Does idealism lead to more compassion ?

[Papanca]

Hello everybody,

So by lurking/scrolling a lot of topic in this forums and the old, defunct metaphysical speculations googlegroup, i often see this idea come often that the current paradigm of materialism is responsible for lack of compassion, lack of meaning etc.

I wonder how true is this and i want to discuss the topic with you, i have to say i don't have any definitive answer on the topic, i'm here to learn, but to begin the discussion, i'm gonna share my first impression that i admit are of course subject to bias.

Sometimes, whenever the topic of suffering/depression etc comes into the discussion, i find that a lot of idealists have a promptness to judge harshly, using an idealistic lense/framing : It's your karma/You deserve it because you project your own perspective into the world/the solution is just to embrace the love path/warrior path/etc path, definitive, absolute answer that seems to leave no path for compassion : the way out of suffering is clear, so the person who have missed it is 100% responsible for it, this to me seems to close the door for compassion. I see this pattern repeating a lot in idealistic forums/discussions, of course it's not a generality, there is many members (for example Eugene, especially in the old forum), who seem to always have a thought for the sufferers, want a spirituality that is also applicable for a poor mexican houseworker etc.

While materialists will often say things like it's not your fault, talk about sociological/biological/environmental etc factors, i was just browsing a subreddit /r/france where there is a talk about someone who lost a child to suicide, and it was full of compassionate advices, most of the members there is materialists.

But like i said, i know that i'm full of bias/prejudices and i'm here to learn, i just want to see how idealism leads to more compassion, how it does manifest concretly, because often i see it as just some theoritical abstraction, that doesn't manifest in reality.

Thanks in advance.

[AshvinP]

Cleric expressed a consistent idealist perspective on compassion very well when commenting on "spiritual change" recently:

Let's consider an example. At some point or another we have all come across a beggar and we gave him some change. Our motives for this act are not always very clear. On one hand we do that for our own personal well-being. We feel that we're not that bad person after all, we give something freely from ourselves. Yet we don't really care if the person will buy bread or alcohol with the money. So basically we're only motivated to please our conscience. If we really cared about the person we would speak to him and ask what he needs. If he says he's hungry, we go and buy him food. If he says he needs money for drugs, we reply "Sorry but I don't want to fuel your further downfall."

Very often we fiercely reject precisely that which we ourselves have but are blind for it (first cast out the beam out of thine own eye ...). In our age of extreme fragmentation of soul and spirit, where we feel utterly isolated, we feel (and we must thank for that!) that others must also have their inner experiences. So we feel a kind of pleasing feeling for our conscience when we say "I'm not such a bad person. I may otherwise not believe in anything but I'm benevolent and generous enough to give the pictures of humans walking on the screen of my consciousness, the privilege of having their own "I" experience. I would really be a wicked man if I were to deny this to them."

And in a sense it is true. It would really be pathological if we deny experiences of thoughts and feelings to the human pictures walking in our imagination. Yet we don't really care enough for these pictures. We only give them some spiritual change like we're saying "See all this self-consciousness that I enjoy? Here - take - you can have some of it too."

The truth is that in this act of 'generosity' we are far greater solipsists than the solipsist-image that we despise. How could that be? Let's simply think logically. What does it mean to understand someone? It really means not only to understand what his sensory picture impresses into our own thinking but to try and assume the same ideal perspective as the person's, to see things through his thinking eyes. What does it mean to have empathy? To be able to put ourselves in the same feeling aura as the person, to experience pain and pleasure as if they happen to us. So really, it is not simply about granting the walking pictures in our dream their imagined separate bubbles of experience, such that we don't feel too wicked, or simply because we're afraid of loneliness and would much rather fantasize that there are also other bubbles. It's much rather about understanding the perspectives of beings, to partake in their ideal and feeling life. If we do that, we really begin to understand that there's only one soul space.

In the physical realm we understand that our bodies share their substances with the whole Cosmos. When we are in a room with other people, do we realize that what we breathe in was just a minute ago part of the organism of someone else? Similarly, in the realm of soul and spirit we're living in shared medium. In fact, the physical world is only a mineralized shadow of this higher medium.

We can use our relations to other human beings as analogies for supersensible consciousness. When we experience the sensory perceptions of other men, we live within the impressions, the effects that their soul life has on ours. For example, if someone pushes me, I may have no idea what his motives are but most certainly this impresses into my perspective. Something changes within my perceptual field because of that pushing act. This is analogous to Imaginative consciousness, where we live in the wider soul realm and experience in imaginative impressions the deeds of soul and spiritual beings.

...

Our moral worth is not measured by giving spiritual change to walking pictures in our consciousness, such that we can rest comfortably in our personal-bubble solipsism but by seeking to perceive and live with the thoughts and feelings of other beings. To this someone will object "But how do we know that we're experiencing the other's person's soul and spirit life and we're not simply imagining them in our solipsistic personal bubble?" Asking such a question in itself must scare us. It practically admits that we can't know in principle if other beings have inner life. We only grant them inner life because of confused feelings of guilt, generosity, loneliness. Even though it's in principle impossible to prove that other beings have inner experience, we chose to believe so, because it comforts our conscience.

