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[SPLIT] a human nature blah blah blah tangent
LoserForHireX
Philosopher KingThe AcademyRegistered User regular
Philosopher KingThe AcademyRegistered User regular
LoserForHireX wrote: »LoserForHireX wrote: »Roussau is the pimp of the Social Contract club. He's the best, Hobbes is the worst.
Seriously though, fuck Hobbes, right in his butt.
Hey, hey now.
No.
Hobbes is right.
Do I need to get nasty, brutish, and short up in here? Cus I will.
If you don't you'll need to provide an adequate argument for the existence of a social contract other than "implicit acceptance" and "bullshit".
There are some things that just aren't possible without society.
On the list of those things is not "being decent human beings"
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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Whence decency absent society?
Compassion. I believe it's a primal human impulse. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty certain that Hobbes is as well.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
hahaha fuck no
Why would there be compassion without the socially indoctrinated compulsion to be compassionate so that others do not bash our skulls in with rocks?
Uh...I don't think that it's a socially indoctrinated compulsion. I think it's basic human predisposition. I really don't think that the only thing that's holding me back from bashing people's heads in with rocks is because society says it's not okay.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
a fascinating argument
on the other hand, everything
Do you have any evidence to offer that human beings are basically predisposed to compassion; that the primary and fundamental human orientation is towards concern for their fellow man?
Because, you know,
Don't click the spoiler if you are opposed to seeing a mass-grave.
I don't even know what you're saying here. I'm sure it's dismissive and assholish, but I'm not quite sure what it is.
It's tough to argue about human predisposition since we can't really study it, there aren't any unsocialized people running around to look at. However, I think that it's reasonable to claim that the majority of people in the world are fairly decent. They likely don't go out of their way to harm others, though they may not go too far out of their way to help (espcially in large groups). I'm not claiming that everyone is a saint, all I'm saying is that there seems reason to believe that instinctually human beings possess some compassionate impulses.
As Mengzi puts it "who, when seeing a child about to fall down a well would not rush to save it?"
I am also by no means saying that human beings are not capable of great and huge atrocities. There are numerous and frequent environments that do their best to crush compassion. Without the proper encouragement the seed that is that primal compassion will not grow.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I kind of think to some degree to boils down to "I don't want people treating me like shit so I don't treat them like shit." Which could be said to be selfish thinking on a base level, but it can have positive results socially.
edit: also, that the "golden rule" has been a pretty universal social imperative going at least back to hammurabi implies that it comes from something innate
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
fix'd! And back on topic!
the answer: most people
"primal compassion" is a myth that even rousseau had to twist himself into a pretzel to try and prove
not really
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Your argument is that "People in society do not smash one another's brains with rocks. So, people, absent society, would not bash one another's brains with rocks."
Do you see how the evidence you cite is not pertinent to the discussion? i.e. the natural state of man?
If a bunch of people in a society do not kill people that says nothing about people outside society or pre-society.
You're wrong
(these one line like 4 or so word answers aren't very helpful are they? do you have data? reasoning? something constructive to lend to the discussion?)
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Please then, regale me with your observations of man in the "state of nature."
I don't think you have any, not any more than I do. I'm looking at what we have now, and trying to pare away all of the society as best I can. You have a fantastically cliche view of human nature that is based on...what exactly?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
you're really not doing much better
That's a fair point.
I do not have access to man in the state of nature. You do not have access to man in the state of nature. So how, then, to discern man in the state of nature?
Yeah, that's what struck me as terribly stupid about the whole thing. With infinite free energy Communism becomes not only viable but preferable.
The best we can from what man is like now. We look at man psychologically, we appeal to what science has to say on the subject. We see if that fits into a coherent picture. We try to avoid psycholgocal egoism because it's a no no (and because you don't want to hear me talk about psycholgical altruism, my pet counter theory). We learn about the way that socialization works and we use that knowledge to pare away the layers of it on the average person.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Studying the daily interactions of technologically primitive nomads who live in familial units is a pretty good start.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Being a 'decent human being' is a learned part of human interaction. I'm not sure you could get it without society, or even need it.
Also, one need recognize that not all social beings are decent.
See Ayn Rand, for example.
People keep saying that libertarianism is similar to communism in the sense that both only sound good in theory.
I disagree with this notion, because it implies that libertarianism sounds as good in theory as communism would.
