a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

[iambiguous]

What is Dasein?
by John C. Brady
Epoché Philosophy Monthly

1.1b On Essence and Existence

If I were to ask you “what is a house?” we could talk about the necessary and sufficient conditions and properties that form the essence of “houseness”, the “whatness” of a house, and eventually finish. It’s not even necessary that the thing we discuss in this way exist currently. For example, I could ask you “what is a perfect house?” and the subsequent properties and conditions we settle upon and write upon a napkin may not be instantiated anywhere in the world currently. This introduces an order of rank: the “whatness” of things, their essence, can be seen to exist happily prior to the thing’s existence, such that if we were to stumble across a really existing “perfect house” we can then say “That’s it!”

Now, let’s shift from Dasein to my own dasein here. The landlord has evicted Tom from his house. Say, a medical affliction caused him to lose his job and he could no longer keep up the mortgage payments. The discussion shifts from “what is a house?” to “was it moral or immoral to evict Tom”?

How would you situate the manner in which Heidegger construes Dasein in the second discussion? We all know what it means for one Being to evict another Being from his home. And it’s not a question of legality because where Tom lives it is perfectly legal to evict him.

No, instead, it’s a question of morality…of ethics. How here does the philosopher weigh in? As a Kantian? Is possible deontologically to reason our way to a moral obligation here?

However, if I were to ask you “What are you?” there is a sense in which any answer you give will be unsatisfactory. Answering “I am a person” points us to the question of what you mean by that, and from there a myriad of possible answers come up: a featherless biped, a political animal, a rational animal, a Homo sapiens, so on and so forth. However, each of these definitional characterizations need to be actively taken up by you, receiving your blessing in a choice that precedes them all.

And then the part I always come back to: “what are you?” in a particular context out in a particular world historically and culturally and personally? And then the part where what you think you are, you are able to demonstrate to others such that they would agree that this is what you are. Why? Because, in fact, that is what you are.

But then the part where you say “I am a libertarian” and someone else says “I am a Marxist”; and then given a particular set of circumstances you are able to demonstrate to others that they ought to be what you are too. Why? Because in fact who you are here is in fact what all other rational people ought to be.

[iambiguous]

What is Dasein?
by John C. Brady
Epoché Philosophy Monthly

The “person” example works in the same way, as does any response you could give, any simple ascription of a “whatness” onto your being. This is why Descartes misses Dasein when he thinks himself as “a thinking substance”. Dasein’s being is not answerable to a whatness, to an essence, that precedes it, but, rather, its essence lies in its existence, through which it makes various choices about what its whatness is and will be, not by contemplating, but by realizing them through living: “The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.” (Heidegger, 2008, p.33) In other words, Dasein chooses what it will be, and this is its essence. Or, more accurately, it is its possibilities, which open it up onto the future, and its activity of choosing, and doing, one or the other as ways of being.

The part where Heidegger is construed to be an existentialist while Descartes is construed to be anything but. It’s not what you are but always the potential to become something other than what others might perceive you to be. The possibilities that one can choose if one did not “believe that all material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate by mechanical principles”. Especially when this machine is also a “devout Christian”.

Similar to Sartre’s “existence precedes essence”. And for some his “Hell is other people”. Why? Because they do attempt to objectify you. To turn you into a “whatness”. Not only that, but turning themselves into a “whatness” as well. Whatness, in the is/ought world, I call the moral cand political objectivists.

“The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that” Heidegger

Thus, its being is always an issue for it, because it is always confronted with the question “what shall I be today, tomorrow, next year?”

Over and again: that’s the basic existential scaffolding that we all carry around with us day in and day out. We all ask ourselves that. The Nazis asked themselves that back when Heidegger was around, as did the Jews. In other words, like this is some extraordinary insight!

Though I suppose for those who predicated everything that they thought, felt, said and did on one or another God or one or another political ideology or one or another “school of philosophy”, it might actually be.

But for me it couldn’t possibly be more obvious: here I am, what shall I do next?

