an ethic life vs an aesthetical life

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I will preface my post with knowing that maybe,
maybe, 12 people in the entire country knows or cares
having/leading an ethical/moral life and even fewer
understand what the connection is between how leading
an ethical life leads one to an aesthetical life…or to put it bluntly,
how does an life engaged with being moral, (and who holds that old
fashion belief in the ethical, the moral, certainly no one I know)
so how am I to pull off the impossible and connect the
ethical with the Aesthetical?

Despite Hollywood attempt to pretty up crime,
that act of being unethical is quite gruesome…
where is the beauty in violence and despair and in
poverty and drugs? a simple assault, which we hear about
every day is violent and bloody and has no redeeming features
of any kind…where is the beauty in one man or several men,
hitting someone? Crime is about as far from being about the beautiful
as one can get…an ethical/moral life is something quite different…
there is beauty in in being a moral/ethical person…
there is a certain beauty in helping an old person cross
the street, that doesn’t exist an assault of that same old person…

(of course, people being people will go out of their way to
find examples of the ethical/moral not being beautiful…
and they will search high and low for examples of crime
and violence somehow being Aesthetical… they will spend hours
on this…to you, I say this, what is wrong with you?)

or to put this another way, one who leads a moral/ethical life,
(those two people on planet earth) are also leading
an aesthetical life… a life engaged in beauty…
an aesthetical life is an ethical/moral life…

a life seeking beauty is a life seeking being moral and being ethical…

Kropotkin

2

If you want to make the world a better place start by looking in the mirror.

If you want peace and quiet and beauty then move to North Carolina, to a small house in a country setting, with not many people around, and enjoy the beauty of nature and lead a good life.

That’s what I did, and I am absolutely blissful! Just me and nature, with deer, birds, rabbits, fox etc.

Loving life!

ps, try to watch as little news as possible while still staying somewhat in touch with reality. And for God’s sake, get off Facebook and Twitter!

3

Motor Daddy: If you want to make the world a better place start by looking in the mirror.

K: I have said this a dozen times…

M: If you want peace and quiet and beauty then move to North Carolina, to a small house in a country setting, with not many people around, and enjoy the beauty of nature and lead a good life.

K: ah, now we run into trouble… why is it that we can only find the
" good life" in a solitary, rural life?..and is peace and quiet really the
goal of the “good life?” why is it that we can only find an ethical life
is by removing ourselves from the city into a “country setting?”…
The Greeks would have disagreed with you… you can only become
who you are by the effects of the city life, of civilization on your soul,
so how does isolating ourselves bring us to the “good life?” does that
mean the ONLY way I can become ethical is by living in the country,
away from civilization? I don’t see that… because we are, within ourselves,
is where the capacity to engage in the ethical/aesthetical life exists…
removing our physical self from humanity doesn’t solve the lack of
ethical/aesthetical that exists within us… I hold that the true test of
holding the ethical/aesthetical life lies in us staying in the city and not
removing ourselves from ''temptation"

M: That’s what I did, and I am absolutely blissful! Just me and nature, with deer, birds, rabbits, fox etc. Loving life!
ps, try to watch as little news as possible while still staying somewhat in touch with reality. And for God’s sake, get off Facebook and Twitter!
[/quote]
K: and again, I hold this is a lazy and artificial method of
trying to find an ethical/aesthetical life…
and how many of us can actually engage in this isolating ourselves
to find peace/quiet/ ethically life? we are, for better or worse,
social creatures… we can only reside within the midst of other
human beings… there is no other way for us human beings…

so living in our urban, crowded cities, how do we find peace/quiet/
an ethical life?

Kropotkin

4

in thinking about this, why does the ethical life,
the peace and quiet of existence only come from
the act of ‘‘renunciation’’ instead of being from
the act of ‘‘affirmation?’’

Kropotkin

5

So I claim to be loving life and give you my recipe, and you reject it. But here you are hating life and looking for a recipe for a good life. How’s that working for you, good??

You’re not interested in entertaining other ideas of a good life, you’re only interested in bitching about your choice of life and why it sucks.

You want to change others to make your life better. That’s not how it works. You need to change, not change others.

Again, look in the mirror and make a change. You will not change others in order to make your life better!

6

[quote=“Motor Daddy”]
So I claim to be loving life and give you my recipe, and you reject it. But here you are hating life and looking for a recipe for a good life. How’s that working for you, good??

K: I didn’t “reject” it, I questioned it…

M: You’re not interested in entertaining other ideas of a good life, you’re only interested in bitching about your choice of life and why it sucks.

K: as I have stated just the other day, in fact, my life is quite good,
but that is in the materialistic fashion of the age… one can have
a “good life” materially, and still question what it means to have
a “good life”… I am, in fact, materially better off then most Americans,
but that doesn’t change my question about how one is to live within
the Ethical/aesthetical life without being force to move to the country?

M: You want to change others to make your life better. That’s not how it works. You need to change, not change others.

K: in fact, that is not true… but in thinking about it, you were the one who
brought up the “good life” and so I ask you, what is the “good life?”

M: Again, look in the mirror and make a change. You will not change others in order to make your life better!

K; as I have stated, literally a hundred times, my only goal is to
get people to question, what it means to be human? I have my own
answers, right or wrong, and this question of what it means to
be ethical/moral and what it means to be Aesthetical is part of being
human…am I attempting to “convert” anyone to any specific viewpoint?
nope…and like Diogenes, I still seek…

Kropotkin

7

The good life is a life that you are good with, that you have inner peace with.

