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Cassie Vrooman
Apprentice
32 Posts |
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Jenna Stimac
Apprentice
28 Posts |
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Cassie Vrooman
Apprentice
32 Posts |
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Jenna Stimac
Apprentice
28 Posts |
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Christine Gylling
Fledgling
18 Posts |
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
 Posted - Jul 25 2010 : 11:49:57 PM
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Christine, I agree with what you said. Younger people don't have any experience with relationships, I feel, and so they are, in my opinion, expected to be more focused on appreciating physical attractions at first. If they get a, let's say, mentor, or someone to teach them that it's better and more valuable to appreciate the soul and mind instead, then I think that's when those younger people start to mature. That's also when I think that the younger people start to look at more than just the hot body, and see that looking at the soul and mind is way more beneficial than just looking at the body only.
I also wanted to say that I think that when people look just at hot bodies, they are more likely to be disappointed in the end in the relationship. Noticing that the hot body is only something on the surface of something way more valuable in a relationship-the soul.
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 26 2010 : 07:01:51 AM
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Cassie, could you explain what the difference is between being attracted by someone or something and being turned on? At the same time, help us to understand the difference you must see on the other side between finding someone or something repulsive or off-putting and being turned off.
I wonder whether you're not talking about the possibility of admiring someone before you begin finding yourself attracted to him or to her -- either physically or otherwise. Admiring someone isn't the same thing as being attracted to him or to her, being turned on by him or by her. What I call being turned on by something (it doesn't make any difference whether it's a person or a thing) needn't be a physical attraction at all, but it has to be more than an admiring. It has to take the form of being "hot to trot": being ready and willing and in fact more or less powerfully inclined to couple with it, enter into it, "get involved in it," throw ourselves into it, play with it, fiddle around with it, mess with it, unite ourselves to it in a way that will give rise to -- produce, bring into being -- something good, something desirable for its own sake. Admiration can be dispassionate. One cannot be dispassionately turned on by something, tempted by it, drawn to it.
It's also true that Diotima would grant -- and I would grant, and I bet that Jenna would grant -- that once you've become capable of being turned on by beautiful speeches and thoughts in such a way that they make you want to engage in conversation of the sort in which you might be able to breed (beget and give birth to) something even better than any human baby (not something we're capable of as infants, whereas physical arousal is something we're all capable of as infants), then an intellectual attraction might well precede a physical attraction. But what exactly do you mean when you say that you were attracted to your boyfriend's mind and intellect? How did that attraction manifest itself in your life? You say you were friends for a long time before you found yourself physically attracted to him. The question is whether you were more than friends. People can, if they've already made it far enough up the ladder of love, be lovers, and not just friends, without having any interest in one another's bodies.
I think that all that Jenna, Diotima, and I are saying is that physical arousal presupposes far less in human beings than intellectual arousal and that many, many people never are intellectually aroused by anything. Maybe, Christine and Katie, you're with Jenna and Diotima and me on this too, though I must say I'm not sure. What Diotima thinks lovers of beautiful souls do with one another is far more than "appreciate" each other's minds. They actively get it on as minds with other minds. Ah, popular music! Its lyrics are often purer and more honest that we're ever inclined to be in our everyday conversation! Here's the test as to whether you're turned on by someone or something either physically or in any other way: are you ready and willing and urgently desirous of gettin' it on?
John recently asked Katie whether the title of her essay ("What Is Love?") is "an allusion to the song from the film Night at the Roxbury? -- 'What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me...no more.'" We'll have to hear from Katie about that. But John has inspired me to cite my sources. I most definitely owe the concept of gettin' it on that I've just been making use of to the title and lyrics -- and the music! -- of Marvin Gaye's magnificently genteel and yet urgent request for intercourse: "Let's Get It On." The thing we've got to see to appreciate Diotima's position is that there's physical intercourse and then there's intellectual intercourse, and both are forms of gettin' it on. Just as being lovers who enjoy physical intercourse with one another is more than mere friendship, so being lovers who enjoy intellectual intercourse with one another is more than mere friendship. For Diotima, and so for Sokrates, the erotic is not the same as the physical. The Greeks have a different word for friendship: "philia," so they're less likely to confuse these things with one another than we are -- we, who use the word "love" to cover both these very different things and so many other things as well.
Now Jenna, it's true that universal generalizations are often false, but they aren't always false, and as you say, when you're talking about essence, you're talking about what's common to everything of a given kind. Circularity is most definitely characteristic of all circles. And we can be sure that whatever the heck it is to be a desk, every desk is a desk. So in philosophy -- and in mathematics, too, and in the purely theoretical reaches of the natural sciences, at least, where our central concern is with all those lovely "What is it?" questions -- we have to hitch up our socks and set out boldly to find the universal. So let me join you in encouraging us all, each and every one, to be bold! We wouldn't hesitate -- would we? -- to say that a number has to be even to be divisible by two without remainder, and that this isn't just sometimes true. We wouldn't hesitate -- would we? -- to say about living things that they have to be alive before they can die. Let's not hestitate to try to capture the essence of that which turns people on, makes them actively want to...get it on. |
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Richard Mikel
Apprentice
32 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 08:15:19 AM
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Richard, I certainly do hope that in editing the comment you posted yesterday at 10:49 a.m., I haven't altered the basic idea you wanted to express. Here's how you originally worded your response: "After reading through Tom's responses to our earlier posts, we can't be looking for a list of things that turn people on. We're looking for the essence of what turns people on. If it is simply a matter of what someone finds beautiful, it is simply a matter of opinion. Therefore the opinion lacks a reasoning for the essence of what turns people on." What I've tried to do is build on your own earlier remarks on the things that are "variables" in the things people say and think to bring out what you mean when you say "the opinion lacks a reasoning for the essence of what turns people on." Assuming I understand your response to Andrew correctly, I think it's an enormously insightful response.
