Beginings of 'How To Think"

I think it is important that people with aspergers get involved with philosophy. It provides insight to why people who don't have aspergers do things like flirt all the time or do many things we find fake and superficial.

Flirting is just a game from socializing; almost as if it were socializing for the sake of socializing. Flirting is not boring to people who enjoy it because it involves them abstracting and heightening skills that come naturally to them. They don't have to toss and turn over doing these things because they lean towards them without having to choose it (much unlike people who do not have innate social skills). Take athletic people who innately lean towards sports. They excel at these things because they don't have to convince themselves constantly to do them; they can concentrate more wholly to the task at hand and not have to constantly remind themselves why they are doing it.

Much to other people's dismay, people with aspergers are innate thinkers. Being a thinker doesn't mean they are geniuses, but that they lean towards thinking. The sad truth is that this goes unrecognized and often discouraged as a mental illness. Many thinkers think themselves into black-holes and self-destruct. People who do not lean towards thinking use this as cannon fodder and try to cattle the person who has made himself fragile from thoughts into a cat carrier; they will probably encourage the thinker to take on the thing they lean towards because they think its the way every human achieves happiness.

But this does not help the thinker. It could distract the thinker for a time if he gets interested in task the person hands down, but ultimately after the task is intellectually exhausted, it loses it fun. The thinker suddenly drops the activity and people who don't understand this type of person view it as a sign of depression. The thinker feels depressed and just assumes this emptiness is caused by "depression". After this the aspie ping-pongs around desperately trying to medicate this emptiness with either chemicals or trying to emulate other people who appear happy/content. It does not dawn on the aspie that he lacks thinking fitness. Friends and guardians will generally advise this person to not think so much. Asking a thinker to stop thinking is like taking away a football from an athlete and making him take piano lessons (when he has no interest in music at all). This is when the aspie has to soul search and recognize bad advice, and not to abandon thinking, but take the mind for a jog to keep it fit.

Philosophy is a good exercise for the mind. It is like those who flirt for the sake of flirting. Philosophy is thinking for the sake of thinking. Chiefly it trains it how to fan out an idea and not get stuck at a mental road block (a very painful experience for any thinker). Often reality for a thinker is only as real as the thoughts he props it up with. Without coherent thinking, things begin to get scary. It is like losing a sense and it is easy to bump into mental things and hurt yourself. So if someone is looking at the sun and complain about their eyes hurting, it wouldn't be effective to tell this person to quit opening their eyes so much. The better advice would be to quit looking at the sun and focus on less luminous things.

Philosophy is a tool to the mind much like the neck is to the eyes. When an idea appears so heavy that it freaks you out, philosophy can come to spread it out. It wont solve the thought but it allows thinking for long durations with out retreading on the same thought. When a thinker gets stuck on a particular thought and cannot move on to other thoughts, it feels like drowning or that time has stopped. Just avoiding these thought traps can make a thinker's life infinitely more sane.

The problem is that philosophy is not taught in primary and secondary schools. The thinker can struggle throughout education without getting schooled in how to effectively use their skills unless a wise teacher interferes and gives this person instructions. Once the thinker is old enough to independently make choices, he if often tied to the responsibility of adulthood and cannot devote as much time and routine to the fitness of the mind as he could in school. This is true especially if the thinker has to start at square one. The thinker may also not have knowledge of what to pursue and what books to read because he hasn't developed friends with a similar temperament to share with. It is a miracle if any of these thinkers land on their feet. Especially since people who do not naturally lean towards thinking try to stifle it and derive enjoyment in doing so.

Another big problem is philosophy has been infiltrated by those who hate thought and use the prestige of philosophy to earn accolades and social advancement. Since non-thinkers are unaware of what philosophy is, they will accept the definition from anyone who seems credible and gives the appearance of a thinker. How ever these fake philosophers choose to display their philosophy, it will be easily marketable since non-thinkers will take to it more readily. So the market is saturated with crap and you need to know how to find the good stuff and to find the right people.

Although it's very hard to keep the mind fit in today's culture, thinkers must figure it out (sadly for a large part on their own). They will have to go through a large gauntlet of people telling them they are mentally ill and that they serve no purpose in society. Their talents will be treated as childish. But as much as these things are true, the thinker must figure these things out or they will self-destruct.

Digesting Philosophy

Synopsis of Nietzsche's
On The Genealogy Of Morality
First Treatise: "Good and Evil", "Good and Bad"

Nietzsche does two things to disqualify morality as something to take seriously. First, he remarks about the idea that morality came from functional habits of which later became part of culture (even when the function was lost). This is lambasted as false and foolish.

He refutes the idea by announcing that morals are set by those with authority. The words noble/good stem back from class distinctions and not functionality. The bad is associated with commoners. Words that are used to express 'bad' are interchangeable with words used to denote activities for common folk. So it does not come about by function but by declaring things so arbitrarily.

He associates nobility with a can-do attitude. They use their sense of right or wrong not to avoid things entirely, but to make themselves more effective (a functional version of morality). They treat opponents not as evil counterparts but more like an opponent in a board game. He makes a comparison to predators hunting prey. They do not hate the things they hunt. It is actually quite the opposite. They love the way they taste.

The morality used by common folk is used to denote who is doing harm. One who is violent is seen as evil. The action is then made into an object that is resented as an idea of the action. But this resentment is seen as impotent. Morality is used to identify evil and dislike it, but that does not make it go away. Morality causes inaction because instead of acting on one's impulses, it requires one to be less active. Or actively being inactive.

Personally Nietzsche is displeased by the consequence a moral carries. It quiets the human spirit and domesticates it. He is not attached to morality by idealism or function. He sees little in it but a way that 'weaker' people try to hold the stronger back. He views morality as a regression. It causes people to fall into nihilism because they are bored with man. Since a moral man is neutered, they get the same respect as a house cat.

The punchline of his polemic and second point against morality is that morality does not remove the desire for revenge or pleasure. It doesn't even eradicate that these acts will happen. Since the weak are to feeble to take matters into their own hands, they design the concept of a spirit that will eventually take care of their problems. While it would be immoral for a person to take revenge or seek pleasure, there is no problem with having a god to take care of the dirty work. So these moral beings are not doing something that is functional and neither are they avoiding unjust behavior in the long run; they are just not willing/able enough to take care of their own problems or deal with them in a way that can still be pleasurable and free of resentment.

So the overall feeling is that Good/Evil is used to support passiveness and to kick problems down the road with the feeling that this behavior will be rewarded. The good/bad mindset is used to promote action and not to assign guilt or fault to individuals. And it seems that the people who assume the good/bad view point will easily manipulate those with the Good/Evil viewpoint chiefly because the Good/Evil people prize inaction and retaliate with internal ideas they keep to themselves.