FT24009: Contraries, Movement, History, Recognition

    Aristotle's mind thought in contraries and being moving from one to another is a process of becoming from potentiality. Virtue was a process of arriving at the perfect point such as a healthy weight contrasted to being overweight or underweight. The people who are virtuous are distinct from those who are not. Everything is connected and in some coherent thing and even if you chopped something from it, it would be a piece of that thing rather than a mixture of other things underlying it. Being is granted and doesn't wear a mask and trying to find mysteries behind the thing other then what is is would go against what the thing is. 

    Hegel's dialectical method from basic perception to absolute knowing invokes the Aristotelian contraries but since it's a historical development it is about arriving at an end point that cannot be overshot. In Hegel's system someone can lack absolute knowing but cannot have a gross amount of absolute knowing. The Stoics mused about whether it's possible for a wise man to lose his wisdom and agree that wisdom is obtained and cannot be lost since that would be foolish and contrary to wisdom. But virtue must mean more than having and lacking for it to be meaningful. 

    Virtue is a quality of a person and not measurable. This means it cannot be measured like the distance between two cities. Having and lacking is the most simplistic of measurements as it either is or isn't. The boolean values of a program are not truth or false as qualities but something arbitrarily assigned to make a program work. Why does assigning true and false to something amount to a simplistic measurement? In the stack of logic values can be true or false like was said earlier to get a result of the program we want. There is no requirement for us to actually assume these values to be the case. We could internally feel otherwise and only assign truth to get our desired result. We could think nothing of it and run the program thousands of times.

    Hegel's arrival at absolute truth come about from a large body of thought. Aristotle's thought begins where Hegel has stopped. Aristotle's world is already absolute and his task as a thinker is to extend the actuality to the world. The difference of thought is seen in the two thinker's ethics. Aristotle's ethics is personal and how we fit in with society while Hegel see's this as regular work-a-day petty matters which are in the shadow of a state that decides what is ethical. Hegel puts emphasis the finding and defining what is ethical while for Aristotle what is ethical is already written in the logos of the world and noticeable when we deviate from it. To define what is ethical would mean one does not know what it is to begin with and likely not a mind that obtains it. What is most virtuous is what is least moved.

FT24005: Will and Anger

    Ressentiment for Nietzsche combines the lust for revenge that never gets satisfied. This is unhealthy and disfigures a soul that is consumed by it. He doesn't discard revenge in totality but advocates that the strong willed exact revenge in a way that satisfies an insult. He often connects this with an old world cultures that appear in pre-christianity to show how the modern man is developing into a pathetic set of thoughts.

    Yet, writings from this old world do not always agree with this. Old writers emphasize the toll anger exacts on us. Servants and slaves cause rumination on this topic. Nietzsche mandates that this period is categorized by the strong dominating the weak. These old writers would fit this category in that they are masters over people with less status fully subjected to the Nietzschian will to power. What happens is these servants perform tasks poorly and in their position they can exact any punishment that they see fit. Writers like Plutarch caution against this from the stand point of what becomes of you as you act in rage.

    All these annoyances sum up and Plutarch responds with a common motif of ethical thinking from the period. He asks us to look at people that have obvious problems with rage and how we react to them. We see these people as out of control and by their habits lose themselves to their emotions. Plutarch admits it's better to let people squander on trivial tasks like failing to remember buying bread for dinner than distort yourself in anger in punishing it. 

    Another writer of these times--Seneca--also has a similar conclusion. Instead of conjuring an instance of someone else, he has us imagine what our faces look like in the mist of rage reflected in a mirror. Our sober self would cringe at the sight. The transformation of our selves in this way is a clear indication of lack of virtue. This virtue is not some decree by the will to power as Nietzsche genealogizes morality to be but some fundamental recognition of stability. 

    Here there is a conflict. Nietzsche has morality be this code that is arbitrarily imposed by those who rule. He uses the past to justify the violence we see in this time but it is also the time which virtue ethics culminated. True, he does acknowledge Aristotle but only to undermine him and show his ethics is just a cloaked version of the will to power. These ancient thinkers had more cultural lee way in how they treated others yet they did notice that behavior--even if allowed--causes a disfigurement just as much as the ressentiment of Nietzsche.

FT24004: The Will in the Present

     The will is located in the present. It is not an integral part of our history and it isn't clear what the future holds. The will is a fundamental part of an individual and exist at the same time as we think. Our present does not stay the same and our will is fundamentally different in different parts of our life. Our actions are provoked by our will and commands us to focus on certain things rather than others.

    Philosophers attribute certain qualities to the will and what motivates it--re: Nietzsche et al. These qualities seem to exist prior to any formation by experience and experience can even tarnish the will. Yet we also see the will develop in philosophies like Hegel. We experience as we will and this experience we have to understand and see how it fits with our willing. Hegel has a passage contrasting the will of the heart vs. the will of the world which focuses us on how we actively have to measure our will with reality.

    This constant reoccurring projection of our will into the present has an iterative nature and each present vanishes into another present. If there were no source of change each present would be the same present much like some coral in a the sea staying the same until it dies. Defining the self as the will is problematic in that it doesn't account for why this will changes and why we choose to disregard our will much like how Hobbes defines the our contract in society. 

    With our experiences, we filter these presents differently even if there is no fundamental change in what we will. There has to be some connectivity with the past that forms our present--even if the present us is what is most real meaning what we exist in. The shaping process of our intellect is very much the accumulation of past experiences. The past shape is also a limited shape and this contrasts with present which opens itself to many possibilities. The present using the past shape to slightly nudge the past shape is a part the will plays in but does not define a person fully.

    The will as a thing separate from anything else cannot be subject to ethics. Alone it has no account for where it has been and where it needs to go. We can account for this because the will is integrated into how we think and our memory of the past. Even though our wills are important in our existence in the present it is not what makes us ourselves.