Ethics and Aesthetics
Bodhisattvacat
another. I have heard people say frequently that their thoughts and
their feelings told them different things; this of course is typically
due to ideologies and injunctions shaping their reason to act against
what their emotions tell them, or else due to psychological forces and
traumas shaping their emotions into distorted shapes. To people who
say that emotions are not to be trusted, the correct response is: Make
yourself trustworthy to your emotions, and they will trust you.
Practice rational-emotional integration. Practice reconciliation
between the sensuous and the rational, starting with an approach
toward the emotions that is understanding rather than judgmental. Talk
to your emotions and let them talk back to you. Build a relationship
with your emotions based on mutual acceptance and understanding in
partnership for happiness, and not one based on rejection and
perpetuation of abuse. And thus arrive at an integrated character, a
character in which reason and emotions are in accord.
The same is to be told to people who distrust sexuality. Sexuality is
a subset of nature, and sexuality that feels itself wrong is a
sexuality that is inhibited, whether through traumatic experience such
as incest or rape or through poisonous ideologies such as Puritanism
and the Wolf-McKinnon-Dworkin "feminism." Complex emotions surrounding
sexuality reflect the complexity of both nature and civilization, and
the honorable solution is not to blame the medium, as many do, for the
problem, but rather to understand the facts of life well enough to
undo the emotional damage of traumatic experience and undo the mental
and psychological damage of traumatic ideologies to forge these
emotions into something beautiful, developed, cultivated and benign -
into something, that is, that produces poetry and art; into something
that is both loving and life-supporting; into something that accords
with developed reason; into something that is - beautiful.
Since ethics determine what we value and aesthetics determine what we
like, happiness is dependent upon our ethics and our aesthetics being
in harmony with one another. That is, for a person to achieve inner
peace, there must be an area of intersection between his values and
his likes, and he must live at that subset. The greater that area of
intersection, the more the chances there are for happiness; the
rational and the emotional, or the ethical and the aesthetic, have to
possess a way to intersect, or else happiness becomes mathematically
unattainable. Inhabiting the region of ethics without aesthetics is
grim joyless duty and obligation, and living there results in ongoing
misery. Inhabiting the region of aesthetics without ethics is the
forbidden pleasures, and going there results in guilt. Where ethics
and aesthetics intersect, is happiness.*
Sri Aurobindo stated that the sum total of ethical endeavor is to live
one's life beautifully. He of course meant that the person was to act
in a beautiful manner – a manner that is kind, loving, dignified,
self-controlled and elegant. In view of his perspective, as in view of
the previous, it is incumbent upon people to cultivate integration
between their ethics and their aesthetics, with that which is
aesthetically pleasing being understood and then either valued or
altered – and that which is valued either being made palatable to the
aesthetic sense or dismissed. In this injunction, is the ultimate
recipe for integration of the ethical and the aesthetic – a moral code
demanding upon the sum total of man's activities to aim at beauty in
all its forms and to lead, through mechanism of man's activity, to
formation of a beautiful world – beautiful in its physical, relational
and human aspects. It is thus a recipe for integration and happiness.
When Beaudellaire said "Make life beautiful, make life beautiful" he
was giving an ethical and not merely aesthetic injunction. It is, in
my view, a very workable ethic; one that is applied with greatest of
success in Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona, Florence, Prague,
Edinburgh – in the best places in the world. Civilizations are judged
by artifacts they leave behind and ways in which they treat people.
Both can be done in a beautiful manner or ugly manner – and in both
cases the ethic of beauty is tantamount.
The person who is attracted to another person without valuing her as a
person commits a theft – a theft of failure to compute value. He fails
to morally value what he aesthetically likes and, having through
whatever methods acquired what he has sought, proceeds to hurt her
instead of doing the thing that honesty would demand – value and
cherish her. The most common example of this is the case of the men
who are attracted to glamorous, artistic women, but value in a woman
the opposite traits – the traits of servility, humility and
traditional values. If this kind of man marries the kind of woman to
whom he is attracted, he (and to a far greater extent she) is bound to
living in misery, as her personality would be the opposite of what he
values, and he would seek to eviscerate her. If such a man marries the
kind of woman he values, on the other hand, he would be sexually
unfulfilled and most likely seek adulterous relationships. For a happy
relationship to take place, the man must alter either his values or
his likes until he either finds a way to value the kind of woman to
whom he is attracted, or else finds a way to like the kind of woman he
considers the paragons of moral virtue. The most common alternative –
of marrying the glamorous woman, and then trying to destroy her
personality and self-esteem in order to bludgeon her into compliance
with the traditional wife role – is miserable for him and, in my view,
criminal due to the amount of agony it inflicts upon the woman.
