Post by VixensVengeance on May 5, 2020 18:02:04 GMT
There is no Middle Road
There is a misnomer that the concept of the height of balance exists by striving to maintain an ethical or philosophical middle ground that exists between the extreme and the lacking. This is the idea that we should never indulge in anything to excess. The Greek Philosopher Aristotle called this the “golden mean”, the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. He believed that happiness is the highest good and the end at which all our activities ultimately aim. He defines the successful pursuit of this as a disposition to behave in the “right manner” which is a mean between extremes of deficiency and excess, both of which he considered vices. For example, In our anger we should never strive to be hot-tempered nor overly lacking of spirit but we should strive for the mean (virtue) of patience between these two. To the Greek mentality, this was an attribute of beauty that produced harmony.
In Buddhism, this concept is known as “The Middle Way”. This is the term that Buddha used to describe the character of the Noble Eightfold Path that he felt led to liberation and ultimately Nirvana by carving a narrow path between corporeal indulgence and asceticism. Through this process of eliminating or lessening excessiveness, which he ultimately viewed as detrimental to our being, we find balance in our lives. It is in this place that harmony is found. In the broadest sense, the Middle Way refers to the Buddha’s view of life and also the actions or attitudes that will create happiness for oneself and others. This philosophy describes a way of viewing life in such a way that compromise of extremes on both sides is what leads to ultimate truth. However these philosophies ultimately fail because of two reasons.
The first reason is that these philosophies encourage an embracement of mediocrity in our lives. People that live their lives this way worry more about appearances than outcomes. They tend to focus on what hasn’t been done as opposed to progress made. It is a view of life that puts undue emphasis on “the process” and not the results. As a consequence of this, these people fail to connect with life and have a lack of vision or bold dreams. They are takers of short cuts to minimize effort and as a result comprise their goals. They want to believe that life can be an easy ride and that they can minimize or avoid pain and suffering and loss. Their need to be safe and secure overrides their sense of adventure and curiosity and boldness. They are people that say “no” to challenge. They have been tricked into believing that playing it safe will make them happy and successful because one day they will be rewarded for their mediocre life styles. They spend their lives waiting for that one person to find them, to be chosen, to be promoted, to be made famous or rich instead of going out and brazenly taking the chances and accepting the consequences in life in the pursuit of achieving those things for themselves.
The second reason is that this idea of middle ground creates a logical fallacy; that of argumentum ad temperantiam or the false compromise. The false compromise exposes the fallacy that the truth must be found as a compromise between two opposite positions. People naturally gravitate toward minimizing conflict by searching for middle ground. But if you are searching for absolute truth, compromise and accepting alternative interpretation is an ineffective way to go about this. An individual operating within the false compromise fallacy believes that positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. However this is not always the case. One should not be exclusively looking for a middle ground between disinformation and information or between falseness and truth. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy can create the rather illogical situation that the middle ground reached in the previous compromise now becomes the new extreme in the continuum of opinions; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position.
This “Middle ground” is something that a Sith never settles for. We live our lives with an embracement of our every instinct and the pursuit of our every “lust” as a natural part or who we are. Every characteristic of our makeup is valid and worthy of pursuit, not sinful or evil or something to be denied or put in moderation. It is embracing the extremes of our morality and our power and having a reverence for the potential and sovereignty of creation itself. We need to realize that “Love of the adventure is the burning point of life that contains both joy and sorrow and to say no to life because of its pain is a childish attitude because love is the pain of being truly alive”. (-Campbell) To take up the adventure is to embrace our undeniable place as a part of nature in its true state. If we strive only for the middle ground, even in the adventure, there is no room for excellence! Instead, The Sith embrace the philosophical extremes of both sides of existence because we are all of it – the light and the darkness. We are the sunshine and the storm. We are there in the laugh but we are also there in the tears. Both these essentials are the reason for everything. We love unboundingly and embrace attachment wholeheartedly for anguish is caused by love and love is caused by desire which in turn is caused by anguish. We believe the individual that is cut the deepest also has the highest capacity to heal. In these ideas, when it comes to a Sith’s approach to our emotions, our morality, our philosophy or our approach to life, we do not live life to the mean, but to the extreme!
