Tag: philosophy

Life

Philosophical introspection is a funny activity.

And it’s funny in both the “ha-ha” sense and the ironic sense. In fact, it frequently becomes so ironic that those who engage in it are led to outright laughter.

Please feel free to follow along as I demonstrate.

When we are alive, one of the first things that defines us is self-awareness. We recognize that there are things that are us – “me,” or as the pseudoscience of psychology calls it, “id” – and that there are things that are not us. These “things that are not us” are the things of the world. They include trees and animals and other “me”s that come to be known as “people.”

You may notice a lot of quotation marks popping up as you’re reading. This is because philosophy, while often funny and entertaining with some bit of purpose, is also much like psychology, a pseudoscience.

Actually, it – philosophy, that is – isn’t a science at all. It’s considered a liberal art, which is to say that it is based upon few quantifiable facts. That means there is very little about philosophy that is definite or solid or unchanging.

These are traits it shares with psychology. Which is considered a science.

This is part where we might began the aforementioned outright laughter.

Remember when President Clinton said “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”? He was using both philosophy and psychology (in addition to several other less-complimentary debating devices).

python-philosopher-song
Monte Python’s Flying Circus perform the famously accurate “The Philosopher’s Song.”

The word philosophy comes from the combination of two Greek words, philo – meaning “love” and sophos – meaning “wisdom”. So, the idea is that philosophy is for lovers of wisdom.

Only a true philosopher can realize how perfectly this ties in to our second paragraph.

Psychology is also an English word created from the combination of two Greek words. Psyche, meaning “breath” or “spirit” or “soul.” And logia meaning the study of something.

Only a true psychologist can understand how fully inaccurate this definition is. Is.

To round out the irony of this comparative study, both of these disciplines are claimed to pursue elemental questions about human life itself. Philosophy often attempts to define thinking and thought toward improving the human condition. Psychology uses science to quantify human thought to improve individual humans.

My particular faith heritage contains a writing that is considered among the oldest in recorded human history, possibly predating even the Greek civilization itself.

“‘Vanity,’ says the Wise Man, ‘everything is vanity – self-centeredness. All the ways of man are selfishness.”

We could have stopped there and saved Aristotle and Freud the trouble.

DEATH TO PACIFISM

“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”

    – Jeremiah 6:14

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.'”

  – Jesus, Matthew 10:34-36

“I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.”

– Jesus, Luke 12:49-52

Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

   ‘My house was designated a house of prayer;
   You have made it a hangout for thieves.’

Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.

When the religious leaders saw the outrageous things he was doing, and heard all the children running and shouting through the Temple, ‘Hosanna to David’s Son!’ they were up in arms and took him to task. ‘Do you hear what these children are saying?’

Jesus said, “Yes, I hear them. And haven’t you read in God’s Word, ‘From the mouths of children and babies I’ll furnish a place of praise’?”

Fed up, Jesus turned on his heel and left the city for Bethany, where he spent the night.

– Jesus, Matthew 21:12-17

Jesus Christ was not a pacifist. His own words as cited above are conclusive proof of His mission and intent.

Modern Hebrew has about a dozen different applications for the word “peace” (shalom – שָׁלוֹם). Some scholars believe there may have been as many as 50 different applications during the time of Christ.

When I say the English word “rock”, I could be referring to a piece of earth that has geologically formed into a single, cohesive unit: rock. Or I could be commanding someone to sway or move in a rhythm while maintaining a stationary location: rock. Or I could be referring to a genre of music made popular in Western culture during the late 20th through early 21st centuries: rock.

Yet we think that whenever we see the word “peace” appear in the Bible – and especially in proximity to Jesus – we assign it the modern Western ideal of absence of conflict. Worse, we ascribe this condition to Jesus and make it a permanent element of His character, conveniently discarding His humanity and the biblical record that we know doesn’t mesh with our preconceptions.

Jesus was often loud. There were times he needed to be.

Jesus was often confrontational. There were times he needed to be.

Jesus was not a man of peace. His time did not require it.

And His ending as King of the Jews was anything but peaceful. But He will be the Prince of Peace.

There is a very dangerous school of thought that has oozed into Western culture, both the Christian Western culture and the secular Western cultures. This poisonous doctrine has largely come to us from Eastern theologies, but it also had roots in the earliest sects of the Protestant Reformation.

I am referring to pacifism.

Pacifism is the idea that the absence of physical violence is the ultimate moral value. It is the elevation of a lie to a place of worship in the place of God. Pacifism says the absence of physical violence is of greater value than life itself. In fact, says the pacifist, only pacifists are moral enough to shed their own blood for their cause; the rest of us are sinful imposters, pretenders to their throne of morality and usurpers of true ethics.

Recently, several people I am close to have bought into this lie. It’s especially hard to witness because at least one of them was once at least nominally a Christian. Since this person has fallen under the New Age influence of pacifistic nirvana they have become unprincipled and anti-American. Peace – that is the absence of violence – is now a goal that can be used to rationalize any number of sins. The United States, this person believes, is a force for evil and its government has not been freely elected for over a hundred years.

Truth, of course, cannot be used to bring deceived people such as this back to reality because they have created their own truth and a separate “reality”. The modern pacifist movement is so insular, it has truly become cultic.

