If you could choose only two of these existential options, which would you have?
A:
Get to score with all of the finest. You’d have a healthy strong body, for as long as you wanted to live for. You get to eat and drink whatever you like most. Cars and trucks, and dvds of your choice, anything. But you wouldn’t have the truth about the highest universe and the deeper facts of self.
B:
You’d be sick, live only a few years. Weak, and poor. Having only plain water to drink, and stail bread to eat. Living in an impoverished country. No cannibas or PC games. Never ever get to have sex or drive a bicycle, or anything like that! But you’d have the highest truth about the universe and the deeper facts of self.
C’mon, which would you REALLY choose if you could only have one?
Pleasure, health, security, and abundance…
Or…
Most important true knowledge?
Is this to suggest that truth is pessimistic or would lead to such conditions?
The ancients knew that an unresolvable tension existed between politics and philosophy. To be a part of society was to be human, while one who didn’t need society was either a beast or a god. To be a philosopher was to study the truth with an “erotic” attachment, caring little about society…but the community can do things that the individual cannot do himself.
To choose truth would seem to imply a certain expectation or a stoic/ascetic resolve to take what comes. It may also suggest that such truth is possible, that wisdom may be a possession rather than a pursuit.
Honestly, I would choose A. I would prefer pragmatism and a healthy body. I will confess that I think that an existence of higher realms is likely (for reasons I will not say here), but also that I don’t necessarily feel rushed to get to the highest peak of consciousness, for now. Better to just live my life and enjoy the simpler pleasures…to demand much, but expect nothing. Call it mental cowardice, but…after assessing my capabilities I’m not entirely sure that I could handle such a truth or that to possess such a truth would be human.
I think it’s an unfair comparison because everyone can understand A but who knows how it would be to live with the highest truth possible? I’d say it’s not only knowing true knowledge, but living in a different dimension.
I choose B because I know that with that knowledge it’s not likely I’d give a damn about anything A has to offer me.
Your question is lacking. Firstly, if you’ve had 1000+ lovers, you’d have to be pretty dumb not to work out a few significant truths. Secondly a purely ascetic life is not conducive to working out the most important truths. One needs to have looked down upon things from an abundance of health to get to them.
However, if the question were: ‘Would you prefer a life of mindless pleasure or one of contemplation’, I would choose the life of contemplation.
Wouldn’t you want to be loved and strong and healthy, and have allot of pleasure, compared to having the highest truth [which humanity would obviously shun or misunderstand, or kill you for saying it, if you ever tried to tell them about it].
Yes, your mind would need to be in a higher dimension in order to truly know highest truths of the universe. You’re pretty sharp to have picked up on that… And you’d probably not completely “die”, if you lost your physical body, also, for you would have a perfect higher dimensional structure which was capable of existing independently from a container, system, suppressant or maintainer, etc.
The sane conscience will allways choose which ever option they think will give them the most pleasure. In a choice between pleasure and ultimate knoledge, to some it’s the same as being between pleausre and less pleasure and to other its between pleasure and pleasure.
Each time I felt closest to truth I wanted to kill myself.
Now I believe I’m settling for “truth mixed with machiavellian goodness, for the perfect psychological nutrition.” I’ve contented that I am too “impure” or too naturally made- I lack the design to withstand truth.
Could someone attaining this abstract truth really exist in the same manner that we perceive a person? Would they not have to exist as something else, displaying only a human-looking host of their influence? Welcome Christians, I just opened up the door for the whole “God-messiah” thing.
I would choose B if I could relay the information to people who chose
A. That way everyone wins and I am worshiped to some extent.
However if I chose B and the truth was too much to bear (disappointment), then I would probably resort to immediate suicide.
In reality I would chose A because of the happiness it would bring.
Philosophy has 2 functions. To put forward the strongest arguments available for positions most defensible as candidates for the truth, and to expose and discredit positions with a unsound claim to represent the truth. The latter is the “eliminative” function. The “Philosopher Gods”, like Russell, Kant or Aristotle were with us to perform the first-mentioned function. The rest of us are take out the garbage. That is, eliminate faulty positions with stronger arguments. But when I was a philosophy major, there was no shortage of philosophy coeds to mix “business” and pleasure with. I had to marry (and divorce) an MBA.