There’s an at least equally good reason for eating human meat as for eating any other meat: it tastes good; in fact, it supposedly tastes even better than pork–better than any other meat. But perhaps we should only eat wild people.
Greetings, Aussenseite
Thank you for your fine contribution to this discussion.
You may find it interesting to notice the confirmation in these words that were written in 2010:
“Many differences between moral beliefs depend on
differences between non-moral beliefs. Consider the
example of a wife – somewhere in the world where
cannibalism may be practiced - who eats the brain of her
dead husband to “keep his essence inside herself”.
She wouldn’t do that unless she held that belief. But that is not a
belief about morality. It is a kind of metaphysical -religious
belief. The difference between the wife’s morality and our
morality seems to depend entirely on a non-moral belief about the world.”
This passage is found in Marvin C. Katz - Ethical Adventures, at the bottom of page 6. Here, for those who care to learn further details about the essentials of Ethics, is a link to the dialog: wadeharvey.myqol.com/wadeharvey/ … NTURES.pdf
Killing and mutilation is wrong if not for first party then the third parties. Secondly if society accepted it, that in itself would manifest >more< cannibalism [given -ism]. Eating [or anything affirming cannibalism] the dead is a desecration, because others see the worthlessness of their loved ones, or that potentially. Harm is wrong in degrees; more harm = more wrong.
I think that for some cultures, eating people they did not know was the only practice that was accepted. Eating ones own connections (family, community) was the immoral thing to do. Again, I think it has to do with the human connection. If you met your meal before it was served, and it greeted you warmly and you made a connection with that human, I think it should be much harder to eat that human being.
I think the disgust we feel towards Armin Mewes is that he had an ongoing friendship (including intimacy) with the victim, and even though we know the subject consented to his body being eaten by Mewes, the horror for us is more that Mewes ate him after knowing him. The same thing goes for Jeffrey Dahmer, he had a connection (either sex or friendship) with his victims before he hacked them up and ate their body parts. We are much less disgusted by other cannibals who either ate bodies that were already dead, and those they had no previous contact with. Like brothers Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali in Pakistan, who dug bodies out of a graveyard to consume and were released with fairly short sentences or Rudy Eugene, who attacked a stranger and ate most of his face in an attack and did not get much time at all. Or the RUF in Sierra Leone who only ate the bodies of their enemies who they were strangers to. We are outraged at the inhumanity, but much less disgusted if the body was already dead by other means or if they did not know. In most cultures, we generally can’t fathom a world where things that we love can be consumed.
There is always the slippery slope argument, of “But if we allow people to consent to being eaten, people will get a taste for it and then might devalue human life” but I think that’s a strawman argument. At the core of it, your connection to other human beings is at the core of our existence, and how we choose to honour that is our connection to humanity. It’s our balance and to consider doing something, an act of our own will, against another human put all those tenants in chaos and flux. It’s dangerous thinking.
The problem with dangerous thinking of course, is that it’s becomes exciting if you fixate on it. The very idea of that deviance becomes a driving force. There will always be people who live outside of society through choice or by the very nature of their being. They are considered sociopaths and are often narcissistic beings who have trouble relating and connecting with other people and their communities. Those are the people we usually associate with cannibalism, so to suggest consensual cannibalism puts your own sanity into question and it becomes a taboo subject. Of course, it also depends on your personal philosophy and whether or not you can reason it within yourself. As long as paternalism is strongly recognized and enforced, you are also going to have a hard time making it morally right because it’s paternalisms sole purpose to protect human beings for human being sake. That includes mind, body and soul.
For me, I don’t care what happens to my body or my things when I die. I’ll be dead and that is the end of it. What you want to do with my body matters very little to me. I’d like it to go towards saving the lives of others and if that means feeding a family of 4 for a year, then I don’t really care if you can reason it within yourself. I can hope that you cannot for your own sake, however.
Aussenseite, you don’t need to worry about my psyche. I have no cannibalistic tendencies; my question is entirely philosophical–albeit political-philosophical.
