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If a human kills another human to save other humans, they are a hero. For instance, if the SWAT team takes out a hostage taker that has a gun to a kids head and is prepared to shoot, then the officer is not evil, they are a hero.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexaris100
It's all situational.
Zebras and lions are not sentient.Quote:
Originally Posted by wpack10
If you believe in good and evil, there are many ways to do good or to do evil. When determining whether an act is good or evil, motive/intent is everything.
Exactly. The lion isn't thinking "Hey, I'm going to kill this zebra so his family will die of grief! Woohoo!", he's thinking "I'm hungry. He's food. It's go time." Evil requires intent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Omnicronimous
And in that hostage scenario, the SWAT sniper isn't killing the criminal because he wants to, or because it would do him good: he's doing it to save the hostage. His purpose is NOT to harm the criminal, which would be evil; his purpose is to save someone's life.
it is my personal beliefe that we are all given our own personal seed of 'evil' to over come. it is also my pesonal beliefe that we chose what evil we wanted to be challenged with. it is also my personal beliefe that we were equiped with all the means nessacary to overcome our personal seed of evil.
therefore it becomes my personal beliefe that we are born with the potential to be truly good, truly evil, or a mix of the two. my obsevance of human life, my own included leads me to believe that for the most part few people ever reach the true extreems of those three sinarios. for the most part we as indaviduals fall in the "shads of gray" catagory. it is much easier to collect the motives of ppls actions and judge them as being good or evil by them but the question before us is how do we fair as a whole. as a collective.
let us therefore judge individuals each by their own standards and take that data for our collective. an imposible task outside hypothetacals. how then can the question be answered? becuase each of us is going to produce hypothetcals based on our indavidual experence of life and our indavidual values.
but lets just say for a moment that you did poll a group of ppl. asking them to judge themselfes by their own personal beliefes. how many would admit to them selfs that they fall short of what they beliefe to be good and right? we are creatuers of habbet that want to strive for something grater. two warring drives with in us that influence every choice we make every second of every day.
do you continue breathing because you wish to do something better with that breath then you did with the last? or becuase its a habbit you dont feel like breaking just yet?
I was going to react with a lengthy reply, but almost at the end I noticed I was at very thin ice, that would most likely get me in the danger-zone for infractions..
I know what I think. Man is good... I also have a strong opinion on what I think is the root of evil. You want to know? Ask me in PM.
uh, ill keep out of this. i would get a gazillion infractions for religous stuff. but i voted people are evil by nature.
[edit] well, unless mods give me the ok.
Hmm ... my two cents on this one ... I strongly believe in free will. Man can be good if he chooses to be good. Same goes with being evil.
I would so love to lay the groundwork and expound on my argument but it'll take all day. So I won't because ...
1. I don't have all day
2. You don't have all day
... and
3. I'll get zapped with infractions for sure!
hen a big murderer, however, comes from the battlefield after committing hundreds of murders to possess another’s territory, we praise him and call him the greatest hero, and reward him. But if we analyse the nature of the work he has done, we find that he has committed many murders to serve his country. As the murderer of multitude is supposed to do good to his country, so possibly the man who kills but one person, may do some good somewhere, although we may not recognise it as such. Our intellect is shortsighted, therefore, we cannot always see the true results of our actions. As we cannot draw a sharp line of demarcation between the good and evil results of the physical forces of nature and cannot say that this is good and good alone, so we cannot separate the good and evil results of our moral acts. That which is morally good in one case, may be evil in another. As, for instance, the commandment of God is supposed to be a moral good and beneficial to all. Think of the command that God gave Saul
Man = relatively EVIL!
Why?
1. We treat our surroundings with no respect and we are destroying our planet and ozonelayer...
2. Some real crazy people, would kill others, just for something like A BIT of money.
3. Some other people, would take pleasure in others dying.
4. We treat eachother with no respect(to those at my school who treats people like that)
5. We don't care about some important things, we don't care for some animals.
6. ...I can go on, but then this would be a wall of text, which I don't want.
That is some of my opinion and how I see others and myself and the people of the world that doesn't try to help others..
