back to the beginning: morality

I think that this is the critical point at which Iambig’s argument unravels, because it shows that he believes that even facts which “are shown to be true for all of us” are molded to suit value judgements.
For example, one could show that communist countries have/had elaborate secret police which jailed, tortured and killed dissidents. But apparently it doesn’t count towards an evaluation of communism because it’s a fact that can be “hammered” into anything that one wants for either side - communist and anti-communist.

Subjective judgements trump all.

What then is the use of a “fact that can be shown to be true for all of us”? :confusion-shrug:

Sure, that is a good point. After all, I went through my own rather grueling existential “crisis”. One in which I was both tugged in the general direction of Marxism/Feminism and in the general direction of existentialism/rival goods.

Still, the folks I’ve aimed my arguments at here over the years are basically those who do embrace a hardcore objectivist frame of mind intertwined in a hardcore authoritarian personality.

And they’re not all just Kids either.

Only my aim here is deflected by the realization that even my arguments here are no less the embodiment of “I” as an existential contraption.

This part of dasein:

[b]Identity is ever constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed over the years by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variables—some of which we had/have no choice/control regarding. We really are “thrown” into a fortuitous smorgasbord of demographic factors at birth and then molded and manipulated as children into whatever configuration of “reality” suits the cultural [and political] institutions of our time.

On the other hand:[/b]

[i]In my view, one crucial difference between people is the extent to which they become more or less self-conscious of this. Why? Because, obviously, to the extent that they do, they can attempt to deconstruct the past and then reconstruct the future into one of their own more autonomous making. [/i]

But then what does this really mean? That is the question that has always fascinated me the most. Once I become cognizant of how profoundly problematic my “self” is, what can “I” do about it? And what are the philosophical implications of acknowledging that identity is, by and large, an existential contraption that is always subject to change without notice? What can we “anchor” our identity to so as to make this prefabricated…fabricated…refabricated world seem less vertiginous? And, thus, more certain.

Yeah, some have a more sophisticated grip on this than others. And some are considerably more wobbly here than others.

So, in exposing my straw man arguments, it becomes necessary for you to impose your own straw man arguments in turn.

What’s lost on you is my assumption that what you think is lost on me is no less an existential contraption embedded in the assumptions you make about the assumptions you accuse me of making about you.

All I can do here then is to bring these assumptions down to earth and shift the discussion toward a description of our reaction to others who embody conflicting value judgments. And then challange our own. What are we actually able to demonstrate to others is “bad, evil, immoral”

Over and again I point to that which I construe to be “unfair” in the world. Only, unlike most others, I have come to recognize these reactions as political prejudices rooted in “I” as an existential contraption.

But: What if I am wrong? What if one or another rendition of moral and political objectivism is fact reflective of “the right thing to do”?

But: How can I know this?

Other than in coming into places like this and hearing the arguments [and descriptions of experiences] of those who clearly do believe that I am “down in a hole” for nothing.

Quite the contrary. Over the years I have become increasingly more sympathetic to those that argue that “I” is more the product of those “selfish” genes than those “civilized” memes. Just look at the world around us and tell me the “id” is not holding the reins.

And not just the part about testosterone.

It’s just that “I” here is still able to go in any number directions given any number of particular historical, cultural and experiential contexts. To speak of one tug and pull here without the other is ludicrous in my view.

Though this too is no less a manifestation of “I” as an existential contraption.

Again and again: What on earth do you mean by this?

Let’s try again take the components of our respective philosophies out for a test drive in which we explore our own reactions to those who embrace “political prejudices” at odds with our own.

What are the limits of philosophy here? Beyond what understanding are we likely not able to go?

You can start with that which you construe to be the most significant “contradiction” that I make in presenting my point of view.

Fair enough. Besides, whatever is left of your own “comfort and consolation” here is still no doubt relatively intact. :wink:

Not to worry. The abyss will [soon enough] do its thing. :wink:

No, I’m just noting how psychological defense mechanisms are powerful tools enabling some to rationalize almost any set of actual facts to suit the moral and political assumptions they make about “I” in the world around them.

Thus there are still no doubt any number of fervent Marxists around convinced that “next time” they will do the revolution right.

Just as there are still no doubt any number of fervent Randroid Objectivisits around convinced that “next time” they will do their revolution right.

We’ve been back and forth about all this on other threads. You have your set of political prejudices, the other side has theirs. Repression it is argued by them was forced on the Soviet and the Chinese ubermen given all that was being done to destroy their regimes.

But: What always counts [in the end] is their own subjective qua objective judgments.