I already raised the political-philosophical issue of cannibalism in my “Straussian Metanarrative” OP. I will again quote a passage I quoted there, this time including its sequel:
[size=95]“If man cannot live except politically, he must live with men who, if they do not know what consitutes man, must have a version of the knowledge of what constitutes man that does not preserve, however much it may reflect, the nature of man. Homer indicates that a most powerful version of that knowledge is summed up in the word ‘Hades.’ ‘Hades’ splits body and soul apart in a peculiar way: the soul retains the looks of the body, and the mind vanishes entirely. Hades distinguishes man from everything else. Men go to Hades, all other animals just die. This distinctiveness of man, whether exaggerated or not, imposes on man certain constraints. The prohibition against cannibalism takes the form of a general prohibition, whether it be through inhumation or cremation, against man being consumed by any wild beast. Hades is a negative determination of man, and, as such, a lawful equivalent of Odysseus’s knowledge of his nature. Its invisibility, which seems contained in its name (Aïdês or ‘Unseen,’ [Iliad] V. 846), seems to displace the invisible bond in the nature of man. Hades, therefore, is not a deduction from the knowledge of that bond. Elpenor has to remind Odysseus to bury him and threaten him with punishment if he does not ([Odyssey] 11.71-73).” (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre, page 88.)[/size]
You say that the human being “includes mind, body and soul”. This is inaccurate. It only includes mind and body. “Soul” is just a popular surrogate for the concept of mind. Most people don’t care if their mind should vanish entirely, as long as their “soul” (i.e., their body, their living, “animated” body) is preserved. The only people who really care about it are those who know “that the mind of man belongs together with his build.” (ibid., page 86.) Thus the only one Odysseus meets in Hades who still has a mind is Tiresias.
Those few, the philosophers or the wise, do not need to believe in the “souledness” of other men or their pets; they will in principle not eat, or even harm, those in whom they discern mind, potential or actual: “a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily.” (ibid., page 87; compare what I said about dolphins in said OP.)
You’re right in saying that my thinking is dangerous. Most of the time, philosophers hide their true thoughts so that only those who can handle them can uncover them, presenting an Aussenmoral that differs significantly from their Binnenmoral. By now, however–in fact, already by Nietzsche’s time–, the Machiavellian Aussenpolitik has necessitated a radical break with all that, a liberalism so extreme that it may lead to a return of the most extreme illiberalism–to the conditions that impelled Homer to command and legislate his characteristic Aussenmoral.
This fuckin’ guy.
Saully have you written a book yet?
Well, I just finished an essay in Dutch titled “A tutorial to Platonic political philosophy”, which includes Homeric, Medieval , early Modern (Machiavellian), and Nietzschean political philosophy.
Yeah well you need to write it in English, not dutch. The Dutch got their shit together, the English, not so much.
I was speaking more to people who would have no problem with the idea, not you in specific. More the royal “you” not the formal “you”.
That said, I do not agree that there is no such thing as a soul. And forgive me if there is another word for this as studies and specialities lie in literature and practical medicine, but I consider the perception of ourselves and our body of work that we show to others to be “soul”. Our soul is what cements our legacy within other people, whether that impact be small or large. Our soul is what effects others, pushing them in directions that their own thoughts and minds might not have taken them. It is what we leave behind for others to ponder and think about after our minds and bodies cease to function. Our children carry a bit of our soul, as do our families and people who we touch with our kindness or cruelty, our manipulation or brutal honesty, our logic, knowledge and reason that we agree to share with others. Some people have other words for that I suppose, because they don’t like the idea of ones soul disappearing over generations if they don’t make a big enough impact. For some ego’s, the idea of being forgotten all together is too hard to fathom. I am sure there is another term for what that is, I just don’t know it because I am mostly ignorant of the totality of philosophical thought having so much to read and having only tackled as much as my time has allowed thus far with my other interests. So if you can correct me, please do.
