Sensitivity is the degree of detail one can perceive sensually. It is mostly innate, as it is dependent on organic features, such as the amount of sensory receptors present in the sensory organ. One is able to learn to perceive detail in what one senses, but one is not able to sense more than one does.
Intrinsic motivation to pursue a refinement of the interpretation of sensory data is what enables an individual to explore the extent of his sensory potential. One most not only sense, but also understand, sort, and categorize what one senses, in order to build a mental catalog of sensory experiences, with which to compare previous experiences with the current one, and determine the superiority of one over the other.
A good memory enables an individual to make the best out of past experiences. Those experiences which have been cataloged and archived in the past are instrumental in giving judgment to new experiences. The greater the catalog of experiences, the greater the accuracy of the judgment.
Exposure to sensory data is what enables an individual to build a catalog of sensory data with which compare new experiences, in order to make a judgment of superiority of an experience. This is also a product of intrinsic motivation, as exposure to sensory data must be actively pursued, as well as opportunity, or the means to pursue these experiences.
Lastly, communicative eloquence is a factor which is not required, but it is one which enables an individual to communicate their sensory judgments to others, and ultimately bring the judgment to existence.
Given the above, taste is a product of sensibility, intrinsic motivation, memory, exposure, means, and communicative eloquence.
Sometimes, when things get too close, pushing back can be pleasing. Space needs. Has to do with time, and intentions...keeping the avenues free of debris.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37201 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
It is said that putanesca derives its name from the brothels men used to stand in line in, and required nourishment to endure the long waits... They invented this sauce there. One pleasure, giving way to another
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37201 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
I deal with it by placing a wooden spoon between my ass-cheeks and speaking into microphones with clenched sphincter, giving me that raspy, manly voice that gets the girlies hot and bothered.
Then I get to lick the spoon.
We all have our own dirty little secret pleasures. Next vid I will be uploading, I want you all to imagine me recording it like that. An old fat Greek guy with a spoon up his arse, speaking into a phallic microphone, rambling on about some stupid stuff nobody gives a shit about. It'll be on how great I am, and how all the women love to be raped by me....a hidden resentment towards my mother, and how she gave away her titties to other men when I wanted them to be mine all mine.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I deal with it by placing a wooden spoon between my ass-cheeks and speaking into microphones with clenched sphincter, giving me that raspy, manly voice that gets the girlies hot and bothered.
Then I get to lick the spoon.
We all have our own dirty little secret pleasures. Next vid I will be uploading, I want you all to imagine me recording it like that. An old fat Greek guy with a spoon up his arse, speaking into a phallic microphone, rambling on about some stupid stuff nobody gives a shit about. It'll be on how great I am, and how all the women love to be raped by me....a hidden resentment towards my mother, and how she gave away her titties to other men when I wanted them to be mine all mine.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
And he stands there like a tiger that wants to spring; but I don’t like these tense souls, my taste is hostile to all these retiring types. And you tell me, friends, that taste and tasting are nothing to be disputed? But all life is disputing of taste and tasting! Taste: that is simultaneously weight and scale and weigher, and woe to all that would live without disputing weight and scale and weighers! If he would tire of his sublimity, this sublime one; only then would his beauty arise – and only then shall I taste him and find him tasteful. And only when he turns away from himself will he leap over his own shadow – and truly! into his own sun.
I believe that quote was against Kant and the Kantian sublime:
Quote :
"The perfect application of the categorical imperative leads to Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ where every person is treated, not instrumentally (as a means to some other end), but as ends in themselves. Similarly, each moral action and decision is treated as something devoid of interest entirely. For the Kantian, the truly moral act is not interested even in its own morality.
Nietzsche sees this morality-in-itself as symptomatic of the ascetic ideal, of Western decadence, and of the will to nothing that began with Socrates. Rather than a pure and separate morality, free from the fray of the world, Nietzsche will attack Kant’s position (furthered by Schopenhauer 4 ) as the interested desire “to gain release from a torture” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 106). Nietzsche states that
If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant’s favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues “without interest,” one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more “interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an “unaesthetic man.” Let us think the more highly of the innocence of our aestheticians which is reflected in such arguments; let us, for example, credit it to the honor of Kant that he should expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of touch with the naïveté of a country parson! (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 104).
