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 MushmanTheManic
Stranger
Registered: 04/21/05
Posts: 4,587
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 Self-Interest as Developing One's Potentials 
#5938088 - 08/06/06 06:26 PM (5 years, 9 months ago) |
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I'm currently reading Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics by Erich Fromm. In this book, Fromm tries to show how an objective form of ethics can be created without the concept of a Higher Being. (As I haven't finished reading the book yet, I cannot tell you how successful his endeavour was.)
Much of the book is relevant to the recent posts by Huehue and Firework's God, so I've decided to share a paragraph I thought was particularly relevant. Fromm believes far too many individuals in our society have been converted by the Church of Success, which turns their self into a commodity, as a means rather than an end, and deceives them as to what their true self-interest is.
"To [Spinoza] self-interest or the interest "to seek one's profit" is identical with virtue. "The more," he says, "each person strives and is able to seek his profit, that is to say, to preserve his being, the more virtue does he possess; on the other hand, in so far as each person neglects his own profit he is impotent." According to this view, the interest of man is to preserve his existence, which is the same as realizing his inherent potentialities. This concept of self-interest is objectivistic inasmuch as "interest" is not conceived in terms of the subjective feeling of what one's interest is but in terms of what the nature of man is. Man has only one real interest and that is the full development of his potentialities, of himself as a human being. Just as one has to know another person and his real needs in order to love him, one has to know one's own self in order to understand what the interests of this self are and how they can be served..."
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Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery
Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 67,518
Loc: underbelly
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Re: Self-Interest as Developing One's Potentials [Re: MushmanTheManic]
#5938252 - 08/06/06 07:30 PM (5 years, 9 months ago) |
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--------------------
“What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.”
― Ernest Becker
"Beneath the civilized veneer, man remains the supreme predator. Cursed with what he believes is understanding, his true soul blossoms godlike in the heart of the nuclear inferno."
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