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Quest for oblivion: humans & suicide + Quest for the beautiful, self-improved soul

#1
C C Offline
Humans are the only animals who crave oblivion through suicide
https://aeon.co/ideas/humans-are-the-onl...gh-suicide

EXCERPT: At some stage in evolution, it must have dawned on human beings that the death of the body brings with it the death of the mind. The idea that death means mental oblivion is a sophisticated one that can be reached only by deduction, not observation; we assume no non-human animal could grasp it. [...] Suicide among humans is, in fact, dreadfully common. In the United States, someone kills him or herself every 12 minutes. Across the world, more people die from suicide than in all wars and homicides combined. [...] From the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, altruistic suicide on behalf of others might possibly be genetically advantageous. But egoistic suicide, simply to stop the self from hurting, could only be severely disadvantageous. Many of those who do it are young. It’s now the second most common cause of death in teenagers. If these young people had not died by their own hand, they would likely have got over the hurt and gone on to make a success of their lives. At a stroke, they have ruined their own biological fitness and that of related individuals too. At the level of biology, egoistic suicide is clearly a mistake, a sure path to genetic extinction. But it is precisely because humans, alone among animals, rise above biology that they can make this mistake. Humans have reason to believe that by killing themselves they can escape from pain. Thus, suicide might seem a rational solution to an immediate problem. Self-killing may be undertaken as self-euthanasia.

[...] The trouble is, all human beings have moments of despair. [...] In light of contemporary evidence, I think we’re obliged to ask how far suicide would have impacted pre-historic human life. Today, there exist cultural deterrents – religious, legal, civic – which, though obviously not wholly effective, help to keep suicide under control. But they have not always been there....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/humans-are-the-onl...gh-suicide



Beauty & aesthetics: Revolutionary figure of the beautiful, self-improved soul
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-revolutionary-...roved-soul

EXCERPT: In a global culture that appears increasingly obsessed with radical individualism, narcissistic presentations of self, and incendiary political rhetoric, it is hard to imagine that society once cared about the beauty of the soul. But, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Germany and across Europe, the pursuit of a ‘beautiful soul’ became a cornerstone of philosophical thought and popular discourse, advanced by some of the most important intellectuals of the time, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt. To these thinkers, the pursuit of inner perfectibility responded to the horrors of the French Revolution’s irrational mass action culminating in The Terror of the 1790s. Nascent notions of democracy, they believed, could be developed only if each individual achieved liberation from what Immanuel Kant described as the ‘self-incurred tutelage’ of intellectual immaturity by developing cognitive and emotional faculties through aesthetic experiences.

At the core of the beautiful soul is the idea that the individual possesses an innate cognitive potential. Subject to the right environmental and educational conditions, this latent potential can be developed to reach a more perfect state of intellect, morality, character and conduct. The beautiful soul is an aesthetic concept focused on developing human capacities and advancing knowledge and culture. It entails the pursuit of personal cultivation to create a convergence of the individual aesthetic impulse with a collective ethical ideal. The beautiful soul is a virtuous soul, one that possesses a sense of justice, pursues wisdom, and practises benevolence through an aestheticised proclivity for the ‘good’.

Inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, the beautiful soul reflects Plotinus’ imperative to cultivate the self in the same way that the sculptor works...

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-revolutionary-...roved-soul
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
To me the soul isn't so much of a moral or intellectual aspect of being. I'd call that one's character. My soul is empowered by nature and metaphors thereof. It is the epitomy of the Natural, absorbing the essences of weather, water, land, plants, and animals into it's core and transcending the sterile world of concrete and electronics we are trapped inside. The soul is whatever we mean by life itself. It is as magical as that property is, and expresses itself thru deep feelings, the body, dreams, and the creative imagination. If the body were an animistic being all on its own, this is the sort of ancient and primitive consciousness it would have.
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#3
Star  Secular Sanity Offline
(Jul 29, 2017 01:14 AM)C C Wrote: Humans are the only animals who crave oblivion through suicide
https://aeon.co/ideas/humans-are-the-onl...gh-suicide

"Life is not that Important"—Louis CK  Big Grin

My little cousin had an inoperable brain tumor.  My aunt was busy cooking and cleaning.  He was standing at the front door trying to get out.  I told her that he wanted to go outside.  She said, okay, but you have to hold onto him and make sure he doesn’t fall.  We walked hand in hand down the street and then he sat down on the curb.  I sat down next to him.  He asked, what is that?  I looked around—a house.  No, that.  A tree, I asked.  No, on my face.  He started waving his hand towards his face.  Oh, the wind.  Do you mean the wind?  Yes, the wind.  I didn’t even notice the wind blowing on my face.  I think that’s why I loved BJ Miller’s talk so much.