Putting humor aside (disinterestedly), Nietzsche is making a serious point here. He is arguing that the truly aesthetic experience (that of artists like Pygmalionor Stendhal) cannot be ‘disinterested’. Rather, this disinterestedness is but a poisoned, negating form of interest itself; in its most refined form it is the Schopenhauerean will to nothing. In the wake of the realization that our faculties (of presentation and representation) are inadequate to the aesthetic experience of the sublime, Kant and Schopenhauer recoil. Rather than diving headlong into the experience, as Nietzsche would undoubtedly propose, Kant steps back, removes himself from the unpresentable. He does not ‘experience’ the sublime, rather, his experience is of his own inability to experience the sublime. Kant himself states that
The sublime may be described in this way: It is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of ideas (Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 119).
It is also “what pleases immediately by reason of its opposition to the interest of sense” (Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 118). Yet, “instead of the object, it is rather the cast of the mind in appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime” (Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 104). So, our experience of the sublime is not an experience of the sublime-object (within which the experience originates), rather it is a removed experience: an experience of our foundational self. Nietzsche sees this sort of removal as precisely the problem. At the very the moment of Kant’s most important realization (one that allows him to ground his ‘metaphysics of morals’) there is an experiential gap. Nietzsche notes:
"Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude and went into some desert: even supposing they were merely strong asses and quire the reverse of a strong spirit." (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 107)
What Nietzsche sees in Kant is not strong independence from Hume, Descartes or the world itself. He sees Kant, like Schopenhauer, recoiling and removing himself from his own realization. Kant’s inability to accept the terrible truth of the world (that it is illusory and unpresentable) forces him to construct (using theHumean faculties he has, ostensibly, rejected) a self that is purely rational, an unmoved mover of sorts: the ultimate philosophical desert. What, then, is Nietzsche’s own reaction to the Humean predicament?
Ah, my friend! That your Self be in the action, as the mother is in the child: let that be your maxim of virtue! Truly, I have taken a hundred maxims and your virtues’ dearest playthings away from you; and you scold me now, as children scold. They were playing on the sea-shore – then came a wave and swept their playthings into the deep: now they cry. But the same wave shall bring them new playthings and pour out new coloured sea-shells before them! Thus they will be consoled; and you too, my friends, shall, like them, have your consolations – and new coloured sea-shells! Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 120).
Amid the prophetic language here, Nietzsche describes the consequences of his argument against Kant (and ascetic ideals in general). We cannot hold fast to our virtues, even our supposedly rationally divined virtues-in-themselves. That is, we cannot treat our actions instrumentally, as means to harmonizing with some rational nature. It is this desire to make our experience ultimately decidable and rational that is, for Nietzsche, the contradiction hidden within Kant’s project. Nietzsche argues that when Kant situates ethical decisions within the realm of disinterestedness he is acting on an interest to escape the problems posed by the aesthetic realization that disinterestedness is a form of interest. Thus, Kant’s work is itself subsumed into the realm of chimera, as is Nietzsche’s. The difference between the two is that Nietzsche affirms the chimeras and illusions instead of denying them. As he mentions in the above quote, let “your Self be in the action.” We should, according to Nietzsche remove the middleman of rationality and maxims in general (hundreds of which he has taken from us) and learn only to create rather than discover." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Continuing on the retardation of Kantian-Xts.,
Kant's definition:
"Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such delight is called beautiful." (Kant 1928, 50)
Nietzsche wrote:
"Kant thought he had honoured art when among the predicates of the beautiful he privileged and placed in the foreground those which constitute the honour of knowledge—impersonality and universal validity... I only wish to underscore that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem starting from the experiences of the artist (the one who creates), thought about art and the beautiful from the view point of the “spectator” and therefore, without it being noticed, got the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful.” If only this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of the beautiful, however—namely, as the great personal fact and experience, as a wealth of most personal intense experiences, desires, surprises, and delight in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear the opposite was always the case: and thus we receive from them, right from the beginning definitions in which, as in that famous definition Kant gives of the beautiful, the lack of a more refined self-experience sits in the shape of a fat worm of basic error.
“The Beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases without interest.” Without interest!"
Compare this definition with one made by a real “spectator” and artist—Stendhal, who in one place calls the beautiful une promesse de bonheur [a promise of happiness].
What is rejected and crossed out here, in any case, is precisely the one thing that Kant emphasizes in the aesthetic condition: le désin- téressement. Admittedly if our aestheticians never tire of throwing into the bal- ance in Kant’s favour, that under the influence of beauty people can look at even robeless female statues “without interest,” then we may laugh a little at their expense. The experiences of artists in connection with this delicate matter are more “interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any case not necessarily an “un-aesthetic” human being.
