Affirmative societies and the concealment of non-being

[PyramidHead]

Why does a philosophical point have to "go somewhere"? The point of philosophy is an unbiased examination of the truth, and if the truth is something trivial and uninteresting, that should not sway anyone from pursuing it. Strangely, it seems to sway almost everybody from actually acknowledging that there is even a truth to be found when the topic of conversation is anything that threatens to undermine the affirmative footing reinforced by society.

Without any handwaving complete the following with something objective and somehow significant.

Humans are such that need food to survive, therefore............

The quote you give talks about dismissing trivialities but you introduce this triviality about food.

It was part of my reply to your claim that life is not inherently a process of decline since people run marathons and go to college. The existence of runners and students is not a counterexample to the direction of entropy. The fact that our bodies predictably fail and are rendered permanently non-functional after a relatively short period without external sustenance is strong evidence that we are all indigent, destitute, prone to an encroaching lack-of-functionality--not just in our later years or when we get very ill, but from the start. Even as we manage to keep ourselves from getting too close to that precipice, we all must contend with disease and injury; even yet avoiding those, we eventually die as a matter of certainty. Thus, when philosophers, societies, and systems of ethics view life as going in one direction and death as an uninvited barricade coming from the other direction, they are not being truthful with themselves or with us.

It's part of a larger pattern of death-denial that leads to all sorts of religious and secular delusions. This manifests itself in the regular congratulatory attitude toward new parents and the condemnation of all suicidal thoughts as mentally disordered, just to give a couple of examples. As if life were an unquestionable gift, and the only thing that could make it otherwise is pure bad luck, or a psychological defect, when the unappreciated reality is that death does not deprive us of anything that birth seems to have entitled us.

In current affirmative ethics, life and death are disconnected, where death is regularly seen as “interruption” and “defeat”, where death have no content; as Wittgenstein said, “one cannot live death”; when the deaths of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Giordano Bruno or Christ are “mourned”, their consummative character is misunderstood, and people persist on setting them in a dimension of “fracture”, as if those people could, with a little more care, “have lived longer”. They cannot visualize these ethical deaths as accomplishments of values in the sense of first-grade morality, giving their own life in exchange. Far from manifesting a morbid “self-destructiveness” - as an ordinary affirmative interpretation regularly considers - all these people made efforts to set their lives in consonance to the world structure. Strictly speaking, the hero and the martyr do not seek their own deaths, but they end up naturally finding it during the process of their negative lives, careless and risky. When disconnecting the habitual self-defense mechanisms, they get radically “exposed” and unsafe.

To see that it could not have been any other way, that we all have lost the 'bet' on life as soon as it began, engenders a different way of thinking about one's own "right to self-defense", and prevents the demonization and blame of the "other", whether it be someone from a different country or an opposing political faction.

The elimination of “enemies” is one of the most typical forms affirmative societies use to deal with this ignored and displaced negativity. Through a conflictive commerce with my enemies, I can always postpone the structural negative for the time after their death. In this sense, there is no better “entertainment” than the game of war, a deviation affirmative society has used and abused throughout its whole bloody history. The empirical “enemies” forged in the intra-world, make us forget about the Great Enemy, which is certainly not nature, but its visualization as strange and evil. The construction of the enemy is an important part of that transformation of negativity into evil. Therefore, in the Project of Negative Ethics it was said that humans, under the impossibility of constructing a paradise, decided to construct a manageable hell. The manipulation of the others is a strange way of dealing with the negative, since the others are at the same impossible situation we are, and they are certainly not guilty of being my compulsive neighbors of not-being. The “creation” of the enemy is, thus, the apotheosis of concealment.

 

[untermensche]

It was part of my reply to your claim that life is not inherently a process of decline since people run marathons and go to college. The existence of runners and students is not a counterexample to the direction of entropy. The fact that our bodies predictably fail and are rendered permanently non-functional after a relatively short period without external sustenance is strong evidence that we are all indigent, destitute, prone to an encroaching lack-of-functionality--not just in our later years or when we get very ill, but from the start. Even as we manage to keep ourselves from getting too close to that precipice, we all must contend with disease and injury; even yet avoiding those, we eventually die as a matter of certainty. Thus, when philosophers, societies, and systems of ethics view life as going in one direction and death as an uninvited barricade coming from the other direction, they are not being truthful with themselves or with us.

