More on the Ascetic Life

We already did one of the criticisms of the ascetic life in the last post (unless you consider some of the subtexts in there criticisms, but I'm not going to research myself because I'm on a role).

The criticism was from David Hume, which I learned from Melissa Schumacher. The criticism is that the desire to get rid of your desires is a performative contradiction. "I want to have no wants" is proposition P and not proposition P.

Another problem is that it's really hard! I believe it's a sort of natural disposition to want stuff. Spinoza lived on light beer, bread and butter, and oatmeal with raisins, for the greater part of his entire life.

Nehru thought that Gandhi was wrong to talk about getting rid of hospitals and railroads.

But is self-control real freedom?

Well yes and no, but I want to consider Isaiah Berlin's critique in "Two Concepts of Liberty".

In the article, Berlin, who is a national intellectual hero in Great Britain and the Commonwealth, argues that the only freedom that can be successfully legislated is negative liberty. Negative liberty is the freedom from coercion.

In the third chapter of the essay, "The retreat to the Inner Citadel," Berlin says that if you had some person who was convinced to cut their leg off and feel good about it, that's not the freedom to cut their leg off.

Berlin is worried about making the worse seem the better (we've gone over this extensively in this blog) from simply leaving the people to their self control.

But more on this later, perhaps.