I really enjoyed this, I think the whole "being-and-becoming dance" captured my response/internal sense to the ways in which various essays and such influenced me very aptly. In particular Michael Huemer's Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism was a eye opener, the realization that what I was doing was torturing small animals to death and consuming their tiny body parts for marginal gains in pleasure was shocking. I really can't look at meat/meat eaters in the same way as I did prior to reading Huemer. I also think Huemer's style of writing is very conducive to this kind of reaction in a way in which other philosophers are not. I can give lots of examples of me seeing things differently and even in such a way as to change my actions/ambitions but that is probably the most striking.
I do have two main gripes though. The first is that when you talk about deciding whether to feel warmth towards only the dog or both the dog and the pig you don't mention that one possible response would be do decide to feel coldness towards both, after all I am responsible for killing many pigs all whom are roughly as conscious as a dog and yet feel nothing why would I care about dogs. You can carry this line of reasoning/curve fitting across this domain and to lots of other domains, such as "do I feel cold about chimps or humans, realistically the pain and suffering I've inflicted on pigs and such is probably so vast that an additional human is negligible at best" (this is a basic outline of only one particular train of thought but you can see how this generalizes). I should also add that this isn't merely something that possible, but in reality no one will behave like that, rather I think a substantial minority of people would and have behaved like that, to keep it short I will only mention Marquis de Sade, and as for piece of work that can motivate such feelings, Philosophy in the Bedroom. But I should say that primitive humans (or at least certain very successful groups) were blood thirsty, mass murdering hebephilic rapists.
The second would be that I think you underestimate the degree to which humans could suffer from self deception and such, which is important at least when it comes to figuring out what the "being-and-becoming dance" actually amounts to (split brain patients might be a good illustration of the degree to which humans are self deceived). For example you mention how a person can think about how their culture influences their coldness towards certain things and such, and after that reach a sort of "more genuine or personal" (not your words but I think it captures roughly the sense of what is meant) response which might differ or be the same, but what if this new response isn't really capturing your genuine response or granting you the new ability to "see more" (In the same way Huemer influenced me) rather the new response is actually the product of something like, choosing values that signal loyalty to your tribe, or choosing values that allow you to ignore inconvenient truths, or choosing values with the deeper hidden motivation being to increase reproductive fitness, or values that you say you follow and roughly describe your behaviour but you don't actually follow rather you are telling yourself a story that allows you defend against being accused of a norm violation without your body slipping up, etc etc. I don't think these sorts of values or motives really fit the story/spirit of actually "seeing more" rather they are just complicated self deceptions. Not sure if I worded this very well but hopefully you can see I'm trying to make a very subtle point about "seeing more" and its underlying mechanisms.
I really enjoyed this, I think the whole "being-and-becoming dance" captured my response/internal sense to the ways in which various essays and such influenced me very aptly. In particular Michael Huemer's Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism was a eye opener, the realization that what I was doing was torturing small animals to death and consuming their tiny body parts for marginal gains in pleasure was shocking. I really can't look at meat/meat eaters in the same way as I did prior to reading Huemer. I also think Huemer's style of writing is very conducive to this kind of reaction in a way in which other philosophers are not. I can give lots of examples of me seeing things differently and even in such a way as to change my actions/ambitions but that is probably the most striking.
I do have two main gripes though. The first is that when you talk about deciding whether to feel warmth towards only the dog or both the dog and the pig you don't mention that one possible response would be do decide to feel coldness towards both, after all I am responsible for killing many pigs all whom are roughly as conscious as a dog and yet feel nothing why would I care about dogs. You can carry this line of reasoning/curve fitting across this domain and to lots of other domains, such as "do I feel cold about chimps or humans, realistically the pain and suffering I've inflicted on pigs and such is probably so vast that an additional human is negligible at best" (this is a basic outline of only one particular train of thought but you can see how this generalizes). I should also add that this isn't merely something that possible, but in reality no one will behave like that, rather I think a substantial minority of people would and have behaved like that, to keep it short I will only mention Marquis de Sade, and as for piece of work that can motivate such feelings, Philosophy in the Bedroom. But I should say that primitive humans (or at least certain very successful groups) were blood thirsty, mass murdering hebephilic rapists.
The second would be that I think you underestimate the degree to which humans could suffer from self deception and such, which is important at least when it comes to figuring out what the "being-and-becoming dance" actually amounts to (split brain patients might be a good illustration of the degree to which humans are self deceived). For example you mention how a person can think about how their culture influences their coldness towards certain things and such, and after that reach a sort of "more genuine or personal" (not your words but I think it captures roughly the sense of what is meant) response which might differ or be the same, but what if this new response isn't really capturing your genuine response or granting you the new ability to "see more" (In the same way Huemer influenced me) rather the new response is actually the product of something like, choosing values that signal loyalty to your tribe, or choosing values that allow you to ignore inconvenient truths, or choosing values with the deeper hidden motivation being to increase reproductive fitness, or values that you say you follow and roughly describe your behaviour but you don't actually follow rather you are telling yourself a story that allows you defend against being accused of a norm violation without your body slipping up, etc etc. I don't think these sorts of values or motives really fit the story/spirit of actually "seeing more" rather they are just complicated self deceptions. Not sure if I worded this very well but hopefully you can see I'm trying to make a very subtle point about "seeing more" and its underlying mechanisms.