People give blood for the sake of doing some good they will never know about; other people create and spread computer viruses for the sake of doing some bad they will never know about. There is so much good in the world, and there's so much bad. (Well, there's a lot of all sorts in the world, so that's not surprising really.) The good makes the existence of the bad more painful, more exasperating. One feels a drive to fight for the good and remove all bad from the world. But this will never happen. There will be bad and good, ugliness and beauty until the end of time.
And in our own lives, happiness and unhappiness. Drives to happiness don't seem to succeed, in any long term. There is no arrival, no final harbour of contentment, just a messy mixture of good and bad feelings over which our control is disappointingly slight.
4 comments:
I get this but I think it's too polar. Events and things are simply that : 'good' and 'bad' are value judgements we place upon them, and I feel like there's little fixed upon them. Each judgement derives only from era, mood, our past experience, and so forth. And ugliness and beauty certainly blur and are incredibly subjective.
I think, for that, there's a lot most people could/would agree is 'good' 'bad' or some approximation thereof. But that has everything to do with where we're at in each time and culture nowadays.
And someone's ugly is someone else's 'beauty.' Which sounds like a cliche. But I feel like it all (or well, mostly) hinges on how we each view things and what angles from which we view them. I'd rather find beauty in something that no-one else noticed than be presented with a norm of something as 'beautiful' and view it as such. (The latter happens, but the former's more interesting.)
Roberta: Thank you for your very interesting comments.
I do think that moral and aesthetic judgements are ultimately subjective, but I don't think this makes them false or arbitrary. We all make judgemnets all the time: this is an essential aspect of our personality and our self-expression.
However our moral and aesthetic judgements differ, I think most of us want what we regard as the good and the beautiful to triumph over what we regard as the bad and the ugly, and it is difficult to acknowledge that this will never happen.
I think we also hope for some bond with others, some shared values. I hope that my belief that causing suffering - especially deliberately - is bad, spreading happiness is good, is shared by others. Such feelings seem too essential for it to be good to distance ourselves from them on account of cultural relativism.
It is interesting to debate such topics with you.
"Drives to happiness don't seem to succeed, in any long term."
Oh I don't know about that, I can think of a few relatives who have had long lives full of ups and downs, but still died with a smile on their dial.
Lillipilli: Yes, perhaps you are right.
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