In the bhagavad-gita Arjuna does not want to fight his kin over a dispute so he is going to just let the opposing side kill him. But Vishnu appears to him as the chariot driver and tells him that it is his duty to fight and kill for he is in the warrior caste. Is then arjuna evil? I ssay he is not it is his dharma to fight.
Its agreed upon by almost every reasonable person that fighting, possibly even killing, to defend your self or others against aggressors isn't evil in any way, so if Arjuna fought back it would be fine. I don't know about Vishnu telling him to do it because he's 'in the warrior caste' though.Quote:
Originally Posted by SunTzu123
alright um there was actually several reasons one reason was that Shri Krishna said that the true self never dies and your actually helping them on there path to enlightment
"Thou must look at thy duty. Nothing can be more welcome to a soldier than a righteous
war. Therefore to waver in this resolve is unworthy, O Arjuna!
Blessed are the soldiers who find their opportunity. This opportunity has opened for thee
the gates of heaven.
Refuse to fight in this righteous cause, and thou wilt be a traitor, lost to fame, incurring
only sin.
Men will talk forever of thy disgrace; and to the noble, dishonour is worse than death"
Who rated my thread 1 star? Apparently they don't like OT going back to the old days.
Anyway, keep up the conversation guys! You're doing good so far :D
It's that auto-rating bug. I haven't been able to rate a thread in months, but every thread says I have already rated it.Quote:
Originally Posted by joemanf
H'm, When did this happen?... Oh well. Lol. Thanks for the info :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Rota
Hello.
Here is an essay that I wrote with this particular topic matter in mind:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Dilapidation of the Human Condition and the Loss of Innocence
By Conrad Jalowski
In general, humanity is a repressed agglomeration of individuals that lacks self-autonomy and is enthralled to the whim of petty and pestilential passions. Humanity is incapable of altruistic acts and unconditional love. Humanity is torn asunder between a dichotomy of individualistic desires and the desires of the societal/collective order. For a coherent order to emerge as well as ameliorating oneself to become a more balanced, moderate and loving individual capable of pure emotions and concepts, there must exist an equipollence or a balance of powers amongst civil society and individualism. If the demands of society are overbearing and puissant, the human individual becomes repressed and devoid of any inwardness and noted by a lack of self-knowledge. If individualism is too powerful, it will break the bond of the sense of familial duty and one's participation within civil society and overall self-worth within the greater context of the world. Furthermore, I maintain that humans are incapable of altruism as any feelings of love or any bonds to the family, community and civil society are mere pawns to the inescapable embrace of hubris. The human individual's desire to feel and to be deceived into believing in their own superiority coupled with the denigration of other individuals in this world is too powerful and fierce a passion. Such a pestilence corrodes even the most stalwart and self-sacrificing of individuals as it sows dissonance within the human character, and impinges general discord and turmoil amidst participants of a community. The passion of hubris erodes moral integrity with the complete disregard of the autonomy, self-worth and sovereignty of others: it is encompassing and can break the bonds of family and the sense of community amongst fellow citizens. The desire for the imposition of one?s own will upon others and for the complete mastery of other individuals is rampant without the placement of order, justice and discipline to stymie such barbarous propensities that inflict all of humanity. In addition, I will describe the main facets of the Realist Tradition of Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes on the moral dilapidation of humanity and the inability of people to truly be devoted to any external cause without the passion of hubris and/or the instinct of self-preservation from occurring and occupying the tenebrous recesses of the human character.
The Hobbesian and Thucydidean traditions regard all human actions as contained within the frame of power struggles with debasement occurring through the ascendancy of lascivious desires, putrid passions and other temptations that weaken the body and dull the vigor of the mind. Thucydides took as his example of the baseness and vulgarity of humanity the horrors and fratricide set during the great Peloponnesian War in which civil society was torn asunder for societal/collective hubris. Common city-states that were united with a Grecian heritage fought amongst each other in terrible warfare. The common ideas of brotherhood, family, liberty and concord were shaken amidst the sheer slaughter of the innocent. The lands of the Greek promontory were ravaged and torn apart to petty hubris. The concept of unification alongside common language, heritage, values and culture devolved into a fissiparous or a highly divided political landscape. Overall, political disequilibrium closely mirrors human nature in which the facets representing both the political scene and the actions of human individuals are intertwined and interrelated: one cannot be separated from the other.
