One of the animal behaviorist’s tricks, The Mechanics of Virtue, Matt Berry, aphorism 102

102
One of the animal behaviorist’s tricks is to take something from or add something to the harmony of a creature.  He leaves one creature alone, throws the other out of harmony, and then compares the two.  He can then calculate what this missing or added thing does or does not do.  After such an experiment, the scientist is in a better position to describe the parts that contribute to its normal state.  

I consider an ethologist the desirable model for an individual's quest for truth.  If the reader can accept this premise, then it follows that an introspective truth seeker is neither himself capable of permanent happiness nor of honestly proposing the discovery of truth as a means toward happiness.  For truth, the seeker constantly throws himself out of balance, recording the push out of and the return toward equilibrium, comparing states and securing knowledge – whose method entails a cycle from order to chaos to order.  Again and again, he experiments with harmony and does not fail to observe the return toward it.  This is not a method whose goal is contentment, but truth.  And although one’s peaks are indeed euphoric, the subsequent depths of self-contempt are greater than complacency can ever imagine.  Who was it that first suggested truth and contentment to be a causal relationship and not an exclusive choice?




A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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