When attempting to explain the necessity for American military action (in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan), I have often spoken the words of John Stuart Mill. His brilliant refutation of pacifism stands as the most eloquent and succinct critique of this cowardly – and ultimately spiritually destructive – philosophy.

 

“But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice – a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice – is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”

 

– John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America”, 1862

Happiness, Part 2

Thanks to everyone for their input.

I wasn’t trying to focus on the pros or cons of anti-depressants. Some people do need them. Most people don’t. Using the statistics provided in the article, over 20 million Americans are using them. That’s probably more than is necessary. But, since none of us has the benefit of each of their particular medical histories (except for those of us who know our own and are taking them), we’ll abandon the impact of antidepressants on this issue.

What I wanted to focus upon was more philosophical. The article mentions the proclamation made in the Declaration of Independence that among the “inalienable rights” with which men are endowed is “the pursuit of happiness”.

The right which is claimed here is not to happiness itself. As the article clearly states, genetics plays no more than half of the drama in which our personal happiness lies. The remainder of the condition lies in our successful pursuit of it.

Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was himself prone to what one of his comtemporaries termed “prolonged fits of melancholia” (and I say this not to point out the possible historical impacts of antidepressants, simply as a point of information and subtle irony). His premise in the Declaration – as it was to be in his later works and philosophies – was that happiness is not guaranteed to any man. The freedom to pursue happiness, however, is ensured by the Almighty and governements must be loosely structured and tightly bound so as to not interfere with that pursuit.

American society (or at least the framers of our Constitution and the founders of our nation) of that time recognized that achieving happiness required a pursuit, an action, effort on the part of the person desiring to be happy. That is precisely why Jefferson, a deliberate and precise writer, chose the word “pursuit”. His intent, and the intent of those who established the United States of America, was to make it a place where men were free to act boldly, do great things and chase wild dreams.

The scientific research cited in the article points out the fundamental truth of this philosophy.

“It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life,” says the author Easterbrook. “And most people don’t make it. Most people take the path of least resistance.

“Far too many people today,” he concludes, “don’t make the steps to make their life a more fulfilling one.”

In short, if you are not happy, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

While I am far from Freudian in either philosophy or psychology, the man had a point about unhappiness being a default mode for the human psyche. It requires no effort to allow one’s self to be unhappy.

If, on the other hand, you desire to be happy, if you want to be happy, then find those elements of your life that make you the most unhappy . . . and change them.

We will, if we are honest with ourselves, almost invariably find that those things which seem to hold us down the most are unappealing elements of our own character.

If we are happy – truly happy – with ourselves, then our circumstances can cause us to focus on unhappy things. We are then faced with two choices: A). shift our focus or B). change our circumstances. Both require action, either mental or kinetic, on our parts.

So, we are left with a choice to allow the atrophy of our human condition overwhelm us and remain unhappy. Or, we can choose to rise above the defining condition of humanity and aspire to happiness. Whether we succeed in reaching that brass ring becomes irrelevant; for all of history, philosophy, theology and science point to the fact that it is not in the completion of the tasks in which we reach happiness.

No, it is to be found in the acts that we engage in to get there.

This is the truth, a simple-yet-complex truth, which even the often anxiety-ridden Jefferson found to be “self-evident”.

Happiness, Part 1

I’ll comment on this a little later tonight. Just read it first and see what y’all think.

The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don’t Use Them

(reprinted from LiveScience.com – www.livescience.com)

By Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
posted: 27 February 2006
08:55 am ET

 

“It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don’t make it.”
—Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook

Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say.

Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago despite significant increases in prosperity, decreases in crime, cleaner air, larger living quarters and a better overall quality of life.

So what gives?

Happiness is 50 percent genetic, says University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken. What you do with the other half of the challenge depends largely on determination, psychologists agree. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

What works, and what doesn’t

Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10 percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men take antidepressants, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Anti-depressants benefit those with mental illness but are no happiness guarantee, researchers say.

Nor will money or prosperity buy happiness for many of us. Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness, but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.

One route to more happiness is called “flow,” an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you’re doing than from how you do it.

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you’re grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life’s small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.

The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy.

On your own

Some Americans are reluctant to make these changes and remain unmotivated even though our freedom to pursue happiness is written into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

Don’t count on the government, for now, Easterbrook says.

Our economy lacks the robustness to sustain policy changes that would bring about more happiness, like reorienting cities to minimize commute times.

The onus is on us.

“There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways,” says Gregg Easterbrook, author of “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” (Random House, 2004).

“Research shows that people who are grateful, optimistic and forgiving have better experiences with their lives, more happiness, fewer strokes, and higher incomes,” according to Easterbrook. “If it makes world a better place at same time, this is a real bonus.”

Diener has collected specific details on this. People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.

Unhappy by default

Lethargy holds many people back from doing the things that lead to happiness.

Easterbrook, also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institute, goes back to Freud, who theorized that unhappiness is a default condition because it takes less effort to be unhappy than to be happy.

“If you are looking for something to complain about, you are absolutely certain to find it,” Easterbrook told LiveScience. “It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don’t make it. Most people take the path of least resistance. Far too many people today don’t make the steps to make their life more fulfilling one.”