It is completely true that we may as well be fantasizing thoughts and feelings as if they belong to someone else but if we don't stop at isolated phenomena but seek their place in the totality of existence, then we'll also know if we really feel another person's pain and joy, or we're just repurposing our own. We simply need to drop the prejudice (and it's nothing but prejudice) that there's some ontological barrier that thoughts and feelings can't cross. There's nothing to cross - there are only unique perspectives of the same soul and spirit reality, just as we experience unique spatial perspectives of the same physical world.

[Lou Gold]

Hello everybody,

So by lurking/scrolling a lot of topic in this forums and the old, defunct metaphysical speculations googlegroup, i often see this idea come often that the current paradigm of materialism is responsible for lack of compassion, lack of meaning etc.

I wonder how true is this and i want to discuss the topic with you, i have to say i don't have any definitive answer on the topic, i'm here to learn, but to begin the discussion, i'm gonna share my first impression that i admit are of course subject to bias.

Sometimes, whenever the topic of suffering/depression etc comes into the discussion, i find that a lot of idealists have a promptness to judge harshly, using an idealistic lense/framing : It's your karma/You deserve it because you project your own perspective into the world/the solution is just to embrace the love path/warrior path/etc path, definitive, absolute answer that seems to leave no path for compassion : the way out of suffering is clear, so the person who have missed it is 100% responsible for it, this to me seems to close the door for compassion. I see this pattern repeating a lot in idealistic forums/discussions, of course it's not a generality, there is many members (for example Eugene, especially in the old forum), who seem to always have a thought for the sufferers, want a spirituality that is also applicable for a poor mexican houseworker etc.

While materialists will often say things like it's not your fault, talk about sociological/biological/environmental etc factors, i was just browsing a subreddit /r/france where there is a talk about someone who lost a child to suicide, and it was full of compassionate advices, most of the members there is materialists.

But like i said, i know that i'm full of bias/prejudices and i'm here to learn, i just want to see how idealism leads to more compassion, how it does manifest concretly, because often i see it as just some theoritical abstraction, that doesn't manifest in reality.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Papanca,

I very much appreciate the views of compassion offered by Gabor Maté:



The fundamental in this compassionate approach would be self-inquiry because "it takes two to tango" and one can give to the other only what one knows or holds for oneself. In this sense, I suspect that compassion ultimately lands in the arena of Idealism (consciousness and awareness) but at a more common 'entry level' one surely does not need deep self-awareness to know that a hungry person needs some food and a Physicalist can be every bit or even more compassionate than an Idealist.

[Lou Gold]

PS, Papanca,

Short answer: My understanding is that ontology does not compel a particular practical action. One can be a charitable or self-interested Materialist or a charitable or self-interested Idealist.

[Papanca]

Hello everybody,

So by lurking/scrolling a lot of topic in this forums and the old, defunct metaphysical speculations googlegroup, i often see this idea come often that the current paradigm of materialism is responsible for lack of compassion, lack of meaning etc.

I wonder how true is this and i want to discuss the topic with you, i have to say i don't have any definitive answer on the topic, i'm here to learn, but to begin the discussion, i'm gonna share my first impression that i admit are of course subject to bias.

Sometimes, whenever the topic of suffering/depression etc comes into the discussion, i find that a lot of idealists have a promptness to judge harshly, using an idealistic lense/framing : It's your karma/You deserve it because you project your own perspective into the world/the solution is just to embrace the love path/warrior path/etc path, definitive, absolute answer that seems to leave no path for compassion : the way out of suffering is clear, so the person who have missed it is 100% responsible for it, this to me seems to close the door for compassion. I see this pattern repeating a lot in idealistic forums/discussions, of course it's not a generality, there is many members (for example Eugene, especially in the old forum), who seem to always have a thought for the sufferers, want a spirituality that is also applicable for a poor mexican houseworker etc.

While materialists will often say things like it's not your fault, talk about sociological/biological/environmental etc factors, i was just browsing a subreddit /r/france where there is a talk about someone who lost a child to suicide, and it was full of compassionate advices, most of the members there is materialists.

But like i said, i know that i'm full of bias/prejudices and i'm here to learn, i just want to see how idealism leads to more compassion, how it does manifest concretly, because often i see it as just some theoritical abstraction, that doesn't manifest in reality.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Papanca,

I very much appreciate the views of compassion offered by Gabor Maté:



The fundamental in this compassionate approach would be self-inquiry because "it takes two to tango" and one can give to the other only what one knows or holds for oneself. In this sense, I suspect that compassion ultimately lands in the arena of Idealism (consciousness and awareness) but at a more common 'entry level' one surely does not need deep self-awareness to know that a hungry person needs some food and a Physicalist can be every bit or even more compassionate than an Idealist.