Instead, the far more interesting question revolves around those situations in which you choose to say or do something and someone else objects to it. That’s the part where my own dasein comes into play. Sure, you can go through your day and choose to do any number of things that have absolutely no impact on anyone other than yourself. But when it does impact others enough to piss them off then you’re confronted with conflicting assessments of the “right thing to do”. What of philosophy and ethics and political science then?

Furthermore, its being is always an issue for it in the survival-instinct “don’t launch me into the sun!” kind of way as well, because it is also confronted with the question “Will I be tomorrow, next year, etc?”

Yeah, but how many of us are confronted with literal life and death situations from day to day? Now, in Ukraine it’s a whole other story. Or if you’re riding the subway in Brooklyn.

The closest many of us have come to this is in regard to the covid pandemic. According to the worldometer site, 1,013,044 Americans have died from it. And over 6,000,000 around the globe. Life and death down to the bone.

[iambiguous]

What is Dasein?
by John C. Brady
Epoché Philosophy Monthly

Finally, its being is an issue for it precisely because it can think “what is Being?” and be troubled by such a question. This is a capability of Dasein, along with buying cabbage, calculating Pi, and saying “It’s raining cats and dogs out there”. Neither houses nor lumps of granite can boast that their being is an issue for them in any of these three ways.

Again, this is supposed to be, what, some great insight that philosophers in the past missed? No, what troubles most of us about the question is this: that while we think that our own “being” in regard to conflicting value judgments has come up with the optimal answer, damned if lots and lots of others don’t insist that, on the contrary, it’s their “being’s” answer. Some even insisting as well that this is the case because their God sent them a Scripture in order to prove it.

Or, if No God, a manifesto?

And, for sure, “neither houses nor lumps of granite” have one of those.

1.2 Mineness

The second feature that inheres immediately to Dasein is that its being is always and in every case “mine”. This has two senses. Firstly, carrying on from its being being an issue for it, its being is an issue for only it. The question of “what shall I be next year” is my, and only my, issue, and I will only work it out through my own existing onto next year.

This, from my frame of mind, is precisely the sort of thing a philosopher might “think up” in the intellectual clouds. Yeah, sure, the narcissist and the egotist might make it “me, myself and I” all the way down. But unless he or she is a survivalist or the only human being around, its “being” is not only going to be derived from others, it will have consequences for others.

Then the parts that revolve around dasein. His or her indoctrination as a child. His or her existential scaffolding into adulthood involving sets of circumstances only understood or controlled up to a point. All of the variables in their lives that can come at them…factors coagulating into experiences that become nothing less than the embodiment of contingency, chance and change.

[iambiguous]

What is Dasein?
by John C. Brady
Epoché Philosophy Monthly

Because I’m always working out my whatness through the business of existing, of doing and choosing and speaking and thinking and interpreting and making, and this issue always comes back to me, regardless of whether I let the world or others reveal certain facts to me, there is a sense that I am accountable all the way down.

Which of course “in reality” is ridiculous. Are you accountable for being born? Are accountable for being brainwashed as a child? Are you accountable for all of the many, many, many people and experiences and events that can come at you from all directions as an adult. In fact, the more you think it through the closer you come to accepting just how much of your life is either beyond fully comprehending or fully controlling. It’s amazing that we understand ourselves as much as we do.

The business of existing, bursting at the seams with contingency and exigency…both amidst the vicissitudes of the ordinary and the extraordinary…is for the human species far, far, far more problematic than for all other creatures. Animals that by and large are driven almost entirely by instinct, libido and deep-seated drives.

This is where Heidegger introduces the normative category of “Authenticity”. Dasein is always its choices and possibilities, but doesn’t often realize this. Often it just carries out actions because “that’s what one does”, thus disavowing its responsibility in its choosing to choose a course of action. This is Dasein in an inauthentic mode. However, inauthentic Dasein is not for that reason lacking in any of the being that Dasein is. The difference is one of comportment towards oneself and one’s being. Accordingly, we will not spend time exploring this distinction in this analysis of basic features.

This is philosophical jargon for…for what exactly?

“Normative category”?

“Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible.” wiki

Come on, if Heidegger was truly interested in integrating Dasein into the is/ought world, he would have spent considerably more time in Being and Time exploring authentic/inauthentic behavior given his very own moral and political prejudices.

