Just feel good, bro

[claudiu]

Hi Syd,

@syd

SYD (3 weeks ago): What I’m discovering so far is that sexual arousal per se (in response to visual stimulus) doesn’t disrupt feeling good. That bodily arousal (the electrifying feelings generally between diaphragm and sexual center) in conjunction with the corresponding hedonic pleasure, in fact, is rather a brief pleasure to be enjoyed (sometimes cheekily) for that brief period. It is everything else that happens after that affectively, that’s the problem.

Hummmm “the electrifying feelings generally between diaphragm and sexual center” that you describe as a “bodily arousal”, are nothing other than the sensation of the hormones triggered off by the affective feelings of sexual desire (aka lust), concomitantly wrapped in and enshrouded by that very feeling of lust in and of itself. As you understood in 2012:

SYD: my experiential understanding is that affective feelings come prior to those hormonal physical reactions (the heart-pumping, the neck-tightening, pulse-racing, etc.).

RICHARD: G’day Syd, Does your experiential understanding – that affective feelings come prior to those hormonal physical reactions – include the experiential understanding that it is those affective feelings which trigger off those hormones (the hormones which produce those physical reactions)?

As in:

no affective feelings=no hormonal production; no hormonal production=no physical reaction. [link]

In other words, it already is affective, and with no affective feeling to trigger off in the first place, no hormones would have been produced, and thus no “bodily arousal” would happen like you describe here, with no further “everything else that happens after that affectively”.

Or that is to say: by the time those “electrifying feelings” are being felt, the “problem” has already happened.

Now in actualism we categorize feelings with a three-category system: ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘felicitous’. ‘Desire’ does, of course, firmly fall into the ‘good’ feelings category – while the actualism method is to minimize both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and maximize the ‘felicitous’ ones.

It should be re-iterated of course that ‘good’ feelings do, ehhh, feel pleasurable, lol, lest they would not be called ‘good’. But “feeling pleasurable” is not the actualism method, as Richard explicated to you in 2016:

SYD: … for already stated reasons (how it being, overall, conductive to feeling good/ pleasant sooner than later).

RICHARD: First and foremost, you are conflating the (affective) feeling known as ‘feeling good’ with the (hedonic) feeling you call ‘feeling pleasant’ as if they were one-and-the-same-thing when they are not.

For instance:

• [Syd]: ‘I appreciate you posting this quote, as it demonstrates the notion of doing all that one can, with the full effect of ‘my’ being, in order to consistently feel pleasant[1] instead of bowing out of such a boots-and-all approach via falling for such moralistic injunctions as ‘No need to invent fancy schemes and methods’.

Footnote [1]: If you have been following the Gitter chat you would know I prefer ‘feel pleasant’ to ‘feel good’ (although they are the same) as the word ‘pleasant’ has a strong referent (‘the thing that a word or phrase denotes or stands for’) to vedana (hedonic tone) than the word ‘good’, and also because the words ‘feeling good’ have weak referent (in my mind) to its intended meaning. Consistently feeling good, in and of itself, excludes the ‘good feelings’ – as the good feelings are highly dependent’. [emphasis added]. (Message № 21385)

Essentially, hedonic-tone has three characteristics: pleasure, displeasure and neither-pleasure-nor-displeasure. Thus, affectively ‘feeling good’ has a corresponding pleasurable hedonic-tone whereas affectively ‘feeling bad’ has, as an accompaniment, a displeasureable hedonic-tone (as in, speaking colloquially, it does not feel good, hedonically, to be affectively feeling bad).

Now, whilst anger (for an obvious instance) has a displeasureable hedonic-tone, typically, under certain circumstances – and for a certain type of person – a pleasurable hedonic-tone can ensue[2]. The English word ‘glee’ (when commensurate with the German ‘schadenfreude’) is a classic example of this.

Viz.:

• glee (n.): great merriment or delight, often caused by someone else’s misfortune; (adj.): gleeful; (adv.): gleefully; (n.): gleefulnesss. ~ (Collins English Dictionary).
• glee (n.): malicious satisfaction. ~ (Princeton’s WordNet 3.0).
• glee (n.): great delight, especially from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune; [e.g.]: ‘his face lit up with impish glee’; ‘Too often their misfortunes are met with glee, a schadenfreude [i.e., ‘pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune’] that is quite horrifying’. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary).

