what doesnt kill you makes you wiser, not stronger?

Is there anything beyond physics?

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.” - LaughingMan

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!"

  • Rudyard Kipling

That’s really good.

I don’t think you understood what I meant by ‘growing up’.
I should have laid it on thicker.

I mean “adapt to the way things go.”

Part of the definition of a philosopher is that he does not, can not adapt, he has to invent a new way or die.

I knew early on that there were a lot of answers they didn’t have. A lot of questions they didn’t ask.
I’m still waiting for the idea to kick in that there is anyone who has a clue about anything at all.

Can you give me the physical definition of your verbal intelligence?

magnus

perhaps you could define what being strong is?

  • once achieved, could any man take on a lion or a bear without using weapons. how ever strong you are, some weakling can just as easily put a bullet in your brain.

i expect that [certainly in my experience] intellectuals dont majoritively carry guns, not go around acting the tough guy nor cause trouble. …but big tough guys do!

so in short, the ‘strong’ are just the pain in the arse idiots who cause all the trouble in the world.

what good does being a winner or being strong actually do?

wouldnt the world be a better place if people didnt act like that?

I think that would depend on the individual, don’t you?
What doesn’t kill us also has the capacity to make us much more vulnerable than even before - can leave us at the mercy of life at its worse.
What doesn’t kill us can rob us of our desire to be wise - or to see wisdom in most things.

But I wonder if we are already born, certain individuals, with enough resilience to overcome and to transcend what doesn’t kill us? Perhaps as human beings, we are made like all elastic bands, made differently. Some of us can be stretched more without breaking and others, have less resilience in their stretchability. :laughing:

Does it come down to Will or to Resilence? If any of that made sense.

Hi arc,

people seem to use the saying as if to say there is some kind of strength to be gained by successive attacks ~ or resilience to such things. Also it seams more of a justification to be assholes to others, to justify egotism and bullying. I am all for people standing up for themselves, but that’s not the same thing.

I agree there is only so far anyone can be stretched no matter how tough they think they are. indeed it seems as though the culture embodied by such sayings, is stating that we just keep getting stronger and stronger every time we are attacked. In fact we can run through whole armies of people with machine guns, and because we are tough-guys the bullets just bounce off of us. :astonished: :stuck_out_tongue:

  • good point about the elastic.

We have many forms through which we can be strong.

Take sight away from a person.

Their hearing will likely become stronger.

Yet, overall, are they stronger or weaker?

Perhaps being blind broke them psychologically, or, perhaps it initiated a journey of self discovery and well being.

I’d say, if it doesn’t kill you, it has the potential to make you stronger.

I always look at the saying from the POV of one who is wants to make the best out of adverse circumstances.

a certain amount of times, I agree not getting killed will make one stronger. yet we are humans not bears or lions, even the strongest people get broken down by successive misfortune, or even a single terrible instance.

this get on my nerves because people expect too much, they say ‘oh its just psycholigical’ but no, nothing is just that. when things break you down in life [and they do that to everyone] that’s real physical neurons which correlate with every cell in the body, which in turn produce hormonal reactions and the brain produces chemicals accordingly. this is all real shit not some pretend philosophy written by an idiot.

Being able to overcome a resistance? I think it’s pretty obvious what it means to be strong. Either you push against something or the thing pushes against you.

They cause trouble only if you are weak.

The world would be a better place if you were a stronger person who could win against those big tough guys. Certainly, that’s what you desire! But without deifying strength you will never achieve such a thing. On the contrary!

(actually, that’s not really true! you can destroy them through weakness i.e. hypocrisy, but that’s a story for another time.)

Magnus

I prefer to take the liminal position [rather than pushing or being pushed]. Point is that it doesn’t [imho] ever stop at not being pushed, the ‘strong’ mostly end up doing the pushing.

The strong don’t only cause trouble if you are weak, as you tend to get more than one party thinking they are strong – hence wars/trouble.

I don’t desire to be strong and neither am I weak, you are making assumptions upon your own experience, the fears which made you want to be the strong guy in the first place.

wisdom = balance, no?

Do you mean is there anything beyond interpreting phenomena/existence via the language of physics? Well yes, of course. One may start anywhere, say by interpreting the language of life through something as ordinary as suffering, or orgasming, or through the language of relief one feels while taking a solid shit, or what have you.

Head injury, causes damage, might make you less wise, but did not kill you.

I see plenty of people, who do not suffer brain injuries, who do not get wiser or stronger or better in any way when they go through crises or adversity.
And everyone has a limit.

It is not a bad idea to see if one can gain wisdom, strength, insight when encountering something rough. AS long as one does not sit around chastizing oneself for not managing this, especially in the early stages. But like a lot of generalizations and universalizations, that idea and even your spin on it are limited.

Yes, that’s the only way a trouble can be caused. If you are strong, you experience no trouble. Why? Well, because you are strong. That’s what it means to be strong.

You are indeed weak for the task at hand. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be experiencing any trouble.

And you do desire to be strong. You’re merely denying it, which is another expression of desire for strength.

One has no choice in the matter. One simply desires to be strong, consciously or unconsciously, and that’s the end of it. Everything else is hypocrisy which is itself, as I’ve already said, another expression of strength.

There is, however, such a thing as relative strength and general strength. For example, a bee can kill me with its sting, but that doesn’t mean the bee is stronger than I am IN GENERAL. It simply means that it is stronger in this one respect which it took advantage of. This is how the generally weak can dominate the generally strong: by exploiting their weaknesses to the fullest. The point here is that, no matter how strong you are, your weakness is still your weakness and if you don’t do something about it, you’ll be dominated by the generally weak.

Interesting points were made.

Fixed Cross

A clown??? lol

Is a philosopher any less of a human being and an individual that he cannot have a certain distain for consequences? You seem to be painting him as far as I am concerned as a coward.

As far as those others go, couldn’t you say that because of what they do, their walk of life, they would necessarily be more careful, wiser? Although they wouldn’t have to be. But in those walks of life, they might necessarily be.
I think it is just a question of who the individual is.

Why do you usually or at least seemingly paint the philosopher as some kind of a god, Jakob and put him on a pedestal far above the rest? :evilfun:

Wait… lol. First explain yourself more coherently. Do you deny philosophy must have an eye for consequence or do you simply find realism cowardly?

Interjection please .It may presuppose a choice but then again they may not be exclusive, and it depends on the context, or the level or the point of view.

Sorry arc and fixed for butting in, but was compelled by the condition. Carry on.