On the other hand, I’m still forced to admit that these points of mine are largely just existential contraptions rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

Whereas phyllo is still able to harbor some level of conviction that his own point of view really is the most rational and virtuous way to look at things.

But that’s the whole point [psychologically] when sustaining some measure of “comfort and consolation” is really at the heart of your convictions.

But for those of us who hold to that such contraptions are to some degree effective from the point of view of retaining some measure ofmthe beginning, would it not argue more than an affect as consolation?

Or, do You also discredit such on dubious grounds such as lack of clear rhetoric, but silently admitting that there is more to this argument then meets the eye? And skipping this argument tantamount to some thing other then mere dismissal on any basis, which may signal some measure denial?

Or.is not brusque-ness on my part try to cut to the chase?

Either way my psych prof had manifold statements attributed to disassociate political, psychological and philosophical parts , so as to find some measure of intent. (at a reasonably arguable level of discussion relating to Dasein)

Otherwise affective response may indeed throw psychological consideration into a tailspin.

.

[numbers added by me]

Sentence one. A seeming concession. A hey, I can’t know statement. A seemingly epistemological humility. He doesn’t know.
Sentence two. A description of this opponent. Could be neutral, who knows. My opponent thinks he is rational, whereas I, myself do not. Could be just a description. Perhaps, but there are warning signs: ‘harbor’ for example with implications of security and safety. Let’s see what happens in three.
Sentence three. An explanation of Phyllo’s psychology. He believes what he believes motivated by comfort and consolation. I am not, since in sentence one I mentioned that my ideas are contraptions.

Cake and eat it too.

I believe that my beliefs are contraptions allows me to conclude that I am superior to Phyllo who believes what he believes because he cannot go without his meme medication. I know his motivations and I know mine. I compare and conclude mine are superior because I get no consolation from mine.

Now there are many, many assumptions and confusions in this.

  1. the obvious one: his idea that he does not have the same or worse motivations than Phyllo would also be a contraption
  2. you don’t get to draw conclusions after undermining all your own thinking. Which is what he has done in sentence one. One is silent after Sentence one. Sentence one does not allow one to draw conclusions, let alone psychic ones.
  3. Comfort and consolation are not the only motivations that can underine conclusions.
  4. Teenagers, for example, can be skeptical about anyone knowing more than them, and this can be based on anger, on wanting to have control, on being cool and more. Iamb is basically being ad hom above, AND THIS IS MORE RIDICULOUS than it would be for others, because he has just said that he cannot trust his own mind. How the fuck can someone who has told us his conclusions are based on contraptions and dasein, then think it makes sense to go on and draw conclusions about other minds. He clearly does not believe Sentence one because it does not affect his actions.

He is a defacto moralist who judges others, but this is OK because he intersperses disclaimers, and yet somehow these disclaimers

function as premises
which lead to conclusions judging other inferior.

Amazing.

There is the question of what is wrong with comfort and consolation?

He treats them as artificial states produced by psychological defense mechanisms rather than as normal products of life and thought.

One is supposed to be miserable?

Yes, there’s that also. It is tough to argue that being in the hole is better, since better would be a value judgment, and those are merely contraptions.

From “Morality: The Final Delusion?” by Richard Garner in Philosophy Now magazine

[b]

[/b]

What this seems to clearly indicate [to me] is how enormously complex the interaction between genes and memes, between nature and nurture must be in grappling with human morality. In other words, as it is embedded both biologically in the evolution of life on Earth, and philosophically in “frames of mind” that we were able to aggregate as a species over the centuries allowing us to be aware of these relationships.

And then to make more or less educated arguments regarding any particular context in which we are challenged to answer the question “how ought one to live”?

What is the “right thing to do” here? And how, given the extent to which there must be a gap between what we think we know the answer is “in the moment”, and all that we have no understanding of at all, are we to actually know everything that would need to be known in order to answer the question objectively. We don’t even really know if the “objective truth” here even exists. Or, if it does, whether we have the capacity as autonomous human beings to effectuate changes in our lives other than as we were always only ever going to.

And yet the extent to which assertions like “our daily kindnesses to strangers are rarely returned, nor do we expect them to be” are true, it’s still all basically rooted in dasein and conflicting goods.

Everyone reading this has had different experiences with things of this sort. And what exactly are we to be kind about? And why would we expect others to reciprocate the kindness?

In what context? With respect to what behaviors deemed to be “good” rather than “bad”?

Some things seem to be applicable to all of our species. But other things seem instead to ever and always be hopelessly contextual and problematic.

