[lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?

Yes, it is an empirical claim.  Everything I say is empirical even if the 
citation is lost to the ages.  And I don't read novels.  Too much interesting 
reality to read about.  I assume your response is probably the only response.  
There is no excuse for not treating incipient humans far far better than 
they're treated except for the chicken and egg thing, i.e. it takes a 
relatively nurtured human to raise a relatively nurtured human and nurtured 
humans are in short supply.  But nurturing can be taught except nobody wants to 
learn.  So, paraphrasing Freud, that's humans for ya.  Speaking of Freud, would 
anybody want to read Civilization and Its Discontents?  I can't find it online 
so I'll have to get it from the library.  I understand he basically went 
misanthropic.  If Freud gave up on humanity, then I'm certainly vindicated, not 
that I need to be vindicated, but I am.
 


--- On Sun, 6/29/08, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sunday, June 29, 2008, 10:41 PM

Irene wrote

> Just curious, how do you or anyone respond to the fact that a human 
> being makes a decision regarding his position vis-a-vis his world, i.e., 
> whether it's a trustworthy place or not, which is to say, whether he 
> feels secure or insecure, by the time he's nine months old?  If the 
> child's cries, etc. aren't met timely and he decides the world is
not a 
> trustworthy place, basically he's been rendered 'insecure',
which is to 
> say, he's been damaged for the rest of his life.

I take it that this is an empirical claim? I have, myself, no particular 
response to it, except that you might be amused by the wildly 
contradictory (but fashionable) theories of child raising described in 
Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group.

> I suspect, though, that it's a 
> concept above the scope of philosophical musings.  One has to wonder 
> what the excuse is for everybody else in the world.

If I understand this at all, you seem to be saying that this concept (?) 
is one that isn't the subject matter of 'philosophical musings,'
and 
that that is my excuse for something or other. You seem also to be under 
the misapprehension that, as an academic philosopher, I think in some 
constrained way. This is like supposing that a particle physicist must 
have a professional view on the best translation of 'akrasia.'

Robert Paul





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