term role be reserved for a course of activity which is played out in the light of one’s construction of one or more other persons’ construct systems. When one plays a role, one behaves according to what one believes another person thinks, not merely according to what the other person appears to approve or disapprove. One plays a role when one views another person as a construer. This, of course, is a restricted definition of the term. It is the definition specifically used in the psychology of personal constructs. The term is used much more broadly elsewhere. The concept of individual suggestibility need not be considered, as it once was, the sole basis for a social psychology.”

For Kelly , the difference between identity and role is that persona identity , the ‘self’ , is the more or less stable sense of one’s own values, how one understands oneself in relation to and apart from all those who play a part in one’s life. Personality is hierarchically organized. At the subordinate end are peripheral constructs involved in interpreting everyday events. At the superordinate level of the self are core constructs concerning our central beliefs and values.
“Core constructs are those which govern a person’s maintenance processes—that is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence. In general, a healthy person’s mental processes follow core structures which are comprehensive but not too permeable. Since they are comprehensive, a person can use them to see a wide variety of known events as consistent with his own personality.”

Emotional turmoil consists of those events ( guilt, anxiety, threat) which throw our core sense of identity into crisis. Not knowing who we are anymore, not knowing what we stand for, is a situation of profound psychologicalcrisis and dysfunction. We can play an indefinite number of roles with other people without destabilizing our core identity. On the contrary, that stable identity ( which is not a static thing or even a narrative but the ability to assimilate a wide range of events in a way that maintains our self-integrity) is what allows us to play so many roles.

Occasionally we have to undergo a major revision of our core identity, which is potentially profoundly traumatic.

social media presents us with the opportunity to try on and off a potentially conflicting array of identities rather than encouraging creativity and self-development thus potentially confusing us and weakening our ability for critical thought — Baden

As I said before, these are not identities , they are roles. And to successfully play a role with respect to others is a very ‘healthy’ and creative achievement, since it requires that we enrich our understanding of others and thus also ourselves. Taking on new roles with new people is not inherently conflictual but strengthens the flexibility and viability of our overall sense of self, which is essential for critical thought. It is only when we are unable to connect with others via a role( due to our failure to make sense of their motives and actions) that we experience conflict.

Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not? — Baden

I think there’s no such thing as ‘societal health’ for the same reason that there no such thing as ‘societal belief system’. There’s too much diversity in lifestyles, backgrounds and personal perspectives for such a concept to be useful or coherent. It’s like those inane polls which supposedly tell us which countries are the happiest.

The vast majority of people are supposed to experience some level of happiness with the way things are and not believe in the practical reality or even necessity of alternatives — Baden

There are approaches to psychology which hew to objectively-based conditioning models to explain human motivation, identity formation and cognition. According to these models, humans can be arbitrarily shaped by social reinforcements ( operating on biological mechanisms of libidinal energy , drive reduction, release of endorphins , etc) to accept distorted ideas about themselves or the world, or to believe themselves to be happy. Implicit in this think is that there is an ‘objective’ reality against which to measure such distortions of belief.

Then there are alternative psychological approaches that reject the idea of an objective reality. For instance , rather than agreeing with cognitive therapists like Beck or Ellis than mood disorders result from an inaccurate or irrational interpretation of reality, they argue that our interpretations of the world are not representations of an external object reality but a pragmatic guide to anticipating events that can be more or less adaptive and useful to us relative to our purposes. We don’t construct our understanding of the world in isolation but through intersubjective discourse and action. As a result , many aspects of our thinking, our political ethical and other attitudes , are partially shared within a wider culture. But we never simply co-opt whole -hog any aspect of culture, as if a culture consisted of objective values that could have the identical meaning for any participant in that culture.

how do we get around that to something more objective that might form the foundation of a more fruitful discussion? E.g. might present opportunities for falsifying the idea that the quality of human experience tends to be eroded by the advancement of consumerist thinking and the increased prevalence of social engineering technologies, particularly in relation to the commodification of identities. — Baden