Even if the world of Atlas Shrugged was viable, that doesn't change the fact that all of the "heroes" are murderous assholes.
Because humanity has not gone extinct?
If every human ever born had the innate desire to kill every other human, humanity would not last past 1 generation. You're being absurdly absolutist.
We are of this earth.. All that we have ever done has been within nature. We may like to think ourselves masters of the universe, but really all we are is beasts who can speak.
I don't think that the idea was that people killed for the sake of killing. They kill for their own survival. i.e., you need food to survive. The guy next to you has an apple tree, but refuses to share. You decide to kill him for it.
People can remain civil when they feel relatively secure, then go batshit insane when their survival is threatened. Social order is good because it helps maintain a feeling of security, which will punish anyone who goes against it.
Ugh...this argument.
One can make the "Beavers build dams, persons build dams, whence the difference?" argument. I just...think it quite dishonest to think an amalgamation of cement, metal, and electronics is ontologically equal to sticks and mud.
Or, think of it as the organic / inorganic distinction. Do you maintain that organic milk and inorganic milk need be distinguished? Are organic honeycrisp apples the same as non-organic honeycrisp apples? One uses pesticide, the other does not. Well, hell, they're both apples, right?
It seems silly, to me, to collapse everything into "natural". Because, you know, atomic bombs, wifi, and cell phones.
So is the idea here that social order is not the result of human nature? That it is counter to it in some way?
Who imposed this order on us, then? Aliens? Mole-men?
When there is plenty of food because of, say, agriculture a society will arise where killing people to obtain food is not the optimal strategy for survival. You said that people act as they do to survive, and that is as true today as it has ever been, when the first humans lived in small family groups and the #1 cause of death was predators. It's just that the rules have changed, instead of gathering fruits you're supposed to have a job and wear clothes and not kill people.
But of course this is reductive as well. People do things for all sorts of reasons. If a man kills his philanderous wife, he has committed a crime against society, because we have tools to deal with situations like that that don't involve the death of a productive member of society. But he didn't pay attention to that, and he will be punished, possibly even killed himself. Were his action the interest of survival and survival only? What about when you post on this forum? Are you acting purely out of some long-lost survival instinct?
Saying that compassion isn't an innate instinct because people kill people sometimes is patently absurd. People are more complicated than that!
what is the "natural man"? who, in this world, can be considered a man in his "natural state"?
every single human being on Earth belongs to some kind of society. nobody is just born from a pod in the ground like an Uruk-Hai or something.
if you are trying to argue what a human being is "really like" in the absence of societal influence, socialization, and upbringing, you first have to find a human being that has none of these things
except, no human being like that exists
even the most isolated Amazonian tribe or whatever has its own society, its own rules and culture and ways of keeping their people behaving in the way they think they should be
in order to observe whether a human being is truly, by "nature", compassionate or empathetic towards others you'd have to like... raise a child in a box, with robots. with the total absence of other human beings until you can be sure you've established a "natural state" as a control. you'd have to essentially raise a human being like a captive animal, depriving it of language, education, and any understanding that other people exist, because to do anything less you can still argue that their behavior is a product of their social structure and not a "natural" state. then, you'd introduce a human being and see how they'd react.
likely, they'd flip the fuck out, since devoid of any sort of socialization or observing other human beings, they'd have no frame of reference to understand the existence of another person. god knows what they'd do! humans generally react to confusion with fear and anger, so i can't imagine it will go well.
the reality is it's impossible to assess what a human's "natural state" is towards other humans. first of all, anyone who has studied neurology can tell you that many humans exhibit neurological processes that put them an entire world apart from others in terms of how they react towards other people (sociopaths, schizophrenics, and autistics, for example). second of all, as i pointed out earlier you can't really put a person in a "natural state", since that's a totally arbitrary definition and basically impossible to accomplish without artificially making a human being totally devoid of social influence by some insane experiment.
so, it's a ridiculous idea. all human beings are social animals. all. we are not entirely products of our environment (genetics and biology are also factors) but that environmental factor is basically impossible to remove. to try to say "devoid of all society and law, a human being will act like this..." because people like that do not exist. even taking a person from an existing society and placing them in a circumstance where their societal rules structure isn't applicable (Lord of the Flies deserted island type shit) doesn't tell you anything about their "natural state", it just tells you how a person of that society might react if suddenly taken from their existing framework. their behavior is reactionary, not "natural", so as an observation it's without merit.
it is important to study and understand how societal structures and social processes affect and shape human beings, and give them cause and justification for whatever action they choose to commit to. but the "human nature" argument is a fallacious one, because in order to have it you first need to have the "natural human" to compare to.
of course, if you believe in some kind of laughable Cartesian dualism, i'm sure you have some sort of screwball idea where the "Mind" has some enlightened inherent value or quality and that represents "human nature". that idea is absurd, of course, and even if you believe it you are essentially putting faith in something you can't prove that you believe exists
at that point you might as well say God makes people inherently good. it's about as logical or provable.