Let’s think more highly of the innocence of our aestheticians that is reflected in such arguments. For example, let us give Kant credit for knowing how to teach—with the naïveté of a country priest—about the characteristic properties of the sense of touch!
And here we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood much closer to the arts than Kant and still did not get out from the spell of the Kantian definition."
"For Kant—a disinterested pleasure is one that lacks a direct connection to desire. This is because pleasure in beauty is supposed to be rooted in our nature as rational beings, which we share with everybody, and it is not rooted in what is idiosyncratic, special to me. Universal validity is supposed to be derived from disinterestedness (Kant 1928, section 6)."
In other words, Objectivity and aesthetic taste is the Xt. Retardation of deriving validity from universal lowest-common-denominators and then calling it a selfless disinterest as it is common to all.
Universal Value/Taste supposedly precedes need...
A Detached perspective is Not a Disinterested perspective!
The Disinterested perspective that splinters mind and body is Not a Detached perspective, but an Involved Hedonistic perspective of that promising the greater pleasure!
Derrida, similar to Heisman, points out the J.-Xt. Nihilism of such a Retarded view of Objectivity:
Quote :
Derrida characterise[s] Kantian “pure disinterested delight” as “the neutralization, not simply the putting to death [la mise à mort] but the mise en crypte of all that exists in as much as it exists” (Kant 43-44; The Truth in Painting).
As he says, “like a sort of transcendental reduction,” this absolute disinterestedness leaves a subjectivity that “is not an existence, nor even a relation to existence. It is an inexistent or anexistent subjectivity”.
Derrida similarly reads the claims of pure disinterested delight of the individual “to subjective universality” in §6 as the unavoidable intervention of the “entirely-other” (Kant 51; The Truth in Painting). Pure disinterested delight or, the “autoaffection” of “I-please-myself-in”, “immediately goes outside its inside: it is pure heteroaffection.” Kant’s idea of subjective universality reveals that the “most irreducible heteroaffection inhabits – intrinsically – the most closed autoaffection”.
In “Economimesis” (1975), for Derrida, disinterested pleasure, the “Wohlegefallen désintéressé,” is produced and enclosed within “the auto-affective circle of mastery or reappropriation.” He concludes that the Kantian idea of disinterest has an overriding “interest in determining the other as its other”. (77, 89, 92).
"The modern spirit's lack of discipline, dressed up in all sorts of moral fashions.- "objectivity" (lack of personality, lack of will, incapacity for "love")..." [N., WTP, 79]
Quote :
"Radical objectivity towards subjectivity would mean attempting honesty to the point of absurdity. To focus on rooting out the deepest sources of subjectivity amounts to seeking out those truths that are most destructive to subjectivity, i.e. self-interest. It is to make a specialty of truths that kill.
If I had no biases I would be dead, rather that sitting here right now, writing about them. To approach the most biasless state of death is to pursue a course of rational selfdestruction through a rigorous elimination of biases towards life. Yet to be value neutral would be to not be biased towards objectivity over subjectivity or vice versa. While objectivity is not inherently self-justified as an end in itself, objectivity could be a means. Objectivity could be a means, for example, of rational self-destruction." [Heisman, Suicide Note]
Quote :
"How far would one be willing to go in pursuit of scientific objectivity? Objectivity and survival are least compatible when objectivity becomes a means of life, subordinate to life — as opposed to life subordinated to objectivity. If the greatest objectivity implicates confronting the most subjective biases, this implicates confronting those truths that most conflict with the subjective will to live. By simply changing my values from life values to death values, and setting my trajectory for rational biological self-destruction, I am able to liberate myself from many of the biases that dominate the horizons of most people’s lives. By valuing certain scientific observations because they are destructive to my life, I am removing self-preservation factors that hinder objectivity. This is how I am in a position to hypothesize my own death.
So if objectivity is not justified as end, then objectivity can be a means of rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life. Rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life, in turn, can be a means of achieving objectivity. And this means: To will death as a means of willing truth and to will truth as a means of willing death." [Heisman, Suicide Note]
Quote :
""Synthetic processes of life work in paradoxical relationship to analytic processes because natural selection effectually “analyzed” or “chose” certain synthetic processes over others. This implies that the most complex syntheses might incorporate an analytic blind spot related the preference of some synthetic organizations over others.
