As near as I come to an “answer”? There is no way [objectively, essentially, definitively etc.] to determine how one ought to live his or her life. Sans God, that is rooted in dasein. At best we can pursue democracy – the rule of law – rooted in moderation, negotiation and compromise.
But even in this [supposed] “best of all possible worlds” political economy prevails. The stuff of Marx and Engels. In the end, insisting we ought to behave in one manner rather than another means little if you don’t have the capacity to enforce it out in the world of actual human interaction.
But I propose this as an ironist. And here I invoke Richard Rorty:
1.She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
2.She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3.Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
In other words, I seem to be proposing something that quickly implodes given the very manner in which I understand the meaning of the words encompassing it. I’m “stuck”. And I’m stuck because there are limitations to what we can propose [and then demonstrate as being true] using the tool of language.
To wit: There are words applicable objectively to all daseins and there are words that express only an inter-subjective/subjunctive point of view. At best philosophers can make these distinctions. But I am basically interested only in distinctions revolving around value judgments and identity “out in the world”.
Stuart: if a man be stuck or not, doesen’t it presuppose gravity? Isn’t that we are fighting all our lives against? To overcome is to overcome this primal force. It is this we fear. The imposition of not being able to overcome, and we develop the will to.
But what is it we are trying to overcome against this force? That which is primal It is not the unknown we fear, it is the fear itself. That we may be not up to the job. We are angry because we need to harness the force, but we are not the force itself.
At the end of the day, we have to let it go, and let it fall back, because we instinctivly know, and really find out, that there is no top of the hill, we can never reach it. If we did, we would become the force, we are pusing with, and against.
We fear the eternity, that’s why we were kicked out.
We fear the one-ness, while coveting it.
The final thing is, even this is just a drop in an ocean whose depth meets your gaze. Both the depth, and You, instinctively know this. It’s the same. You are the ocean. You are who came out of the primal depth, by the force of your will to overcome.
And your pragmatic approach to overcome even this nihilism, has been the task all these futurist philosophers have been grappling with. So we are in the same boat, I think you are right, if I read You correctly, there is not just one approach.
I guess some people push a boulder up a hill who’s top never comes, others just let it roll back everytime they push it a couple hundred feet. I guess ‘contrived’ is the key word here, ‘subjunctive’ too.
Sure, go ahead. But how exactly does the crane [sky hook?] function here:
There are words applicable objectively to all daseins and there are words that express only an inter-subjective/subjunctive point of view. At best philosophers can make these distinctions. But I am basically interested only in distinctions revolving around value judgments and identity “out in the world”.
Instead, I use distractions on the boulder: music, art, film, poetry etc.
Whatever works.
I’ve been trying to come up with a good responce for that, I guess I could say that it can be a crane connected to a truck, but what does that even mean?
Analogies aside, meaning is of no use for me, meaninglessness isn’t either, so I don’t know where use may be. You have similar ideas as me, I spoke as you do before I knew you, do you disagree that we have so much in common, and if not then do you have still no interest in having conversations, and if yes, then is their anymore details that you can go into as why. Now for an anology it’s like I’m freezing in the cold but no one with a heated house will open their door.
“I” as a narrative. “I” as a wave out in the ocean.
I particularly liked this observation:
I gave up years ago believing that this could be captured in words. It’s like trying to capture water in a fishing net. The best we can do is point and know that we are only pointing.
You finally came back to this thread. I could say that I found your philosophy to be worthwhile and then now find your philosophy to be tiresome, but what would that really mean. To say I’ve surpassed such a form of nihilism would be to show I never understood it at all, but then what irony to suggest that anyone could understand it to begin with. I could say that your philosophy is not one to live by and mean that in a more literal sense, but then I would be mistaking you for one who automatically places value in what one can or can’t live by, and myself. How though, do you live by it. Seriously, maybe I can understand how you can for a while, the last few years, but could you have always sustained it. Or are even those questions missing something; rhetorically speaking, of course.
I would say the odds that you understand nihilism, identity and value judgments – and the existential relationship between them – as I do [here and now] are rather remote. But then isn’t this the point behind the conjecture that capturing these things in language is almost futile. They are no less embodied in dasein.
It’s true however that I am more or less preoccupied only with this: How ought I to live in a world sans God and immortality? And the extent to which philosophy either is or is not of limited value [use] in answering it.