Thomas Hobbes disregarded humanity in its primitive and savage stage and was a major proponent of an absolute and encompassing civil society that totally repressed and constrained the individual. Unrestrained freedom corrodes the sense of duty. Such was the view espoused by Thomas Hobbes of the requirement for order and restraint. However, the view that I uphold is that individual autonomy can be led astray by base and petty passions and become inimical to love with a general repugnance for humanity in general. However, if civil society becomes puissant the multifarious representation of humanity would be standardized, repressed and broken. Since humanity is unable to reach equipollence or maintain a state of equilibrium between the poles of civil society and individualism, it is doomed to alternate in cycles of hubris and pusillanimity in periods of extreme elation and ebullience that are overvaulting and unrestrained, and in periods of timorousness through the degeneration of the sense of purpose within the individual being.
My emendation that altruistic acts are incapable of being performed by human beings in a collective representation is taken further into account by the grand experiment taken by the French Revolution in relation to Friedrich Schiller's "On the Aesthetic Education of Man". Influenced by Kantian tradition, Friedrich Schiller viewed the world as a dichotomy of mind and body, as well as the individual and the collective whole. Friedrich Schiller depicted the Absolute Ideal that was to be carried on in a similar fashion by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as achieved through apolaustics in which the human individual is able to perceive aesthetic beauty and to comprehend the will of the incorporeal or the divine as opposed to the common, decrepit, customary, palpable and corporeal. Friedrich Schiller in his "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" initially viewed the French Revolution as a grand and noble experiment with the complete integration and synthesis of the individual with civil society.
Friedrich Schiller was also influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding the individual and individual autonomy that is integral to the coherent functioning of the multifaceted whole. However, while Rousseau advocated the whim of the collective whole as central and key to civil society, Friedrich Schiller argued that the rights of the minority were disregarded and violated leading to dissatisfaction, disequilibrium and a disconcerted state. Friedrich Schiller believed that a bond linking individuals into a large conglomerate of differing beliefs linked together through a harmonious synthesis between the collective consciousness and individual autonomy would result in a coherent and self-sufficient society that would be maintained by an utmost devotion to aesthetic beauty; that the sempiternal beauty and glorious renown found within art, music, philosophy, literature and poetry would unite all of humanity through the appreciation of the sublime, virtuous, good, pulchritudinous and symmetrical. Such an optimistic and euphoric abstraction or theoretical model would dissolve at the sight of the course of events taken by the French Revolution that rooted Friedrich Schiller into atrabiliousness or sheer melancholy and despair at the savagery, irrationality, vulgarity and cruel nature of humanity.
The initial course of the noble experiment being the French Revolution was for a moderate and balanced form of government that was in accordance with the whim of the whole nation of France. However, with the temporary power of Alexander de Beauharnais in the National Convention, the French Revolution came into the hands of perfidious and hubristic men who had no sympathies with the oppressed classes. After the fall of Alexander de Beauharnais and the intense and hotly contested struggles between the Girondist and Jacobin political organizations, the rise of the revolutionary triumvirate of Danton, Marat and Robespierre plunged France into great terror and carnage. With the decaying flesh and the mass slaughter of the innocent, the noble experiment of liberty, universal peace and concord that was envisioned by Friedrich Schiller in his "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" fell into ruin and was sown its abjuration or utter dissolution.
Friedrich Schiller assumed that humans would coalesce together into a universal brotherhood through the harmonious amalgamation of the individual and civil society on the sole basis that humanity was capable of breaking free from the obsequious chains of bondage and from subservience and servitude to vulgar and base desires. In further letters and essays in his "On the Aesthetic Education of Man", Friedrich Schiller lamented the death of aesthetic beauty that had previously inspired the great men and women throughout history who harbored visions of human progression, excellence and moderation. The love and dedication for aesthetic beauty characterizes excellence in a human individual and allows for the emergence of virtuous conduct. This would then stymie hubristic passions and result in the regard for other human individuals as opposed to petty self-preservation and enmity to the autonomy and self-sovereignty of others.