A living thing cannot incorporate all physical possibilities into itself if it is to remain alive. Life, on some level, is an organization synthesis that contradicts, overcomes, or outsynthesizes the physical probabilities of its immediate environment that would otherwise lead to death. Just as the life processes of an individual bacteria cell could not exist if its cell walls were opened to all the physical possibilities of its outside environment..." [Heisman, Suicide Note]
Last edited by Lyssa on Sat Jan 24, 2015 5:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
I'm not going to have a conversation with book quotes. I could quote from a dozen different references, but I am instead giving you my own take on the subject, adding my own examples. If you can't be bothered to do the same, then I think my time is better used reading the books you're quoting in their proper context, than writing here to no one.
Biases are products of consciousness, not life, and there in lies the profound beauty of the philosophical zombie as partially seen in sociopaths.
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.” ― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Perhaps greater intelligence in reality seen depending on a lack of consciousness. What was once selected for now retracted in altered environment.
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.” ― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Lisa: You know, there's too many buttons in the world. There's too many buttons and they're just - There's way too many just begging to be pressed, they're just begging to be pressed, you know? They're just - they're just begging to be pressed, and it makes me wonder, it really makes me fucking wonder, why doesn't anyone ever press mine? Why am I so neglected? Why doesn't anyone reach in and rip out the truth and tell me that I'm a fucking whore, or that my parents wish I were dead? Susanna: Because you're dead already, Lisa!
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I'm not going to have a conversation with book quotes.
What?
Not everything has to do with you... The mention of Kant is said to conjure up a certain somebody like magic, and it worked, what do you know... Its a private joke, you wouldn't understand...
Quote :
I could quote from a dozen different references, but I am instead giving you my own take on the subject, adding my own examples. If you can't be bothered to do the same, then I think my time is better used reading the books you're quoting in their proper context, than writing here to no one.
Really? I thought you of all people would appreciate the 'disinterested' approach... Writing on the subject and to no one in particular, no purpose, no telos, for the simple joy of the writing experience per se divorced from any need was your definition of aesthetics. *shrug*
In any case, you didn't have much of a conversation with someone who had 0 book-quotes either... All you could bother to offer was a coarseness of the common kind, you know, the one from jadedness, when Satyr did counter your example about the sunset. You seem to have found sufficiency in the retort 'Nope' or 'o..O' or ''tis not so' or 'your own limitations'...
And you try to modulate *how* I am *supposed* to respond??
You use your time well as you see it, and I will, mine, as I see it. My aesthetic format is none of your concern, dear.
On the subject itself,, despite you pretending otherwise, Satyr has thoroughly covered it. I can be bothered enough to offer a recap. of your dumdum.
One stands back, far enough to be able to capture a vision, an experience whose change affects us without harming us, or the core that holds us together. Distance is a safe bubble, and one can then speak of *enjoying it for its own sake* when one's consciousness is sufficiently protected from disturbing awareness and pressure of pressing needs. This 'disinterestedness' is not aesthetic objectivity, but a hedonistic Involvement of pre-positing pleasure as good and abstracting life to a safe mode. To speak of 'disinterestedness' as if one were doing so from the point of view of an uninvolved spectator is to make the Kantian error of presenting collective subjectivity as aesthetic objectivity. When one is sufficiently removed from their ego like Xt. and popular Buddhism and Hinduism teaches, then cost/benefit is put on snooze, and then the subjectivity of '(de)-person' x, y, z can be intercepted at some lowest common denominator and this 'uninvolved' appreciation common to any and all is supposedly objectivity. Since it is common to all, it is supposed to be 'disinterested' and selfless. That is a tautology. It is also called J.-Xt.
From the point of view of a god far and transcendental enough, every individual looks equal, and a slave can conveniently speak of the 'objective truth' of equality and 'common humanity' as the retarded Xt. does. At a sufficient distance, my "uninvolved" "disinterestedness" will inform me of the aesthetic beauty of Death being the same as life. With enough ego-dimunition, self-distancing, I can remain uninvolved, unaffected and appreciate the experience of the common dust uniting us all "for its own sake" and call this shared commonality 'objectivity', and an aesthetic pleasure.
To take your chocolate bar example, or your sunset, of how it feels 'for its own sake', you again and again, make the Kantian-Xt. error of presenting shared subjectivity as objectivity, that Apaosha already pointed out to you in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
To say as you have done,
"That which is considered tasteful, beautiful and captivating determines how one decides to soothe one's need."
...is to to say aesthetics determines objectivity, rather than objectivity determining aesthetics.
... is to say value determines need, rather than need determining value.
This is a gross conflation of the two. And the most unscientific understanding.
It is an expression of how our needs are satiated....