How are these not merely comments about a specific state of existence?

My contention is we can only comment on states of existence, not "existence" itself. You are not disproving this.

Life is short but food is only significant if it is hard to get. And if we have people around us we are not destitute because we need food.

The decay can be slowed with exercise, including mental exercise, and nutrition. That is something incredibly significant.

It's part of a larger pattern of death-denial that leads to all sorts of religious and secular delusions. This manifests itself in the regular congratulatory attitude toward new parents and the condemnation of all suicidal thoughts as mentally disordered, just to give a couple of examples. As if life were an unquestionable gift, and the only thing that could make it otherwise is pure bad luck, or a psychological defect, when the unappreciated reality is that death does not deprive us of anything that birth seems to have entitled us.

The psychological causes for religion are many.

The holy man allegedly closer to some god has real power over the people he can con into believing it.

In current affirmative ethics, life and death are disconnected, where death is regularly seen as “interruption” and “defeat”, where death have no content; as Wittgenstein said, “one cannot live death”; when the deaths of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Giordano Bruno or Christ are “mourned”, their consummative character is misunderstood, and people persist on setting them in a dimension of “fracture”, as if those people could, with a little more care, “have lived longer”. They cannot visualize these ethical deaths as accomplishments of values in the sense of first-grade morality, giving their own life in exchange. Far from manifesting a morbid “self-destructiveness” - as an ordinary affirmative interpretation regularly considers - all these people made efforts to set their lives in consonance to the world structure. Strictly speaking, the hero and the martyr do not seek their own deaths, but they end up naturally finding it during the process of their negative lives, careless and risky. When disconnecting the habitual self-defense mechanisms, they get radically “exposed” and unsafe.

I see this as capricious. We can make of what we want of life and death.

There is nothing objective to say about either however.

It is all opinion. There is no proper course.

To see that it could not have been any other way, that we all have lost the 'bet' on life as soon as it began, engenders a different way of thinking about one's own "right to self-defense", and prevents the demonization and blame of the "other", whether it be someone from a different country or an opposing political faction.

What we have done by being born is beat incredible astronomical odds. Of course once an egg meets a sperm the chance is realized.

But the odds of that sperm meeting that egg are too big to even fathom. It required a whole lot of life preceding it. An endless string.

So one can focus on the decay or focus on beating the odds.

There is no objective way to decide. It is just something people can decide.

The elimination of “enemies” is one of the most typical forms affirmative societies use to deal with this ignored and displaced negativity. Through a conflictive commerce with my enemies, I can always postpone the structural negative for the time after their death. In this sense, there is no better “entertainment” than the game of war, a deviation affirmative society has used and abused throughout its whole bloody history. The empirical “enemies” forged in the intra-world, make us forget about the Great Enemy, which is certainly not nature, but its visualization as strange and evil. The construction of the enemy is an important part of that transformation of negativity into evil. Therefore, in the Project of Negative Ethics it was said that humans, under the impossibility of constructing a paradise, decided to construct a manageable hell. The manipulation of the others is a strange way of dealing with the negative, since the others are at the same impossible situation we are, and they are certainly not guilty of being my compulsive neighbors of not-being. The “creation” of the enemy is, thus, the apotheosis of concealment.

Many societies in the past have had to deal with real enemies.

The "dealing with enemies" is something ingrained in societies because of this past, not individuals. Modern societies have large institutions and there is institutional activity established by humans but superseding any individual human desire.

 

[PyramidHead]

How are these not merely comments about a specific state of existence?

Because it is true of all humans everywhere, regardless of their specific state of existence. I thought I had made that clear?

My contention is we can only comment on states of existence, not "existence" itself. You are not disproving this.

First, I need not disprove something that has no basis to begin with. After all, I can comment on anything I want, and so can others. If one of the things we choose to comment on is the problems at the roots of human existence, then you'll just have to deal with that. Don't you ever talk about things in general, rather than specific attributes of those things? If someone told you "we cannot comment on capitalism in general, only on specific policies enacted by existing capitalist economies," wouldn't you think they were being obtuse?

Life is short but food is only significant if it is hard to get. And if we have people around us we are not destitute because we need food.

The decay can be slowed with exercise, including mental exercise, and nutrition. That is something incredibly significant.