[Continued]:
Altruism is incapable by human individuals in a collective representation or in the societal context. I agree with Friedrich Schiller that it is only through aesthetic considerations, or the love of beauty, glory, the virtuous and the sublime coupled with a desire for companionship, concord and peace that humanity can transcend from its vulgarity or baseness and stymie its barbarous propensities. I have maintained the position that human individuals in a collective representation are incapable of altruism and are obsequious to prejudices, preconceived notions and putrid desires. Overall, I have maintained that human beings as a whole are morally repugnant and abhorrent.
ok can u do a abridged version
This is Conrad Jalowski we're talking about. He could, but he won't.Quote:
Originally Posted by SunTzu123
I think I understand this sentence but I want to ask you to clarify, just in case I'm reading it incorrectly.:) Is it humanity in general that lacks self-autonomy in your opinion, or is it the individual?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
Does the need to achieve a balance necessarily indicate that a balance can't exist, or that such a balance might not even be the default? (I think you answer this question later, but I would be interested in seeing your expanded thoughts on the topic)Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
So individual altruism exists in stalwart individuals?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
So is hubris a "built-in" feature of humanity? If so, in what sense can a moral dilapidation occur if it was an ever-present feature? Also, dilapidation implies the ability to restore something in the future to its former glory. How could we achieve that, and what would it look like?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
Communitarian or individualistic politics? Or both?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
What do you mean by aesthetic beauty? Can you provide some examples? Earlier you said that humanity is incapable of unconditional love, so is conditional love of the aesthetics going to be enough to allow this balance to occur? In your opinion, is the establishing of conditional love in such an arena intentional or spontaneous?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conrad_Jalowski
Conrad i thought for sure that you belived humanity capable of greater love then your most recent post gives creadet for. is not love the driving force for "good" the motive that drives ppl to do things that we prais as "good and right" is not always love i can readily admit but the origaln drive to do said acts always was. it is only after seeing the act praised as good that other motives enter in behind it.
there are countless acts being done the world over that could be seen as good or evil by out siders and only the one commiting the act its self will know the motivation behind it. so i maintain that it is in the heart that we find weather man is good or evil, the drive behind the actions that is the telling triate between the two. acts of kindness can be done out of spite just as attrocities can be comited out of love.
Hello.
Overall Statement:
I do not believe that a permanent state of equipollence shall be achieved by humanity. To believe otherwise is to pursue mere chimeras or specters of illusion: such a viewpoint is chimerical and hopeless. Although there will continue to be intermittent periods of civil peace and prosperity such moments will prove to be ephemeral and transient. Society quickly devolves into disequilibrium and civil disunion through processes of disintegration and fragmentation. Either civil society would become despotic and devolve into an autarchy with the oppression of the individual or civil society would disintegrate and become fissiparous. In both models, the individual is rendered suppliant and obeisant with the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual being trampled upon. External and societal elements are impinged upon the human individual with the outcome of obsequious and pitiful individuals that are repressed and broken. The vulgar impulses of humanity for the exertion and imposition of will is merely magnified in the case of civil society with varying gradations between the societal and collective context to the single human individual.