Aesthetics is a Science of evaluating sensory-values, sensory-power judgements.
Aesthetics is applying objectivity to self-consciousness, which is a Continuous reflection of our need...... there is no break. Objectivity itself is a reflection of our need for Order - pleasure.... and aesthetics expresses this objectvity. Therefore aesthetics and need/pleasure are not separated.
To say, as you do, "rooted in need but not pursued for need's sake" - as what is aesthetics, is NON-SENSE.
Pleasure to the body is satiation of a need, and aesthetics expresses how we choose to satiate this need and this 'how' therefore requires objectivity, FOR pursuing that need ----- efficiently. ---"For need's sake".
Get it?
The weak diminishes his senses, removes himself from his ego, in order not to feel overwhelmed by pain or pleasure. The Xt. slave calls this de-personalized uninvolvement 'objectivity' and noise-reduction of bodily passions, but what he is reducing is his body, his self. This is objectivity born of a self-dimunition and a self-denial, a fracturing of mind and body.
The strong deploy their senses fully, and affirm their ego to the fullest. Their strong will over-rules the bodily passions and does not eliminate or "completely transcend" it; it regulates the bodily passion's maximum participation. Objectivity is this fine-synchronizing of body and mind to discern life more Fully in all its intricate complexities, enduring the as-it-is beyond pain or pleasure. This is objectivity born of maximal self-affirmation, mind as the wisdom of the body and its extenstion, its realization. The body and passion not as an obstacle that pulls down, but pushes up and onwards to higher planes of being to a fuller picture of the world.
The "for its own sake" here, which is the contemplation of the object or experience by the self-dimunition of the subject and therefore divorced of any cost/benefit, to the point of a shared commonality - 'objective',,, is not the same as "for its own sake" of scientific objectivity which is the contemplation of the object with full awareness of what it IS in Reality --- of the unpleasantness, of the pain, of the disturbance, of the defects, the cost involved that reveals the nature of life as it IS and 'therefore' *common* to all - 'objective'.
The 'objective' of the hedonist slave who ego-diminishes his way to a commonality is not the same as the 'objective' of the master who ego-maximizes his way to discern the nature of reality as it is that is common to him and all. He sees the mountains and sunsets as extensions of the reality principle inside him and not divorced from it.
It is what enables us to feel a sunset so beautiful, which is not an isolated object, but a framing amidst a background... the grandeur of that flux and that terror and yet a manifest order amidst, which we feel attuned with in our own selves, *therefore* inspires us with the awareness of our survival and endurance thus far like the sun, or uplifts us to survive, like the sun extinguished today manages to arise again. The "for its own sake" is the objectivity of acknowledging nature as it is, beyond pain and pleasure this awareness affects us with. It is not the disinterested ego here, but the utmost self-interested ego tending towards max. order, near coinciding with the pleasing object of contemplation, the self-appropriation of the power of the sun in the attempt to affirm life as it is in its widest scope of being. Sun, mountains, etc. as self-mirrorings as existence is an interaction and all life is rooted in need.
The 'detachment' of the hedonist is that of the self, to view an unaffected pleasant experience.
The detachment of the master is that of the effects of pain/pleasure on the self, to view a realistic and truthful experience.
Likewise a symphony, a flower you do not have to pluck and can enjoy by letting it be 'for its own sake'...
An aesthetic appreiciation amidst the chaos and meaninglessness that our world is "for its own sake", is to make maximum sense of it all FOR NEED's Sake. Not every objective description of a subjective experience is an aesthetic. Just because I can objectively describe the subjective experience of swallowing paint 'how it makes me feel for its own sake', is not an aesthetic.
The affirmation of life as it is to appreciate the height as well as the depths, beauty as well as the terrible that we can afford to be touched by. The sight of a sunset is not pleasant; it is awe-some and why it captivates us.
If you want to still argue for the kind of unscientific Xt. retardation you've been on about simply to save your 'pride', even after Satyr and Apaosha and the rest have pointed out, remain slavishly as you are. I cannot be bothered.
Last edited by Lyssa on Mon Jan 26, 2015 8:04 am; edited 1 time in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.” ― Peter Watts, Blindsight
That's a nice quote, thank you.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37201 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
An animal driven by need is fully engrossed by the source of his satiation. He is given over, possessed, by the object/objective, fully dominated by a pressing need that focuses its consciousness upon it. It becomes obsessed.