Not in any way that refutes what is being said. Your choice of words acknowledges that decay is the default state, and actions are taken by humans in opposition to it, in order to slow it down. That's all Cabrera is trying to highlight, in contrast to the usual thinking about life and death. People tend to think good health, mental fortitude, and education are things that prove life is good and valuable, something to be thankful for. But those things are actually mitigation strategies, postponing strategies. We erect them as barriers against the actual direction of life, which as you acknowledge is decay.

It's part of a larger pattern of death-denial that leads to all sorts of religious and secular delusions. This manifests itself in the regular congratulatory attitude toward new parents and the condemnation of all suicidal thoughts as mentally disordered, just to give a couple of examples. As if life were an unquestionable gift, and the only thing that could make it otherwise is pure bad luck, or a psychological defect, when the unappreciated reality is that death does not deprive us of anything that birth seems to have entitled us.

The psychological causes for religion are many.

The holy man allegedly closer to some god has real power over the people he can con into believing it.

In current affirmative ethics, life and death are disconnected, where death is regularly seen as “interruption” and “defeat”, where death have no content; as Wittgenstein said, “one cannot live death”; when the deaths of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Giordano Bruno or Christ are “mourned”, their consummative character is misunderstood, and people persist on setting them in a dimension of “fracture”, as if those people could, with a little more care, “have lived longer”. They cannot visualize these ethical deaths as accomplishments of values in the sense of first-grade morality, giving their own life in exchange. Far from manifesting a morbid “self-destructiveness” - as an ordinary affirmative interpretation regularly considers - all these people made efforts to set their lives in consonance to the world structure. Strictly speaking, the hero and the martyr do not seek their own deaths, but they end up naturally finding it during the process of their negative lives, careless and risky. When disconnecting the habitual self-defense mechanisms, they get radically “exposed” and unsafe.

I see this as capricious. We can make of what we want of life and death.

There is nothing objective to say about either however.

It is all opinion. There is no proper course.

Well, you can say that about pretty much anything that involves value judgments, including all of ethics. Cabrera's point was that it is not necessarily true that dying in service of a moral principle is tragic, and that we can only approach this other way of understanding the deaths of such figures by adopting a different stance on life and death themselves.

To see that it could not have been any other way, that we all have lost the 'bet' on life as soon as it began, engenders a different way of thinking about one's own "right to self-defense", and prevents the demonization and blame of the "other", whether it be someone from a different country or an opposing political faction.

What we have done by being born is beat incredible astronomical odds. Of course once an egg meets a sperm the chance is realized.

But the odds of that sperm meeting that egg are too big to even fathom. It required a whole lot of life preceding it. An endless string.

So one can focus on the decay or focus on beating the odds.

There is no objective way to decide. It is just something people can decide.

Those are odds, but we don't have to think of our coming into existence as lucky just because it was unlikely. For someone to get struck by lightning and hit by a bus simultaneously is staggeringly unlikely, but nobody would say "we should focus on how he beat the odds" rather than how he got zapped and pancaked at the same time.

Many societies in the past have had to deal with real enemies.

The "dealing with enemies" is something ingrained in societies because of this past, not individuals. Modern societies have large institutions and there is institutional activity established by humans but superseding any individual human desire.

Yes! And these institutions thrive on affirmation, support, concealment, and hypocrisy in the face of moral outrages. Exactly that.

 

[untermensche]

Because it is true of all humans everywhere, regardless of their specific state of existence. I thought I had made that clear?

I don't know what you think you can make of it besides humans have an evolutionary past?

It does not mean that humans are continually dying. Life is a continuum. It must be uninterrupted.

Death occurs once, not many times.

And dying is not a thing in itself. It is merely a negation of some vitality that was had at some other time.

All there is is life and some degree of vitality. If there is any vitality it is life, not death.

Well, you can say that about pretty much anything that involves value judgments, including all of ethics. Cabrera's point was that it is not necessarily true that dying in service of a moral principle is tragic, and that we can only approach this other way of understanding the deaths of such figures by adopting a different stance on life and death themselves.

The causes of why people believe some story are many. If you actually look it is usually because they were brainwashed as children. That is not a universal but it is usually the case.

Those are odds, but we don't have to think of our coming into existence as lucky just because it was unlikely. For someone to get struck by lightning and hit by a bus simultaneously is staggeringly unlikely, but nobody would say "we should focus on how he beat the odds" rather than how he got zapped and pancaked at the same time.