Examples:
1) My comments on Hobbesian Realism:
Thomas Hobbes in his political treatise "Leviathan" expounded on the key government that would provide order and stability from rising chaos and dissension within the particular political entity. After years of dissonance, discord and the arising of petty factions of the English Civil War between the Royalists dedicated to Charles I and the Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell as the backdrop of "Leviathan", Thomas Hobbes viewed civil war with the total lack of governmental control or anarchy as the worst possible situation. To prevent such a crisis from arising, Thomas Hobbes listed despotism or an absolute monarchy as the key force in maintaining order, discipline and justice. The despot ruled an autarchy or a self-sufficient state [despotism] that served all the needs of the executive body of the state, either as a single individual or an oligarchic/legislative body. The populace of the state served the needs of the head(s) of state and was similar to the description of a leviathan: a mighty force encompassing and presiding over all the affairs of state so as to maintain justice as well as maintaining the very survival of the state. The head(s) of the state, especially in the case of a single individual held supreme secular and ecclesiastical hegemony, or the concept of caesaropapism. Though the head(s) of state held complete dominion within the state, there was a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. Since people are brutal, base, vulgar and horrific in their natural and savage state, the hegemon that represented the Hobbesian ruler(s) would exert discipline and a morale code upon the populace so as to maintain peace and concord. In return, the denizens of the state professed and practiced total devotion to the head(s) of the state. Thomas Hobbes was following in the tradition of Thucydides and was a major proponent
of the branch of socio-political philosophy called Realism.
2) My comments on Montesquieu's State of Equilibrium:
Montesquieu based his ideas on Polybius, Titus Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli, Plato and Aristotle. His concept of government was based on a balance of powers resulting in political equilibrium and a concord between the multifarious branches of government. A prime example of a mode of government based on Montesquieu's theoretical constructions was the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe I that lasted from 1830-1848. Louis-Philippe I was a constitutional monarch that held more limited powers than under the Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and was limited in political power by the legislative body, or an oligarchic mode of government. Under Louis-Philippe I, the electoral voting capabilities increased from 94,000 individuals in 1830 CE to over 200,000 individuals in 1848 CE. Though this version of a balance of powers as expounded by Montesquieu achieved political equipollence, it was ephemeral due to the hubristic means of petty individuals that strove to tear asunder the institutions of civil society. Montesquieu noted that contumelious individuals could eradicate even the most balanced and fairest of governments. For the explanation of the dilapidation of government, Montesquieu adhered to the Polybian Cycle of government. According to such a system, out of anarchy a principate would arise under a just and benevolent ruler. After a certain amount of generations had passed, the principate would devolve into despotism. With pestilential passions, the despot/autarch would overwhelm and consume the principles that founded the glorious principate. Thus, an aristocracy would arise. However, with each passing generation, the aristocrats became more indolent, despondent, uxorious and ostentatious. In such throes of civil discord the aristocracy would degenerate into an oligarchy. Enraged, the populace would rebel against the current order and remove it. A democracy would arise in which all were given moderate freedom and order kept chaos at bay. As many generations would pass, demagogues would arise and the populace would become licentious, elemental and irrational. Finally, chaos would be unleashed through civil disunion leading to a state of anarchy. These actions are cyclical and as according to Montesquieu and Machiavelli would continue to cycle indefinitely until the interference of external forces.
i musst confess that i have not yet voted as i am quite torn. i must believe in that at our core we all want to be good. but there is enough evidence that when we act as a colletive we can not act for more then the grater good.
where therefor is the balance? does it lie more with one then the other? how often does the innder dive to to what ones own set of core beliefes sates to be good and true and right over ride the pack instienct to follow the croud and do what will make one fit in and be most accepted?
as a true romantice i must believe that love is and always will be the driving force in the univers. as an idealist i must believe that we can reach the potential with in us for good. but too often i see evidence to the contrary, and have only a handfull of experences (my own and those confided to me by others) which show humaity capable of striving for that wich is desirable above all else.
too often we see that ppl give in to the dictats of "socity" and what is easy rather then what would ultamatly make them happiest. too often one sees that what should be treasures is tossed aside and valued at not. but i can not bring my self to believe that we are beyond hope. that we have lost all the will do to good.
are the few to be lumped in and judged with the masses? can they not pull their friends and nahborse from the slump of appithy? or should this thread of hope to which i cling be cut and reallity faced, am i simply too blind to see that coruption and self distruction are the order of the day and there is no place left in this world for those who love? recent actions of so called friends would have me sever my last thin ray of hope, but i give them not that power. the power to cut it lies in my hands and my hands alone and for my sanity i can not cut it. other friends have steped up and proven that there are indaviduals left in this world who are willing to love without question, to support the ppl what they care about without nessacarly agreeing with the actions of the indiviual. that one can support a friend in doing the "wrong" thing if they do it for the right reasons.
