Driven5 said:
In reply to DaewooOfDeath :
Your 'thought experiments' are poorly formed and provide extremely inadequate representations of whatever point you may be trying to make. Owning the entire LV catalog does not preclude one from the greatness of challenging one's self through necessitas in other areas of their life. Getting in the ring with the best MMA fighter does not preclude one from the corruption of ozio in other areas of their life. There is an equal probability that it's the same person on both sides of this thought experiment.
True. Though it seems like you could emphasize one or the other overall.
Since ALL people (I dare you to find me one that doesn't) have both ozio and necessitas in their life: If one ozio does not make someone corrupt, and one necessitas does not make someone great, at what point does Machiavelli believe that the transission occurs for any given person taken in their entirety?
Of course everyone has both. Machiavelli believes that emphasizing comfort is corrupting in the spoiled rich kid sense MORE OFTEN THAN NOT. He believes emphasizing the difficult is the opposite, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT.
In my opinion, ozio and necessitas are simply flip sides of the same coin. Whether any given thing is ozio or necessitas, depends entirely on which side of the coin you're looking at. Basically, it's not what they exerience, it's how they experience it. Undertaking physically demanding and dangerous endeavor out of a basic and fundamental necessity to survive is necessitas. Doing the same as a masturbatory fantasy providing delusions of greatness, is pure ozio. If one desires to demonstrate self-imposed necessitas, it pretty much has to be something that is NOT something they would otherwise seek out or enjoy.
This is not the argument. Forgive me if I was confusing. Doing hard things because they are hard is how you achieve self-imposed necessitas. I didn't go into it in the OP because it was already too long, but the logic he employed was this:
a) The Italian nobles I see in the 15th century are very corrupted, cowardly and petty when they become comfortable. Ozio.
b) The foreigners who keep coming down the peninsula and beating us up are vastly less comfortable and, in many cases, hold comfort in contempt. They also surpass us in courage, greatness and skill. Necessitas.
c) The study of history (from his study), provides many, many examples of the same.
d) However, there have been prosperous societies and individuals who did not become corrupted.
e) The study of history (from his study) shows these people usually self-imposed hardship individually or through laws.
If you training with the best MMA fighters because you worked your way up from the bottom entirely on your own merits, that's necessitas. However, if you jump straight to training with the best MMA fighters because flashed enough cash to get their attention, that's ozio... From both sides.
Depends on whether you're doing it for attention and attend to take it easy or because you want to toughen yourself and intend to take it seriously. Ed O'Neal practices jiujitsu with the Gracie family, he takes it seriously and he does it to strengthen, challenge and improve himself, for example.
If you're summiting Everest as a Sherpa to provide for your family, that's necessitas. If you're summiting Everest as one of the lines of under-qualified and over-funded self-serving tourists slowly destroying that which made Everest so grand in the first place, that's ozio.
Once again, are you taking it seriously and improving yourself or are you LARPing?
If you live in a van because you've lost everything else, that's necessitas. If you're living in a van because it's your dream retirement, like my parents, that's ozio.
Ozio is idle, easy, decadent comfort. It's not achieving your goals. And living in a van in your retirement is the sort of sacrifice of comfort in the name of adventure Machiavelli would probably approve of.
Taking the family camping is ozio for us, but would be necessitas for certain friends of ours.
I have a friend that is a bicycling fanatic. He loves everything about it. There is no more necessitas in his biking to work, than there is in my driving to work.
Enjoying something is not ozio.
Buying a fast car may be more akin to necessitas, if your true desire to build one instead. Building a fast car may be more akin to ozio, if your true desire is to buy one instead.
Basically, I am arguing that it's not self-imposed necessitas if it does not take someone outside of their own comfort zone. From my understanding the Apollo astronauts were mostly extreme adrenaline junkies, but many were terrible husbands and fathers because that didn't provide enough of a 'high' for them. So for them, they would have have been more challenged and overcome more for the sake of personal greatness if they dedicated themselves to being faithful to their wives and taking that family road trip loaded into a comfortable car, than they did on their adventures into space and back.
Much of the 'greatness' that seems to be described as being derived from necessitas in Machiavellian terms, is actually what I would describe as deriving from ozio in disguise. In that regard, perhaps Machiavelli may have been his own worst student.