The irony of course being that many today insist that any number of Germans back then lived “inauthentic” lives because they allowed those like Hitler to turn them into full-blown Nazis. They lived out the normative parameters of others rather than their own. They allowed their subjectivity to be owned and operated by the state. Any number of whom became full-blown fascist thugs.

After all, what is the “Final Solution” but how far the fulminating fanatic objectivist minds can go?

[iambiguous]

Identity and Postmodernism
From UKEssays

The stability or otherwise of identity has become a major battleground for sociological theorists in recent times. The infamous ‘postmodern’ turn has rendered identity a deeply problematic phenomenon. In this paper I will investigate the claim that identities are unstable sites of contestation.

Phenomenon: “a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question”.

Again, back to the obvious:

What in particular is being observed? Who is observing it? What do they think they are observing" What can it finally be determined [and then demonstrated] to in fact be?

How is a human identity any different?

Well, for one thing, our identity is not a thing being observed. It’s not a tree or a cinder block or a tube of toothpaste. It is a complex amalgamation of objective facts and relationships. Of ever evolving changes. Of purely speculative assumptions rooted in behaviors chosen based on yet more assumptions about right and wrong, good and bad.

All the postmodernists have done is to turn the focus in more on the language that we use to describe it. The phenomenal relationship between words and worlds. The extent to which we can substantiate our words about any particular identity by showing how they are entirely in sync with the world around us.

Vladimir Putin for example. He’s been in the news [and in the minds] of many of late. What can we pin down objectively about his identity?

I will do this by examining the dissolution of identity within postmodern theory before examining both the negative and more importantly, the positive consequences of this. This will enable a deeper understanding of precisely what is meant by this fluid notion of identity, and where possible criticisms and inconsistencies can be located within this theory.

Okay, imagine you existed a century ago. Before the advent of “postmodern theories”. What about you then would have been subject to “dissolution” had they been around? What about you now can in fact be “dissoluted” by the postmodernists? How exactly would we – philosophers – go about pinning that down?

The question isn’t the “fluidity” of human identity. That’s just commonsense. How someone who is now 60 was when she was 10 or 20 or 30 will reveal any number of changes. Some glaring, others less so. Biological changes, demographic changes, facts regarding any number of aspects that constitute “I”. Changes almost none will question or refute.

And hardly just “theoretical”.

And changes that some see as negative, others might see as positive. Again, we will need to know what those changes are given the particular life that one lives.

But what if the changes revolve instead around value judgments. You change your mind about abortion or homosexuality or consuming animal flesh or the proper role of government. Here “I”, now that you are 60, might be nothing at all like “I” when you were 20. How would this be assessed objectively?

And what does that have to do with the arguments made by postmodernists?

Or the arguments made by me?

[iambiguous]

Identity and Postmodernism
From UKEssays

The debate over the stability of identity is one that is inseparably linked to postmodernism. This diverse group of theories centre around, in Lyotard’s famous phrase, ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives.’ Postmodernists maintain that the project of modernity has failed, and that no single source or body of knowledge can legitimise itself as a universal measure of value or identity.

Two points:

1] Like all the rest of us, postmodernists are creating their own narratives as a result of the life that they live out in a particular world understood in a particular way. Some of it can be demonstrated to in fact be true and some of it is only what they think is true…their own personal opinions. Others may see the same situation differently. You go back and forth trying to pin it down, but it never really is.

2] human reality is such that, if you are able to convince yourself that your own narrative does in fact reflect something in the vicinity of a “metaphysical” truth, then from your frame of mind it is. And, far more important still, you will behave as though it is true objectively. And it is through the behaviors that you choose that consequences occur. For both yourself and for others. Thus if stability is important to you in regard to your identity there are any number of “isms” out there from which to choose. And certainly not just mine.

Postmodernism no longer allows us to theorise society into homogenous identities which can then be totalised in a grand-theory or meta-narrative. This is also the case when it comes to the identification of the self. Rather than the self maintaining a stable core of identity, from a postmodern perspective identity is fluid and is dependent upon where the self is historically and culturally situated.