There is a misnomer that the concept of the height of balance exists by striving to maintain an ethical or philosophical middle ground that exists between the extreme and the lacking. This is the idea that we should never indulge in anything to excess. The Greek Philosopher Aristotle called this the “golden mean”, the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. He believed that happiness is the highest good and the end at which all our activities ultimately aim. He defines the successful pursuit of this as a disposition to behave in the “right manner” which is a mean between extremes of deficiency and excess, both of which he considered vices. For example, In our anger we should never strive to be hot-tempered nor overly lacking of spirit but we should strive for the mean (virtue) of patience between these two. To the Greek mentality, this was an attribute of beauty that produced harmony.
In Buddhism, this concept is known as “The Middle Way”. This is the term that Buddha used to describe the character of the Noble Eightfold Path that he felt led to liberation and ultimately Nirvana by carving a narrow path between corporeal indulgence and asceticism. Through this process of eliminating or lessening excessiveness, which he ultimately viewed as detrimental to our being, we find balance in our lives. It is in this place that harmony is found. In the broadest sense, the Middle Way refers to the Buddha’s view of life and also the actions or attitudes that will create happiness for oneself and others. This philosophy describes a way of viewing life in such a way that compromise of extremes on both sides is what leads to ultimate truth. However these philosophies ultimately fail because of two reasons.
The first reason is that these philosophies encourage an embracement of mediocrity in our lives. People that live their lives this way worry more about appearances than outcomes. They tend to focus on what hasn’t been done as opposed to progress made. It is a view of life that puts undue emphasis on “the process” and not the results. As a consequence of this, these people fail to connect with life and have a lack of vision or bold dreams. They are takers of short cuts to minimize effort and as a result comprise their goals. They want to believe that life can be an easy ride and that they can minimize or avoid pain and suffering and loss. Their need to be safe and secure overrides their sense of adventure and curiosity and boldness. They are people that say “no” to challenge. They have been tricked into believing that playing it safe will make them happy and successful because one day they will be rewarded for their mediocre life styles. They spend their lives waiting for that one person to find them, to be chosen, to be promoted, to be made famous or rich instead of going out and brazenly taking the chances and accepting the consequences in life in the pursuit of achieving those things for themselves.
The second reason is that this idea of middle ground creates a logical fallacy; that of argumentum ad temperantiam or the false compromise. The false compromise exposes the fallacy that the truth must be found as a compromise between two opposite positions. People naturally gravitate toward minimizing conflict by searching for middle ground. But if you are searching for absolute truth, compromise and accepting alternative interpretation is an ineffective way to go about this. An individual operating within the false compromise fallacy believes that positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. However this is not always the case. One should not be exclusively looking for a middle ground between disinformation and information or between falseness and truth. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy can create the rather illogical situation that the middle ground reached in the previous compromise now becomes the new extreme in the continuum of opinions; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position.
This “Middle ground” is something that a Sith never settles for. We live our lives with an embracement of our every instinct and the pursuit of our every “lust” as a natural part or who we are. Every characteristic of our makeup is valid and worthy of pursuit, not sinful or evil or something to be denied or put in moderation. It is embracing the extremes of our morality and our power and having a reverence for the potential and sovereignty of creation itself. We need to realize that “Love of the adventure is the burning point of life that contains both joy and sorrow and to say no to life because of its pain is a childish attitude because love is the pain of being truly alive”. (-Campbell) To take up the adventure is to embrace our undeniable place as a part of nature in its true state. If we strive only for the middle ground, even in the adventure, there is no room for excellence! Instead, The Sith embrace the philosophical extremes of both sides of existence because we are all of it – the light and the darkness. We are the sunshine and the storm. We are there in the laugh but we are also there in the tears. Both these essentials are the reason for everything. We love unboundingly and embrace attachment wholeheartedly for anguish is caused by love and love is caused by desire which in turn is caused by anguish. We believe the individual that is cut the deepest also has the highest capacity to heal. In these ideas, when it comes to a Sith’s approach to our emotions, our morality, our philosophy or our approach to life, we do not live life to the mean, but to the extreme!