Philosophical Health Check
Philosophical Health Check
wowie zowie
this thing's cooler than i expected
..also, Taboo. I'm not so much up on taboos, of course, so I nearly got all 0s on this one.
The one question I wavered a bit on was about a man making a promise to his mother on her deathbed to visit her grave weekly, & then not following through. What I feel like is "wrong" (my concept of "wrong" might not match most ppls) is if his promise wasn't made with complete sincerity.
I have a strange hunger in me for honor. Like, I see there as being situations where clarity of speech & action are fundamentally important, not because of a particular situation but because of a larger possibility, that by following a rule of honor a sort of perfect world is born.
I guess I don't really think it's immoral to choose to be dishonorable. It's not that it makes you bad (= worthy of punishment) to opt out. But I just think it's good to opt in. It's a nice way to live.
There's this science fiction story that influenced me a lot. I totally forget now where I read it. But in the story what happens is this fellow is on a world checking out some "savages" & they have this bizarre burial ritual, where you take the contents of the dead person's bowels (what would have become them) to the top of a particular mountain. Blah blah, the details aren't the point.
The point is, the fellow in the story didn't believe in this crazy ritual, that the skygods on the mountain would grant you an afterlife if your leftover shit got up to this peak, or whatever. He didn't think it was "true." But he still felt deeply honored by it-- he'd rather die down there & be honored by those crazy savages, than be treated clinically by the "logical" spacepeople.
Honor isn't about what's true. It's about this fantasy world, this shared delusion, but which in an odd way is more true than what's true.
<3
wowie zowie
this thing's cooler than i expected
..also, Taboo. I'm not so much up on taboos, of course, so I nearly got all 0s on this one.
The one question I wavered a bit on was about a man making a promise to his mother on her deathbed to visit her grave weekly, & then not following through. What I feel like is "wrong" (my concept of "wrong" might not match most ppls) is if his promise wasn't made with complete sincerity.
I have a strange hunger in me for honor. Like, I see there as being situations where clarity of speech & action are fundamentally important, not because of a particular situation but because of a larger possibility, that by following a rule of honor a sort of perfect world is born.
I guess I don't really think it's immoral to choose to be dishonorable. It's not that it makes you bad (= worthy of punishment) to opt out. But I just think it's good to opt in. It's a nice way to live.
There's this science fiction story that influenced me a lot. I totally forget now where I read it. But in the story what happens is this fellow is on a world checking out some "savages" & they have this bizarre burial ritual, where you take the contents of the dead person's bowels (what would have become them) to the top of a particular mountain. Blah blah, the details aren't the point.
The point is, the fellow in the story didn't believe in this crazy ritual, that the skygods on the mountain would grant you an afterlife if your leftover shit got up to this peak, or whatever. He didn't think it was "true." But he still felt deeply honored by it-- he'd rather die down there & be honored by those crazy savages, than be treated clinically by the "logical" spacepeople.
Honor isn't about what's true. It's about this fantasy world, this shared delusion, but which in an odd way is more true than what's true.
<3
posted by mungojelly at 11:29 PM
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