Let’s just say that I understand this better than you you. If in fact that’s true. But in fact I am no more able to demonstrate that it is than you are that it’s not. But then I understand this better than you do too.

As Luntley (1985) notes, this conception of the self threatens the very possibility of self-identity:

The loss of self-identity is threatened because if we situated the self in real historical circumstances, we would situate it in things that are contingent and constantly changing. Therefore, the self would also be constantly changing. It would be in flux and would have no continuing identity.

And all I ask of others is that they at least make an attempt to demonstrate that this is not at all the case for them. Instead, their own particular moral and political and spiritual foundations really are a reflection of the One True Path to, among other things, enlightenment.

[iambiguous]

Identity and Postmodernism
From UKEssays

Once the very identity of the self comes under threat, then so does the possibility of any coherency in social theorising. A postmodern society is one in which the identities of the social actors are undergoing constant transformation.

And how can it be otherwise since identity itself is thought to be rooted out in particular worlds understood in different ways by individuals who live in this world experiencing truly diverse sets of personal circumstances. What seems coherent to some seems utterly foolish and irrational to others. And constant transformation because our interactions are submersed in the relentless reality of contingency, chance and change. Even here however some experience this far more than others. Then there are those global episodes that can impact millions like the covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Identity then becomes open to contestation as there is no longer any ultimate referent (truth, science, God etc.) to provide universal legitimation.

That “transcending font” which most call God. And not only on this side of the grave but, of far greater importance, on the other side. After all, what is the 70 to 80 odd years we live from birth to death on Earth compared to all of eternity. On Judgement Day “legitimation” determines whether we go up or down. Paradise or damnation.

In Lyotard’s terms, the impossibility of a grand or meta-narrative leads to the social being constructed of small narratives, none of which are necessarily more valid than another.

Small narratives ever and always derived from individuals living their lives out in particular worlds understood in particular ways historically and culturally and experientially. And while each “ism” insists that their own “meta-narrative” must prevail, they refuse to acknowledge the possibility that their own One True Path – one among hundreds and hundreds of others, both God and No God – might not actually be the “ism”.

Why?

Well, back to the OP here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

Back to the “psychology of objectivism”. Back to my own speculation that for the objectivists among us [and they know who they are] it’s not what they believe but that what they believe is the font they embed I in in order to sustain their own “comfort and consolation” all the way to the grave.

[iambiguous]

Identity and Postmodernism
From UKEssays

Any theory that aims at totalising society should only be seen as one constructed from a particular perspective (e.g. one that still remains in the logic of modernity), rather than a totalising theory as such.

And lest we forget, there is, in my view, the significant – gigantic? – gap between “totalizing society” in one or another theoretical construct and being able to demonstrate out in a particular community of actual flesh and blood human beings how that society can reflect/encompass the least dysfunctional interactions. Your “rules of behavior” or mine?

Whilst postmodernism can be viewed as liberating and opening up seemingly limitless opportunities for re-theorizing society, it does at the same time impose new problems. Firstly, there seems to be an inconsistency in the postmodernist stance, as it could be argued that the theory of the dissolution of meta-narratives is a type of meta-narrative itself.

Cue, among others, Wittgenstein? And forget about “re-theorizing society”, how about the act of actually choosing behaviors itself without a “meta-narrative”. Without God or ideology or deontology or Satyrean assumptions about nature.

But, sure, there’s always the argument that post-modernism itself is just another meta-narrative. Which is why I always insist that discussions of it be taken down out of the theoretical clouds and introduced to, say, the real world? The one where we interact in social, political and economic contexts that precipitate conflicting assessments of right and wrong, good and evil, true and false.

And then the part where in “opening up” your options you become “fractured and fragmented” as I am.

This criticism can also be applied to the postmodernist take on identity, for in arguing that identity is ultimately unstable and fluid postmodernists inadvertently provide a certain rigid structure in which identity operates (i.e. that all identity must be unstable).

Which is why a distinction must be made between one’s identity in the either/or world and one’s identity in the is/ought world. Given a specific set of circumstances. I believe “here and now” that in the absence of one or another “transcending font” the “self” will become unstable. You are who you think you are now. Then in a world inundated with contingency, chance and change, new experiences cause you to question that.

