More preaching of predestination!
Whatever is said by the determinist is false because he couldn't say anything else! His intellect couldnt decide between two theories! His intellect is not free. He is an automaton and automatons cannot think.
Where does the word freedom come from? Who determined it to become an actual word!!!!!

More preaching of predestination!
Whatever is said by the determinist is false because he couldn't say anything else! His intellect couldnt decide between two theories! His intellect is not free. He is an automaton and automatons cannot think.
Where does the word freedom come from? Who determined it to become an actual word!!!!! — Asif

Karl Popper has written probably the most succinct refutation of determinism I have found, volume three of his Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, the Open Universe.

@Pantagruel I will have a little look. I read some of poppers work on historicism years ago. I do like his take on plato and there NOT being laws of history.
Many thanks.

We no longer understand melancholy. Today we lump all forms of melancholy together into one indiscriminate bundle and call it “depression”. While a lot of good is being done by psychiatrists, psychologists, and the medical profession in terms of treating depression, something important is being lost at the same time. Melancholy is much more than what we call “depression”. For better and for worse, the ancients saw melancholy as a gift from God. Prior to modern psychology and psychiatry, melancholy was seen precisely as a gift from the divine. In Greek mythology, it even had its own god, Saturn, and it was seen as a rich but mixed gift. On one hand, it could bring soul-crushing emotions such as unbearable loneliness, paralyzing obsessions, inconsolable grief, cosmic sadness, and suicidal despair; on the other hand, it could also bring depth, genius, creativity, poetic inspiration, compassion, mystical insight, and wisdom.

No more. Today melancholy has even lost its name and has become, in the words of Lyn Cowan, a Jungian analyst, “clinicalized, pathologized, and medicalized” so that what poets, philosophers, blues singers, artists, and mystics have forever drawn on for depth is now seen as a “treatable illness” rather than as a painful part of the soul that doesn’t want treatment but wants instead to be listened to because it intuits the unbearable heaviness of things, namely, the torment of human finitude, inadequacy and mortality. For Cowan, modern psychology’s preoccupation with symptoms of depression and its reliance on drugs in treating depression show an “appalling superficiality in the face of real human suffering.” For her, apart from whatever else this might mean, refusing to recognize the depth and meaning of melancholy is demeaning to the sufferer and perpetrates a violence against a soul that is already in torment.

And that is the issue when dealing with suicide. Suicide is normally the result of a soul in torment and in most cases that torment is not the result of a moral failure but of a melancholy which overwhelms a person at a time when he or she is too tender, too weak, too wounded, too stressed, or too biochemically impaired to withstand its pressure.

There’s still a lot we don’t understand about suicide and that misunderstanding isn’t just psychological, it’s also moral. In short, we generally blame the victim: “If your soul is sick, it’s your fault”.

For the most part that is how people who die by suicide are judged. Even though publicly we have come a long way in recent times in understanding suicide and now claim to be more open and less judgmental morally, the stigma remains. We still have not made the same peace with breakdowns in mental health as we have made with breakdowns in physical health. We don’t have the same psychological and moral anxieties when someone dies of cancer, stroke, or heart attack as we do when someone dies by suicide. Those who die by suicide are, in effect, our new “lepers”. In former times when there was no solution for leprosy other than isolating the person from everyone else, the victim suffered doubly, once from the disease and then (perhaps even more painfully) from the social isolation and debilitating stigma. He or she was declared “unclean” and had to own that stigma. But the person suffering from leprosy still had the consolation of not being judged psychologically or morally. They were not judged to be “unclean” in those areas. They were pitied. However, we only feel pity for those whom we haven’t ostracized, psychologically and morally. That’s why we judge rather than pity someone who dies by suicide. For us, death by suicide still renders persons “unclean” in that it puts them outside of what we deem as morally and psychologically acceptable. Their deaths are not spoken of in the same way as other deaths. They are doubly judged, psychologically (If your soul is sick, it’s your own fault) and morally (Your death is a betrayal). To die by suicide is worse than dying of leprosy.

I’m not sure how we can move past this. As Pascal says, the heart has its reasons. So too does the powerful taboo inside us that militates against suicide.

There are good reasons why we spontaneously feel the way we do about suicide. But, perhaps a deeper understanding of the complexity of forces that lie inside of what we naively label “depression” might help us understand that, in most cases, suicide may not be judged as a moral or psychological failure, but as a melancholy that has overpowered a suffering soul.

There are good reasons why we spontaneously feel the way we do about suicide. But, perhaps a deeper understanding of the complexity of forces that lie inside of what we naively label “depression” might help us understand that, in most cases, suicide may not be judged as a moral or psychological failure, but as a melancholy that has overpowered a suffering soul. — Natherton

Wow, Natherton, what a great post. Well done, more please.

I was listening to a NPR show about suicide awhile back where a panel of experts was passionately making the case for suicide prevention etc. They obviously had the best of intentions, but the irony of their cause seemed not to dawn on them. The message they were really sharing, without intending to, was something like this.

"Sure, your life totally sucks now, but we really really really need to help you avoid suicide because... ...the alternative to your sucky life is even worse."

What an uplifting message for a depressed person to receive, eh? Especially given that the depressed person is inevitably going to die sooner or later anyway.

And of course, the widely shared assumption that death is bad, to be avoided at all costs, is based on pretty much nothing more than fear and ignorance. So, based on our own fear and ignorance we presume to lecture and judge suicidal folks, give them advice, "rescue" them etc. Good intentions, sloppy philosophy.

I dunno. In my own mind I tend to draw an age based line. If someone is over 50 and has been here long enough to have considerable experience, and they decide to leave, I don't see how anyone is in a position to advise them. But younger folks are often overwhelmed by temporary strong emotions driven by hormones and inexperience etc, and I would be more inclined to intervene there.

One of the factors driving suicide would seem to be that folks are having a bad time in life, and they assume that the badness is all they will ever have. If death were perceived as being something other than the worst possible outcome, the situation would be less desperate. Maybe we need to upgrade out relationship with death? Not just the troubled person, but all of us?