[Continued]:
To Boleslav:
Aesthetics is the desire for the beautiful, attractive, sublime, symmetrical, pulchritudinous, virtuous and good. Although certain things that are morally reprehensive and abhorrent may be sublime and fantastical, such things cannot be truly beautiful or divine. Aesthetics allows for the transcendence from human vulgarity and savagery. Aesthetic beauty manifests itself in art, music, poetry, literature and philosophy. Through the acquisition of knowledge one is instilled with vigor, courage, virtue and vivacity as opposed to the trappings of comfort and the pursuit of frivolous activities or sportive tricks that render the human individual complacent, indolent and despondent. For example, I believe that poets, artists and philosophers are the hierophants of creative glory and a beauty that is far removed from the common and customary.
Here is a short piece that I extracted from my blog that specifically concentrates on the aesthetic theories during the Neo-Classical, Enlightenment and Romantic periods of European philosophy:
An Analysis on Friedrich Schiller's On Simple and Sentimental Poetry and On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy
By Conrad Jalowski
Aesthetics is a subcategory of the philosophical foundation that is characterized by aspects of the attractive, beautiful and pulchritudinous. It was through the disciples of the aesthetic tradition, ranging from Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus through Boethius, Joachim Du Bellay, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lodovico Castelvetro, Julius Caesar Scaliger and Dante Alighieri to Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson amongst many others that the aesthetic portion of philosophy was upheld. The apolaustics or the dedication and devotion to aesthetic beauty instilled such individuals with the ability to gaze at the aura of immortal beauty and divine truth that rendered them the standard bearers of progress and truth as found in literary criticism, art, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy and other components. This brief analysis will concentrate on a single contribution to literary theory with far reaching reverberations and consisting of the utmost significance to the German movements of Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism as well as the poetic tradition within the context of philosophy as a whole.
Friedrich Schiller's "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry" was rooted heavily in Kantian tradition regarding the dichotomy between nature and reason, or the sensuous and voluptuous as opposed to the cold, barren and calculating. For apolaustics, it is nature that is encompassing and is an intricate component, or at the very core of the self-identity of the individual. Friedrich Schiller recorded that:
"I have previously remarked that the poet is nature, or he seeks nature. In the former case, he is a simple poet, in the second case a sentimental poet."
The tension of opposing factors represent a Kantian dialectic of thesis and antithesis. As each individual is a part or component of nature, and nature the very essence of the human being, the mere acknowledgment of such a concept results in a petty poet. However, the poet or creator that seeks for the aesthetic ideal indulges in a transcendence from mortal affairs through a voracious hunger for proportion and beauty as opposed to the barberous propensities that inflict humanity. The creating poet is able to unlock the inner wonders central to pure and divine beauty.
In essence, the underlying emendation of Friedrich Schiller on aesthetic philosophy exerted a preponderant influence in this passage:
"The poetic spirit is immortal, nor can it disappear from humanity; it can only disappear with humanity itself..."
In such an excerpt, Friedrich Schiller linked the poetic [medium for aesthetics] spirit to immortality. By partaking and immersing oneself into literary works, the individual is able to transcend above human frailties and petty passions for a fugacious and an ephemeral duration of time. Regardless of the seemingly evanescent time that one is divinely inspired, creative, artistic and imaginational vivacity is most prominent; a single intoxicating moment is worth more than thousands of moments in obsequious bondage. In addition, Friedrich Schiller noted that poetry is inescapable; it is ubiquitous and permeates throughout all facets of civil society in which poetry cannot expire until humanity itself ceases to exist.
In a similar fashion to Thomas Love Peacock, Friedrich Schiller developed a dichotomy between two opposing facets: ancient literary compositions and modern literary compositions. Thomas Love Peacock divided the whole realm of literature into two cofactor spheres with each comprised of a four age system: Iron, Gold, Silver and Brass. The ancients were composed of the literary ages of the Bardic, Homeric, Virgilian and the Nonnic while the moderns had Chaucer and Petrarch as the precursors to the Golden Age that consisted of William Shakespeare. John Milton stood on the threshold between the Golden and Silver ages. The Silver Age consisted of Spenser, Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau whilst the Brass Age consisted of the Lake Poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The underlying and constant theme of the aesthetic foundation of Friedrich Schiller's philosophy was succinctly expressed in this passage:
"Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely free...".