The same is the case for women's attractions. It is common for women
to be attracted to the macho character, but to value in a relationship
the man who would treat them well. Now at the risk of provoking to
anger the entire feminine gender, good treatment of women is not in
the description of the Rambo character. He is most likely to see
himself as superior to women, to be violent, to be more loyal to his
buddies than to his wife, and to be prone to adultery, gambling,
drinking, flirtation and other behaviors that are devastating to the
woman emotionally. The provider character isn't much better, seeing
his wife as property and treating her as worse than property – as
property that had the insolence to possess a will of her own that can
at times disagree with his own, a will that by all means had to be
stamped out. A woman therefore needs to decide what she values and let
her values lead ahead of her likes – or learn to value what she likes
and stop complaining when her likes lead her to bad situations.
Both man and woman are at a disadvantage, due to historical errors
that pit the ethical and the aesthetic against each other. The
attitudes that create a rupture between the ethical and the aesthetic
– the attitudes that tell people that their desires are sinful, or
that there is no use for sensitive and romantic women, or that women
are irrational or evil, or that men are out to use women for sex – are
the attitudes that are responsible for such abuse. Effectively, they
cause a separation between the ethical and the aesthetic; which leads
to ugliness and suffering for everyone whose lives a person may touch.
A person whose aesthetics and ethics are contradictory to each other –
a person who is attracted to one set of qualities but values another -
is a miserable individual who inflicts misery on other people. Such a
person simply cannot be happy, and he would not bear for anyone else
to be less wretched than he.
St. Paul said that the wishes of the spirit and the wishes of the
flesh are contradictory to each other. I suggest that this is an
error; for as anyone who's been in love knows, love involves both a
spiritual and a physical longing – the feelings for the loved one and
cravings for her are both spiritual and sexual at once. A partner who
is both spiritually developed and physically beautiful evokes both
spiritual craving and sexual desire; and in the best relationships,
there is both spiritual love and physical affection at once. Spirit
and flesh are two distinct existents within the human being – and in
the best situations, the happy situations, the harmonious situations,
the two work in accord and in collaboration. In Schiller's beautiful
character, the two are in agreement with one another – and in
beautiful social covenants, both the emotional and the rational, like
the aesthetic and the ethical, are integrated using the mechanism of
the human mind and will into the best synthetic product.
Russian Communist candidate Gennady Zuyganov said, "A smart woman is
fine. A beautiful woman is fine. But a woman who's both smart and
beautiful is the scariest thing in the world." As she should be – for
him. A woman who's both beautiful and smart contains in herself the
secret of happiness – the accord between reason and sensuousness - a
refutation to the collectivist misery which the Communist party
preached. Someone who stimulates both the reason and the emotions can
present a point of intersection of the ethical and the aesthetic and
as such refute by counterexample the misery-inducing ideologies that
seek to make people believe ecstatic happiness to be unattainable in
this lifetime. But it is very well attainable. It is attained when
people value beauty and love goodness. When the reason is developed
enough to join with the best of emotion, and emotion is developed
enough to join with the best of reason and morality. When reason and
sensuousness are in accord.
The discordance between many people's ethical and aesthetic values can
be understood from the psychological perspective. Our values, except
for the case of people who put a lot of thought into making their own
values or else adopted a belief system radically different from that
of their hometown, are largely the result of childhood reinforcement.
In perhaps every society, men and women are reinforced differently.
Yet, with the exception of homosexuals, men and women make
partnerships with each other. To both like and value a
different-gender partner, we therefore have to recognize value in
things other than what is similar to us – we have to extend ourselves
to embrace something different from ourselves – different also from
how we have been reinforced; men have to learn to understand and to
value feminine traits and mentality, and women need to learn to
understand and to value masculine approach to life. Scott Peck said
love is an act of extending ourselves for the purpose of another
person's spiritual growth; the spiritual growth achieved here is
likewise one's own, that of integrating into one's personality an
appreciation for something that is not of oneself.
