In a post below, I promised a discussion in a few days of the issue of whether violence enables personal growth in crucial ways; I want to draw your attention to the comments, where some excellent arguments have already been fielded. I'm going to think about that over the weekend and try to construct something worthy.
Preparatory readings, for those of you interested: The Smell of Death, by myself; the Laches, by Plato; and Aristotle's arguments about courage and practice, from the Nicomachean Ethics. (I don't mean to suggest that my writing is as useful or worthy as theirs, but since I'm the one writing the introduction to the discussion, it will be on my mind.)
3 comments:
2 key peeps are miyamoto mushasi and nathan bforrest.
Classic hero s journey archetypes
If the discussion is moving here (and then further onward), I would like to agree with LittleRed1 and part of the original article that there is something deeply wrong with having an upbringing so sheltered that you believe that someone saying bad things to you or about you is as bad as actual violence. I wouldn't want to give an opposite impression in this.
There is a limited sense in which insult can be worse, because it can be recalled and nursed indefinitely, while physical pain is not stored in memory (except at the level of sympathetic or avoidance reflex when remembering). Emotional pain can be made to linger for years or decades, and thus, I grant, worse in some way. Yet one has to embrace that emotional pain and nurture it for that to happen.
So people who say it's violence are somewhat admitting they are clutching the pain to their breast rather than trying to put it behind them. For the rest of us, no, I'd far rather you shout vile insults at me than hit me with a bat, thanks. Pretty obvious.
I prefer people with bats. More useful as target practice.
The issue is that verbal violence is as high as most civilized citizen serfs can get. To get to physical violvence first they graduate on this spectrum or scale.
The advantage of experienced adepts and skill users in blood is that we can go from level 0 to level 100 skipping the verbal stage.
This advantage is nullified if i have to keep talking to people.
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