Are you kidding me regarding Plato's view of the physical? — Beebert

No, why do you think I am? In the Republic Plato is quite clear that flourishing requires harmony between all of the souls elements, and this can only be achieved via reason becoming the ruling faculty. This isn't a denial of the body, but rather placing the body in its proper place so that it can attain its own fulfilment.

Body and soul are one. There is no seperation as in Plato. I prefer the view of Walt Whitman on this:
"Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far"

And in Phaedo Plato through Socrates speaks about the evil body that causes man to be sick etc. And the convienience of dying so that the virtuos soul, the philosopher, can be freed from it.
One problem with Plato is that he speaks of the soul as trapped, imprisoned in the body and yet there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a certain body. Their difference makes the union a mystery.

Body and soul are one. There is no seperation as in Plato. — Beebert

I don't think Plato makes this kind of ontological separation :P But rather he distinguishes there are different parts of oneself, which includes the body and its appetites. To satisfy the entire person means that there is harmony between these parts. To bring this into N.'s language, we ourselves are formed of multiple and contradictory "wills-to-power" - so we have to bring those wills to power in harmony, otherwise we're conflicted people, and we don't even have a self as Kierkegaard would say. This is effectively what Plato is saying - he identifies three different faculties of the soul/body and he investigates how they can be brought in harmony. His conclusion is that this only happens when the rational faculty rules over the others. But this rational faculty includes much more than what we consider reason today. It also includes intuition - for example. This is absolutely essential - Dostoyevsky's and N's critique of reason isn't a critique of Plato's reason, it's a critique of scientific reason. Intuition plays a fundamental role in Plato - it is through intuition that one has access to anamnesis - remembrance. That's why Plato thought that only those who have the mystical vision of Agathon can be philosopher kings.

I dont agree. He clearly makes a distinction, unless you try to turn him in to a Christian, while in reality he was closer in many Ways to the thoughts expressed in the Upanishads... I agree with you that you can understand Plato in the way you present above. Perhaps that is what he meant , but I doubt he was aware of it. I would then prefer Nietzsche's way of saying it but you are right that language is just a mask and a mirror. As I have Said.

Blake sums up some of my problems with Plato:

"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True.
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."

Aaaaaannnnndddd...

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

I like Plato. Dont get me wrong. He is one of My favorites.

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." — Beebert

>:O >:O Funnily enough this is very very Platonic :P

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." — Beebert

This is more controversial. BUT! "Progression" is only a temporal matter belonging to this world, and this life.

I forgot these twi which were most fundamental in the part from Blake I quoted. They follow immediately from the one you found to be platonic:

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal delight!

"This is more controversial. BUT! "Progression" is only a temporal matter belonging to this world, and this life"

Sure. But the next life is unimportant right now. Only Now is important. Nothing else. Progression for Blake is never about material things. But always about art and creativity

. "This is effectively what Plato is saying - he identifies three different faculties of the soul/body and he investigates how they can be brought in harmony. His conclusion is that this only happens when the rational faculty rules over the others."

This is where I simply cant agree with Plato

This is where I simply cant agree with Plato — Beebert

Why?

Sure. But the next life is unimportant right now. Only Now is important. Nothing else. — Beebert

Hmmm... now is as important as then. I don't see why you prioritise now over everything else.

Because now is all that is, and one of the reason of all faults is man's inability to be now and his inability to live Now is a main reason why he feels the need for redemption: Jesus on the Cross eliminates man's past, he now lives a resurrected life. Jesus also stresses the here and now. Unfortunately not enough though in words. As Wittgenstein Says in Tractatus: "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."

I can entirely buy Wittgenstein's view here but I have never met a Christian in Real life who hold this view, though I am sure they exist. Dostoevsky was one.

I am against Plato's view here about rationality for the same reason Nietzsche praises Dionysos over Apollo

The Socratic method and dialectic found in Plato has a serious flaw, a sickness within it: It is mainly concerned with looking at life. It is opposed to that which Nietzsche would call the Dionysian comcept, because it seeks to negate life in the end, in that it uses reason to deflect, but never to create.

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." — Beebert

I'm not quite sure. So long as we have a physical body we're trapped in time. After death we will be, as you say, in eternity, completely. Much more than we are in eternity by living in the present now.