So, sure, I can certainly understand why some would grow weary of the same points being repeated over and over again. On the other hand, new folks pop into ILP everyday. So I figure what the hell: there is always the slim possibility that one of them may actually come much closer to my own frame of mind than you have. And a few have.
And one “lives by it” in part by recognizing that human interaction revolves far more around other things: actually living your life from day to day to day. Eating, drinking, securing [and then sistaining] shelter. Securing and then sustaining employment – a source of income, the capacity to pay your bills. Forming relationships. Interacting with others socially, politically and economically. And then there are countless distractions: art, music, sex, sports, games, hobbies etc… Even philosophy.
I only probe the implications of doing this in the world as dasein. A world in other words of conflicting goods in which “I” is merely the embodiment of a particular existential narrative fabricated and then refabricated over and over and over again amidst the mindboggling complexity of contingency, chance and change.
I don’t Think so. Some of these one would experience. Even responses from other posters are directly experienced. Effects on those one is in Contact with. Anyone one communicates with. And, of course, if one has the beliefs, and these beliefs affect how one feels, this will also affect other people. My Point was mainly that having a philosophical position that there is a large set of things one cannot know does not, due to its content, have only quasi effects. It has full on effects just like beliefs one can know things in that set. There is no quasi, semi-being in the World. One is here, one has effects.
Good chance we are talking past each other because I can’t connect this to what I meant.
I like this form of nihilism - my apologies for labelling it, but in this instance I want to emphasize that I react to it differently than other nihilisms, even Iambs. It undermines itself.
I don’t Think it avoids the kind of causation I am talking about in the post above, but nothing can. You are stuart, stuarting and your beliefs and metabeliefs and lack of these and shifting and tentativenss of these, will have effects and complete ones. That is part of being alive.
But I don’t feel like I am being told to either Believe or not Believe anything (by your version of N, or whatever it is and isn’t. I also do not feel judged as if you had extricated yourself from some ugly thing but some of those you address have not. You may feel that way at times, I can only react to what I read as far as you.
Yes, there is a kind of Buddhist about you. I don’t know if that is ironic or not. And I am not attributing Buddhist beliefs to you. But anyway, there is a tremendous internal focus.
I dunno but it seems to me you keep a pretty tight focus… viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454
But maybe this works also, some sort of see-sawing from distraction to utter focus.
That's sometimes a comforting thing, as much as you can bundle all those, you can dispense with them for the time being: while sustaining the undercurrent of thought, that it's always there if you need to bring it up, in it's essential Dasain, as needed.
I was just trying to be technical, I don’t think we really disagree on the issue; or at least we don’t anymore.
Thank you, I had put a lot of time and energy into it.
It seems I’m always extricating myself from something. First it was those unfortunate beliefs, then it was nihilism itself, which was what I considered to be the original source of that extrication.
I’m surprised that you still find me to be that way; recently Phyllo mentioned a negative change in my demeanor. Choosing between the nihilistic philosophy I had months ago and my new “naturalistic” philosophy was a matter of choosing the lesser evil. Obviously six relatively uneventful months can only change a person so much, but I wonder how much different I seem to you.
Not really sure what you mean. The mundane ironist thread is one particular focus for me here. So is the film thread. The focus being experiences that prompt me to think about ideas and the meaning of my reactions to the world around me. The music thread used to be but I more or less abandoned the part about philosophy and now it is more of a “my favorite music” thing. A distraction from ideas and meaning in other words. But that still leaves me with plenty of other activities that take me away from thinking about “how ought I to live my life?”. Everything from the films I view only for entertainment to crostic puzzles to scouring the web for the funniest jokes and comedy bits.
True. He just points to the consequences that may ensue when others think that they are. And we see this right here almost everyday, don’t we? And not just from the Kids.
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.[/b]
Folks living in a world that might be described as, say, less than zero. And only some of them have access to Rip.
A child should never even think about being a “good son.” A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the “perfect dad”? I shudder at thinking what that may be.
Besides, a lot of them just make it up as they go along.
The newspapers kept stoking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had ‘unwittingly’ been done. There were ‘feared lapses’. There were ‘misconceptions’ about potential. Situations had ‘deteriorated’. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn’t care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people’s days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn’t help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it.
Still, don’t forget to vote!
I’ve been accused of being vain about my apathy.
Must be like those who accuse me of being vain about my cynicism. But how close to or far apart from each other can they be though?
Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.
Trust me: it’s not even close to being one of the worst.