You obviously have no inner peace about your life, so you are not living the good life.

Material objects will not give you inner peace, they will bring you more headache, because they need to be maintained, stored, and dealt with.

I find the good life to be in touch with nature and less in touch with society as we know it.

You are an ANIMAL, and you came from the wilderness. That’s where you belong. Evolution has not caught up to the technological change that humans have went through. We are cavemen out of our element!

Get more in touch with nature and you will notice a change in how you feel. Go for a walk in the woods on a hiking trail on a beautiful sunny day and you will IMMEDIATELY notice a difference in how you feel.

That is because you are more at home in the woods than you are in the concrete jungle (city).

8

Solitary, rural life allows you to protect yourself from the negative influences of urban cities, those influences being both physical and mental. I am not sure the exact details of Motor Daddy’s plans but I’m sure there is certain wisdom in removing yourself from the existing communities (particularly if they are large) in order to amass enough health to be able to build new or fix existing ones.

Yes and no. It depends on the kind of effect a community has on its people. If it’s too negative, one would do well to distance oneself from it. Such distancing doesn’t have to be categorical “I will never ever live in another community”. The point is merely to restore both one’s physical and mental health. The same is the goal of restricting the amount of time one spends watching/reading news, watching/reading/posting on social networks and forums like this one, etc. One must identify what’s harmful in one’s life if they are to prosper; but then, only if one can remove such things or avoid or nullify their effects.

In a sense, yes. The kind of environment you live in determines how well your brain can function. And in order to be ethical, your brain has to be functional.

9

Peter Kropotkin: and so I ask you, what is the “good life?”

M: The good life is a life that you are good with, that you have inner peace with.
You obviously have no inner peace about your life, so you are not living the good life.
Material objects will not give you inner peace, they will bring you more headache, because they need to be maintained, stored, and dealt with.

K: I am a philosopher and as such, I must question everything,
including what “inner peace” means and is it really the ''highest"
value we should seek? I have a couple of issues with “inner peace”
one, inner peace seems to be, at least to me, to be of short term,
inner peace never seems to last that long… it is a temporary
thing, not a permanent thing… and unlike you, I am not sure that
“inner peace” should be the goal…one of the problems with the world,
anyway, it seems to me, that people become complacent and fat and
content while holding “inner peace”… they become “sure” that there
values and beliefs are set for life and all they have to do is “live life”
whereas I hold that people shouldn’t be fixed into set beliefs and values…
One of the principles I often refer to is that I want people to become
unsettled and dizzy… peace of mind leads to us just settling
and removed from the possibilities of existence… you don’t challenge
your beliefs if you are content, of peace of mind… and this challenge
of the possibilities of existence is fundamental to our continued advancement
of being human…monkeys that are settled and of peace of mind,
don’t climb out of the trees to begin the rise to becoming human…

M: I find the good life to be in touch with nature and less in touch with society as we know it.
You are an ANIMAL, and you came from the wilderness. That’s where you belong. Evolution has not caught up to the technological change that humans have went through. We are cavemen out of our element!

K: and here is where we truly disagree… the choice isn’t toward the past,
remaining animal, but going from animal to animal/human, (where we are now)
and finally becoming human, fully and truly human…we should grow and by growing
I follow Nietzsche in the path to becoming is going from animal to animal/human
to becoming fully human…

M: Get more in touch with nature and you will notice a change in how you feel. Go for a walk in the woods on a hiking trail on a beautiful sunny day and you will IMMEDIATELY notice a difference in how you feel.

K: as the reason I can write so much these days is I had surgery on my ankle
and I can’t walk at all for a couple of months… so no walk in the woods for a while…
but while I agree with you, it isn’t true of everyone… not everyone believes in
nature the way you do… and not everyone reacts as you do…

M: That is because you are more at home in the woods than you are in the concrete jungle (city).

K: for some that is true and for others, not so much…I have taken
week long backpacking trips in the Sierra’s mountains, more then one
actually…and I love backpacking but that isn’t for everyone…
My wife has said she will go backpacking if there is room service…
not everyone is in favor of nature as you are…

Kropotkin

10

Well, it’s not for everyone. It works for me.

Good luck in your search for whatever it is that you’re looking for.

11

“Inner peace” merely means that there is no internal resistance to what you’re doing. If you’re eating a donut, while at the same time feeling that you shouldn’t, your actions are being internally resisted. And while I agree that inner peace isn’t the highest goal, I think it’s a damn important one.

Excessive consumption of food is actively resisted from within. Thus, if you’re at peace, you can’t be overweight let alone obese. In order to be obese, your inner peace must be disturbed e.g. you must be under too much stress.

People who overeat aren’t exactly at peace. They certainly feel a lot of comfort, thanks to how much they eat, but at the same time, they feel a lot of discomfort, which is what prompted them to start overeating in the first place. Overeating doesn’t remove discomfort, it merely overshadows it. The discomfort is still there, and it’s still felt, it’s merely no longer felt as intensely, and in the same way, as before. This is different from inner peace because inner peace implies zero discomfort (something that is extremely difficult to pull off.)

But that’s precisely what leads to obesity.

Peace of mind means that every voice from within has been heard by your conscious mind and has been allowed to have its due influence over the final decision and course of action. The opposite of that, to be disturbed, is to ignore certain voices; to limit their influence. That alone should tell you which state challenges one’s beliefs and which doesn’t.

I’d say that external pressure and disturbed (= ill) mind are two different things.