Once again, this may contain an important insight regarding the moral narrative that I have come to embody “down in the hole” that “I” am.

But in no way, shape or form [that I can discern] are these words connected to any actual social, political or economic context in which particular value judgments do in fact come into conflict with other particular value judgments.

Now, why do you suppose that is?

P.S.

.

Ok. To clarify

The hole as You express is very understandable from the point of view
that has generally been expressed all through out our / Your experience .

But that hole is not a singular manifestation of being (there), but a built (here) , where it (the experience)
of Being having a beginning.

The point Heidegger makes is that the Being can not be approached as if, through It’s self, the whole self, as a composite of psychological , philosophical, metapsychologocal, political origin, because it has to be looked at from the different vantage points.

But we can’t because trying to find it is only possible by going back and finding the original experience of the hole.

The ‘hole’ , , has manyform derivations. of mostly symbolic forms taken , would You go along with that?
That the Platonic Cave, and Nietzsche’s Abyss have some semblance relevant to experience in general. Then the the hole You inhabit share somewhat of a re-semblance.

The etymology of the word between semblance and resemblance occasions two different forms of ‘appearing different’. Not that I’m into with this kind of analysis for my basic effort of proof, only to dole out defenses toward such people who find such proof definitive. (And you know whom I’m referring), but merely stating that that view is not substantially definitive, only literally.

That connecting types of holes by virtue of an imposed temporal referentially is am arduous and nay oft impossible task, and it is not based simply on current, not exclusive definition.

It is alive, in the sense temporality more in line with what Augustine defines time as being transcendence.

,It’s is an existential contraption , but one with transcendental undertones of time as understood to before, bound to a backward understanding rather than a forward look.(which causes stasis)

So the contraption is there and it isn’t.
The duality has disappeared but understandably so, because of the inherent duality within time itself.

This is the conflict which binds us onto a hole from which we are trying to escape.

We would like to get away from time, as some modern historians claim unsuccessfully so, that we are living , having passed the age of history.

But it may not be so simple to escape it, nonetheless, the constraints, which the totality of the darkness of the hole(whole) has imprinted.

True, but I speculate that there are any number of variables embedded in our lives that do seem true for all of us: mathematics, the laws of nature, empirical facts, the logical rules of language.

But [as I always note in turn]: Even the either/or world is still embedded in this:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Embedded in [among other things] the extent to which determinism or sollipsism or sim worlds are or are not applicable to the “human condition”. Given the gap that would seem to exist between what any particular “I” claims to know here and now and all that would need to be known about the very ontological nature of existence itself.

The parts that any number of “serious philosophers” [not to mention astrophysicists] seem to just shrug off.

Look, either Phyllo is still able to sustain some measure of “comfort and consolation” regarding the relationship between morality on this side of the grave and his fate on the other side or he is not.

And that is either embedded in the assumptions he makes about how rational his thinking is “here and now” or it is not. Only he can aprise us of that. And I have reacted to the assumptions [political prejudices] he makes about things like Communism with certain assumptions [political prejudices] of my own. Then it is up to others to react to our arguments as they do. I merely note that such reactions seem to me to be embodied in political prejudices rooted in the existential contraption that is his “lived life” rooted in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

But that explanation is acknolwedged by me [over and again] to be no less an existential contraption. Given that I know very, very little about the life that he has lived, I can only react to his points by extrapolating from arguments that I have come across many, many, many times from those that I – “I” – deem to be objectivists.

But even here given only the extent to which my own understanding of objectivism is, in and of itself, just another existential contraption. The product of “I” embedded in my own actual “lived life”.

The comfort and consolation is either there for him [or you] or it is not. It is no longer there for me.

Huh?

If I believe that my beliefs here [re the is/ought world and oblivion] are just existential contraptions then I am acknowledging right from the start that assesments deemed to be either “superior” or “inferior” here are no less existential contraptions.

Also, to the extent that subjunctively I seem to be more certain of this, is only the extent to which the subjunctive “I” too is an existential contraption.

And the only thing I can “know” about his motivation and intentions is that which “I” have managed to scrape together given my own profoundly problematic reaction to what he has told me about his life so far. And what are the odds that is anything other than me barely scratching the surface of what makes him tick?

As for all this…

…we would have to bring this “general description” down to earth. To focus this “wall of words” on a particular context in which we attempt to describe what unfolds “inside out head” when confronting conflicting goods at the existential juncture that is 1] identity 2] value judgments and 3] political economy.

He can choose it.

Then it will come down [once again] to the extent to which we might perhaps become clearer to each other regarding the arguments we made here and elsewhere about things like Communism.