In my experience, Außenmoral ideologies are to be trusted and invested in more than Binnemoral ideologies because by challenging the old guard, we can progress as a society. We evolve more when we are questioning everything than we do when we stand still doing what society and culture dictates is right. The problem only comes when the morals being challenged are challenged by a force that is not conducive to the advancement of society, or even harmful to it. Some of the greatest thinkers of such outsider morals have done so because of ego hypercathexis, mental defect or simply because they do not live among the society in which they are trying to challenge and have no honest and logical perception of said society. It’s a hard line to balance on between the two but to retain some of our logic and reason we must keep an eye on both camps and not move in to one or the other permanently, lest we become broken of said society without a good grounding on the reality that makes up humanity. I do think that we often do not revisit old morals and systems for the sake of “progression” and that the backslide of the introduction of nihilism to this new notion of modernity for modernization sake is harmful to us as humans. We also have been taught to ignore our instincts almost entirely to fit in with all these great societies, but when those societies have been perverted by a malignant paternalism like religion and/or a will to power that does not have that societies best interests in mind, it leads the whole of humanity astray and we must look to the past traditions and ideologies to help center ourselves.
With that, it brings me back to the topic of consensual cannibalism and the problems of its moral or immoral distinction. If we are eating the bodies of the dead, that may be different to us killing with consent to consume the flesh. If we are consuming the dead after they have died of other means other than to be consumed, it does not devalue life as much as if we are killing a person in order to feed our bodies for sure. But is there a value in a dead body that has died of natural causes or other naturally occurring incident or accident? Do we need a place to bury the body, or place the ashes in order to help carry that memory and the value of that human with us? Can we see a consuming of the flesh (as some cultures do) as a way of valuing human life more? Consider the case of a criminal who has harmed society greatly and added no value to said society. Would it be of more value to consume him/her after their death?
Simple answer, the same why it is wrong to eat monkeys. We have a certain respect to somebody and we dont eat. Zarathustra doesn’t even let dogs eat them. It is for sure that more intelligent and cultivated people also possess more respect to intelligent bodies.
Everything that is moral is used to the upbringing of young people. To show respect means to bring up intelligent offspring. And the power from one’s own upbringing is self-explanatory.
For example, see the face of a white American who was bombed recently as a member of ISIS.
removed for reasons of duplication
Cezar… be honest now, if Nietzsche ate a monkey, you would eat monkies. Your not a real person, even less of a person than Sauwelios.
There is plenty of cheese in the Netherlands, Sauwelios isn’t suffering from a protein sufficiency, and all his Nietzschean rhetoric doesn’t help progress society in any direction positive, save to manipulate a few fools to join his cult. His aim isn’t a higher man, but a larger bank account. If he was really concerned about moral awareness, he would adapt his rhetorical methods so they would be effective, not despiriting and mundane, and so very easily refuted pun by pun. If a philosophy can’t take the frictions arising from the asymmetry if comparison in jokes, what chance dies it have of actually reflecting a possible reality that others of experienced but never grasped intellectually? Both humor based rhetoric and Saully-Soured Faux Intellectualism seeks to address poorly addressed memories, but Saully never gets his philosophical act together and comes off as a disturbed beast, a predator of the sexually weak and eater of the dead. Whats the end result, a race of antichristians who fuck and whip children and eat the dead? I see a fucking amazing future potential for a subspecies of man specializing on such things…
Honestly, you may of stumbled across the most retarded and backwards method to the philosophy of statecraft in history. Tell everyone to listen to homosexual singers to make you straight (WTF on so many levels), testing the limits on just what too young in your underage pirn star thread, wanting to whip and potentially damage child bearing women… as a an you should already tower over them, and most willingly submit… it’s weak to demand more. Now were discovering the Dutch are considering extending their national dishes to human flesh. Unless your in a airplane crashed in the Andes starving to death, don’t eat people. Its not the Christian God telling you to do this, it’s everyone, knock it off. When it’s consensual outside of starvation pacts of lost sailors, it usually has sexual roots… which is just a whole nother reason no. Sex in mammals really should be a net reproductive positive. You fuck to make young, not fuck to eat dinner. We don’t need a society that confuses reproductive impulses with consumption impulses. Its bad enough to have a teething baby chewing on moms tit, we don’t need him consuming her flesh too. Its a reproductive method for barely conscious bugs, not for more advanced species. I don’t care how bad the food is in your little shitty backwater country is, just fucking no. No… No… No… no Over man us going to come from this, anymore than sucking shit out if one another’s ass in a Human Centipede… where the face if one person is sewned to the asshole if another. Einstein developed his theory of relativity without the human centipede. We landed a man on the moon without eating people. The US won WW2 without Nietzsche. We never had to go full retard like your always suggesting Sauwelios to do great things.