Thanks for sharing, i'm gonna listen to this asap.

[Lou Gold]

Papanca,

I often emphasize that I'm not a philosopher. I'm sort of an intuitive "feeler", who possibly makes little sense from an analytic or ontological perspective. Anyway, I just stumbled upon this youtube, which includes one of my favorite musicians, Jacob Collier. I don't know what, if anything, it has to do with ontology but for me it conveys a deep feeling of compassion.

[Lou Gold]

Some might pick up a similar vibration in the Buddhist practice of chanting the name of Avalokiteshvaraya, the Bodhisattva of great compassion. Perhaps compassion is the harmonic expression of a Oneness that may be expressed many ways.

[findingblanks]

Papanca,

I like how Lou put it. I typically find that when somebody is explaining their compassion with reference to how they intellectually grasp their own ontology, that the cart is being put before the horse.

I disagree strongly with Kastrup's claims about the affects of holding a materialistic ontology. That said, I think we can understand why a materialistic ontology might increasingly become correlated with many pathological symptoms, both individually and collectively. But nearly everybody in this form knows why we must never conflate correlation with causation too quickly. For the same reasons, I would say we can understand the correlation between the rise of materialism and the sudden global sprouting of profound intuitions about universal human rights, including the way many 'naturalists' began to articulate the Earth's inherent so-called rights. But correlation isn't causation, so any materialist who tries to claim it was the growing materialism that caused these impulses would be making the same mistake as Kastrup.

I love you question.

I know that as I type this there is probably a person who has held some form of idealism and by dropping it is about to experience strong new steps forward in their moral life. And the opposite is certainly true. To understand how dropping any world-view can be a necessary step forward, we have to dive into the the phenomenology behind taking up world-views, modifying them, and, often, not knowing at all.

[Papanca]

PS, Papanca,

Short answer: My understanding is that ontology does not compel a particular practical action. One can be a charitable or self-interested Materialist or a charitable or self-interested Idealist.

Interresting, i'm starting to like this guy and he does feel very compassionate, but i don't think he's an idealist, or is he ?

[Papanca]

Papanca,

I like how Lou put it. I typically find that when somebody is explaining their compassion with reference to how they intellectually grasp their own ontology, that the cart is being put before the horse.

I disagree strongly with Kastrup's claims about the affects of holding a materialistic ontology. That said, I think we can understand why a materialistic ontology might increasingly become correlated with many pathological symptoms, both individually and collectively. But nearly everybody in this form knows why we must never conflate correlation with causation too quickly. For the same reasons, I would say we can understand the correlation between the rise of materialism and the sudden global sprouting of profound intuitions about universal human rights, including the way many 'naturalists' began to articulate the Earth's inherent so-called rights. But correlation isn't causation, so any materialist who tries to claim it was the growing materialism that caused these impulses would be making the same mistake as Kastrup.

I love you question.

I know that as I type this there is probably a person who has held some form of idealism and by dropping it is about to experience strong new steps forward in their moral life. And the opposite is certainly true. To understand how dropping any world-view can be a necessary step forward, we have to dive into the the phenomenology behind taking up world-views, modifying them, and, often, not knowing at all.

Thanks for your reply,

There is something interresting and refreshing about the dropping of a worldview (any worldview), i think this in itself is correlated with change, as one often drops this worldview because it feels alienating, not compatible with one heart/temperament/views, the transformation may reveal something about the person more than the worldview in itself is determining the change in the person.

To be more precise about what prompted my initial post, i do perfectly understand what in materialism can lead to carelessness, meaninglessness, etc, in theory, but in practice there is also devices and postulates in materialism that can and often do lead to more compassion : Understanding that whatever prompts someone to action is at least influenced by his upringing, economic status, the land where he lives and its political system etc etc, i think no person who gave the subject a moment of thought would deny those influences, one may deny it determines anything, but to deny the influence is absurd, recognizing those influences can lead to more compassion and understanding.

And i do understand perfectly how idealism can lead to a more compassionate approach, i really do, but what i find in reality is that this becomes restricted to theory, many people prefer to make theoritical treatises or poetic arguments (often they are beautiful, persuasive, not denying that) about compassion, while using heavily other devices of idealism that often lead to adverse results, like believing that someone absolutely deserves something because of his past karma, that there is no big harm in his suffering whatsoever because it's just a "dream" or because he should have just adopted our prefered path/solution to the human condition.

So i think, imho, we should always be careful about how our egoic tendency can bias and corrupt anything, even a promisory idealistic call to compassion, i think a lot of people are afraid to admit the influence of luck, because it's scary to think that what happened to someone with a non enviable position could've happened to us where it for a difference of luck, one may go to the other extreme position and attributes everything to luck, of course, but in reality this extreme is reached way less than the other.