As for this…

you pick the context, the conflicting goods, and the extent to which “I” can articulate a point of view here that is able to transcend the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein above.

Show us how “pragmatic” you can be in exposing me as just another “moralist”.

Or maybe it’s time [once again] for you to be “moving on” to others. :wink:

The abortion issue can be approached logically.

If giving birth makes the planet worse for all including the child in question, then abortion is prudent. What better generation than this to make this argument?

If there is some kind of “cosmic savior”, this baby would be impossible to abort.

Since we know in fantasy (by definition) that the second one is true, it’s up to us to handle the justice of the situation, and abortion is a matter of justice.

I’ve often said that if people are really concerned about “be fruitful and multiply”, we’d have 3.7 billion women strapped down on beds and inseminate them every 9 months - leaving us with a world where each women has an average of 52 offspring - real lives that we know for a fact can be here, to the extent we don’t do this - it also is abortion.

That you actually [still] imagine that this is what is really behind my posting here speaks, say, volumes?

Comfort and consolation per se isn’t my point.

It is the extent to which others insist that what comforts and consoles them can comfort and console you too — if only you’ll think about one or another set of conflicting goods and/or God as they do.

Not counting those objectivists [ubermen] here who insist that, say, only white anglo-saxon, protestant and heterosexual men even deserve to be comforted and consoled.

I always focus the beam on the fact that I – “I” – no longer have access to this comfort and consolation. Neither on this side of the grave nor on the other side of it.

And all I can do is to explore the reasons that others give to explain why they still do have access to them.

The rest is just polemics and waiting for godot.

Right.

Clarification as just another [bigger] wall of words defining and defending other words. An intellectual contraption of steroids.

Really, imagine someone struggling at the intersection of identity, value judgment and political economy. They are struggling existentially to answer the question “how ought I to live?”

In other words, given that they are faced “out in a particular world” with a tumultuous clash of moral and political narratives/agendas. It could be anything from abortion to keeping animals in zoos.

They read your assessment and…and what?

Right.

Clarification as just another [bigger] wall of words defining and defending other words. An intellectual contraption of steroids.

Really, imagine someone struggling at the intersection of identity, value judgment and political economy. They are struggling existentially to answer the question “how ought I to live?”

In other words, given that they are faced “out in a particular world” with a tumultuous clash of moral and political narratives/agendas. It could be anything from abortion to keeping animals in zoos.

They read your assessment and…and what?[/quote

Then , like I likewise, would and do, feel existentially defeated, and adhere to an earlier sign posted there: Beware those, who enter here!

I can no possibly give up on getting out of the I (eye) , whereby my values and my confusions would condemn me , in a metaphorical Altona.

But as I’m completely on that as for me, I cannot get over an existential leap i have made recently to transfer the angst in form of a totality of hope.

Situations give rise to conflicting values as well, and in cases like that,
choices can drive one literally to the wall, from which there actually may not be an exit.

I will describe somewhat a situation to follow that personally is causing me similar state of impotence.

I’ve been looking for a job for some time now, for my familie’s financial needs grossly acceed my capacity to satisfy them.

I took a job offer about a couple of months ago, and I was fired from lack of telling them, that my recent operation would disqualify me from the job, as designated in their employment manual.

Actually , it was a joint decision by my employer and me.

So now I was left with not only a diminished income, but time , which would have been better spent.

So just today, I get a call from another interested employer in Santa Ana, .ca.
and they indicated a far better paying training paid opportunity at twice the salary and a lucrative sign in bonus.

Well, then I suddenly remembered that my wife and I have purchesed6 tickets for a return visit to Hungary, my birthplace.The shock of that remembrance knocked the wind out of me for, this would have been an ideal position , if it had worked out.

So feeling trapped, I asked them if the starting date could be adjusted to coincide after the 10 some days that our visit would have taken.

The answer was a flat out , resounding ‘NO’, and with nothing to drink, a total exasperation came over me. Now this ‘real’ hole, not constracted, seems to bottom out into a myriad of valuelessness, leaving me in an existential lurch, from which escape appears impossible for the moment.

I an particularising for a deeper meaning here, that it appeared for me. that I’m not in a situation, but its derivative : a state.So here it is: my psycholigism or lack of psycho-holism devolved into a feeling state, because I couldn’t dis-associate it from the overall situation as a whole.

Literally I fell into a whole-less hole, like Alice did.

I think this is a good metaphore into what Heidegger meant.

I bring you back to this:

viewtopic.php?p=2705940#p2705940

Apparently, Iambiguous is not looking for an on topic debate.