And Zoots, you know Sauwelios knows any work he puts out in English will come down with a damning critique by me. I’m far smarter than him, way more persuasive, and deep down inside he knows it. He is more or less stuck to the Dutch, and he has to pray they don’t read my responses.
The inability to tell right or wrong isn’t a sign of high intelligence or superhuman cognition, but more than likely a cognitive abnormality caused by a brain lesion or tumor. I’m not talking about grey areas of morality, I’m talking about obvious as fuck areas… don’t eat people, don’t fuck infants, don’t microwave minorities just cause you get confused and fearful at the sight of a black face. The very few primitive cannibalistic societies we have left in Indonesia, go through logical gymnastics to explain how their cannibalism isn’t really cannibalism. Even they have issues explaining it. Problem solved in the long run by giving them some high protein beans to grow around their villages.
As to Aussenseite, meat eating in Tibetian Buddhism has already tackled most of these issues, they adopted Buddhism, but edible plants really don’t exist in Tibet, so they came up with all sorts of twisted logic trying to separate intentional killing of animals with the “lesser” karmic crime of eating it, putting all the blame on the butcher. I think the Tibetans more or less exhausted food taboos and double standards and intellectual dishonesty here. No need for Sauwelios to raid a graveyard, he can just read Buddhists from other traditions visiting Tibet, discovering to their horror it’s a completely carnivorous society, asking for explanations as to just what in the hell is going on.
online.sfsu.edu/rone/Buddhism/Bu … tTibet.htm
If you see Sauwelios smothering some confused drugged up person with meat tenderizer, or sneaking towards a graveyard with knife and fork in hand, smack the shit out of him. Lay him flat. He will give all sorts of bad counterpoints about how evolved he is, or how much of a brute you are for doing it, but really, your doing the same thing as he is… breaking some moral standard of non-violence, but for a much better cause… stopping some idiot Nietzschean from eating someone else. Every time he goes to bite someone, beat him down. If he keeps his procannabalism behavior up, tie him up like one of the zombies from the early episodes of ‘The Walking Dead’ till a psychologist can arrive and figure out what went wrong with him.
I don’t much care who is eating who as long as they aren’t trying to eat me, because if they do, I’m gonna chain them to a stake and give them two options: eat yourself, or die of starvation. That’s how you handle a cannibal.
Regarding the strange beliefs we find circulating through the cults of the world, most of these people can’t be blamed for what they believe. There is a long history of nonsense in mythology, philosophy and metaphysics, and those who are a few sandwiches short of a picnic can’t know any better.
I don’t blame the cosmological presumptions of religion, both ancient religions, modern mainstream religions, cults, or atheistic sects for believing factual information that explains the world around them… I might ridicule them for it, but if I see it arising from a honest explanation derived from earlier ideas, or have a cognitive basis I find other groups had elsewhere, Ill assume it’s just a result of how we process information in our brains.
However, when I see a false cultic leader like Sri Sauwelios consistently use twisted logic to confused and bedevil people, I get defensive. More so when it threatens them, brainwashes them to let go of natural defense mechanism for self preservation. It goes against the most basic definitions of Health Oriented Ethics of Aristos of Chios. Nietzscheans wouldn’t even have a conception of Health or Ethics if it wasn’t for him.
Ill give you a example of how they twist logic, by addressing in advance normal, expected fears resulting form their ideological teachings, this is from The Heavens Gate Cult official website, written before their mass suicide:
heavensgate.com/misc/letter.htm
I want you to appreciate that mind fuck there… in that Suicide isn’t suicide, the Real suicide is NOT committing suicide quote, Ill repeat the specific paragraph:
[/quote]
The true meaning of “suicide” is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered. In these last days, we are focused on two primary tasks: one - of making a last attempt at telling the truth about how the Next Level may be entered (our last effort at offering to individuals of this civilization the way to avoid “suicide”); and two - taking advantage of the rare opportunity we have each day - to work individually on our personal overcoming and change, in preparation for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
[/quote]
So yeah… it’s easy to see everyone knew the definition of suicide prior to joining this cult. They arguments more or less recognized this, and had to build itself around the obvious issue of making suicide NOT suicide, but survival, your really killing yourself by NOT killing yourself.
