- 09 Oct 2019 18:51
#15040773
This has been a recurring thought through my adult life, as it feels like the real issue of free will in the decision making process where I might have influences intervene such that I do things that are in some sense no authentic.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
The concern of external influences making me suspicious of my own desires, wondering to what extent can one choose their own desires rather than merely choose to fulfill them.
Where my desires are clearly tied to culture and is structured although it may feel quite private.
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandesire.html
In the Spinoza line of thought, it seems to be about being able to determine our selves rather than the absence of any external determinations.
Because a free will that is uninfluenced is clearly a false one that doesn't explain the nature of any real existing individual. But then we're also not strictly subject to the laws of matter and motion when we don't reduce the higher mental functions to lower ones, such that all of emotion becomes reduced to physiological descriptions or consciousness reduced to brain states.
So how do we determine our own desires, and how do we control ourselves such that we're not subject to the whims of the environmental pressures in any circumstance, such that I have a will to do things in spite of any distractions. And what is it should I desire? It seems in capitalism I should desire what ever I want freely as long as it doesn't in that direct instant pass some line of harm.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf
But if I make desire problematic by doubting it, I then pose the ranking of certain desires.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/i.htm#virtue
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm
Where we might judge my character if I didn't kill someone but I desired as much, I may not do anything that crosses a certain line but I perpetually spew hate on others.
What do you want and why?
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
In our common sense conception, will presents itself to us as a capacity, a power vested within ourselves. This power (located in the soul according to Descartes) is set apart from the world of matter upon which we act, as an independent force. Coupled to this everyday common-sense conception of freedom is the idea that free will is the unencumbered pursuit of the objects of desire – ‘free to consume what I like’. Presupposed here is that what-I-am is what-I-desire (my identity is an outcome of my consumption patterns). There is little thought that desires may not be genuinely my own, i.e. not my own in the sense that they determine me externally
The concern of external influences making me suspicious of my own desires, wondering to what extent can one choose their own desires rather than merely choose to fulfill them.
Where my desires are clearly tied to culture and is structured although it may feel quite private.
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandesire.html
Desire, in other words, has little to do with material sexuality for Lacan; it is caught up, rather, in social structures and strictures, in the fantasy version of reality that forever dominated our lives after our entrance into language. For this reason, Lacan writes that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan terms the symbolic order or "the big Other." In a sense, then, our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that are caught up in cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality. For this reason, according to Lacan, the command that the superego directs to the subject is, of all things, "Enjoy!" That which we may believe to be most private and rebellious (our desire) is, in fact, regulated, even commanded, by the superego.
In the Spinoza line of thought, it seems to be about being able to determine our selves rather than the absence of any external determinations.
Because a free will that is uninfluenced is clearly a false one that doesn't explain the nature of any real existing individual. But then we're also not strictly subject to the laws of matter and motion when we don't reduce the higher mental functions to lower ones, such that all of emotion becomes reduced to physiological descriptions or consciousness reduced to brain states.
So how do we determine our own desires, and how do we control ourselves such that we're not subject to the whims of the environmental pressures in any circumstance, such that I have a will to do things in spite of any distractions. And what is it should I desire? It seems in capitalism I should desire what ever I want freely as long as it doesn't in that direct instant pass some line of harm.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf
In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.
But if I make desire problematic by doubting it, I then pose the ranking of certain desires.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/i.htm#virtue
In ethics, virtue answers the question “What is the right sort of person to be?”, in contrast to duty, which answers the question “What is the right thing to do?”.
Bourgeois ethics is exclusively an ethics of duty. Problems of bourgeois ethics centre on moral dilemmas in which a person must determine the right course of action; but it is never asked whether it is right that someone should value this or that thing, whether they should want some particular thing in the first.
For example, utilitarianism, the dominant ethics of bourgeois society, takes for granted the lowest kind of selfishness and greed, and seeks to prove that the general good will arise from the ethical pursuit of selfish needs.
Socialist ethics, by contrast, are essentially an ethic of virtue, being primarily concerned with the kind of needs and the kind of desires which may lead to a better life and a better world.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm
However, there is another understanding of morality which should not be forgotten. This is the sense of morality in which morality is linked with certain virtues, excellences, or flourishing ways of living. In this sense, morality is not primarily concerned with rules and principles, but with the cultivation of certain dispositions or traits of character. This view has been expressed in this way: ‘The moral law ... has to be expressed in the form, “be this”, not in the form, “do this” ... the true moral law says “hate not”, instead of “kill not”...... the only mode of stating the moral law must be a rule of character.’ [28]
Where we might judge my character if I didn't kill someone but I desired as much, I may not do anything that crosses a certain line but I perpetually spew hate on others.
What do you want and why?
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics