Somehow you manage, in your head, to strip morality of all links to the external world.
There seems to be no way to reattach it for you. C’est la vie.
“Discussing it” in this case means repeating the same statements over and over. You, yourself, said that there is no way to measure progress. There is no direction, endpoint or goal that the discussion can move towards. It is talk for the sake of talk.
You can spend your time better by gossiping about Taylor Swift.
Epictetus - Discourses Book 1, Chapter 5
How on earth is this…
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
…not an attempt to demonstrate how my own moral values relating to abortion are deeply embedded in the “external world”?
Note to others:
What important point is he making here that I keep missing? And I’m certainly willing to concede that I may well be missing it.
Yes, Zinnat’s “groots”.
Guilty as charged.
I believe that the manner in which, over the years, I have come to frame the existential relationship between identity, values and political power is succinctly summed up in them.
But I also recognize that if I were to argue that there is no way here in which to “measure progress”, I would be contradicting the very thrust of my own narrative: that my own arguments are no less existential contraptions.
Of course there may be ways to measure progress. Of course there may be an objective morality. Of course there may be a God. And, over the years, I had certainly believed this.
I just don’t believe it anymore, “here and now”. But [ironically] you’re the one insisting that you know better.
Those are just a bunch of events that “changed your thinking”. Beyond that, you don’t describe the consequences of anything that happened for the people involved or the society that they lived in. You don’t describe the changes in the “external world” … the changes outside of your head.
What were the consequences to your family/community because they were conservative?
What was the impact of marrying a feminist beyond uttering some slogans? Good life? Crappy life?
How did the abortion change the lives of Mary and John? Their families?
Your narrative reminds me of the Godfather movies. In the first one, Al Pacino kills two rival mobsters and has to go into hiding in Sicily. He comes to a town and notices that that it’s full of old men and women. He asks about it and finds out the young men have been killed in vendettas.
He’s supposed the smart one in the family but the penny never drops for him … he doesn’t realize that he is seeing the consequences of the gangster life that he is choosing. People are going be killed, families destroyed, misery piled on misery.
He doesn’t spend much time thinking about the morality of anything that is happening or that he is directly doing.
The movies mostly describe events … somebody was killed, then some other people were killed, then more …
Maybe in the last scene when he is sitting alone on a bench… his first wife murdered, his second wife left him, his daughter shot dead … maybe he’s thinking about the morality of his decisions. Maybe not.
Yes, the manner in which I encompass the existential meaning of dasein with respect to value judgments out in a particular world that might be experienced by any particular one of us:
1] “I” believe this.
2] Something happens, something changes.
3] “I” believe that instead.
Now, with respect to God, nature, political ideology and/or a deontolgical philosophical assessment, is there a way to obviate this subjective/subjunctive evolution of values over the years by subsuming the changes themselves in an “objective” understanding of whatever particular conflicting good precipitates in the way of conflicting behaviors?
The actual consequence of these experiential changes for me revolves [here and now] around my dilemma above. And I embedded the evolution of that frame of mind in the changes that unfolded for “I” out in a particular external world. Mine.
Well, by and large, their conservative frame of mind precipitated attitudes and behaviors relating to abortion [and gender, and race, and sexual orientation etc] that, back then, was attendant with what many construed to be a “conservative” political agenda.
You would have to ask them this. My point is that we take out of a particular political conflict [like abortion] that which we first bring into it: “I”. Then things can change in our lives and we can find our thinking changing along with them.
Then back again to this: Given these clearly existential trajectories is there a way in which we can assess the changes in order to derive a set of essential behaviors that all reasonable [and virtuous] men and women are obligated to choose?
Again, my point is this:
When any particular one of us watches these films, our reaction to what we see is clearly existential, rooted in “I”. Most will be repulsed by what he does, but others will not be.
And, when we think about what he ought to do instead, the same thing.
Now, is there an “essential” reaction that all rational and ethical men and women are obligated to embrace?
Is being a “gangster” essentially irrational and immoral?
And what of the sociopaths who choose this lifestyle either because they construe “good” and “bad” as revolving entirely around that which [in a Godless universe] gratifies them, or because they somehow are able to rationalize their behavior [reconcile it with God] “in their head”.
In the movies, God and religion are ever hovering about these generally Catholic hoods. Both in and out of church. But each of them one by one takes his or her own leap.
But: You’d have to ask them though how it all “works” with respect to their “moral philosophy”. And how that is integrated into their understanding of God and the Catholic religion.
Here’s one take on it: georgiabulletin.org/commentary/ … rspective/
Though Coppola himself has struggled with his Catholicism, his imagination is so steeped in Catholic practice and atmosphere that he can never fully abandon the faith, any more than his greatest character Michael Corleone can.
What I would bring up however is the extent to which their behaviors either are or are not rooted in the manner in which [existentially] I have come to understand the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
You know, in the manner in which I always bring them up to you.
Yo, where’s Otto?!
No, seriously, Wendy.
And where is Otto West (seriously)?
Sure, that works too.