It is no wonder you (hedonically) feel pleasant – as per your footnoted ‘in order to consistently feel pleasant’ words as quoted further above – upon channelling that police-force calibre ‘power’ (so as to obtain dominion over those ‘run-of-the-mill’ citizens, colleagues, and etcetera), eh?

‘Tis nothing but old-fashioned gleefulness (obtained at another’s expense) under the guise of [quote] ‘standing up for oneself’ [endquote]. [link]

Footnote [2]:

An instinctual and thus affective hedonic attraction/ aversion discrimination underpins each and every feeling-thought-action which all feeling-beings manifest whenever ‘being’ itself (‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being) is present-to-itself as an affective/ psychic ‘presence’ within.

Viz.:

• hedonic (adj.): of, pertaining to, or involving pleasurable or painful sensations or feelings, considered as affects [viz.: ‘emotions, moods’]; spec. hedonic tone, the degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with an experience or state, esp. considered as a single quantity that can range from extreme pleasure to extreme pain. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary; 1999, 2nd. Ed.; CD-ROM Vers. 2.0)

Put succinctly: every feeling-being’s experience or state of being – including that feeling-being’s emotions, passions, moods, sentiments and, thus, affectively-tinged and/or emotionally-driven thoughts – has hedonic tone (a degree of affective pleasantness or unpleasantness/ a degree of affective pleasure or displeasure).

For instance:

• [Prof. George Stout]: ‘When we wish to say that pleasure or displeasure belongs to this or that mental process, we may say that the process is pleasantly or unpleasantly toned. Hedonic-tone is a generic term for pleasure and the reverse, considered as belonging to this or that mental process. […].
‘The hedonic tone of perception is determined by varying conditions. We may distinguish broadly the pleasure or displeasure which is directly due in the first instance to the perceptual process at the time of its occurrence, and that which arises from preformed associations. Whatever obstructs or disables perceptual process at the time of its occurrence is disagreeable; whatever favours or furthers it is agreeable. […].
‘It is difficult to bring emotions, such as anger and fear, and sentiments, such as love and hate, completely under any other head [besides pleasure and displeasure]. Certainly, an emotion, like anger, involves some kind of cognition; but it cannot be said that the specific experience of being angry directly qualifies the nature of the presented object; in other words, this experience is not a presentation. So, too, anger has hedonic-tone, mostly of an unpleasant kind’. ~ (from ‘A Manual of Psychology’ by Professor George Stout, first published 1899 by W. B. Clive, The University Tutorial Press, London).

As a matter of historical interest: the earliest record on the topic of hedonic-tone, which predates the above 1899 publication by millennia, is none other than what is known in the buddhavacana (as per the Theravādan Pali Canon) as ‘vedanā’ (approx. pron.: vay-duh-nar) or ‘vedanā-khandha’. According to Prof. James Baldwin (‘Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology’, 1905) it was Prof. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) who first coined the term hedonic-tone (translated from German, ‘Gefühlston’; approx. pron.: gar-fools-torn).

Just as glee (in the sense above) feels pleasant, so, too does lust! You can find many examples of people, ehhh… enjoying the pleasures of the feeling of lust, on various websites on the internet with ‘hub’ in the name.

It should also be noted that lust has been evolved by nature over millions of years, to not only feel almost irresistibly pleasurable, but to also be highly addicting as well… all for the purpose of blindly propagating the species as furiously and powerfully as can be done. Indeed, much of the modern civilizational framework (with all the morals, mores, and ethics) specifically evolved (culturally rather than biologically) to rein in this powerful force and channel that chaotic energy into productive means. One would be well-advised not to strip away such morals from one’s own life before a better means of dealing with that which they are meant to control be firmly established and committed to, due to the sheer potency of these passions under discussion.

All that to say that you may have better luck with the actualism method by minimizing lust itself in the first place, rather than enjoying it (briefly or not) and thus endorsing it, and then trying to somehow prevent all that inevitably flows from that initial root cause.

(To forestall a predictable response by any reader seeing this, this is not advice to suppress lust either, as the actualism method is to neither express nor suppress the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ feelings, along with all that entails.)

Perhaps this shall help clarify the current discourse as it seems you may be talking at cross-purposes^[1] w/ Vineeto here.

Cheers,
Claudiu

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1. “If two or more people are at cross purposes, they do not understand each other because they are talking about different subjects without realizing this.” (Cambridge Dictionary) ↩︎