If I have no pain it doesn’t mean everything is pleasureable -
If I have no pleasure it doesn’t mean everything is painful.
It is just an unhappy person who wants to become happy; a happy person does not have the wish to become happy. So the question of being unhappy does not arise as long as you don’t search for happiness.
Why philosophize except with a view to happiness.
Why live except with a view to happiness? I do not have an issue with happiness at all. However, I do not think happiness is attained without pain. Pain is an essential part of living also.
man has moments of happiness and moments of unhappiness.
And this pain, where is it? It does not exist at one or another intellectual, mental level — it is here, it is part of the body. Therefore the body has to take the consequences and generally you can not solve the problems. The body has to work them out, and the body can do that in a very intelligent and successful way if you just give it a chance. Your desire to solve your problems at some other level will not be honored. It just remains a hope and nothing else. After all, there is nothing that you can do. But you can’t accept that, because the instrument that you use for that is the thinking, and the thinking can’t accept that because it has always gotten results for you.
Pain and pleasure are ‘passions’ – not just physical sensations, but also the deep rooted emotional responses that accompany them. Philosophy that examines pleasure and pain is often misunderstood because people tend to naturally consider those ideas in their most literal sense, as a physical sensations. However, it is the powerful emotional response that turns a painful, or otherwise uncomfortable, sensations into life altering experiences (ex. suffering, torture, depression, demoralization, anguish, etc.). The physical sensation of pain is usually regarded as far less influential, or traumatic, than emotional pain. Yet, at the same time, the word “pain” is most commonly associated with the physical sensation only. Passions, as such, are never completely under control for most people; they are largely habitual. I think our best method of controlling the emotional damage wrought by a painful experience is understanding. The better one understands his passions, the better equipped he will be to deal with them.
We do tend to be children of our time and the civilization in which we have spent our formative years, so our minds tend not only to think but think with ideas, most of which we adopt from our surrounding society. Spinoza is pointing out how one can become critically aware of presuppositions of ones thought. This takes some special effort; self awareness? The source of passion lies not with the senses but with the innward parts.
To treat pain as nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles robs one of the possibility of understanding ones habitual passions. Know thyself.
Yes! Well said.
Special effort indeed, along with a rare sense of intellectual honesty and self awareness.
Your naturalness is something that you don’t have to know. You just have to let that function in its own way. Your wanting to know that demands some know-how, which you want from somebody. The functioning of the heart is a natural thing; the functioning of all the organs in your body is very natural. They are not for one moment asking themselves the question “How am I functioning?” The whole living organism has this tremendous intelligence which makes it function in a very natural way. You have separated what you call life from that. What you call life is living, which is in no way related to the functioning of this living organism.
So, naturally, you are asking the question, “How to live?” It is the “How to live” that has really destroyed the natural way the whole thing is going on. That is where the culture steps in and tells you, “This is the way you should act and live. This is the one and the only thing that is good for you and good for the society.” Some want to change that state of affairs. What is it that they want to change? That’s all I’m asking.
This could be said about anything one desires to remain complacent or ignorant about.
I’m not sure I follow…
Separated how? “Life” is most commonly a reference to that which is living or the state of living (wherein the aspects that constitute “life” are things that influence the living). In short, how a living organism functions is how it lives – that constitutes “life”, in part at least. Your organs are just as alive as you are even though they may not be aware of themselves. You are self aware, as a whole, to regulate the components that constitute you.
Spinoza, in my opinion, is not saying “fight what comes naturally”. He is saying that one should take the time to understand what comes naturally so a physical pain, for example, does not manifest into something more than it actually is because we allow emotion to overpower reason. Is that not one of the chief struggles of man?
