When someone behaves negatively towards you, typically displaying some kind of rudeness, there are three ways in which you can take it: Insecurity. You take it personally by default, even when you aren't attacked on a personal level. This is due to your lack of self-esteem, often accompanied by an oversensitivity to nonverbal cues. For all you know, the other person might just be in a bad mood because he is sleep-deprived, love-deprived, angry at or disappointed by someone else, or suffering … [Read more...]
What Do You Want? On Will and Desire
There are three common types of I want: Egoic desire: I want to be X, whereby X can be any physical, psychological, or social state.Possessive desire: I want to have Y, whereby Y can be any material possession or abstract ownership.Motivational desire: I want to do Z, whereby Z can be any choice or activity. But whatever I want to have I ultimately want because of the state I expect the possession to put me in; e.g., I want to have a fulfilling job in order to be happy, or I want to have a … [Read more...]
Plunge Your Mind in Cold Water
The Way is the flow of the universe, and Daoism teaches us to go with the flow, to be in harmony with nature. But how could we not do that? How could we ever fail to be in accordance with nature—are we not a part of it? And if we can't paddle against the stream of Life, doesn't this make Daoism meaningless? What's the point of a philosophy telling us to move along the Way if there is no way that opposes the Way anyway? Funnily enough, this apparent pointlessness of Daoism is actually its … [Read more...]
Beyond Good and Bad?
Nietzsche's philosophy 'beyond good and evil' is a refusal of religious thought and of what he calls 'slave morality'. Last week I defined 'good' and 'bad' in Spinozian terms, which already are beyond good and evil. Now we will contemplate: Can the mind venture beyond good and bad, too? Let us being with Ethica, pars IV prop. LXVIII: Si homines liberi, nascerentur, nullum boni, & mali formarent conceptum, quamdiu liberi essent. which translates into: If men were born free, they … [Read more...]
Let’s Define ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’
Good is what is useful to you, that is, what facilitates your capacity to preserve yourself; for your body, good is what facilitates your power of activity; for your mind, good is what facilitates your capacity to form accurate ideas. Bad is the opposite of good: it's what hinders or erodes your conatus, what diminishes your power to act, and what undermines your rationality. These Spinozian definitions are what I have in mind whenever I use the words 'good' and 'bad' on this blog. Even … [Read more...]
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