BJ Miller
I've known many people who were ready to go, ready to die. Not because they had found some final peace or transcendence, but because they were so repulsed by what their lives had become—in a word, cut off, or ugly.

Beauty can be found anywhere. One night, it began to snow outside. I remember my nurses complaining about driving through it. And there was no window in my room, but it was great to just imagine it coming down all sticky. Next day, one of my nurses smuggled in a snowball for me. She brought it in to the unit. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin; the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet in this universe mattered more to me than whether I lived or died. That little snowball packed all the inspiration I needed to both try to live and be OK if I did not.

As long as we have our senses—even just one—we have at least the possibility of accessing what makes us feel human—connected. Primal sensorial delights that say the things we don't have words for, impulses that make us stay present—no need for a past or a future.

If teasing unnecessary suffering out of the system was our first design cue, then tending to dignity by way of the senses, by way of the body—the aesthetic realm is design cue number two.

"Play" may sound like a funny word here. But it is also one of our highest forms of adaptation. Consider every major compulsory effort it takes to be human. The need for food has birthed cuisine. The need for shelter has given rise to architecture. The need for cover, fashion. And for being subjected to the clock, well, we invented music. So, since dying is a necessary part of life, what might we create with this fact? By "play" I am in no way suggesting we take a light approach to dying or that we mandate any particular way of dying. There are mountains of sorrow that cannot move, and one way or another, we will all kneel there. Rather, I am asking that we make space—physical, psychic room, to allow life to play itself all the way out—so that rather than just getting out of the way, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end. We can't solve for death. I know some of you are working on this.

Meanwhile, we can—we can design towards it. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well—not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination. SOURCE
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#4
C C Offline
(Aug 1, 2017 02:54 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [...] My little cousin had an inoperable brain tumor.  My aunt was busy cooking and cleaning.  He was standing at the front door trying to get out.  I told her that he wanted to go outside.  She said, okay, but you have to hold onto him and make sure he doesn’t fall.  We walked hand in hand down the street and then he sat down on the curb.  I sat down next to him.  He asked, what is that?  I looked around—a house.  No, that.  A tree, I asked.  No, on my face.  He started waving his hand towards his face.  Oh, the wind.  Do you mean the wind?  Yes, the wind.  I didn’t even notice the wind blowing on my face.  I think that’s why I loved BJ Miller’s talk so much. [...]

The uniqueness or specialness of childhood perception.

Feelings might have been the original or non-verbal tokens for mediating meaning to objects and circumstances. Depending on the clinical condition, an afflicted person can view their house, belongings, family, friends, etc as either "imposters" or those and their life in general as suddenly devoid of significance. Due to no longer having the appropriate (or any) feelings associated to those items. The linguistic values and definitions for them are still being assigned, but not the affective states and inner sensations (or the usual / correct ones).

But for the rest of us, perhaps we deteriorate in an opposite or alternative manner. We begin with an undifferentiated consciousness -- an elementary, unstructured cognition. A late-stage fetus or newborn supposedly marvels at the simplest qualitative content that pierces nothingness. Yet the eventual understanding of those phenomenal properties seems to suck that initial wonder from them. Our attaching of intellectual meanings and practical expectations to bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, and exteroceptive events. Over time the novelty fades, people even dreading -- interpreting awareness as suffering rather than liberation from absence. Even people who still "enjoy life" take the basic presence (of anything), itself, for granted; as banal.

Dying may revive the original childhood enthrallment of raw sentience, thanks to that looming "absence of everything" finally providing stern contrast to the presence. Upgrading the latter's value, engendering enchantment with it again. Plus the press of civilized duties, obligations, goals, and holding on to slash fighting for material possessions no longer weighing heavy in one's personal future (finally being allowed some luxury to return to an earlier, uninitiated mindset).

For those who believe in afterlife, transmigration (whatever), there's arguably other factors that might dissolve the rat-race habits and its Weltanschauungs during the kicking the bucket process, for them.

- - -
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#5
Secular Sanity Offline
Aww...that was great!  You should write a book, if you haven’t already.

I loved that!

Thanks!

Goodnight, C C.
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