Small children grasp there is something wrong with this logic. Its not a requirement to have extensive knowledge of the world to figure out when a statement logically contradicts itself. Once a child hits the age of having bad nightmares of dying, or the awareness their parents will someday die, and they go running to their patents room at night crying about it, this shit doesn’t work anymore. It means that part of the mind’s bullshit detector is up and running.
Sauwelios is fucking around in a unnatural area of the mind. Its unnatural because even cannibalistic societies have sharp taboos (Tabu) delineating what is happening… they question it. Tribes that consume flesh for funerary purposes likewise have very sharp dichotomies, and coincidentally leave in protein impoverished areas.
Most animals don’t practice cannibalism. Its usually from a invididual going wack, or a female needing that last protein surge before pregnancy.
I don’t blame people for thinking the earth sat on the back of a turtle she’ll, or life started when lightning struck a puddle 4 billion years ago… both equally implausible and absurd, but you can expand on it, reject elements, grow a better theory.
In the case of “consensual suicide”, the cult had to recognize and tear down several psychological defense mechanisms and increase solidarity in odd ways to achieve their ends. They we’re all Nike wearing andtogenous suicides. They didn’t really have a basis to consensual thinking. Same for extreme fetishes of dependency… all their bullshit detectors get twisted and the Ger aroused at self destructive acts… including sexual cannibalism.
And it’s all great you can hide behind the tolerance of cannibalism, but do you really want to live next to the Hewitts from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or down the street from a human butcher shop? You want to find out your mom, sister, or child is hanging on a meathook? That if you get drafted and die, drafted cannibals have a religious right to consume you?
Nope. I’m a organ donar to save lives, not fuel deeply disturbed fetishes.
You keep the hormones for eating away from sex. Don’t mix them up to the point where family and dinner makes them the same thing.
farscape.wikia.com/wiki/Eat_Me
Its a episode of farscape that explores Sauwelios’ confusion.
Honestly, I don’t understand the Nietzsche an compulsion to mutilate and hurt themselves or others. Taz/Impious claimed he castrated himself, Trixie got a sex change, Sauwelios is toting with cannibalism. Whatever happened to painting dammit. I’ll by you a watercolor set. Shit, common already. Your all stabbing at one another’s flesh and privates in the name of satanic enlightenment, you don’t become a higher man by reinacting the punishments of Dante’s lower circles of hell.
How do we answer to an American? - “Get of my dick you cocksucker!”?
I am showing our dear friend Pigelios the degrees of culture. Of course, culture is “just a tiny skin over a brutal nature”. But if “we do something” then it is called this tiny skin and not exceptional circumstances.
Does culture even exist though, in regards to the acceptance and rejection of lethal intent?
I’m saying, if you isolated the event, lobotomized every other part of the brain not actually involved in this macabre act, a lot has to come down to memory access, extroverted sensing, and linguistic understanding, and awareness of self. Maybe not that simple, but you get my idea, a swisshole cheese brain in a vat, accepting or rejecting. Does culture prepare people in advance for encountering such questions? I don’t like in a Anti-Cannibalism culture… cannibalism is nearly unheard of in the US. Children are not taught in school ‘not to be eaten’. We figure that shit out as a afterthought, if it ever pops up. We have a genre of Zombie shows, focusing on zombies eating people, but that’s a survival from colonial days from Pittsburgh and the Ohio Valley, where Indians and Settlers scalped one another for payments by the French and British, as proof of kill. We had a very literal concept of raising from the dead… the first zombie movies start in this area of the country. Likewise, teenagers might watch or read books about crazed cannibals, or survival stories… but we also read stories about werewolves, Dracula’s, aliens, etc. Its a kind of excitement that fits that age group. But no one has never gone out and said “Don’t eat one another” to me or anyone I ever knew growing up.