Is there a way to apply a ‘social engineering technology’ to convince far-right Trump supporters to become CRT leftists? If one accepts the objective reinforcement model
of human behavior , then one might argue yes.
If one instead believes that one can only be shaped by those aspects of culture that are already consistent with one’s personal system of understanding , then social engineering technology is as much a myth as stimulus-response reinforcement. It fails to take into account the autonomous self-consistency of a meaning-making organism. There are absolutely profound differences in ways of understanding every major aspect of the world , from the religious to the ethic to the political to the scientific , between the far right and the left , regardless of the fact that we are all supposed exposed to the same social engineering technologies and consumerist thinking.
Why is this the case? If we believe in the objective reinforcement model we probably will claim that these differences are superficial and are themselves manipulations of social engineering technologies or the indoctrinations of media. If we instead recognize experience as perspectivally subjective, then we will insist that it is never the ‘same’ social engineering or consumerist thinking that you and I are experiencing.

I am curious to know if you think, regardless of your personal experience or theoretical convictions, that modern societies are progressing in a manner conducive to increased human flourishing and what objective metrics you consider relevant in determining that. — Baden

There in no such thing as increased human flourishing, as though there were one objective linear scale of meaurement. For one thing, the understanding of what flourishing entails ,how and why it is important, changes from era to era, culture to culture and person to person.
Not too long ago in many Western cultures duty to others was considered a more important value than individual happiness. If more people today report psychological dysfunction than in earlier times this may be due less to the fact that we are more objectively unhappy than that we are more invested in using medicalizing terminology

We are more depressed than 19th century individuals because they didn’t even use that concept to describe their moods. One was not depressed, one had melancholia , which meant something quite different.

If one wants to know how well a person is flourishing , one needs to find out from them what they want from
life in their own terms rather than pretending that some society-wide metric will have any meaning at all. The. one needs to find out if they feel they are achieving their goals relative to their own aims , and respect their answer rather than accusing them of being blindly indoctrinated by social engineering techniques or consumerist thinking.

w

Joshs - I read in the above blog post 'Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…”

Do I not detect the echo of hylomorphism in these kinds of sentiments from Husserl? Where 'forms' or 'ideas' are now transposed as 'essential structures of consciousness'? — Wayfarer

I don’t fully agree with the way that blogpost characterizes how Husserl conceived of the constitution of spatial objects. I’m not denying that for Husserl form or morphe is an essential aspect of intentional constitution of objects , along with the hyle or ‘stuffs’.
But an individual object is general for Husserl not because a particular car belongs to a general category of cats, but because the unity of an object is an intentional achievement produced by a synthetic act uniting memory , anticipation and actual presence. The self-same object is an objectivating idealization concocted out of a changing flow of senses , and thus a generalization.

Phenomenology, insofar as it understands consciousness to be intentional, is still working in dualistic terms, and I see it as helping to understand how things seem to us in our everyday dualistic mindset; I don't see how it it can offer anything beyond that. — Janus

You seem to be understanding ‘dualism’ in an odd sort of way. When phenomenologists claim to be transcending dualism what they mean is the splitting of the subjective aspect of experience from the objective. Their solution is to be make the subjective and the objective indissociable poles of all experience
This is what intentionality means. It does not mean a subject aiming at an object. There is no pre-constituted, or ‘ inner’ subject for Husserl. There is only the interaction, which precedes both subject and object. Your solution to dualism , by contrast, seems to assume an inner feeling or experience of some sort that just subsists in itself, outside of time and interaction. This sounds like something like Michel Henry’s view of self-awareness. Dualism depends on the idea of a pure in-itself outside of relation to something else. Both the subject and the object have their own in-itself, interiority, intrinsicality, from out of which they encounter each other . That’s what your ‘non-dualistic’ awareness seems to consist in.

I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes. — T Clark

The authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia article would agree with you. They are among those who believe that a ‘mutual enlightenment’ between cognitive science and phenomenology is desirable and attainable. Husserl himself believed that trying to ground phenomenology in empirical science was putting the cart before the horse. I believe that it can eventually be possible to naturalize phenomenology , but this will require innovations in thinking within the psychological sciences that haven't taken place yet. Using current models within biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology to underpin Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology would completely misrepresent the subject matter.

I think the aim of meditation is to be in the way we primordially are. I wouldn't even call it being-in-the world, which is still a dualistic notion, but rather simply being with no distinction. The awareness of self arises 'later' as a thought. — Janus

You refer to the being of a ‘we’. In what sense is it a being if there is no distinction? Isn’t pure absence of differentiation non-being?