If said animal evolves self-awareness, it begins to perceive itself acting, and so it can stand back from its own obsessiveness, if it has not already been taken over, and observe itself feeding. Part of the mind is still involved in the pleasure of satiating a need, and a small part is detached, observing itself enjoying.
If said animal becomes sophisticated enough to have more complex needs such as psychological ones, derived from this increasing self-awareness, then it can find pleasure in a color, a tone, a smell that feeds this need though no feeding no physical consuming is involved. The mind is consuming the object/objective on a different level. It is consuming the image, the sound, the smell, the texture, absorbing ti as memory.
A psychological need might be founded on the recognition of order, symmetry, which is for an ordering a matter of survival. It might be the recognition of potential, as in the case of genetic fitness, and erotic beauty, where the object/objective is full of untapped promise which the organism is inspired by, or comforted by, or covets.
The need always corresponds to an organic source, which would include psychological needs. They may combine into more intricate needs which are connected to multiple organic needs.
Once the need is present the object/objective is what promises to satiate it. Then the mind need not be self-aware, but it can let go to the moment of satiation. The need has already established the taste for this or that....the obsession for an object/objective. Satiation can now become engrossed with the moment of gratification, with no self-consciousness disturbing it.
This is called "being in the moment". What comes easily to animals, and to simple minds with little self-awareness, is problematic for more complex, self-conscious minds.
A factor that may increase the possibility of being engrossed in this way is the size of the need present. A man who has not had water for days will drink completely taken over by the moment of satisfaction. A man who is dominated by a sexual need will be taken over by sexual frenzy when gratification is potentially close. A man obsessed with his appearance will be taken over by his own image and how he looks to others.
True indifference, being the result of independence, or a degree of it, would made being engrossed impossible. The need would not be strong enough to cause the losing of self. in he object/objective, and no possibility would be so pressing as to create the circumstances necessary to be engrossed by otherness. A sunset is mesmerizing for a mortal creature who witnesses the power of the sun, the father, which he dependent upon, and which in that moment experiences the passage of time, and recalls that he is on a planet moving in space, putting him in perspective. A flower will remind him of how fragile life is, he is, and how wonderful it is to be alive, feeding his need to live, to experience as much of life as possible.
He need not understand any of this, no more than a wolf needs to know why it is so obsessed with killing and eating lambs, or why it prefers the taste of deer to that of sheep, because to understand this requires self-knowledge, and only humans, on this planet, are capable of this level of self-consciousness.
"That which is considered tasteful, beautiful and captivating determines how one decides to soothe one's need."
...is to to say aesthetics determines objectivity, rather than objectivity determining aesthetics.
... is to say value determines need, rather than need determining value.
Wrong. Confusing HOW and WHAT again.
The objectivity of need is untouched by aesthetics. Aesthetics takes care of the how. If I have energy that I need to spend, my sense of aesthetic will determine how I will spend it. From the need POV, it doesn't matter if I watch a recital or if I watch the superbowl, as long as the energy is spent.
Sorry dear, I only have time for snippets today. I've got toys to deliver.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"That which is considered tasteful, beautiful and captivating determines how one decides to soothe one's need."
...is to to say aesthetics determines objectivity, rather than objectivity determining aesthetics.
... is to say value determines need, rather than need determining value.
Wrong. Confusing HOW and WHAT again. The objectivity of need is untouched by aesthetics. Aesthetics takes care of the how.
That sounds familiar...
Lyssa wrote:
I am hungry. --- (sub)Consciousness.
What am I hungry for? --- Self-consciousness.
How am I satiating my hunger? --- Aesthetics.
It is an expression of how our needs are satiated....
Aesthetics is a Science of evaluating sensory-values, sensory-power judgements.
Aesthetics is applying objectivity to self-consciousness, which is a Continuous reflection of our need...... there is no break. Objectivity itself is a reflection of our need for Order - pleasure.... and aesthetics expresses this objectvity. Therefore aesthetics and need/pleasure are not separated.
To say, as you do, "rooted in need but not pursued for need's sake" - as what is aesthetics, is NON-SENSE.
Pleasure to the body is satiation of a need, and aesthetics expresses how we choose to satiate this need and this 'how' therefore requires objectivity, FOR pursuing that need ----- efficiently. ---"For need's sake".
Get it?
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Christian wrote:
If I have energy that I need to spend, my sense of aesthetic will determine how I will spend it.