[iambiguous]

Identity and Postmodernism
From UKEssays

…whilst postmodernism is liberating on the one hand, on the other it sets limits to the very possibility of any meaningful social theory or practice. This is exemplified in the disparity between postmodern theorists, some of which view postmodernism as opening up huge opportunities for getting rid of authoritarian grand theories, others view it as essentially debilitating as the only thing that can prevail in postmodern societies is a sense of meaningless flux.

I fit in here somewhere but, again, only in making that crucial distinction between either/or world human interactions and interactions that revolve more around conflicting moral and political value judgments.

In other words, in regard to conflicting goods, in seeing myself “fractured and fragmented” as that pertains to my own hopelessly drawn and quartered sense of moral and political ambiguity and ambivalence, “I” am considerably closer to the debilitating end of the spectrum. Yes, moral nihilism as I construe it, provides me with many more options. And that’s because unlike the objectivists, I am not anchored to “pick one”, the right or the wrong thing to do. But what good is this freedom when I can never feel securely anchored to any sense of objective reality at all. At least not in regard to value judgments.

Within this disagreement the postmodern analysis of identity remains reasonably intact, both sides of the argument largely accept that identity is fluid and unstable. By analysing this disagreement we can therefore obtain a better understanding of the various aspects of fluid identity.

And yet like you and others, the fluidity of my identity in the either/or world is considerably less problematic. Here stability can revolve around the circumstances in our lives hardly changing at all from day to day, from week to week, from month to month. And, for some, year to year and decade to decade.

Jean Baudrillard, for example, argues that the dissolution of identity is a process that started in the nineteenth century and was exacerbated in the twentieth.

Pertaining to, among other things, “the death of God” and full-blown capitalism. In particular, the Industrial Revolution. Thus…

In the postmodern era, historical processes have undermined the stability of identity, so that it becomes impossible to meaningfully theorise about social identity. Rigid identity and meaning are destroyed due to the rise of global capitalism and the demise of the referents from modernity (truth, purpose, meaning and so on). ‘Gone are the referentials of production, signification, affect, substance, history, and the whole equation of “real” contents’. Identity now becomes a radically fluid and empty vessel, which becomes temporarily filled with content that has no foundation or ultimate meaning.

Basically what I am arguing myself. Though, surely, one antidote is objectivism. Either God or No God. We come into the world hard-wired to find meaning…and so we find it. First derived from others as children, and then [given autonomy] new experiences bring us into contact with other possibilities. And there is never a shortage of “isms”, right? I myself subscribe to moral nihilism. I just have no illusions that it is not but one more manifestation of dasein.

Whilst for Baudrillard this cannot be thought of as a particularly positive or negative phenomenon, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ no longer have any real meaning in postmodernity, it does render theoretical and political action largely impotent. This is why in postmodernism we are presented with numerous texts heralding the end of theory, history, meaning and so on. The dissolution of identity means for many postmodernists that theory and meaningful political action are no longer possible.

Of course that doesn’t explain the fact that millions upon millions of men and women around the globe are still firmly anchored to one or another, at times, dogmatic, doctrinaire, domineering objectivist credo. Sacred or secular.

And these folks are hardly impotent. On the contrary, here in America, they are thriving. The cult of Trump for example. Hell-bent on bringing America back to the 1950s.

[iambiguous]

Where Does Identity Come From?
A fascinating new neuroscience experiment probes an ancient philosophical question—and hints that you might want to get out more
By Jason Castro at the Scientific American website

Imagine we rewound the tape of your life. Your diplomas are pulled off of walls, unframed, and returned. Your children grow smaller, and then vanish. Soon, you too become smaller. Your adult teeth retract, your baby teeth return, and your traits and foibles start to slip away. Once language goes, you are not so much you as potential you. We keep rewinding still, until we’re halving and halving a colony of cells, finally arriving at that amazing singularity: the cell that will become you.

You and Benjamin Button.

Only when I imagine a life being rewound, the focus is more on the variables that shaped and molded our value judgments. The biological variables after all are applicable to each of us. We all began as a single cell in the womb. We all share the same biological components. The genetic codes that are generally beyond our control. Like the time and the place where we are born. Like the social, political and economic parameters of our first years.

