I’ve been feeling sort of disturbed lately over the thought of how people use retribution and violence to comfort themselves. This disturbance came to me when I started thinking about whether or not it’s okay to hurt rapists after they’ve raped someone. I feel like if I were to just say, yeah go ahead and smash their balls with a sledge hammer, then that may satisfy some basic need for moral answers in the universe. The problem is, the existential and higher rationality side of me says that violence doesn’t really achieve anything.
So, it’s left me in an existential dilemma that I’ve been inside of for a while now. It’s the problem that there is no ultimate good or bad in this world. Even rapists, they’re only bad because we place that jurisdiction on them. We’ve come to a societal consensus that rape is a bad thing, for the betterment of our human kind. One of the reasons society has religion is because people feel - as I am feeling right now - uncomfortable with existential dilemmas. It makes us feel uncomfortable to feel like we don’t have answers in the world.
It feels like a valley has opened up inside my head and all logic seems to fall into it, like a black hole, the weight collapsing in on itself from the complexity of the problem. I realize with despair, there’s nothing that makes good people good and bad people bad, and the very idea of justice is something that perplexes me. This disturbs me to the core of my being, the existential dilemmas that we can face. There’s no ultimate feel good endorphin release with intellectualizing the universe. The only thing that can superseded our emotions is our intelligence, but even intelligence isn’t enough.
I don't believe I have the education needed to speak with authority on the matter but I believe you'd find something in René Girard's work. Memetic violence/scapegoating - s'wat he deals with. I've been meaning to get more into his ideas but I don't have the time anymore.
>>8120797
I'll look into this
Schopenhauer deals with this by saying that once a person has committed a harmful crime, the job of the state is to use him as a means to dissuade other would-be criminals from breaking the law via punishment, as well as to restore public order.
Congratulations. It sounds as though you've made your first steps toward an ascension from the herd. You're as yet still riddled with spooks, but give it some time and a bit of intellectual elbow-grease, and you'll soon be both thoroughly free and thoroughly embarrassed at having created this thread. Godspeed, Opie.
>The problem is, the existential and higher rationality side of me says that violence doesn’t really achieve anything.
It depends what you mean by violence. If you mean violence in the most abstract, universal, and general sense, as a synonym for chaos or strife or evil, then you are a right, violence is a principle of disorder and does not solve anything, but only creates problems.
But violence in a more specific sense does solve things, e.g. it is used by animals to get food and settle conflicts.
Pacifists will say that because violence in the philosophical sense is an evil, then all violence, even in a practical sense, is evil.
You have to make a subtle but important distinction though, that those who are philosophically opposed to violence are rarely thoughtful enough to make. Physical violence is not the only form of violence, there is a higher form of violence: a spiritual or intellectual violence. Gandhi was an anti-violence pacifist, but only when it came to physical violence; in reality, Ghandi was an extremely violent man who went around telling people how they should live; he even sent a note to Churchill (I think it was Churchill, whoever the PM was of the UK) to let the Germans conquer the UK, because, "they can kill your bodies, but they can't kill your souls." Now, philosophically, there is nothing objectionable, in principle, against using a lower form of violence (physical violence) to establish a higher form of peace (civil peace, spiritual peace).
Christ was a very violent man, even though he very rarely used physical violence (although he did, e.g. when he drove the merchants out of the temple with a whip); his main violence was a spiritual violence, but this spiritual violence aimed towards a spiritual peace: the bond of love between God and man, and between men. This is essentially a doctrine of peace, but it necessarily meets violence because so many are opposed to it.
Plato talks about the Spartans basing their entire state on war, and preparation for war. Plato argues that the first principle is not war or disorder, but peace and order; and that the state should be built on achieving peace, not war, and that war should be treated as a failure or an exception, rather than the normal state of things. Plato argues this by saying that even to go to war and have any chance of winning, one needs peace and order among the military; if the military men were at war against one and other, the state would collapse, which shows that not war, but peace and co-operation is the first principle of the state.
>>8122350
Great post, man
People that have an existential crisis think they have discovered the ultimate pointlessness or meaninglessness of the universe. They continue to live, but with an anxiety which says that their life is ultimately pointless. They will then have to either admit they were wrong and affirm the goodness of existence, or practice a kind of detachment from all things, or kill themselves.