I am against Plato's view here about rationality for the same reason Nietzsche praises Dionysos over Apollo — Beebert

N. misunderstood Plato's view of rationality, so he was criticising a strawman. What N. called the Dionysian element was always a part of Plato's view of rationality.

It is mainly concerned with looking at life. — Beebert

Not at all. It's concerned with how we should live life. Thinking always has a practical aim for Plato.

Suffering is more negative than pleasure is positive. — dukkha

This is not true in m experience...

I believe that the more suffering someone experiences, the more sensitive they then become to the alleviation of suffering or the presence of comfort. Like a cold beer at the end of a hot day, the struggles we undergo actually seem to sweeten and enhance the temporary plateaus of pleasure and relaxation which we continuously strive toward.

Leo Tolstoy wrote about his suicidal thoughts later in life as an existential and mental crisis which he scrambled to alleviate. He was rich, highly famous, had a family, was an accomplished writer, had servants, and was well liked and respected by all accounts. Why then, should he of all people, be the victim of recurring thoughts of suicide? He could see no grand meaning in life; especially compared to his personal accomplishments, the small things in life no longer offered any satisfaction and he was left suffering because of this...

When he asked his servants about suicide, who he reckoned must idolize it even more than he due to their more difficult day-to-day existence, he was flabbergasted to learn that they held suicide to be the most sinful of all actions. In my opinion, it was not just because they were Christian that suicide was seen as a bad thing, but rather that to them life was precious and an abominable thing to waste.

In one of his late essays (I forget the title) he expresses that the reason these peasants were so content with life must be due to their religious faith, and over time he came to embrace ascetic Christian ideals. I submit that it was not the ideas themselves which most helped to alleviate Tolstoy's thoughts of suicide, it was his scramble itself -- hard work and suffering -- and his embrace of a more ascetic lifestyle, which would have been more beneficial to his day to day mental satisfaction with life.

A contemporary example of how too much success can be a bad thing (mentally) would be Tom Cruise. Rich, famous, and idolized, he fell prey to Scientology which to him seemed like the thing which offered the most meaningful and satisfying path forward in life. Having himself already reached the plateau of his conception of western success, he had nowhere else (that was sane) left to go, and so buying in to Scientology seemed natural.

There's an underlying reality about the human psyche that makes this an enduring fact of life; we tend to want what we don't have. When we have everything, which seems a wholly unnatural state of existence, our drive to constantly get more doesn't go anywhere. I think that evolution afflicted us with this, and that we should all constantly have to struggle toward a next achievement is a good thing at times and a bad thing at others.

Pain and pleasure are linked in a strange and similar way. A pleasure which becomes too familiar loses potency as does a familiar pain, and when there is contrast between pain and pleasure (including emotional pain and pleasure) we feel them more powerfully. To me this paints a kind of "crack-head model" of the human condition: we willingly endure suffering in order to temporarily rid ourselves of it, and in this cycle we find balance. Perhaps this can also offer some interesting insight into the phenomenon of "masochism" (wanting to be harmed); when we experience pain, some connected aspect of pleasure is affected, and perhaps normally, or if an individual is comfort laden, merely the alleviation of suffering itself is a desirable and pleasurable end.

"N. misunderstood Plato's view of rationality, so he was criticising a strawman. What N. called the Dionysian element was always a part of Plato's view of rationality."

Could you explain this more in detail?

This is not true in m experience... — VagabondSpectre

I'm not so sure about this. There's accumulating scientific evidence that traumatic events shape one much more than ecstatic moments do - the brain also seems to remember pain much more than pleasure. There seems to be an evolutionary reason for this, since avoiding pain ends up being more important than pleasure in terms of survival. Pain implies death and death is final, whereas pleasure has no finality. There is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain...

Could you explain this more in detail? — Beebert

For example, reason for Plato includes, and in fact is based on noetic truths and intuition, and the intellect is active, and not just a passive recipient of ideas as it is for Bacon. The passive, life-killing intellect that is based on pure logic that Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche criticise isn't the intellect of Plato.

I'm not implying that pain and pleasure are symmetrical but that they have a relationship between them. Severe trauma ~might~ have longer lasting effects on us than say, marriage or procreation, but that doesn't mean "the negative of pain is greater than the positive of pleasure".