Needless to say, this does not result in easy peace but in dynamic
equlibrium, a state that constantly takes mental effort in order to
sustain. It results in a polarity, in a synergy, that makes the most
of both components. The process is an ongoing synthesis and
refinement; a Zarathurstra's acrobat bestriding the marketplace on a
tightrope, a juggling, until the synergy has been made complete into a
product and the goal – the consummation - has been reached. This is
how the multiplicity is unified and a product is shaped. True peace –
a state of ongoing synthesis and integration among dimensions of
multiplicity – a state of beauty - is therefore a dynamic process
involving thought and ingenuity. The other solution is that of one
side of the dialectic driving the other side into extinction; a war
solution, a domination solution, a lazy solution that fails to produce
a product and results in ugliness, waste of resources, unhappiness and
prevention of inputs from producing anything better than what they are
in themselves.
For those who do not like dynamism and want to seek stability, the
response is: Life is dynamic. Life requires a homeostasis, yes, but it
requires also constant motion and work in order to defeat entropy.
Life has to be both balanced and dynamic; within itself it has to
possess homeostasis and it has to move ahead. True maximization as
living beings is neither the simple straight-line progress of the West
nor the circular harmony of the East; it is rather a combination of
two, a spiral heading upwards, a helix in which the motion is both
circular and linear, with each cycle along one set of dimensions
resulting in an uplifting of human condition along another dimension
of measurement toward a more advanced state, or, if interrupted at any
point in the process, heading downwards to continue the process again
once the destructive influence has passed.
The finding that happiness can only result when likes and values are
in harmony with each other necessitates that both ethical and
aesthetic development proceed in a manner that is harmonious with each
other – through development of the aesthetic sense with help of art
and literature that integrates beauty with virtue and develops
emotions into forms that are noble and beautiful, while providing an
equally elegant conceptual structure that intellectually accommodates
emotional understanding. The high purpose of art is thus to
communicate to senses and to emotions the universal order - to
communicate the ecstasy, the majesty, the magnificence of the universe
in which we live. The high purpose of art is to communicate the truth
in a way that is accessible to emotions - in a way that the feelings
can catch on and that can bring into expression that they can fathom
the higher truth of the world. The high purpose of art is to express
what is true and what is lasting - what is true, that is, to the
universe, whether it find its reflection in passions that run through
us or in fractals and logarithms or in the substance from which has
come matter and time.
The high purpose of science and philosophy is to communicate the same
truth in a way that is accessible to reason.
The goal of therapy as aiming at increasing the person's chances of
happiness should be to bring reason and emotions, or ethics and
aesthetics, into accord. This will result in an integrated character
who values what he wants and wants what he values, thus arriving at a
state of inner harmony and proactive effectiveness. As art develops
emotions into states that accord with developed reason, and science,
philosophy and insight develop reason into states that are friendly to
developed emotion, is arrived a character that is integrated and lives
in a state of dynamic equilibrium, unified among its components and
striving in a united manner toward his or her goals.
Want more? Check http://www.geocities.com/drr0cket/pareto.htm
David
> It is normally held that reason and emotions are opposites to one
> another. I have heard people say frequently that their thoughts and
> their feelings told them different things;
Yes. They often do.
> this of course is typically due to ideologies and injunctions shaping
> their reason to act against what their emotions tell them, or else due
> to psychological forces and traumas shaping their emotions into
> distorted shapes.
Or perhaps it's due to the knowledge that it would a felony to twist
the bitch's head off -- and that then you'd miss her. (Tell me you've
never had that thought: it's easy if you lie.)
> To people who say that emotions are not to be trusted, the correct
> response is:
Take lots of psychiatric drugs!
> Make yourself trustworthy to your emotions, and they will trust you.
> Practice rational-emotional integration. Practice reconciliation between
> the sensuous and the rational, starting with an approach toward the
> emotions that is understanding rather than judgmental.
In your case, bullshit yourself the way you like women to bullshit you.
> Talk to your emotions and let them talk back to you.
*My* voices picked *me* a long shot horse -- twice.
With women though they're *idiots*.
> Build a relationship with your emotions based on mutual acceptance
> and understanding in partnership for happiness,
And wank a lot.
> and not one based on rejection and perpetuation of abuse.
That's right: don't reject your need for *self*-abuse.
> And thus arrive at an integrated character, a character in which
> reason and emotions are in accord.
Or tell yourself you've done so, regardless of what the truth is.