It’s not that language goes but how the words that shaped and molded our sense of reality itself go with them.

The question, of course, is what happens when we press “play” again. Are your talents, traits, and insecurities so deeply embedded in your genes that they’re basically inevitable? Or could things go rather differently with just a few tiny nudges? In other words, how much of your fate do you allot to your genes, versus your surroundings, versus chance? This is navel gazing that matters.

Who presses “play”? God? Nature with its immutable laws? Lady Luck? If your biological/genetic components remain exactly the same and all of the environmental factors do in turn it would be something analogous to Nietzsche’s eternal return. But if nature is the same but nurture is different those accumulating “tiny nudges” can result in some truly dramatic changes in your life. Re Ben Button here: youtu.be/6Zp7dq6b2PI

Then the part where our reaction to this is rooted subjectively, existentially in dasein. Reactions no less derived from those tiny nudges I suspect.

Though, for some of us, from far more dramatic experiences.

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one?

My point here is well known.

We all ask these questions of ourselves as individuals. Individuals who have lived different lives in various places around the globe, born and raised at different times, indoctrinated as children in different ways, and having accumulated different experiences precipitating, at times, very different understandings of the world around us.

So, given this what are philosophers able to establish about human identity that might be thought of as applicable to all of us?

Thus…

Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us.

But here I muddy the waters all the more by making a distinction between the either/or world Self and the is/ought world “self”. The essential biological, demographic, empirical, circumstantial Self vs. the existential “self” espousing widely distinctive moral and political and spiritual value judgments regarding human interactions that come into conflict.

Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Thus, here, Socrates and governments are no less confronted with this distinction. It’s one thing to correctly understand yourself in regard to your “biological, demographic, empirical, circumstantial” reality, and another thing altogether to understand yourself in regard to the many, many “conflicting goods” that divide us in any given community.

Right?

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

If the network includes the goods that should conform to the Socratic notion of determinate variables described, then yes, but that ‘should’ can objectify a future perfect conflict free world.

But the can not hold up in an either/or world in a present context as they are described.

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories.

Sure, start there.

But what is “psychological continuity” without a mind attached to a brain attached to the rest of the body?

Clearly, the place to start in regard to the essential conditions of the self are with those things each and every one of us must have if “I” is going to survive at all: subsistence itself.

I need food. I need water. I need protection from the elements.

And, in needing those things, how much pertaining to your self is going to revolve around attaining them? Yes, that can either be on your own isolated from others or in one or another community with others. But it’s not for nothing that two of the most influential thinkers there have ever been are Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

Identity and political economy. The bottom line as it were.

Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness.

Only here the plot thickens. For all we know, the brain, the mind and the rest of the body are all wholly in sync with the laws of matter…just like all the other “stuff” in the universe.

John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness.

Nope, not if the prince’s body is perfectly healthy and the cobbler’s body is riddled with stage 4 cancer. See how quickly the prince’s consciousness adjusts to that.

Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

And then there’s my own assessment here: the “psychology of objectivism”. Only the “container” is infused through and through given the existential parameters of dasein. Particularly when one’s thoughts and feelings come to revolve around sets of moral and political value judgments.

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

All these approaches [above] reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity.

Exactly. We all come into the world able to sustain one or another manifestation of this “psychological continuity”. Ours as a species is just significantly more complex – and thus problematic – than any other species. Our psychological self is rooted far more in historical and cultural and interpersonal “memetic” parameters that other species know nothing of at all.

What one person may grasp in regard to a “personal consciousness” another may have little or no understanding of at all. So what does it really mean then to speak of this “psychological continuity” when the psychological self itself can construe the world around it in so many profoundly different ways?

In other words, the need to make that crucial distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world. There are things that all of us are able to establish as true regardless of our differing psychological trajectories and things that we cannot.

Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Exactly my point. The elements that, by and large, encompass my own assessment of dasein.

Thus, the task for philosophers in my view is to confront that. If these truly problematic components of “I” are all around us, what then can we conclude reflects the “wisest” course of action in regard to moral obligations? Can there really be any obligations at all in a No God World?

