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Psychic numbing and genocide - "If I look at the mass I will never act"

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(Sep 24, 2016 07:03 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Idiot Compassion vs. The Rationalist Delusion

At one end of the spectrum, we have Paul Bloom, who makes a strong case against empathy, but at the other end, Jonathan Haidt makes a strong case against reason.

From your article:
Quote:Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another.

I agree.  Art is an expression of our emotions.  Emotions aren’t valueless.  They’re not to be weeded out but cultivated.

"Art is "woman" without which it is impossible to live. In this supreme jeopardy of the will, art, the sorceress expert in healing, approaches us, only she can turn our fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live."—Nietzsche

Nietzsche got a bad rap as a misogynist. He uses "woman" as metaphors for the truth, art, wisdom, and life.

In "The Other Dancing Song," Zarathustra is gazing into Life’s eyes. He remembers the whip that the old woman told him to bring, if he is to engage her. It’s a dance, a battle of wills. Wisdom, i.e., the whip tries to bring order to life, but in trying to impose order on life you run the risks of losing touch with reality by replacing it with your own concoction. Life, therefore, is a little jealous of his wisdom, but nevertheless she appreciates his willingness to engage her. She admits that she would run away from him, if his wisdom departed. He whispers something in her ear, and of course, she has the last word, reminding him that any statement on the actual reflection of reality will always fall short. Next he says "But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was."

"You will dance and scream to the rhythm of my whip. I did not forget the whip, did I?"


I think our empathy and action is limited by our perceived effectiveness.


If reason was considered a kind of regulating template (both a search for coherence slash revealer of coherence and a formulator of coherence), then that abstract form would still need particular qualitative content to apprehend and manipulate (sensations, feelings, passions, etc). Otherwise the situation would be equivalent to absent, meaningless be-ing like what matter is to itself when not organized into consciousness and an animated body (Schrödinger: "The world [or _x_] does not manifest by its mere existence."). Kant's cliche phrase of "Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" comes to mind as perhaps a wayside ancestor of such a perspective.

For an empiricist philosopher who seemed so devoted to immediate experience / perception in the beginning, it might be surprising to some how much George Berkeley had turned his God into a personified version of Plato's intellectual world by the time he wrote "Siris". He seems to have become such a bitter quasi-rationalist in his old age that kicked sentience and passion completely out of that transcendent deity. Wink

George Berkeley Wrote:But to conceive God to be the sentient Soul, of an animal, is altogether unworthy and absurd. There is no sense, nor sensory, nor any thing like a sense or sensory in God. Sense implies an impression from some other being, and denotes a dependence in the Soul which hath it. Sense is a passion, and passions imply imperfection. God knoweth all things, as pure mind or intellect, but nothing by sense, nor in nor through a sensory. Therefore to suppose a sensory of any kind, whether space or any other in God would be very wrong, and lead us into false conceptions of his nature. --Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries, Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water


Actually, he may have already arrived at that view when he wrote the "The Three Dialogues", but I just had to go the bitter old fuddy-duddy spin on it that the "Siris" date enables.
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