It's my suggestion that experiencing one changes your experience of the other...

Severe trauma ~might~ have longer lasting effects on us than say, marriage or procreation, but that doesn't mean "the negative of pain is greater than the positive of pleasure". — VagabondSpectre

But yes, I'm talking about the negative of pain being greater than the positive of pleasure.

@Maw if you're around, can you give your input on this? I may be mistaken, but I remember you had researched and studied this phenomenon quite a bit!

Severe trauma ~might~ have longer lasting effects on us than say, marriage or procreation, but that doesn't mean "the negative of pain is greater than the positive of pleasure". — VagabondSpectre

But yes, I'm talking about the negative of pain being greater than the positive of pleasure.

@Maw if you're around, can you give your input on this? I may be mistaken, but I remember you had researched and studied this phenomenon quite a bit!

But yes, I'm talking about the negative of pain being greater than the positive of pleasure. — Agustino

How can we reliably say this is true? Perhaps in our modern age so filled with comforts, and since pain and trauma are infrequent, they seem more significant to us when they do occur. It could be true that for people enduring lives of hardship and pain, the rare moments of comfort and happiness they are able to find become more defining or longer lasting as you suggest trauma is for westerners.

Where are you getting this idea from in the first place though? Who told you that "the negative of pain is greater than the positive of pleasure"?

I'm still not quite sure what this necessarily means...

So why not just suicide? Suicide will free you from all suffering, ever. — dukkha

Do you know what will happen after you die?
Do you guarantee that you will actually be free from all suffering?
Cause seriously, I don't.

Who told you that "the negative of pain is greater than the positive of pleasure"? — VagabondSpectre

In some circumstances, that is possible.
When you have nothing to lose and you just don't give a shit anymore.
The pain is driving you crazy and you just wanna end it. People telling you to hold on and get through it and things will get better, but they aren't convincing anymore.
There is just too much PAIN.
And you won't care about the pleasure you gonna get after getting through the pain, you just want to end it.

It could be true that for people enduring lives of hardship and pain, the rare moments of comfort and happiness they are able to find become more defining or longer lasting as you suggest trauma is for westerners. — VagabondSpectre

I agree with that. As I said, not all circumstances, but some.

I think the vast majority of people value life for its own sake, not just for the sake of experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain. It's hard to put your finger on precisely, but it's just good to be alive, is the position.

Because we value our lives, we're willing to put up with a significant amount of pain before we generally consider giving it up. So suicide is generally not an attractive option until the horribleness of the pain outweights the good of any continuation of being alive.

I think the vast majority of people value life for its own sake, not just for the sake of experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain. It's hard to put your finger on precisely, but it's just good to be alive, is the position.

Because we value our lives, we're willing to put up with a significant amount of pain before we generally consider giving it up. So suicide is generally not an attractive option until the horribleness of the pain outweights the good of any continuation of being alive. — Brian

The better question is why we continue to procreate. Fear of death, the "unknown", pain, and the unsettling idea that there will be no future "self" that we are so used to chattering with, are sufficient enough reasons to me for why people do not commit suicide often outside of extremely painful circumstances.

The more fundamental question is why we continue bringing forth more people. What is it about having a next generation that needs to take place? The thoughtful answers would be something like: self-actualization, scientific discovery, art/music/humanities, creativity, flow experiences, physical pleasures, friends, relationships, achievement in some field or area of study, and aesthetic pleasures. However, the thoughtful person may also know that these experiences have some vague repetitiousness to it. It seems old hat that just repeats for each person in each generation. Why does it need to be carried out? Why go through it in the first place? In our linguistically-wired brains, we take the chaos of pure sensory information and through many cognitive mechanisms, create concepts and provide an impetus for our actions. In other words, we create goals. These goals, whether short-term, long-term, vague, or well-planned are executed as we have no choice. They well up from the unformed and provide some sort of ballast to the chaotic, undefined world. We must make one goal, then another, then another, even if just to get something to eat. What is really a value-less, goal-less world, is subjectivized into one where the individual human now has "priorities", "preferences", "tendencies", "hopes", "way of being in the world", and "personality". The structural needs of survival, the existential needs of entertainment, and the contingent setting of cultural surroundings that provide the content for surviving and entertaining, what is it that we want from this? Why do we need more people to exist who need goals to work towards, over and over, relentlessly until we die?