Is deontology itself subject to the same critique?

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is.

The main point being that we might think of our personal identity in an overall sense, but there are really all of these many, many components to it coming from different directions. Only some of which are we able to even fully control. Yet how many of us ever really sit down and “think through” all of this? Philosophically or otherwise. We tote ourselves around from situation to situation thinking, feeling, saying and doing things as though it is simply who we are. It’s who we have become, and only when confronting something truly extra-ordinary might it trigger us to reevaluate all of the components that do go into making us who we think we are.

The part where we seriously consider, “what if I wasn’t this, what if I was that, instead? What if this hadn’t happened to me, what if that had happened to me instead?”

What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self.

My point being that the complexity of the self – “I” in the is/ought world – becomes such that these “philosophical assessments” are hopelessly inadequate when taking into account how the hundreds of existential variables in our lives can reconfigure into countless new permutations. What most do of course is to hammer these changes into the familiar, comfortable Self. It’s only when the changes are extra-ordinary enough, that this will no longer be possible.

The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

Next up: the “network self” and…dasein?

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics.

This part is always tricky. These are facets of your acquired identity over the years out in a particular world. You might pull back and think, "well, I am these things but they were largely beyond my control. They are in fact a part of who I am and how others react to me…but how much weight should I give them? To what extent are they merely stereotypes and to what extent are they more than just that? "

In other words, like it or not, there is no getting around the politics of identity. You can insist that others not think of you as they have been indoctrinated by others to compartmentalize you – by others to judge you – but out in the real world that is always going to be problematic.

Then the truly existential factors…

You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Again, these are all empirical/demographic/circumstantial facts about you that may or may not play a significant role in the behaviors that you choose. The important point is that there are so many of them. And the more there are, the more problematic it will be that you can collate them into, what, the most reasonable rendition of Who I Am?

[iambiguous]

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities.

Of course it’s the same for each of us. We all come to embody different [sometimes very different] components intertwined in our own complex demographic, circumstantial networks. It’s just that some of us acknowledge how in a world of contingency, chance and change it is all but impossible to put all of these pieces together in order to grasp anything even approximating the “real me”. Others, however, either brainwashed as children to put all the pieces together and then taking that indoctrinated identity to the grave or coming up with their own more “autonomous” “real me” as adults, live with the assumption that they grasp not only their own singular reality, but the reality that all others are obligated to grasp as well. Call it the Ayn Rand Syndrome. But we’ve got more than our own fair share of fulminating fanatic objectivists here, right?

Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

This is just “intellectual speak” for…for what exactly? You tell me how it is applicable to your own sense of identity. Again, I merely make what I construe to be that crucial distinction between the self in the either/or world and the “self” in the is/ought world.

Traits that almost no one will deny is true about you. And then how these traits come together in choosing one set of behaviors rather than another. Your traits, my traits. Your network as you understand it, my network as I understand it. Your behaviors, my behaviors.

Then the moral and political and spiritual wars that follow.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

Interesting take, it disconcerns the veritable political aspects which may define identity as pinned between progressive and regressive forces.

That politics may or may not noticeably effect outcomes one way rather than in other ways, precludes weather the longer ranged plans pan out, or time becomes so essential that reactions are firmed to narrow choices.

Irresolute political inventions do become problematic, if excessive time elapses between the traits’ formative expectations, for example the failure of 5 year plans was very basic in the failure of the communist social experiment.

That ism on a social scale debunked the rhetoric Marx was pushing, whereby masses were reduced to comrades.

So the two levels of hierarchy of social intercourse, inversely reversed the ideological emphasis from uniformly nominal - toward a new ideology still looking for some kind of middle ground that is sought in the NWO.

Not that such presents a solution within a failed ideology, but an almost superior search for a midis operans on a minimal, deontologically level, bordering a metaphoric solution in terms of very general terms grounded in the most basic perimetric ideas possible.

This process is as necessary as it is constantly recursive, and tends to obliterate more recent tie ins.

It cuts to the chase, on a reboot to far earlier analogical processes, before social-psychological diversions may not yet be appropriate.