My answer to this is that life wouldn’t be dramatic without pain. That probably comes across as baseless to most people, but I say it with a certain perspective in the background, one that you would have to understand first. I won’t go into the details, but I’ll just say that I believe that there is more to existence than mere nihilistic existentialism. I believe reality is fundamentally and inherently meaningful - and also valuable - but that the ultimate meaning and value to life and existence is beyond the grasp of human comprehension (incidentally, I maintain that this makes a meaningless/valueless universe indistinguishable, from a human perspective, from one full of meaning and value but incomprehensible as such to human beings). Pain and pleasure are human values, and if that were all that mattered to the universe on the whole, then indeed it would follow from the existence of pain and suffering that the universe lacks any real justification. But if it could be said - like I’m saying now - that what matters to the universe is something over and above the balance of pain and pleasure (at least as humans experience it), then it might yet be possible to justify existence without recourse to some kind of utilitarian calculus.
I maintain that whatever this justification - however it gives meaning and value to the universe - the best analogy is that of drama. A performance in the theatrical arts is only as valuable as it is dramatic - that is, insofar as the audience is moved and wowed by it - otherwise, they demand their money back; they say it wasn’t ‘worth’ it (i.e. that it had no value/meaning for them). But how can such a performance be dramatic unless it featured some pain and suffering? How could it grip the audience and enthrall them unless the characters therein - indeed, the protagonist himself - went through some series of trials and tribulations?
But as I say, drama is only the best analogy to this higher form of meaning/value, and ultimately, this higher meaning/value is beyond us, beyond our ability to understand, and therefore I’m not ready to literally equate it with dramatic effect. Rather, I still maintain it is an incomprehensible form of justification but that drama is the closest analogy we have, and that the manner by which drama justifies pain and suffering is the hinge on which this analogy fits.
EDIT: one last addition to this point: I will also maintain that the sheer existence (of particular things in the world) insofar as they add what I call “qaulitative diversity” to the universe, is precisely what amounts to this form of universal justification, this universal ‘drama’. What I mean by this is that, just as in the theatrical arts, what makes for a good drama is, first and foremost, that something happens - anything - rather than nothing; and secondly, that just so the performance avoid being monotonous and boring (and therefore undramatic), a wide variety of differing things happen. So the sheer existence of something - including pain - is valuable insofar as it contributes to there being something rather than nothing - and secondly, insofar as the existence of pain makes for a wider diversity of things (imagine how dull and monotonous a life of unadulterated pleasure would be - though, of course, by human standards, such a life would be a most blessed gift), it adds value and meaning by way of adding drama to existence. Even a canvass full of color could be made more beautiful if a color as ugly as black we added. In brief, the sheer existence of something - anything, even pain - especially if it contributes to the qualitative diversity within the universe - trumps the human value system of mundane pains and pleasures insofar as it justifies the meaning/value of existence itself in this incomprehensible way.
A plant is mainly passive, but not totally, passive it has a limited ability of adaptation to changing circumstances. An animal through the apearance of consciousness there is a striking shift from passivity to activity as evidence of free and often purposeful movement, not a gradual turning toward light like a plant, but swift action to obtain food or escape danger. There is evidence of an inner life and it cannot be a mere object. At the human level there is a subject that says “I”- a person. This progression is a movement from passivity to activity. While a person is undoubtably a subject he remains in may respects an object pushed around by circumstanses. Only when man makes use of his power of self awareness does he attain the level of a person to the level of freedom. At that moment he is living not being lived. As your forum name implies “finishedman” you should know this. 
Each individual by virtue of his genetic structure is unparalleled, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mould to which all must conform. It is grotesque. Nature is interested in only two things - to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. You just don’t have the courage to be yourself. That means you have to be alone in this world - one without a second. The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living. As long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
I don’t think that’s exactly accurate. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE that by some freak accident two children are born from different parents with exactly the same genetic structure. It is EXTREMELY unlikely, and both sets of parents would probably have to be very closely related to each other, like one set of brothers marries a set of sisters, but just because it’s ridiculously unlikely doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Also, twins. But that goes without saying.
