xFrockx said:

When we see absolute questions, like "what is knowledge" or "what is truth" we need to recognize that there is no right way to answer these.

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Quote:

"By good here I understand every kind of joy, and whatever leads to it, and especially whatever satisfies any kind of longing, whatever that may be. And by evil, every kind of sadness and especially what frustrates longing."

Passions/longings:

"III Proposition 11, Scholium: We see, then, that the mind can undergo great changes, and pass now to a greater, now to a lesser perfection. These passions, indeed, explain to us the affects of Joy [laetitia] and Sadness [tristitia]. By Joy, therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection."

Perfections:

"An increased power to persevere in being is for Spinoza a transition to greater perfection and a decreased power is a transition to lesser perfection (see IIIp11, the end of IV Preface, and especially III, Definitions of the Affects, III, Exp.). So joy is the passion one experiences in the transition to an increased power to strive, and sadness is the passion one experiences in the opposite transition. Spinoza thus provides, in his account of the affects, the basis for an explanation of how it is that introspection into our conscious experience of desire might fail to bring us accurate knowledge of our own psychological processes. Our conscious experience, both in reacting to ourselves and external objects and also in forming our desires, has an emotional component: we experience joy and sadness and varieties of these. But we may be unaware of why we feel joy or sadness or why, really, we desire what we desire. So Spinoza writes repeatedly, in the context of his criticisms of teleological reasoning and the introspective experiences of free will or mind/body causation (e.g., at IIIp2s): "men are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."

Spinoza offers an explanation of the apparent teleology in desire, in particular, at IIIp28:"

The imagination's role:

"We strive to promote the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to sadness."

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^ That imagination bit could be evidenced by dreams, I have heard of data from people depriving dream sleep from mice and it turns out often they lack development of skills in waking world for survival, obviously according to this science it seems the dreaming state helps the intellect do what it needs to do to sustain itself, "its body"...

One could say we experience many dreams that often deal with basic things... fear, sex, etc............

Spinoza's psychological system is really good, its very "geometrically" connected and deduced in a very logical systematic way. Very interesting... I am drunk, hopefully this was interesting to you... im rambling

xFrockx said:

Lets say there is one person who is asking moral questions to find "what is good"  and another person believes that there is no such thing as good.  How can there be an answer to the question which satisfies both?

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xFrockx said:

"What is good, well if you would see that there is a brute striving of animate bodies, life forms, to nutrition and expansion... a basic drive or virtue of life is that is powers itself and seeks this basically. So what is eventually labeled the good is what we should healthily call what we aspire to which rightly sustains our bodily life."

This is doing exactly what I mention in the OP.  I don't see we are a brute striving of animate bodies.

"The answers change the question. Truth in this respect is an approach, not a solution. "

I'm not the one giving the approach, I am merely providing a possible example of a disagreement.  How can these two people resolve their conflict?  You are absolutely right that their feelings change the question, that is the problem, and that is why they cannot agree without first changing their beliefs.

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Ahhh youre tryin to be a "socratic" lil prick arent ya!? Is that terminology more clear?



They resolve the conflict by doing battle if its really a conflict.... yeahhhhh