Satyr wrote:
Organ Hierarchies The particular arrangement and relationships between an organism's organs and the cells that comprise them. Inheritance is the primary determinant, but mutations, and environmental effects (illness, etc), will also contribute to this inherited organic predisposition. These organ hierarchies will determine which organ needs will dominate consciousness. The organ's dominance, and the particular needs of that specific organ, will decide which elements will appeal to the individual more, and which, will not. This is the nature/past factor.
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Christian wrote:
From the need POV, it doesn't matter if I watch a recital or if I watch the superbowl, as long as the energy is spent.
Sense of aesthetic is shaped by need - the way a hierarchy of drives arranges itself is an expression of need.
The two are not divorced.
If you have no scientific conscience, pray hard for a shepherd, cross yourself and say amen! and be done with it.
I thought I'll throw that in, since we already have an animal farm of crabs, spiders, bats, maggots, precious pups, pussy purrring, ponies horsing around and for the most part, a huge bull.... but there's a sheep bleating too,, would explain all the yarn.......... zz
A disinterested appreciation understands that by judging something to be of a quality, that quality itself is all there is to be gained. Disinterest does not imply any action or course, there is nothing to pursue and no particular suffering to remedy. Why do people stare at sunsets, for example, other than to enjoy their beauty? This is an aesthetic appreciation of beauty, whereas an interested one isn't.
What makes you think that a man who stares at a sunset in order to enjoy its beauty is not at the same time doing it in order to prevent suffering?
Suffering, after all, occurs as a result of suppression of one’s needs, so every release, every expression of one’s needs, no matter how small, helps reduce and prevent suffering.
That a man can pull out of an activity without suffering any consequences is no proof against the notion that his actions are guided by his needs. What this means is that his needs are relatively weak or that he has other means of satiating them.
I suspect that you are a rigid thinker who cannot think beyond bivalent logic. But I may be wrong. Let’s see. Do you agree that all action is guided by needs? A no would be a vote for the idea that you are a rigid thinker.
I agree that there is a difference in the way needs are expressed, that there is such a thing as neediness, characterized by crudeness, abruptness, bumpiness and explosiveness in expression; and indifference, characterized by smoothness, fluency, gentleness and simultaneity in expression. But I don’t take indifference literally, so I have no issue with the idea that need underlies all behavior. You, however, do.
You judge labour to be good because it gives you the means to have food and shelter. A need to minimize the chance of sudden disintegration, of death, judges here. It has a toward, that is true, but every need, every action, has its toward, every judgment is a judgment toward.
A means and an end, a process and a state, a drive and a goal, a flux and an object, a becoming and a being: an action can be pursued for its own sake or it can be pursued for the sake of another action. Whether you know it or not, agree with it or disagree, the former is what we call indifference whereas the latter is what we call neediness (as well as desperation and nihilism.)
That an action is pursued for its own sake, however, does not mean that it isn’t pursued for the sake of another action as well. An action always leads to another action, it never remains the same, for in the universe of flux, nothing ever does.
The real difference lies in the way one action, one step, one need, one energy, flows into another action, another step, another need, another energy. A lack of elegance in this flow, a lack of smooth interpolation, of gradual movement, a presence of a leap or a skip, of any abruptness in the flow, indicates a movement of neediness, of excess, of a force not absorbed well enough.
A skip can be made in one of two directions: in the direction of comfort, as an excess of fluidity/relaxation/forgetting/Dionysus, as a sudden numbness, acoustically speaking, as a sudden silence; or in the direction of discomfort, as an excess of ridigity/tension/memory/Apollo, as a sudden painfulness, acoustically speaking, as a sudden loudness. Neediness is a skip in either direction whereas indifference is this imagined, ideal, perfect, skip-free flow.
This perfect skip-free flow, however, is an ideal, a fiction, something that is imagined and that does not really exist in reality. It should be taken as a direction, not as an end, for in reality, skipping is inescapable.
Neediness, then, is not simply a presence of a skip, just as indifference is not simply an absence of a skip (if you think you are not skipping this is only because you are unaware of skipping.) Neediness is rationalized skipping, a reaction to skipping, which can take two forms, as a love of skipping, where the means dominate the ends, hedonism, or a hatred of skipping, where the end dominates the means, masochism. Needy means skippy, addicted to skipping.
A man has a position. This position is given to him, he does not choose it. His goal is to simply keep this position as much as he can. The reality, however, does not let him do so, it always forces him to move, if not blow him away, to another one. A man, thus, should always be ready to find himself in a different position. All of his ideals, then, should be able to work with any position he finds himself at.