I don't agree with that article regarding pre-reflective self-awareness. I think pre-reflective awareness is prior to self and other; prior to subject and object. — Janus

Interesting. How would that work? Kind of like meditative awareness?

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

Try this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/

Do you think people are becoming deeper, more thoughtful and more in touch with themselves? Do you think modern societies are progressing away from frivolousness, stupidity, and superficiality towards character, intelligence and creativity? Do you think there is less and less evidence of mental conflict evidenced through reduced levels of mental illness, unhappiness, anxiety and drug use? Or are you positing this is as a positive potential in current society that has yet to be realised? — Baden

I think that the Marcusian model , with its reliance on libidinal energy and it’s notions of social conditioning, is too reductive and monolithic. It forces us to see ourselves as pushed and pulled and shaped by the same abstract encapsulated forces within ourselves and in our cultural environment.
It misses the fact that there is no such thing as consumer society or late capitalism. Not as some singular monolithic entity. There are many subcultures within the larger culture, and many ways in which economic, political and social aspects of culture interaffect each other. We dont all live within the same circumstances of culture because we don’t interpret the meanings of our interactions with others in the same way. Our identities aren’t formed by culture in a one-way manner , they are formed by the way we integrate and interpret culture on the basis of our own history and worldview. The way we adapt our behavior to the different propel in our lives is not a question of putting on an identity but rather of playing a role. To play a role with respect to family , friends and others is to make use of our understanding of how others see us. It is to anticipate how others will react to us on the basis of this understanding. The role we play with others is shaped by our sense of the regard others have for us. The inner conflict you are talking about takes place when others , or ourselves, act in ways that we can’t make sense of, that confuses us. In other words, it is when our role construal breaks down and ceases to be an effective guide for understanding our relationships with others that we experience conflict.

In general , people today are more psychologically self-aware than in previous eras. How well they adapt to stress and change is not a function of their exposure to some monolithic label like ‘consumer culture’ or ‘capitalism’ but the permeability of their ways of construing themselves and others.

Reasons are human-related (when distinguished from mechanics). If ask "why did you smash that vase?" I'm not expecting "because my arm raised, my hand released it and that caused it to smash". I'm asking about your motives.

In Physics, chemistry, neurosciences...etc, the distinction doesn't make any sense. There are no motives, to 'why?' and 'how?' are the same question. As I alluded to earlier, about the closest we could get to a distinction is in evolutionary sciences where 'why?' refers to the evolutionary advantage, and 'how?' refers to the genetics, but even there it's just convention. we could ask 'how?' of evolution too and get a good set of theoretical answers.

Equally, if I asked a physicist 'why did the vase smash?', he might say 'because gravity pulls objects toward the earth and brittle things like vases smash on impact'. That's considered an answer. I could ask why both those laws are the case, but all I'd get is further, more fundamental, rules. At the end of my questioning there'd always be 'it just is' — Isaac

Aren’t we talking about different epistemological accounts of causation? For conscious actions we use an intentional motivational account , and for physical processes we use an objective causative account ( or a variety of them). We might even talk of an intermediate epistemic account pertaining to living systems that we could call biosemiological. You seems to suggest earlier that we could reduce consciousness to a physical account , but it would seem that biosemiotic thinkers like Howard Pattee would disagree. “…all of our models are based on epistemological assump­tions and limited by our modes of thought…. if biosemiotics is not primarily the study of symbolic matter but the study of symbolic meaning, then as I have emphasized (Pattee 2008), this requires a different epistemological principle than does the study of physics and biology.”

So it seems your approach , reducing biological and psychological phenomena to the epistemological domain of physics and chemistry, is one of a number of positions that have been put forth(Btw, I would argue that free energy approaches in neuroscience, even though they borrow from physics, depend on a novel epistemic account. Without this , their model consciousness would look like Penorse’s). Another , which I believe Searle endorses, is to acknowledge that psychological and physical phenomena belong to separate accounts , but that these cannot and need not be reducible one to the other. They coexist for the different purposes they serve. Hermeneutisticts like Wilhelm Dilthey advocated something similar He divided the human sciences from the natural sciences based on their different epistemic organizing principles.

