The Joker is essential in a monarchy and tasked with reminding the king of his mortality lest he become too full of himself. The king wanted a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity, so the jeweler inscribed “It shall pass”.
…all I am basically interested in is the extent to which this point reflects some measure of human autonomy. And, if it does, what are the existential implications germane to that which is of most interest to me: how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods?
It’s fun to discover how one ought to live because invariably it’s discovered that one ought to live in a way that is fun, otherwise what is the purpose of living? “Fun” is just a placeholder for the purposeless.
Now, if “human freedom” here is essentially a self-delusion rooted in a mind rooted in a brain rooted in laws immutably applicable to all matter, then nothing that any of us post here was ever going to be anything other than that which it could only ever have been: what in fact it is. Period.
Laws? That’s an objective thing, right? Laws require an authority to enforce, but what happens in nature just happens and if it happens regularly, we presuppose they are laws. If the universe is inherently random and we rewind it to the beginning, it would almost certainly unfold in some other way. It’s the lack of purpose that gives the universe purpose. If everything had a purpose; a destiny; a determination, then what would the purpose be for having the show? It would be a fatuous waste of energy and much easier to have had nothing.
Then we go from there to whatever brought into existence the existence of existence itself.
But [admittedly] part of my psychology [rooted in dasein] has predisposed [driven] me to pursue polemics. And part of this is “fun” in the sense that deconstructing objectivists is “entertainment” for me.
Some of these folks have spent literally years constructing these complex and convoluted “intellectual contraptions”. Things like “value ontology”. Then they bump into me and I start in on tinkering with them. Maybe even take them apart.
But is that really fun or vanity? Or is vanity fun? Is playing the game fun or is winning fun because that’s part of a larger game?
And we all know the manner in which some of them react to that.
Yes it’s never fun to be wrong.
Then to me.
Why do I do this?
Well, there’s this:
He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles
And [no doubt] there’s the part revolving around the fact that I no longer have access myself to the “psychology of objectivism”. I am no longer able to sustain the sort of “comfort and consolation” embedded in that frame of mind convinced it is in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.
If you truly feel there is no “right thing to do”, then what you do cannot be predicated on what is “right”. You just do what you do because that is what you do. Self reflection on the matter is taking an engineering view of the universe that everything must have a purpose.
So – consciously? subconsciously? unconsciously? – I have come to truly envy those who still do. And there’s a part of me that goes after this.
But that’s just the sort of speculation built into “I” here as an existential contraption. I can never really know for certain what makes “me” tick here. There are far too many pieces [going all the way back to my birth] hopelessly entangled in far too many contexts that are surely beyond either my complete understanding or my control.
What I do however is to suggest that this sort of thing – the fractured and fragmented “I” – is applicable to all of us. Some are just more aware of it than others.
Unless of course I’m wrong. But how [using the tools of philosophy] would I or others go about establishing that?
At least you can articulate the problem!
On the other hand, some of the stuff that folks like Guide write here borders on gibberish to me. It’s so fucking unintelligible at times I’m thinking that maybe he/she really is just putting me on. Just yanking my chain.
So, sure, the joke may well be on me.
I don’t understand his talking in the 3rd person, but I suppose that is just what Guide does.