The basic ideal is to gradually move toward the position that is most intimate to him (all positions he encounters in his life become intimate to him, but not equally so.) Again, he has no complete control of this gradual movement and he should be prepared to be thrown anywhere at any point in time.
So when does neediness begin? It begins with a man who loses his position and who resents losing it. He does not accept it, so he ends up forcing himself back into the old one: he willfully skips to the old one. This is when decadence begins, when skipping becomes desireable. In this masochistic, we can say conservative, form, the end becomes more important than the means. This is what you mean when you talk about labour. This is also what happens when one forces himself to be indifferent: he becomes needy indifferent, he becomes masochistically indifferent, not naturally indifferent. This is the tyranny of the ideal.
This is the danger a man of labour faces. He must work in order to avoid death. He must stick to his job or else he will die. No flexibility, no letting go. If his needs rebel, if his body disagrees, thus sending him into a foreign position, he must use force to shut his needs down and restore his lost position. He is not free to pause here, for pausing will automatically make him assert his own rhythm over the one asserted by his employer, thus risking losing his job.
A man of anything, even of philosophy, can face the similar danger, because it is not the other who makes one a tyrant, it is not a single event that makes one a something, it is a series of events, one’s entire past that does so. It is psychological, it has much deeper roots than simply being forced to do something you do not want to do at one point in time. So a man of philosophy can find himself in the same trap if he projects goals he cannot live up to, say, if he dreams of becoming a great philosopher, or putting an end to philosophy, or shaping the future of humanity and similar craptrap that is popular among the species tyrannosapiens philosophicus. Once he locks himself into a box of his own promises, breaking out of them becomes extremely difficult, because what waits him on the outside is a terrible feeling of shame.
A reaction to this sort of addiction to skipping is hedonism, another sort of addiction to skipping. Here, only direction is changed: one no longer skips towards a single position, one now skips to new positions. Old positions become quickly boring, so a skip to a new one becomes increasingly desireable. Originality, innovation, individuality and divergence become the key values, even if these are completely shallow.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
You wish to define aesthetics as that objective disposition which reduces noise-factors in judgement [divorcing of needs from consciousness] and therefore allows a thing to be appreciated for its own sake.
Yet, take note, there are two kinds of objectivity that You confuse:
1.
Schopenhauerian's "will-less will" or "disinterested contemplation" As Self-effacement is a sense-dimunition.
2.
Scientific objectivity is the disciplined employment or application of every power of the senses to discriminate and observe an entity from the fullness and engagement of one's being. This kind of Objectivity AS Self-assertion is a sense-augmentation.
The ability to stand at a distance from oneself when the senses are sharp, powerful, and so able to disregard values of pain/pleasure impressing itself as evaluatory-factors in judgement;
Quote :
"Objectivity" in the philosopher: moral indifference toward oneself, blindness toward good or ill consequences: lack of scruples about using dangerous means; perversity and multiplicity of character considered and exploited as an advantage. My profound indifference toward myself: I desire no advantage from my insights and do not avoid the disadvantages that accompany them.- Here I include what might be called corruption of the character; this perspective is beside the point: I use my character, but try neither to understand nor to change it-the personal calculus of virtue has not entered my head for a moment." [N., WTP, 425]
This kind of Objectvity deploys every method, every sense, every tool at its disposal to gather observation without effacing its character, without effacing self-involvement.
The first distinction is already made in season 3; between Observation and Participation, reflecting the above two takes on Objectivity.
Hellenic asceticism did not involve total abstinence, but more stringent selectivity, seasonal in nature.
To abstain from alcohol is the only way an alcoholic can hope to cope with the inner void that made him turn to alcohol for comfort. True self-control would be selective indulgence, not total abstinence. Hellenic asceticism would not indulge in excessive wine drinking, for the sake of wine, nor would he abstain from consuming wine for an entire lifetime, to satisfy the gods. He would take what is allotted to him, and give to the gods their share.
With Judeo-Christian asceticism the weakness of the body is acknowledged and adapted to by distancing the mind from that which it is tempted by. The only force of will required is to abstain, to avoid, to evade, knowing that one taste will rekindle the physical weakness, the internal need that cannot be denied. With Hellenic asceticism, seasonal abstinence is meant to test and exercise the will, making the source of satisfaction more clear to the mind that keeps it at a distance, only to approach it, at the end of that period with a renewed understanding, of self in relation to it. Not to, then indulge gluttony but to partake with more discrimination, more self-control. To enjoy every bite and every swallow, to know what it is and to sharpen one's tastes by knowing and understanding it.