Another approach argues that we can and must reduce one of these accounts to the other , not by reducing psychological to physical but the other way around.
According to Husserl and Heidegger, objectively causal accounts as in physics are naive forms of naturalism. Put differently, objective physical causation is derived from intersubjective intentional processes. This does not mean that conscious subjectivity precedes the world, only that there are fundamental organizing principles uniting the physical, biological and psychological domains. As Piaget argued , “physics is far from complete , having been unable to integrate biology and the behavioral sciences within itself”.

y. Darwin found a mechanism for producing multiple species. The answer to the question 'why are there so many species?' was 'species evolve by natural selection and this process produces many species as a consequence of its mechanisms'. — Isaac

If all mechanisms are alike in their fundamental condition of possibility, then I agree that they cannot not answer ‘why’ questions, because they simply replace one arbitrary ordering scheme with another. We can only say ‘so it was not this way, it was that way’. It is only if we see changes in mechanism in a dialectical sense, as in some sense subsuming previous modes of representation, that they answer ‘why’ questions.

There are mechanisms like clocks or car engines , and there are mechanisms like evolutionary, organic and ecological processes. In the broadest sense, yes, we can call all of these mechanisms. But don’t you see a difference in the nature of the ordering system involved in these two domains? What about the difference between a hardware and a software description of a computer? What I am suggesting is that if we study the history of the empirical understanding of mechanism and causation , we find a parallel to its evolving philosophical understanding. Mechanical causation was understood differently by Newton than by Leibnitz and later thinkers. Causes were certain and absolute for Newton , but after Hume the history of a cause could not guarantee it’s future. More recently, dynamical , reciprocal and gestalt causation are further transformations of the concept of ‘mechanism’ that in some respect encompass and subsume the earlier models.

Kuhn shows us how paradigms are discontinuous, they are not answers to the questions left by the previous one (that would merely be a continuation of the investigation within the previous paradigm) they a new ways of framing the problem such that those question become meaningless. So the mere possibility of a new paradigm doesn't mean the questions in the prior paradigm are unanswered, just that they might, in future become obsolete, or meaningless. — Isaac

The prior questions don’t become completely meaningless. If that were the case, Kuhn would not be able to claim that there are reasons to choose one paradigm over another , that one solves more puzzles
than another. One can be perfectly satisfied that , even though the specific meanings of concepts used in one paradigm change in the alternative paradigm, enough remains stable in the general domain of relevance pursued by the competing paradigms that it can appear almost as if the new paradigm were being appended to the old.

The proof of this is that this is exactly how many sciences still think of the relation between Newton and Einstein, and progress of science in general. If it were so obvious that new paradigms “are not answers to the questions left by the previous one”. and that the previous questions become “meaningless” , Kuhn wouldn’t have needed to write his book.

It should be kept in mind that concepts are elastic: the meaning of a scientific term can gradually morph via paradigm shift without scientists being aware of it.

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed.
— Joshs

:clap:

Do you see any relationship with this and Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'? — Wayfarer

Absolutely, and Husserl’s natural attitude.

Science has the conceptual framework to address the easy problem. It lacks that framework to address the hard problem. To make progress, the realm of the physical will have to expand to include subjectivity. — frank

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. We artificially split it off it and now are trying to append it back on like a new object.

The freedom of identity a technically advanced consumer society facilitates (identity commodified / personal paralysis packaged as endless novelty) contains within it the anaesthetic that neutralizes a more valuable freedom, the freedom of resistance against an orientation towards the self that dictates that a self must consume even the self and in as many flavours as possible in order to fully experience itself. — Baden

I’m not convinced that it is in the interest of ‘advanced consumer society’ to keep personal identity fragmented and internally conflicted. On the contrary, the proliferation of techniques of the self can be argued to produce a creative, adaptively flexible intricate structure of personal identity that is less vulnerable to becoming paralyzed by internal conflict than more traditional forms of identity.
I think Habermas had the right idea, and was able to overcome the pessimism of other Frankfurt school thinkers, via his communicative rationality approach.

