This is stupid stuff

Mill, in the third chapter of On Liberty:

It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; the exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

Man, that's a lot of colons, isn't it?  The substance of the passage, which clearly grows out of the arguments regarding toleration of opinion in the preceding chapter, though he does not make that connection himself, reminds me in some respects of the one quoted here.  He goes on to discuss, in a very even-handed fashion, I think, Calvinism: According to that, the one great offence of man is self-will … You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: whatever is not a duty, is a sin. Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for any one until human nature is killed within him.. For whatever reason there recently popped in my head the oft-quoted saying from Terence, homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto (there seems to be some disagreement on the internet as to whether the fourth word is nihil or nil).  Now, before reading the languagelog post linked in the previous sentence, I had all sorts of apparently incorrect thoughts regarding this little tag.  I did not know that it was from a play, but thought it came from someone speaking in propria persona and in real life, and thought it was a defense for entertaining licentious or even concupiscent thoughts—sort of like this one, except more elegantly expressed and with that nice dark sheen of age described in In Praise of Shadows.  The sort of tag one might think expressed a position opposed to the Calvinistic one adumbrated by Mill, and, on some uncharitable* interpretations of his moral philosophy, Kantian positions, that hive off some obviously human capacities/experiences/thingummies (new preferred philosophical term for just about anything—100% guaranteed not to pump any illegitimate intuitions) as impediments or at least needing to be granted permission to exert an influence by a more-human capacity.  Even the willingness of more Humean sorts to talk about external desires and whatnot—though I should look it up again, I'm pretty sure both Bratman and Frankfurt are willing to talk in something like this way; I should look it up again anyway to see who exactly deploys examples of drunkenness talking, not me (Nomy Arpaly mentions the obvious follow-up question: so who was talking, drunkenness not being able to actually speak?)—kind of bugs me.  It's all you, dude.  As one might say: homo es; humani nihil a te alienum putare debes.  Mill, anyway, would be amenable to such a position, I think; having desires, even strong ones, is part of what being human is, and should be developed just like anything else.  (Though those strong feelings ought still be "controlled by a conscientious will", they aren't, like, invaders, man.)

But, instead it expresses a busybody's willingness to interfere with anything at all.  Some won; some lost.

Mill, it turns out, is extremely interesting.  I read On Liberty as an undergrad but did not, I think, appreciate it nearly as much then as I do now.  It's almost as if the classic works of philosophy that get assigned in intro courses are worthy of study even after one stops taking intro classes.

*I include "uncharitable" not because I have reason to think that my incredibly nonspecific reference actually is uncharitable, but because I assume that, the range of Kantianish positions being fairly broad and especially the amount of text available to a determined interpreter to contort into support for some position being what it is, there is probably a Kant scholar who would be willing to call it uncharitable.  Anyway, here is an image for you to look at.