> The same is to be told to people who distrust sexuality. Sexuality is a
> subset of nature, and sexuality that feels itself wrong is a sexuality
> that is inhibited,
Oh come on, Ilya: pedophiliac scat-hunger should be inhibited. Even yours.
> whether through traumatic experience such as incest or rape or through
> poisonous ideologies such as Puritanism and the Wolf-McKinnon-Dworkin
> "feminism."
Or maybe through years of experience with the kind of women who could go
both for me and Ilya Shambat. They're still unable to cure homosexuality,
but heterosexuality can easily be cured by gobs of experience with women.
I think it's because the Homo-curers take the wrong approach. "Aversive
therapy" is backward: what you have to do is keep showing them videos of
actual real-life experiences, while reminding them that this is what they
think they *like*. After a few sessions they'll puke it up and swear it
off, because nobody with any self-respect can be turned by *reality*.
> Complex emotions surrounding sexuality reflect the complexity of both
> nature and civilization,
Not quite: they reflect the depths of our ability to swallow bullshit.
> and the honorable solution is not to blame the medium, as many do, for
> the problem, but rather to
... Put the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger *hard*.
[...]
> The person who is attracted to another person without valuing her as a
> person commits a theft – a theft of failure to compute value. He fails
> to morally value what he aesthetically likes
But Ilya, both Layo and the late Sollilja have told us and you publicly
that you were so wrapped up in your own wordy "mystical" bullshit that
you had no idea what they were about. If you can't begin to *know* what
(or *who*) you aesthetically like, how can you value her morally? When
your idea of her has nothing to do with how anybody else experiences
her, let alone how she thinks of herself, all you can value morally is
your pitiful illusion.
Ilya, I gotta hand it to you: with you the Maya of Kali Yuga finds its
true embodied voice. You're the Saul of Tarsus of Post-Post-Modernism.
[...]
> Russian Communist candidate Gennady Zuyganov said, "A smart woman is
> fine. A beautiful woman is fine. But a woman who's both smart and
> beautiful is the scariest thing in the world."
And ya know, he's almost right: a woman who's both smart and beautiful
and neurotic as all get-out -- like the typical angstress, living or
dead -- is the scariest thing in the world.
On the other hand, a woman who is smart, beautiful, and able and willing
to be a *friend* to her man is of incomparable worth: it's hard to know
what to compare to something that might only be a product of a lonely
boy's "science fiction" fantasies. But I digress: I'm sorry, I know, we
were *supposed* to be talking about *your* unrealistic thinking.
[...]
> Yet, with the exception of homosexuals, men and women make partnerships
> with each other.
I'm not sure "partner" is the right word here. I'm also not sure it'd be
a good idea to post a more appropriate term.
> To both like and value a different-gender partner, we therefore have to
Make shit up *real* hard, just like we have to do to value anybody (once
we're old enough drink from a cup and wipe our asses all by ourselves).
Let's face it Ilya: people suck. Even those we like. (Like, e.g., you.)
Once we've come to terms with that, once we've acknowledged that we're
far more likely to like somebody because of some fucked-up stupidity on
*our* part *regardless* of what "moral" value he or she might have (or
not), then we we can begin to live as all-growed-up grown-ups -- i.e.
as twisted disillusionees who know that no matter how hard one squints
the joke will always be on us. S/he who can live like *that*, without
fleeing into madness, dementia, and/or licit and/or illicit substances,
*truly* deserves the appellation "bodhisattva". (Don't look at *me*,
I'd rather drink: 10 year old bourbon is ever so much *easier*.)
[...]
> Want more?
No thanks, Ilya. You're like a rich truffle: too much will make me puke.
Of course stinking sushi has the same effect at lower concentrations --
which food you resemble more I'll leave to *your* imagination.
HTH,
TD
P.S. By the way, the *book* _The Manchurian Candidate_ was *meant* to
be a *comedy*. I'm glad I finally figured *that* out *too*.
--
"A big disadvantage of living sewage treatment systems is that if
the house is empty, the sewage system starves to death." Wikipedia
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(C) 2004 TheDavid^TM | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
David
> I think it's because the Homo-curers take the wrong approach. "Aversive
> therapy" is backward: what you have to do is keep showing them videos of
> actual real-life experiences, while reminding them that this is what they
> think they *like*. After a few sessions they'll puke it up and swear it
> off, because nobody with any self-respect can be turned by *reality*.
Er, I meant 'nobody with any self-respect can be turned ON by reality.'
Decipher or be damned!
THEDAVID