The Resources of Other People

[The Voice of Time]

I would like to suggest a view on other people as presenting to us (us being consuming individuals) two types of resources for our use. The first is an "Aesthetics and Functionality of Human Being", with the second the "Instrumentality of Human Being".

The first is everything that is pleasing to our body and mind: those things whose sole purpose is to make us feel good in the moment, this includes balancing of the senses and preserving a functionality in our body and mind that ensures we continue to stay good and do not fall apart. For this kind we have emotions, drives, reality improvement through imagination, sensory play (anything from movies to comfort and sex and music and all other sorts of entertainment) and the like.

With the Instrumentality of the Human Being we go into a value other people have for us as means for which to achieve a goal that we believe we need to achieve. While both can be highly abstract (Aesthetics can sum up into huge nests of complicated ideas to describe how we come to like and find pleasing something specific), Instrumentality is necessarily abstract, even though it doesn't have to be complex or complicated, but can be very simple ('I want beer -> I say to wife: "I want beer" -> wife goes and gets beer', the abstract part is that beer doesn't come to us so we are not being aesthetically satisfied but performing an action and in so an abstraction in order to acquire it, we must first talk, and our talk directs itself through our wife, and our wife has to do a lot of complicated things to end up giving us the beer, for which we might even not find that satisfying, we just happen to believe we need it, so we do it).

The interesting part of this is that it says a lot about how we should then proceed to plan our social relations and what we need in order to develop them further. By formalizing the value other people have to us we can discuss how "the others" living with us works in practice, by the way of us and the other make a good case both aesthetically, functionally and instrumentally.

Criticism? Comments? Questions?