Honestly, when your a kid, parents sit you down for “the discussion”, kids are expecting a birds and the bees discussion. Never has there been a flustered parent telling his predictive child “No kiddie, this isn’t the srx talk, that’s for when your older. This is the cannibalism talk”.
You try telling this to a child, they are going to look at you retarded or as if your demented. “NO SHIT DAD!”
Why, cause the kid already knows, and if he doesn’t, he is likely destined for a asylum. It only becomes a cultural issue in societies that practice Cannibalism… kids and the society as a whole have to carefully navigate obvious paradoxes and contradictions arising from self evident observation. If they don’t, that society gets eaten, and only one sick fat fuck is around to contemplate why he is suddenly do lonely and so hungry. Its only under those conditions it’s a cultural issue. There is no fucking rainbow spectrum of various linguistic classifications of degrees of cannibalism to non-cannibalism, reinforced by philosophers and religious thinkers over eons, like Zarasustra or Buddha and Mani… just a species that is called human, that has evolved to reject it naturally, but accepts it under conditions of protein deficiency and sexual fetishment.
Honestly, I want a show of hands here… who was told growing up NOT to eat other people? If one if you said you did, I want to know what you were doing just prior. Its not cultural. Its something grew some and sickening, read in horror genre and survival stories. It is around as a despised fixation everyone can agree upon.
But as I noted before, there is a impulse surrounding death, especially when it’s fetishized, than can make it sexual and desired. There is cartoon porn out there, women being probe like pigs and rotissery on a scewer. It parallels the phallic shape of cock, the pain and destruction of being used for sex and reproduction as being eaten. Its a very extreme fetish, not wise to dwell upon it. If your in a subculture that dwells on this, I very much question it’s long term survival. Every time the go to breed, they get confuse and eat one another. I don’t think Nietzsche was suggestion extinction as being the superhuman ideal he was after. It sure the fuck wasn’t what Aristo of Chios was advocating.
it’s simple folks. primitive superstituous animists with absolutely no scientific knowledge used to believe that by eating people you could absorb their animating power/force and make it your own. and if they weren’t eating people for that reason, they were doing so as a gesture of absolute spite: oh yeah? check this out bruh. after I defeat you in battle, i’m gonna eat you.
The problem in this belief lays in eating only the quality.
The things which you mention above can only really be considered wrong in light of their doing harm to self or to others. I’ve since changed my mind a bit when it comes to euthanasis, depending on the circumstances. No one needs to live a life that has absolutely no quality to it but I do think that there are gray areas and this is why there are people set up to question and decide.
I was actually reflecting on this the other day after having seen the movie “Into the Heart of the Sea”. Awesome movie by the way. The ocean scenes in 3DImax gorgeous, thrilling. Anyway, I believe it was after having spent about 40 50 days at sea in a boat, after the awesome whale had totally destroyed their beautiful ship, one of the men died. The first mate suggested or said that they had to eat the man, certain parts of him to stay alive. Of course, the men were not happy with this. They cut him open took out the important parts which would nourish them and sewed him back up and let him go into the sea. I’m sorry to have revealed that much of the movie.
I began to question the ethics and morality of this and unfortunately I couldn’t really come up with a delimma there - I hate to say it. I realize that cannabalism is such a staunch taboo. We don’t eat people – there are other ways to get our nourishment. It is not civilized and it’s disgusting when you think about it. BUT in the wake of starvation, in wanting to say alive, especially since those men had no idea when or if they would be saved, is it immoral or sinful to eat a human being in order to stay alive? I can’t believe I’m actually asking that.
Had the men deliberately killed one of the others in order to survive well then, for me, there would be no question of immorality or ethics. But the man had died and the instinct to survive I think is far greater than any taboo, any social conditioning, any pre-determined patterns of our brain that say No to it. Consider the families waiting at home, the children?
What was the greater good, the greatest good? If eating parts of that man helped those men to survive what harm was there to that? Don’t be afraid of me guys - I’m not a cannibal but I think that there are extenuating circumstances where what we consider to be appropriate - or politically correct, need to be bypassed.
That’s not to say that it would be a good idea to throw all of our strong socially conditioned concepts away and live like hyenas in the jungle.
