pure solipsism — apokrisis
So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative? — schopenhauer1
Someone once considered the Introduction to Formal Logic of the Spanish Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book A Critique of Affirmative Morality will be considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions -often exasperating –this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc., and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to surpass the stage of the children‟s questions and to analyze “the serious moral crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These "adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the “naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times. — Julio Cabrera
The lack of radical reflection in the current ethics of beings (both classical and modern, of Kantian or, specially, Utilitarian inspiration) consists of the fact the crucial question has been, throughout the history of philosophy, how one should live, without considering in a positive way the possible ethical character of dying and abstention. Asking, in the ethical field, how to live is admitting ab initio there is not and there cannot be any moral problem in the very fact of being; that all moral problems arise "afterwards", in the domain of how. If the initial ethical question is how to live, it is assumed beforehand that living has not, in itself, any moral problems, or that living is, per se, ethically good, or that, for some motive that should still be clarified, the matter of good and evil does not concern to being, but only to beings. Affirmativeness is the historical form taken by the lack of radical character of the ethical reflection. (Indeed, a reflection that would answer "no" to theinitial question would not be radical either). But what is the philosophical-rational justification of living as ethically good (valuable) per se, and of the idea the
only thing that ethically matters is how to live, that is, how to turn into ethically good this or that ontic human life, excepting life itself from any questioning whatsoever? — Julio Cabrera
Since the beginning of this book, I have taken an attitude of that kind (which, in my view, is not “skeptical” in any pejorative sense, nor “nihilistic”), presenting the argumentations on the first chapters as of “a radical and anti-skeptical moralist” (using there Habermas‟ conception of skepticism), but disposed to argue until the end, employing the same conceptual tools supplied by the moral cognitivist. I will call “empty skeptic” the skeptic who refuses to argue, and “plenary skeptic” this who accepts to argue infinitely and radically. Perhaps the “skepticism” is maintained in the negative conviction of the plenary skeptic that it is not necessary, in argumentation, to destroy concepts and theories, but only put them in movement, let them live. From a negative point of view, the most appropriate way of denying a concept is not killing it, but –on the contrary –letting it die naturally. — Julio Cabrera
One of the most employed terms in the previous reflection has been “affirmative” and its derivatives. What has been understood as such? I understand by “affirmative”:
(a)The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense -as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.
(b) In the second place, affirmative means assuming the task of thinking as “insuring” or “supportive” (and, maybe, as a solace, as a certain type of “conceptual edification”), in the sense that the conceptualization of the world shall protect us, for example, against relativism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism and, in general, against all that may threat the continuity of the life of thinking. For affirmative thinking, it is not the case of pure and simple “looking for truth”, but of looking for all truth compatible with the continuity of life, with the enterprise of not allowing that thinking get blocked so it could keep developing itself indefinitely (I have used the word “affirmative” because it has, in Spanish, precisely these two meanings: “affirmative” as opposed to negative [in the sense of“positive”, of “saying yes”, of “assenting”], and “affirmative” as “affirming”, “supporting”, “finding something firm, or firming” [as in expressions of the kind: “It is necessary to firm on something, on some belief”, etc.].). — Julio Cabrera
___________________________________________________________________From the optic of the present book, what is interesting in those theories is they all are “affirmative” theories, in the explained sense (contemporary north-American Pragmatism is perhaps the philosophy which has most openly assumed the “affirmative” character –in the dual sense mentioned –of ethical reflection, through a pragmatist theory of truth [vide, for example, the attempt of reconstruction of moral theory proposed by John Dewey]: true is what protects us from danger, what can be used as an adequate instrument for successful survival. What pragmatism has openly exposed remains implicit, I think,in the rest of moral philosophies in general, including Kantian ethics).
“Affirmative” are theories in which the movement of the quest for truth is conceived as a vital process (even when this “Nietzchean” interpretation might seem offensive to many of theauthors of these theories), in which the hypothesis that the quest for truth may lead us to an anti-vital result is rejected beforehand and not critically. The basic affirmative meta-thesis would be the following: life and truth go (or should go) on the same path, they never get in conflict; discovering truth is (or should be), at the same time, to discover the continuity of life, the uninterrupted process –however arduous –of vitality. There are not (or there should not be) anti-vital truths. — Julio Cabrera
Yeah, Cabrera's book is more meta-ethical and meta-philosophical than normative or applied ethics. He has some things about how you shouldn't kill anyone or have children but that's about it. The closest he gets is basically when he asks whether or not negative ethics is even possible, or if we need to make "negative categories" after the affirmative ones die. I know somewhere in the book he talks about how letting a murderer kill you is "technically" an ethical victory, but I also think he realizes the clumsiness of this view (severe agent centered restrictions, essentially). But I suppose that goes all the way back to the initial observation, that we can't have life without some kind of conflict or compromise. Someone gets hurt, no matter what. — darthbarracuda
It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with. — schopenhauer1
Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure. — apokrisis
Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe. — apokrisis
And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels. — apokrisis
So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness". — apokrisis
Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. — schopenhauer1
Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology. — darthbarracuda
I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved? — schopenhauer1
Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar. — apokrisis
What jargon were you struggling with exactly in the bit you quoted? — apokrisis
Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure. — apokrisis
It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness". — apokrisis
One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine. — apokrisis
Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics. — apokrisis
So we can look to nature — apokrisis
So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help. — apokrisis
Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain. — apokrisis
You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong. — darthbarracuda
And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s. — darthbarracuda
We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. — darthbarracuda
Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? — darthbarracuda
...rant continues in same vein... — darthbarracuda
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