Unethical to be happy

[The Voice of Time]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w

About speaker: famous critic who has an incredible ability to speak much and rapidly

Slavoj Žižek: I think it unethical to pursue happiness

Argument: Humans do not really want to pursue happiness, but as title of video indicates they want to do whatever is interesting

Video is 2-3 minutes so everybody can afford the time spent seeing it.

[johngalthasspoken]

A traditionalist perspective, happiness or pleasure belongs to the naturalistic plane and is marked by passivity toward the world of impulses, instincts, passions, and inclinations. Tradition defines the basis of naturalistic existence as desire and thirst, and ardent pleasure is that which is tied to the satisfaction of desire in terms of a momentary dampening of the fire that drives life onward. Heroic pleasure, on the other hand, is that which accompanies a decisive actions that comes from being, from the plane superior to that of life and overcome what is merely human, as the means to attain a new 'heroic sense of reality' which would replace hedonism and the pursuit of happiness as the chief driving force of life.

the guy in the video has a funny accent, is he Russian ?

[The Voice of Time]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek

[Impenitent]

we don't want what we desire...

interesting...

yet, having your wife and mistress seems to be perfectly ethical to him...

heroic?

-Imp

[thedoc]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w
.

Well that was an amusing bit of nonsense, he is just an unhappy man who is trying to justify his misery by claiming that no-one else really wants to be happy, making everyone else just as miserable as he is, and just like him. It is common for those on the fringes of society, to project their condition onto everyone else, so that they can feel that they are part of the mainstream of society.

[The Voice of Time]

Meh, he's not the type who becomes unhappy I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... ek_Studies

He has attracted an own crowd of scholars about him. This guy is more of the person who takes on stances just for the sake of brewing up reflection, criticising things almost randomly to flip and turn on subjects until he has penetrated about every angle of defensive weakness portraying the whole thing as filled with faults.

I would rather think this video is some form of provocation to reflection than solid idealism.

[thedoc]

I would rather think this video is some form of provocation to reflection than solid idealism.

That could be, I have been known to play 'Devils Advocate' at times, and Henry once complemented me for taking the unpopular stance.

[HughKnows]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w

About speaker: famous critic who has an incredible ability to speak much and rapidly

Slavoj Žižek: I think it unethical to pursue happiness

Argument: Humans do not really want to pursue happiness, but as title of video indicates they want to do whatever is interesting

Video is 2-3 minutes so everybody can afford the time spent seeing it.

Thanks for the link. When I started playing the video I was puzzled because it seemed to be of Stephen Fry rather than Zizek, but then I realized that that was just an advert...

OK, so Zizek says we don't want what we desire, but when he explains what he means by this it looked to me as if he was actually saying something different. (I think he just gets a kick out of sounding paradoxical!) He wasn't really claiming that we don't want what we desire, he was actually claiming that
a) Sometimes we want something else more than we want our own happiness, narrowly defined - which doesn't mean we wouldn't also quite like to be happy if that was possible.
and
b) Other times we are confused about what we actually desire (eg with his example about the guy who thinks he wants to be with his mistress).