So, you're a creationist?
The question is how society first came to be. If you argue there has always been society...well, that is quite odd.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Well, I think the contention is that some argue that absent society there is no compassion.
Not "sociopaths" but, rather, "rationally self-interested agents". And our rational self-interest is restrained by society.
You have an apple.
I want your apple.
When you're asleep i'm going to smash your fucking head with a rock to get that apple.
That's the natural state of man absent society. Cause society gives me a way to get your apple without smashing your head. Or, better, society provides more apples which can be accessed absent head-smashing.
No, J, once again you fail at reading comprehension and quote someone out of context to alter their argument to suit your purposes.
Fantastic!
But I'll engage you in this absurd topic, even though I know fully well ahead of time you're a Cartesian dualist and that much of what I am about to say is completely unintelligible to your way of seeing the world.
I said that human beings are part of societies. We are. We all are. Prior to that, evolutionarily speaking? We weren't human beings. We didn't have formal societies in the same way that we have societies now, but even the lowest mammals still have some level of social structure with each other.
If you want to take a step down on the evolutionary ladder and talk about pre-human hominids and sapiens, that's cool. I mean, those creatures no longer exist nowadays, so it's tough to observe them, but inferring what they might've been like from other simians to whom we are closely related or share common ancestors is pretty close!
So, let's look at apes. Chimpanzees and gorillas, for example, don't necessarily have "societies" in the same way humans use the word, but they still have social structures. They still have groupings, and rules. We can even observe the young of these apes being socialized and instructed by their parents and other elders in their community. I suppose it is possible to find out what a chimp's "natural state" is devoid of any sort of socialization with other chimps, as does happen when chimps are raised in captivity. However, it's also been observed that in the absence of other chimps to socialize with and learn from, chimpanzees will socialize themselves and adapt their behaviors to say, the human zookeepers they deal with on a regular basis. Monkey see, monkey do, and all that.
However, even then you are still socializing the animal, even if it's not in the way that is common for that creature. If you tried to raise a chimp in a box, devoid of all other animal life, I suppose it would be possible to figure out what it's "default" behavior is towards other creatures when you introduce them. Given what I know of zoology and chimpanzees in particular... I can't predict pleasant results.
Now, you could say at that point "See! It's natural state towards another living thing without socialization is to freak the fuck out and attack!" or whatever.
But that's hardly a natural state, is it? It's a state you had to inflict on them, and used it to essentially alter the animal's psychology essentially to support your argument. You're still, essentially, warping the creature by your societal influence on it, just not in a way it might be aware of.
It is impossible to divorce people from the influence of other people entirely, because it is essentially impossible for a human being to survive or come into existence in that way. We don't exist in a vacuum, nor did we come about in one. Even creating an elaborate experiment with a baby in order to figure out what a human's "nature" is, is inherently fallacious because in order for the experiment to function you have to forcibly remove a human being from what is their natural environment, and place them in an artificial assessment construct. Any "results" you attained from such an experiment would be tainted by the artificial nature of the experiment itself. In a way, it's almost like the observer effect: the act of trying to figure out man's "nature" essentially involves subjecting a man to an un-natural circumstance.
Except there is no such thing as a man absent society.
They don't exist.
You're trying to argue some theoretical, non-existent thing that you can't even make exist if you try.
It's ridiculous.
So both human beings and societies came to be at the same moment?
Upon what do you base this claim?
Society has been around longer than humans, or anything human-like for that matter.
I think that's always-enough for this context.
inorganic milk" is not a thing, though. milk is organic, regardless of labels
this is what amuses me. there is absolutely a scale of how much we are able to manipulate nature to suit our own needs, but it is gradation, not some kind of binary "natural/not natural" proposition.
The whole concept is a holdover from the religious bullshit about god creating man seperately from the animals.