As such, the objective and subjective elements to argue, may yet be overly accentuated, as mere embellishments to shine up ivory tower infatuations.

We must GI back far earlier, than modern philosophy allows to make sense of such peculiarly designed assumptions as if modern philosophy was an end all of all discussion as far as reactive consciousness goes.
The unconscious plays a key part to overcome this peculiar way of defining the self in terms of the other and vicars versa

This is a problem that finds home mire in the hermeticism of affirmation that Nietzsche so well brings up, and it’s unfortunate the way it proceeded, as if the synthesis were to dampen the self rather then exalt in it.

That was a significant cross cultural moment in time, where certain indelible values were sacrificed , so that belief in the either or world of perception could have been raised to the idea professed. The is - ought world, then was understood not through the metaphor it trued to convey of longer ranged ideas befitting social harmony, instead reduced inversely into the either belonging or not into the dialectical absolutism of the late 18th century, hoping hope against hope that such a gamble will pay off in the eyes of those whose memory goes back merely to their last meal.

This doing away with the hope of a revival of essential elements become the traits we all gave to endure is but a very shirt sighted appeal to wait until the white of their eyes become apparent, and not to waste any more time in trying to attain politically based equilibrium , that in fact is sorely a reminder of some game of wait and see type effort to keep conflict under control, while bidding for time.

One arm will then necessarily demand sacrifice from the other, which means nothing less then a demand fir their own self sacrifice (of their own set of values commensurate with their traits )

[iambiguous]

@Meno_

Interesting take, it disconcerns the veritable political aspects which may define identity as pinned between progressive and regressive forces.

That politics may or may not noticeably effect outcomes one way rather than in other ways, precludes weather the longer ranged plans pan out, or time becomes so essential that reactions are firmed to narrow choices.

Irresolute political inventions do become problematic, if excessive time elapses between the traits’ formative expectations, for example the failure of 5 year plans was very basic in the failure of the communist social experiment.

That ism on a social scale debunked the rhetoric Marx was pushing, whereby masses were reduced to comrades.

So the two levels of hierarchy of social intercourse, inversely reversed the ideological emphasis from uniformly nominal - toward a new ideology still looking for some kind of middle ground that is sought in the NWO.

Not that such presents a solution within a failed ideology, but an almost superior search for a midis operans on a minimal, deontologically level, bordering a metaphoric solution in terms of very general terms grounded in the most basic perimetric ideas possible.

This process is as necessary as it is constantly recursive, and tends to obliterate more recent tie ins.

It cuts to the chase, on a reboot to far earlier analogical processes, before social-psychological diversions may not yet be appropriate.

As such, the objective and subjective elements to argue, may yet be overly accentuated, as mere embellishments to shine up ivory tower infatuations.

We must GI back far earlier, than modern philosophy allows to make sense of such peculiarly designed assumptions as if modern philosophy was an end all of all discussion as far as reactive consciousness goes.
The unconscious plays a key part to overcome this peculiar way of defining the self in terms of the other and vicars versa

This is a problem that finds home mire in the hermeticism of affirmation that Nietzsche so well brings up, and it’s unfortunate the way it proceeded, as if the synthesis were to dampen the self rather then exalt in it.

That was a significant cross cultural moment in time, where certain indelible values were sacrificed , so that belief in the either or world of perception could have been raised to the idea professed. The is - ought world, then was understood not through the metaphor it trued to convey of longer ranged ideas befitting social harmony, instead reduced inversely into the either belonging or not into the dialectical absolutism of the late 18th century, hoping hope against hope that such a gamble will pay off in the eyes of those whose memory goes back merely to their last meal.

This doing away with the hope of a revival of essential elements become the traits we all gave to endure is but a very shirt sighted appeal to wait until the white of their eyes become apparent, and not to waste any more time in trying to attain politically based equilibrium , that in fact is sorely a reminder of some game of wait and see type effort to keep conflict under control, while bidding for time.

One arm will then necessarily demand sacrifice from the other, which means nothing less then a demand fir their own self sacrifice (of their own set of values commensurate with their traits )

Alan!

As always, thanks for stopping by and clearing things up for us.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

I tried