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Aaron Mund
Apprentice
37 Posts |
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Richard Mikel
Apprentice
32 Posts |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 12:29:25 PM
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| Tom, that was pretty much spot on. If things depend on people's definitions of beauty, or what people consider to be beautiful, we aren't really getting to the core of beauty. Maybe we're broadening or narrowing our understanding in order to reach the essence, but if we're using it to make a list, then we aren't making progress. Using something from someone's idea of what is beautiful as a starting point for a hypothesis would be a solution, but a list itself is just that: a list, not a definition. |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 2:59:41 PM
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| Aaron, why do you equate what people want in a mate with what turns them on? I don't see any necessary connection between those two things at all. I think you're simply changing the subject. And in any case, we're looking for the essence of what turns people on. Read the things Richard has just been posting about this. |
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
Posted - Jul 28 2010 : 1:11:50 PM
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| Richard, I am a little confused by your most recent post. I just don't understand what it is you mean when you're speaking of a "list," or "making a list"? Do you mean making a list of what is beautiful? |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 28 2010 : 3:49:09 PM
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Katie, Richard can correct me if I'm misrepresenting him here, but do you remember the Meno and Sokrates' complaint that although in asking Menon what virtue is, what he was looking for was "the one thing, the same in all [i.e., the same in each and every virtue], that makes them virtues" (72c, Rouse 24, emphasis added), Menon was always giving a whole swarm of things instead? That image of the swarm isn't easy to forget! You may recall that Sokrates drove this point home by asking Menon:quote:
If I asked you what a bee really is, and you answered that there are many different kinds of bees, what would you answer me if I asked you then: 'Do you say there are many different kinds of bees, differing from each other in being bees more or less? Or do they differ in some other respect, for example in size, or beauty, and so forth?" (72b, Rouse 23-24)
Sokrates' point is that in asking "What is a bee?" one is looking for a characterization of the beehood of bees -- the being of bees -- not for a list of all the different sorts of bees there are, and similarly, that in asking "What is virtue?" one is looking for a characterization of the essence of virtues, not for a list of all the different kinds of virtue there are. Unless I miss my guess, Richard's point is that in asking "What turns people on?" we're not looking for a big long list of turn-ons and comments from one and all about how amazing it is how many different kinds of things turn different people on. No, what we're looking for is the essence of the things that turn people on, what it is for something to be a turn-on, the one thing, the same in all (i.e., the same in each and every turn-on), that makes each and every one of these things that turns somebody on something that turns somebody on.
We're looking for one of the realities. We want a formulation of the essence of the things that turn people on, not a list. We don't want a list of different kinds of turn-ons. We want a definition. I think the reason that Richard mentioned beauty is that Diotima clearly thinks that it's beautiful things that turn people on, and if that's true, we also don't want a list of different kinds of beautiful things. If we agree that it's beautiful things that turn people on, then what do you think of the idea that we ought to be trying to come up with an explanation of (1) what it is to be beautiful and (2) why it should be that beautiful things turn people on?
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Katie Contreras
Apprentice
29 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 30 2010 : 11:20:59 AM
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Looks can be deceiving, and they're not just deceptive with respect to the character of something that's completely different from the thing that misleads you with its great looks. If someone gave you a beautiful, poisoned apple (we're moving into the fairy tale realm now), you might look at it and say, "How great that looks!" only to find out later on -- too late! -- that this particular apple was a bad apple! It's the apple that looks good -- that seems full of promise of good things -- but that's really bad. There's no body/soul distinction here for you to appeal to in order to say that the beautiful thing wasn't bad the bad thing. No one would say that the apple had a great body that housed a bad soul. Or take a really great-looking car that turns out to be a lemon (with this, we're moving out of the realm of fairy tales back into the realm of all too real everyday life). It's beautiful but bad. It's a great-looking, really lousy car. One and the same thing in each of these cases is both great-looking and lousy. I think there are all sorts of cases like this that provide more than enough reason to doubt the equation you make use of here: "beautiful things = good things." I just don't think this is true, so I don't think it can be the explanation of the fact that beautiful things turn us on.
Not that it's particularly relevant to this argument, but since I reject the whole body/soul dualism that you appeal to here, I can't really agree that people can have beautiful bodies and ugly souls. I'd redescribe the case you gave us this way. That guy who looked so fine to you; he -- the very same guy -- turned out to be really bad. He too -- just like that fine-looking lemon of a car -- is beautiful but bad. |
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Stephanie Miller
Fledgling
13 Posts |
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Aaron Mund
Apprentice
37 Posts |
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Andrew Koziuk
Apprentice
34 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Jul 31 2010 : 5:35:35 PM
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| Stephanie: it's sad, but true. There really are beautiful bodies that are lousy bodies. Quite in general, being beautiful isn't the same thing as being good. |
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What Turns People On?
