What your really asking is how to relate to people who haven't genuinely suffered? Because to talk about suffering one has to experience it to conceptually relate to it, as far as I'm aware.

Just start explaining it to those around you and, trust me, they’ll soon learn the meaning of suffering.

If suffering was merely a concept it would be at the lowest end of the suffering scale.

To explain the concept of suffering to others, all you need to do is to hurt them. Inflicting hurt upon others is a quintessentially human attribute. We can even do it by doing nothing at all.

M

Is that what your post is meant to do, through exposure to its stark ZzzzZzzZz of boorishness? Kudos.

does not every language user already have a concept of suffering? Is your concept, or your extension of its usage, different to the everyday concept and its usage?

Tell them it's self-explanatory. — Πετροκότσυφας

Just start explaining it to those around you and, trust me, they’ll soon learn the meaning of suffering. — praxis

Danke, I read the OP and then I read these and I tell you now I'm not suffering at all, I mean I'm fuckin' laughin'... :rofl:

To explain the concept of suffering to others, all you need to do is to hurt them. Inflicting hurt upon others is a quintessentially human attribute. We can even do it by doing nothing at all. — Marcus de Brun

For example:

Is that what your post is meant to do, through exposure to its stark ZzzzZzzZz of boorishness? Kudos. — InternetStranger

zx10 EXP z

M

Suffering might well be described as a 'negative' emotion. In this sense it is absolutely essential to functional existence.

The problem with suffering only arises in the extremes. Suffering is absolutely essential for both learning and survival. Therefore the only type of real suffering is 'needless suffering' or suffering that might reasonably be avoided. Therefore there are two types of suffering.

Suffering that is both necessary and reasonable
Suffering that is both unnecessary and unreasonable

When we apply terms such as needed and reasonable we then need justifications for each, and these may be arrived at through the application of logic and deductive reasoning alone. Out of this intellectual application, a functional morality should arise.

M

When we apply terms such as needed and reasonable we then need justifications for each, and these may be arrived at through the application of logic and deductive reasoning alone. Out of this intellectual application, a functional morality should arise. — Marcus de Brun

Which is often very very hard to arrive at - Is the use of torture on someone to get information that may save thousands functionally moral ? Would most agree or disagree? Is it a personal or communal judgement? Does that matter ? Do we know enough to make the judgement ?

Basically, the trolley problem in some form or another.

You're are not Eugene Ionesco: therefor, you haven't the right. You're a ninth octopus testicle. — Marcus de Brun

"You're are not Eugene Ionesco: therefor, you haven't the right. You're a ninth octopus testicle."

I love it!

At last. Ignatius J. Reilly has produced a bit of decent poetry.

I had suspected there was something behind the truculent verbiage.

M

How would Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée read if it were recast: All our dignity consists in our ability to produce those most useful men, accountants.? The thinking part of the community must find such a notion risible, not to say maniacally ludicrous.

Even worse: our ability to produces boorish and unworthy philistines, (yourself the perfect model of their tribe. )

:

My mind revolts, yet my heart (that putrid stinking thing) grows fonder of you with every post I read.

You think that men have some dignity in thought. Ah how sad it is that one who does in fact think (despite my initial presumption) should tumble blindly nay, willfully, into the first and deepest pothole. Stay there with Onan, and the deluded, that is where they love to fondle each other with their precious thoughts.

Kindly accept by return this 'dignity', unopened, I smell the poisoned delusion within. The stench of romance, of cowards and small people clings to it. It is the same stench that bleeds upon the air of Cathedrals and shopping malls, infused with eager supplications and pathetic prayers of the worshipers.

There is dignity only in the Crucifixion, and this dignity follows not the thought, but the deed.

M

Your despicably obstinate idiocies, though beneath the notice of the thinking part of the community, are, yet, reassuringly de haut en bas. However, if your harmless and vaguely nicompoopish notion of thought, which properly means human experience in toto, i.e., the human essence, what makes the human peculiar, amuses you, there it is. You are amazingly lacking in mental acuity. You, as usual, tilt at windmills of your own making like a child in a crib over which no one sings. You are a wretch.

Coda, for the edification of sappy remedial beings:

Perched amidst the glimmering spoils after the Terentum war, the Romans, soaked in the blinding glint of opulent spoils, relished most of all the sight of the downcast miens of the monsters now shown to be elephants, which were said to be thought non sine sensu, not wholly unconscious, of their humiliation. For thought is so much the essence of things, it exudes a golden world and first makes the earth what it is.

However, if your harmless and vaguely nicompoopish notion of thought, which properly means human experiencein toto, i.e., the human essence, what makes the human peculiar — InternetStranger

Dearest Sancho

If perhaps you had the courage to see that all the giants are merely windmills, you too might squire for a thinking man.

I may tilt at the giant and you may dream of Dulcinia. Bring your dreams and your essences to your actuary in the clouds and see what he makes of them. How are they to be counted? Will he use his grubby fingers, like the shopkeeper adding 'halfpence to the pence and prayer to shivering prayer'?

This 'human essence' of yours is a detritus of your own making, it is the scatology of fools. There is nothing peculiar in the thought of man, dinosaurs did not extinguish themselves by a cancer of their own making.

You must think yourself useful? As useful as the philosopher to the Tyrannosaurus. We speak here of 'suffering', the proud and shameless daughter of your 'human essence'. Make love to her if you wish.

Me thinks your precious Jezebel is a syphilitic whore.

M

Essence means one can distinguish one thing from another, a stone doesn't think, it makes no distinctions, nothing is intelligible to it, but a human thinks. Thinking is an interpretation of experience or existence. Consider, one says, each one experiences the same things in their own way.

You have a problem with philosophy because you don't see that our lives are in our speech, the human essence. So the same thing said, bodily lived, by different people, is something different. Words are understood only by the soma, intelligibility is not something added on like a rucksack. It is the world and the body.

Essence means one can distinguish one thing from another, a stone doesn't think — InternetStranger

Again, you joy in this self love. You are indeed willfully determined not to think and see in the sacred order. Have you not heard of old Philosophy? Such confusion cries for a mature hand to rock the cradle.

Will you have me and all of your fellows follow you into the cave? To "see". and then think that we are thinking? You 'see' you 'think' and then you cannot help yourself, but gorge upon these lovely "one thing from another!" Enjoy them while they last, but keep them to yourself, they twist my bowels, and I try to eat only when I am hungry.

Return to the the chalkboard of philosophy and look again, you might 'see', that 'thought comes' before those simple eyes see any thing at all.

Now you wish to tell me that the stone does not think. It does not think and yet it is part of thought... Oh yes... and that this thought is yours alone, it does not belong to the stone.

Let me help you find your crucifix for this thing with eyes: the 'son of God' .....the maker of thought?

I hear old Zarathustra laughing.

Give me stones before men, they are more enduring, they are more beautiful and they are more thought full.

M

You need a basic primer on what a technical term is. You're boring as hell.

Philosophers look at ways of thinking, or experiencing. If you at every moment treat the matter as a debate about what the truth is, you never enter the thinking. It's not important at first to ask what the truth is, one wants to see the sense of how the terms are being used crudely first. You never reach the first level.

I will keep my eyes peeled for these philosophers.

M

You're drearily stupid.

Correct,
but not willfully so.

M