Whenever our sciences leave us with an arbitrary starting point , this should be an impetus to start asking ‘why’ questions.
— Joshs

But to say it's arbitrary is to already frame it as requiring a reason (but lacking one). 'Arbitrary' doesn't make any sense in the context of things not even requiring a reason. — Isaac

What circumstances do you think require a reason via those that do not? Some are perfectly happy with the current status of quantum theory , and others think it is lacking a deeper reason , or as Lee Smolen says, a deeper ‘why’, and so is incomplete.
What would we be saying about the nature of an event or fact such that it would be exempted from requiring a reason? Put differently, what kind of reality is it that cannot be potentially construed in an alternate way, so that we come to see it’s role within an order that did not exist to us previously?

I don't see how. In a multi-verse theory (which I make no claims to understand I should point out), we would have one speed and other universes would have another speed. That doesn't in the slightest answer the question why we have the speed we have, it only says that others don't. — Isaac

I’m not saying that placing the constants of our universe on an evolutionary spectrum removes all traces of arbitrariness in their numeric values. What it does is diminish the arbitrariness by placing these values within a larger order. This is analogous to the origin of species before and after Darwin. Pre-Darwin, the answer to the question ‘Why are there different species’ was , because God made them arbitrarily unique in themselves. Beyond this, no deeper inquiry was attempted. After Darwin, the deeper ‘why’ question could be answered ‘ because each is the product of an overarching process that allows us to relate one to the other via temporal genesis. Are there still arbitrary differences from one species to another? Of course, but the concept of species in itself is , since Darwin , much less arbitrary than prior to Darwin.

alternative mechanisms don't require even a question of 'why?' let alone an answer. One can simply say 'it needn't be that way'. All it takes to shift paradigm is an understanding that things need not be looked at the way they are, that grounding assumptions can be questioned. none of those questions need be 'why?' they could be 'is it?' — Isaac

What youre describing doesn’t sound like paradigm change so much as minor adjustments with an ongoing theory, which deals with questions of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’.

‘Is it’ suggests to me invalidation or disproof. We ask ‘is it true’ and answer yes or no. But for Kuhn , there need be no invalidation in order to investigate new orientations. The question isn’t ‘is it right’ or ‘does it work’ but ‘how does it work’ ? Don’t we choose one paradigm over other because changing the way we look at things ‘solves more puzzles’, as Kuhn put it? It seems to be that choosing the way that works by solving more puzzles, albeit differently, amounts to finding a why where there was none before. One cannot solve more puzzles without making correlations, connections and unities where they did not exist before. This is what a why question does, it is a ‘meta’ -how question .

↪Joshs I think harm is less deniable than the good. Pain seems to be obviously bad but pleasure could be obtained from anything good or bad. — Andrew4Handel

You mean like S-M? It hurts so good? Pleasure through pain? Harm me, baby?

magine you are good at art - you can, if you so wish, produce beautiful paintings - but you decide not to. Have you done wrong — Bartricks

I discovered when I was very young that I had a talent for drawing. This was the first skill that I was good at, and I enjoyed sharing my art with family and friends. I developed my skills through college, but since then I have all but abandoned it in favor of other interests which I find more creatively satisfying. Others ask me from time to time if I still draw, and I know some of them think it is a shame that I haven’t continued to pursue this talent. Also, my art was aesthetically accessible to them , whereas my philosophical interests are generally not.
From my vantage , it is as though I never abandoned my artistic interests. My philosophical thinking is very visual, and it has always felt to me as though , rather than abandoning art , I simply transferred my visual creativity from the canvas to the page.

The point I want to make is that there are myriad ways at any point in time we can choose to add value to the world, from contributing to charity to creating art to supporting our fiends and family to building a successful business.Whichever of those at any given time seems to us to be the most satisfying way to contribute to the world ( and to our our own well-being) is what should determine the correct path, not the second-guessing by others who do not know us. The value of the art within us is not for others to determine. The tortured novelist or musician who quits writing or music completely is not cheating the world of their gifts , but opting for the best way to offer themselves to others.

By the same token, art is destroyed ( the demolition of temples and religious icons by new regimes) when it is determined that its existence will cause more harm than good, that is, when it is not perceived as inspiring art but as a source of corruption. What you’re arguing is a truism: we should not destroy what we consider to be uplifting art. And no one ever does. They destroy what they fail to see as uplifting art.