To live means to cope, to contend and keep level with all sorts of circumstances. Difficult circumstances present the problems. Living means above all else dealing with problems many of which are not created by you. Problems of survival and reproduction do tend to cause anquish because people are complex beings but thats what we do we are expert problem solvers. Convergent problems cause less anquish because they are solvable, divergent problems are not solvable but they can be transcended. It is then that such forces as love and compassion, understanding and empathy, become available, not simply occasional impulses but as a regular and reliable resource.
Renaissance203,
You seem to think that destiny is blind then, right? I somehow feel that our destiny can be well written in the actions we take today, in the way in which we think and believe and act. Some people can see the ‘writing on the wall’ if they are aware…and they know their destiny ahead of time.
Some others look at their past and know that they would not have changed a thing, no matter how difficult and what the cost. They are their very past…that is destiny too…or something like amor fati.
We do not have to flow with the wind though. We can walk into it too. That is also living the present moment. How can we know that we are going in the same direction as the wind, unless we do. That is sometimes much more satisfying…walking into the wind.
Only a ghost wallows around in his past, explaining himself with self descriptors based on a life lived through. You are what you choose today, not what you’ve chosen before.
Once you label me, you negate me. When the individual must live up to the label, the self ceases to exist. The same is true for self-labels. You could be negating yourself by identifying with your trademarks, rather than your own potential for growth.
All self-labels come out of an individuals history. But the past is a bucket of ashes.
We have skin.
We would like to keep our skin.
Pain allows us to keep our skin by telling us when it is in threat of being compromised or lost.
Psychological pain?
We have contentment.
We would like to keep our contentment.
Suffering allows us to keep our contentment by telling us when it is in threat of being compromised or lost.
Numb the skin so that you can’t feel anything at all.
Numb your emotions so that you can’t feel any emotions at all.
Basically; stop being alive.
No.
But we usually think long and hard, cognitively and intuitively, when something causes pain or suffering.
Why?
Because we need to know everything about it that causes a problem so that it can be better avoided in the future.
We don’t need to know everything about ice cream or the provocations for a present someone gave us.
We do, however, need to know everything about peanuts when we’re allergic to them and what provokes someone to hate us that we wanted to like us.
Welcome aboard cognition.
Complexity is a word for, “I don’t get it”.
It just means we have more to learn, and that it’s not as easy as finger-painting.
Why would it be?
How could life as a human being be more simplified than photosynthesis in plants when the human is a far larger networking of components.
The internet didn’t get easier as it got bigger.
Make life hell?
What’s hellish about life?
Life just is.
If you want to give a shit about something, great.
But if it causes you massive dreadful suffering that provokes you to think all of life is hell by the absolute consumption of this thing, then you might want to recheck what you focus on in your life as you obviously don’t enjoy whatever it is that you are focusing on.
Terrible movies are fun, sure; but I’m not going to force myself to sit through The Cure for Insomnia all the while asking why film has turned into shit, when I can just get up and leave and go watch a different flick…something like Date Night.
See description of The Cure for Insomnia
[tab]Not really following any standard plot structure, the film mostly consists of poet L.D. Groban reciting his own poem of 4,080 pages, inter-spliced with X-rated film footage and rock music videos.
-http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284020/
I know…it sounds cool…but for 3 days and 15 hours straight?
Is his cure for insomnia suicide?[/tab]
In response to the original post about why we might have pain, I personally think it was an evolutionary advantage so we can remember what things are bad and avoid them. It is not good if you cut yourself because it messes up your internal organs, so if the brain can send you “pain” signals so you don’t like that, it will most likely prevent you from doing more harmful things in the future. but this is just an idea of mine, I don’t really know if it is accurate or not.
So finishedman? I would certainly think that a name such as yours would not only negate you, but discontinue the flux of your becoming. If you think of yourself as a ‘finishedman’, what is left for you to do?
On the other hand, arcturus rising…is always rising or at least attempting to…
This is not just an idea of yours.