Existential crises are common today because people think that the first principle is chance or chaos, that all things are born out of lifeless matter and chance forces and particle collisions. Then intellect and purpose come to be seen as a mere illusion arising out of matter, a kind of accident of the human brain.
The fact that this leads to the notion that good/evil, true/false, are an illusion, shows that it is faulty and self-defeating premise. If the first principle is disorder/chance/chaos/matter, then there is no reason to trust our minds and we shouldn't bother to reason at all. This is why we have to accept, for the sake of maintaining the knowability of the world, that the first principle of things is not blind chance and matter, but intellect. We have to agree with the Greek Anaxagoras and Plato & Aristotle following him, that Intellect or Mind is prior to matter, and that the material world is caused by Intellect, rather than say that intellect is caused by matter.
The problem with this view is that it leads naturally to religion which a lot of people today have an almost superstitious aversion to because they have been taught that religion is the mother of all evils: ignorance and war.
The only way is to kill yourself by getting through Being and Time, and then chilling out and watching Futurama and waving/being kind to people
>>8122413
It's true that the mind or intellect is what directs things to a purpose, and therefore if the only mind is the human mind, then all purpose or meaning is a human invention, whereas the things that exist prior to or without humanity have no intrinsic purpose in themselves, and humanity has no intrinsic purpose because humanity did not create itself. In this view, only things made by the human mind have an intrinsic purpose.
However, there is no reason to reject, and (on the contrary) every reason to accept, that there is a supreme mind or intellect which directs all things in existence to their ultimate purpose, just as the human mind directs human artefacts to their purpose.
It would be absurd to think that cars have the purpose to transport humans around, and cities and roads have the purpose of helping men to live prosperously, but humanity itself has no purpose whatsoever. It would be absurd to think that anything in the world has any purpose, if the world itself has no purpose. If we accept that there is purpose in the world, we must accept that the world is being directed by a Mind. And we must accept this, otherwise existence is absurd and meaningless and there is no reason to do anything. We would either have to kill ourselves or retreat to a Buddhist monastery and pretend that the whole world is an illusion.
>>8122433
Also, it's clear that mind is prior to matter because mind is a self-moving substance whereas matter is only moved by extrinsic forces.
It is more the case that mind moves matter than that matter moves mind. Our general psychological intuition is that we move our bodies; our common sense has us feel in direction of our movements. We experience ourselves making decisions and moving our bodies accordingly, i.e. we experience mind moving matter, more than matter moving mind. Similarly, just as there is a mind that moves the human body, so there is a mind that moves the whole body of the universe (c.f. Plato, Timaeus).
>>8122348
I always see people saying spooks when they talk about max stirner. would you suggest I look into some of his works?
>>8122656
Somebody is going to meme hard at me for this post but you can literally understand everything worthwhile about Stirner if you just google 'philosophy of max stirner' and visit the first link.
>>8122350
The diamond among the dirt.
>>8122350
Can u explain or give some example of this spirituality violence
>>8122350
>but this spiritual violence aimed towards a spiritual peace: the bond of love between God and man, and between men.
and if it is just abstract violence towards nothing?.
>>8122350
Spiritual violence is a nonsensical idea. You can't force someone to believe something by simply preaching it, and introducing new ideas into their heads can hardly be labeled as any kind of "violence."
If you have a reasonable view of the world, then the explanation for the evil of violence is straightforward (it isn't just "violence is bad because it is chaos"), and you don't need to introduce lemmas to the concept. The reason why violence—real violence—is evil is because it's an effort to supersede the individual and the rational. People who are in favor of violence believe that violence is the solution to a disagreement of the minds, whereas those who don't favor violence will continue discussion and compromise. If you force somebody to believe your way by conquering them (if you are a nation) or threatening them (if you are an individual), then you have admitted that reason (compromise, diplomacy, etc.) has failed. Therefore, the times when violent acts are permissible are those where the other party refuses to negotiate, such as with dictatorships or with people who believe violence is an answer. Violence can be used in the those situations as a defensive measure.