It is true that pain and pleasure are incommensurate, with the former being more potent physiologically and psychologically, all things being equal. than the latter. For a rudimentary introduction (particularly on the psychological aspect), check out Prospect Theory (the graph in particular). From an evolutionary standpoint, it certainly makes sense: an organism feeling pain will react quicker depending on the potency of the pain, and escaping that pain will enable it to survive). An organism feeling pleasure isn't likely to be in any danger, and feeling overwhelming pleasure may in fact distract it from potential dangers, thus its restrained force relative to pain.

Some people might endure an hour of the worst suffering for an hour of the best pleasure. I don't think the choice is so obvious. Examine your fantasy life. Does nothing you can dream up at least tempt you? Let's say you get to experience yourself as a world famous genius of some kind experiencing the perfect sexual situation with the perfect cocktail of drugs in the blood stream. Maybe you just completed the greatest work ever, the female(s) and/or males(s) and/or those more complicated arrive, and the doctor plugs the shot in your arm. You feel yourself to be as complete as God, etc. Maybe all of your sexual visitors are "geniuses" too -- who just happen to absolute fit your vision of the perfect sex partner physically and in terms of how they present themselves. If you act now, I'll throw in the sensation of killing all your enemies in a supremely elegant act of ultraviolence. Personally, I'd forget I had enemies with everything else going on. But I'm throwing that into the sales pitch.

I know by not killing myself this minute that I put myself at risk for great and unexpected suffering. Most of us know this and many of us do not feel constrained by platitudes or religious principles to live whether we want to or not. Some of us make peace with this possibility (to some degree) by remembering that it's probably the case that suicide will remain an option. Accidents could of course change us unexpectedly. That does scare me, an assault on my personality or self-ownership. But even this is "rationalized" or forgiven as a necessarily temporary situation. Certainly there's some probabilistic reasoning involved. Anyway, I suspect that lots of men especially at least fantasize about the possibility of ending their lives at some future time, when life can no longer be lived "nobly." And maybe lots of us aren't really disturbed by the suicide of those we don't love. Of course public, respectable voices (because they are public voices who must play a role) will offer your blue-pill platitudes. But I wouldn't take any of that at face value. There are plenty of mostly happy people who are well aware of two-faced life's terrible face. And they probably value suicide as a option that allows them to describe their life as an affirmed, calculated risk.

I really enjoyed your post. I definitely share your perception the repetitiousness. But I'll try to supplement your post with an answer to your rhetorical question, although I myself am not a parent. Of course kids just happen if you don't take precautions and becoming a parent (especially if you can support your own children) is anything but taboo. But those are easy reasons. How do parents justify their bringing of life into the world when they stop to reason about it? I think it's pretty simple. Life is viewed as a "net good." Despite the horror and futility and dogs it, it is nevertheless viewed as a silly dream worth having or passing through. Many of us (most of us?) do not regret being born. We can chalk this up to "blue pills" or something, but it's hard not to see the blue pill talk as itself a sort of rationalization. Thoughtful parents know that they bring suffering as well as pleasure into the world, perhaps even "more" suffering than pleasure in unlucky cases. It's a calculated risk. Maybe we circle around a hole. We amuse ourselves with partial objects and fragile, ultimately meaningless projects. We floss thousands of times. Behind the brilliant moments of life lurks an immense background of repetition. I definitely see that.

I personally take a neutral view. I don't know whether in some ideal general case the game is worth the candle. I even want to not know or take pleasure in the freedom from needing to know. I think of it as a transcended attachment, this extremely common itch to declare general existential truths. I can see the "blue bill" cheerleading from the outside and the "black pill" (red pill) cheerleading from the outside. Both are in some sense poses. What they share is an attachment to trans-personal truth.

While suicide may be ultimate pain reliever, it is also the ultimate pain. It takes courage, and a lot of loathing for life to build up to killilng one's own self.

I would turn the question around just a quarter turn, and give rewards for murdering others. It serves the same purpose, and it is way easier to execute as a course of action than suicide.