That is why I said that your state is what determines what life is. Life has no general definition that fits everybody.

For some it is incredibly good almost all the time. For some incredibly miserable.

 

[Speakpigeon]

<snip>
In brief, affirmative morality is any system of ethics that deals with how to live in the world, while taking the existence of the world and the structure of living itself as "given" and exempting them from consideration. One analogy that Cabrera uses to make this distinction is the rules of war, which provide guidance to combatants and states about how to do battle or take prisoners, but say nothing about the issue of war itself.
<snip>

The affirmative concern on how-to-live (or the overwhelming concern of living, of finding, in any way and against any one, a way to be, to plant your own “right to live” in the middle of the world) drastically assumes that, in order to say yes to life, it is necessary not to consider the other's life as absolutely inviolable. Considering the other's life as inviolable is something that, given the conflictive structure of the world – as elucidated by naturalized ontology - can only be done if we are willing to put our own lives at disposal, an attitude strongly contested in current affirmative thinking based on pride and hetero-aggressiveness. At most, affirmative ethics encourages dying in the full exercise of killing (in war, for example). This way, the how-to-live assumes total primacy over the what-to-live, and the how-to-live can only develop at the expenses of breaking the principle of inviolability of the other's life, to the extent that the ethics of how-to-live only conceives the respect for the other through strict qualifications [...]

From there on, aggressiveness is admitted and administrated intra-worldly by the organized affirmative societies, creating a “politicized ethics”, in the sense of a fair distribution of violence, a typical piece of secondary morality since violence has been accepted in the radical level. Affirmative societies accept as morally correct, for example, the implantation of capital punishment and, in general, the extermination of people who are considered pernicious to society, struggling against all forms of what is narrow-mindedly seen as “self-destructive” (suicide, drinking, drugs and excessive exuberant hedonist forms of life in general), admitting the existence of “fair wars” undertaken by nations against “dangerous enemies”, and accepting competence and struggle as forms of social interactions par excellence, propitiating the struggle for “gaining favors”, where the less malicious are massacred by the more “intelligent”, quick and opportunist in a commerce where one should not allow oneself “to be taken as a fool”. Institutionalized violence is, at the same time, concealed in legislation, public morality, institutions and public freedoms, apparently “at everyone's reach.” [...]

Furthermore, affirmative ethics, founded on a primacy of being over non-being rather than a conception of equality among all beings, is prone to assign people value based on group membership, an easy behavior that we evolved to do almost reflexively.
<snip>

it's refreshing to find someone willing to give existential concerns a properly rigorous treatment. Or maybe I'm just biased, and he's full of shit. What do you think?

It seems rather straightforward to relate our views on life and death to the nature of life itself understood as a mechanism of perpetuation through sexual reproduction, and differentiation through mutation, survival and evolution. It seems to me also obvious that people are more likely to emphasise the positive aspects of life if they are lucky to belong to the privileged minority. As such, they are able to give prominence to the public expression of their views. They are also, for the same reason, more politically effective than other social groups. At the other extreme, people with "no future", are more likely to develop a "subculture" of death: substance abuse, sexual abuse, murder. suicide, etc. And these two patterns seem both self-reproducing. And I don't see how we could radically stop this without redesigning life itself.

Yet, there are other people in between these two groups and we can hear their diverse voices if we pay attention, in a way that does not seem reflected in the picture given by Cabrera. I believe that this relatively quiet majority is in fact the real cultural driver and that its more conflicted views are very influential and politically effective. The modern world values individual life but allows abortion. It values peace but authorises war on a case by case basis. It values medical treatment but allows assisted suicide.

It is also not clear what is the point of using this metaphysical expression "non-being". He may have been better served using the ordinary word "dying". The expression "non-being" is a misnomer here. We can express ourselves because we're living organisms. Dead things are not even organisms and they don't express themselves the way we do. They don't appear able to debate properly with us. So, any discussion on this is bound to be between living things. The expression "non-being" connotes a metaphysical perspective that's completely inadequate to discuss what matters to the living things that we are. Few people would have anything to say about non-being but we all could say a lot about death and death seems over all more prominent than life in news coverage. People can choose to emphasise life or death as they see fit and they do, but it has nothing to do with the notion of non-being since all are alive and kicking.
EB