A new philosophy?

I apologize for not getting this out yesterday. Thursday is my busiest day of the week, and it was particularly insane.

Pretty much all of my life philosophies focus on avoiding dumbassery, the collective unit of stupid and stagnant actions and thoughts. These are “negative” philosophies, designed to avoid or take something away. This is all fine and dandy, but even though I have known it for a long time, it really just occurred to me that positive philosophies have their place as well, maybe a higher place than should negative philosophies.

It’s difficult though… Sorta like how “Do no harm” is a negative philosophy, it must be this way because “Do only good” is sort of impossible… we’re only human, ya know? It would seem the corollary to Do no harm would indeed be Do only good, but you can do a lot of things that do neither. This is the problem with negative philosophies, is that they only not do something. There is a more proactive approach; positive philosophy.

The people who ascribe to positive philosophy are actors: they act, they do things. Negative philosophers may act too, but they are more likely to not be driven to. Take a simple graph:

–|——|——|–

The left line is bad, middle neutral, right good. Negative philosophies only seek to cut the left line out, while positive philosophies seek to push the right line forward. Right has more potential for good, left less potential for bad, each with their own potential costs.

“Well, why can’t you just mix the two?”

Yeah, why not? And that’s my whole point. My conscious philosophies have had a tendency to side on the negative, but I feel it’s high time to start spreading positive ones as well.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve recently come across a quote while reading Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, that essentially says while “Do unto others…” is a great maxim, another is even more valuable: “Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others.” This pretty well mixes both positive and negative philosophies.