:eek: OMG joe what have you done nowwww???
tl;dr. :rolleyes:
Ok I'll try to read this later but -- ow! my brain! my braaainn!!! -- it's bleeding now. -_-
man is evil and no hearted they create weapons to defend themselves and kill to survive, but its also makes them a superior race -to become superior is to become a killer . we kill because we hate and we hate is because we want , we want because of survival........
I hate most of the people,but every child is born innocent
I can't say men are evil but lazy
its the nature of evil and destruction
even think about how hamburger tastes and how spinach tastes?
good things are hard,bad thing are easy and enjoyable
so people choose the easy way most of the times
so wat ur saying is that man is good but also evil
what I say is they dont care about being good,because its hard workQuote:
Originally Posted by alkhest
they choose evil not because they are evil but they find is much more profitable and easy
thats being weak and greedy
we are like Gollum in LOTR
All men, according to Mencius, have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others. For example, if you suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, your first reaction is to save him. You don't do this for the sake of befriending the child's parent or to gain praise from the public; you do it out of your original good nature. According to Lau: because we are caught off our guard, the case is therefore a true manifestation of our original human nature.
According to R. E. Allinson, in A Hermeneutic Reconstruction of the Child in the Well Example, however, such an example is not intended to prove that all men will actually take some action in such circumstances. What Mencius intends to show in the child-falling-into-the-well example is that all men will at least be moved to compassion by such a sight. It is not an empirical example. It is more of a phenomenological one. In other words, all we need to prove the statement is that we carry out some sort of self-examination or thought-experiment. Once we are convinced, that's the proof. We don't need the results of others to confirm our result. That's a case for science.
yeah that may be right,what if you are getting stabbed in the middle of the street how many people will come to save you?Quote:
Originally Posted by SunTzu123
its not because of people its because of children
self preservation kicks in because u fear for your life that you if you help will be injured but there are people who will help
re. If a man is constantly subjected to negative influence, his character is bound to be affected accordingly, despite occasional good education. But that is not his true character, or his original nature. His original nature, as Mencius always insists, is good. The evil in him is a result of external influence.
In fact, as A. C. Graham pointed out in The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature, only on three occasions did Mencius actually affirm that man's original nature is good: firstly, in a debate with Kao Tzu; secondly, during a discussion with his disciples on the three current doctrines; and finally in a conversation with the crown prince in the Pre-Han period (206 B.C - 220 A.D). However, according to Graham,
'Man's original nature was never referred to as good, bad, without good or bad, capable of becoming either good or bad, or good in some and bad in others, except in controversies between philosophers or in formulae summing up the doctrines of philosophers.'
yep a few people are going to help and those people will be the good onesQuote:
Originally Posted by SunTzu123
because being good isn't easy sometimes you prefer someone else's life to yours
so that proves my point being good is hard,on the other hand being self-centered working or worrying only for yourself,doing as you please is a lot easier and thats what most people do
thanks Sun-Tzu
humans are creatures and like all creatures we all have the built in drive to survive is that neccessarily evil?
yes survival creates a evil heart we fight to survive and to survive we have to fight but evntually we created peace which was good but wars broke out which hitler though his"race" was superior
so your saying that to fight to survive is evil?Quote:
Originally Posted by alkhest
if so then a ant is evil or a centiped
nope he tries to say doing anything to survive is evilQuote:
Originally Posted by SunTzu123
because u have to kill, killing is evil hearted
im not being too religous but here goes:
when god created animals, air, the planets,stars, etc in the beginning he said everything is good ,but when he created man he also saya that it was good. -so thats good
but the evil part is that when god created man, man had to eat fruits cuz its the only 'good thing' too eat but when man and woman betrayed god he sent them out of the garden so they had to kill for surivival which was not 'good'
due to wat god said to eat anything but the tree of life