Necessity is conditional, need is a desire or a drive - it is a lacking either real or imagined
On 3/24/09 9:03 PM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: You answered it. In my case 'need' and necessity is the same thing. Boris Shoshensky ____________________________________________ Saul Ostrow | Visual Arts & Technologies Environment Chair, Sculpture Voice: 216-421-7927 | [email protected] | www.cia.edu<http://www.cia.edu/> The Cleveland Institute of Art | 11141 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH 44106 ---------- Original Message ---------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Boris claims if X exists... Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:49:46 EDT I wrote: "The line 'What exists must be needed' is, call it, bogus. How many things do you eat in a day that you desire but, in no interesting sense of the word, "need"? We all of us have given things -- toys, photos, jewelry, tickets to the ball game -- that are desired but not needed. "I'd recommend that we also maintain a distinction between "necessary" and "needed". Certain inexorable biochemical facts may mean that various events necessarily left us with cancer or a heart condition, but it seems silly and vacuous to say portentously, "If your cancer exists, it is needed." To which Michael replied by first quoting me (but leaving out any mention of my urging that we maintain a distinction not just between 'needed' and 'desired', but also between 'necessary' and 'needed'): ""The line 'What exists must be needed' is, call it, bogus. ... it seems silly and vacuous to say portentously, "If your cancer exists, it was needed." "Not if the needing is needed by the RNA/DNA of a cell that just has to grow bountifully. Your rebuttal example cleverly shifts the needing from whatever agent could generate a result (the tumorous growth) to the person ("you"). Not playing by the rules, Cheerskep." You get next to none of this right, Michael. The shifting here is being done by those who are committing the error of anthropomorphism -- shifting human feelings attitudes and belief onto inanimate, insensate objects. My effort in this thread was to save from mystical obliterators some useful distinctions in the notion behind our language (except in the purposely figurative language of poetry, etc). William quotes Aristotle's faulty achievement but good effort to urge such a distinction, and William then puts his finger right on it: "Aristotle said that desire is a condition of sensing and fantasy. My own idea is that need and desire (I prefer desire as willful or concscious desire and need as unconscious desire) are constructed subjectively and thus filter or shape our sensing of experience." Rolling rocks don't need to their sensing of experience shaped. I.e. rocks never "need". I claim it isn't just silly and vacuous to obliterate such distinctions as William feels, it's harmful to clear thinking. But you, Michael, are one of those guys who embrace the children's book insight that the stone rolling down the mountain has (an unconscious) DESIRE to get down to the valley. You say what you call a "cause" NEEDS its result in order to be fulfilled. ("To actualize its potential" perhaps? By God, I now think William is right in sensing that a Jesuistic, Thomastic education can screw some minds up forever.) You write: "The result is "needed" by the cause, in the sense that whatever the cause sets into motion or causation completes the cause, i.e., it is "needed" in the sense that it is inevitable or inexorable, given the cause." This is quintessential "shifting", Michael, shell-game debate tactics. (It is useful and reasonable to reserve the word 'cause' for an event. Static objects almost never conform to our notion of a 'cause', so to keep our notions consistent we should not label a bullet as the cause of death -- though it's a sure thing lots of people will continue to do so.) That parenthetically said, let's say Jake "causes" the rock to start rolling down the mountain to the valley by pushing it. What, according to you, is the "completion" of that cause? The arrival of the rock in the valley? "It" (what? The push? The rock?) "needs" what -- to reach the valley? Bad luck: The rock bumps into a bigger rock just fifty feet down the slope and it comes to a dead halt. But wait -- what happened to the "inevitability", the "inexorability", of the "result"? Do you feel an accumulating gas of absurdity here? It's not mine, Michael, it's yours. And here's where the shell game comes in: You say, Oh, well, the "completion" of the cause was not the arrival in the valley but the starting to roll. Or the bumping into the bigger rock. Whaever happens is inevitable -- and "needed". Oy. Michael, don't fuss with words like 'cause', 'result', 'need', 'inevitable', et al while you have primitive, not-thought-out and deeply "fuzzy" notions behind them. You say, "Ask the tumor, not the person with the tumor." Kate is right: go ahead, ask the tumor what it "needs". A nice anthropomorphic tumor will go on at length about its need to grow. And depending on in which country "Bobby's Puppy Talks With Tumors" is published, the tumors will speak a different language! They'll explain why they NEED to grow until they kill their host and thus kill themselves. Kate also is right to ask, "Isn't consciousness part of this problem?" Yes, much of the time. Because the word 'need' so often does connote an element of desire, however unconscious, of at least "requirement to function". "Johnny disrupts the class because he has a need to be noticed because at home his parents ignore him." I, with William, claim 'need' should always be saved for sensate creatures. Granted, no word so common as 'need' comes with only one persistent connotation. We say, "This crop will need three inches of rain this summer or it will fail." But I urge that 'need' there be replaced by the word 'require'. There's no absolute right or wrong here. I claim that the notions of "desire", "need", "necessitate", "require" and others all come to us (variously) with associated notions that are different and arise from different notion. To say, "Nah, let's call them all 'needs'," obliterates distinctions that many minds have usefully made. To say, "Your cancer exists, therefore it is needed," is either simple-mindedness or bogus obscurantism. ************** Feeling the pinch at the grocery store? Make meals for Under $10. (http://food.aol.com/frugal-feasts?ncid=emlcntusfood00000002) ____________________________________________________________ You will believe your eyes! Click here for great whale watching packages! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2241/fc/BLSrjpYXA9D4XE27PV5owippadGEjj wX5kPAH4NHMrLNa3l68LFQGB12bKo/ --
