Groot was the best character in that show. Epic compliment towards Iambig.
In that case, should iamb not thank me!
with love,
sanjay
What Iambig should or shouldn’t do in regards to your Grooting him out is between the two of you.
Yes, it is between him and me.
I am just following his famous NOTE TO OTHERS.
With love
Sanjay
Let’s just agree to disagree then regarding the extent to which my chronology above is just “lots of theory”.
Instead, if someone were to ask me about my values pertaining to abortion, I could note the actual evolution of my thinking over the years as it intertwined both my own personal experiences and my contact with others who introduced different ways of thinking about it.
This as opposed to any number of moral objectivists who basically argue that, either through God or through Reason, one is able to arrive at an argument that enables all rational/virtuous people to know [epistemologically] what their obligation is when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy.
And, again, pertaining to an issue like abortion how are your own values not in turn a reflection of this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
I’m always looking for arguments that might actually succeed in yanking me up out of this dilemma. Especially from those who somehow manage to intertwine both God and Reason.
Though few are ever willing to explore in depth just how they manage to do this.
As I recall I noted the crucial factor [as always] revolved around your own experiences. As opposed to the experiences of others that were more positive. And there are still any number of folks who very much want to see socialism/communism prevail as the more rational political economy.
In other words, what they do is to note all of the terrible experiences that they had to endure living in a capitalist society.
How then is the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein and conflicting goods here obviated? Other than by you insisting that if others don’t think about Communism in exactly the same way in which you do they are wrong.
As though there exists some optimal set of experiences that enables us to ascertain this. You know, objectively.
I repeat the same arguments because over the years my philosophy [as a moral nihilist] is seen by me to be encompassed most succinctly in those arguments.
Why on earth would I feel compelled to rearrange the words to say the same thing in different ways?
Instead, I am looking for arguments from others [however many times they might wish to repeat them] that persuades me to change my mind regarding how I now connect the dots “out in the world”/“for all practical purposes” between the question, “how ought one to live?” and the manner in which I construe the meaning [the existential parameters] of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
Which is succinctly encompassed in this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
And then I ask objectivists like you to note how this is not applicable to them when their own values come into conflict with others.
Now, if you wish to equate this with me coming in here and posting “I am groot” over and over and over and over and over and over again, sure, be my guest. I am more than willing to allow others to make up their own minds about that.
In turn, I ask objectivists of your ilk to intertwine one of their own value judgments in an existential contraption like this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion [like premarital sex] was a sin. Big time. Both in and out of church.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
Though I am hardly ever surprised when they invariably refuse to. After all that would require them to connect those dots between the values that they espouse in the “society and government” forum and the manner in which they encompass valuing itself in an epistemological/intellectual/scholastic contraption in the “philosophy forum”.
In other words, you won’t even spend a few minutes considering what I said about. If you did think about it, then you might also come to see that your chronology does not show any practical application of philosophy.
The evolution of your thinking about abortion does not say anything about the legitimacy of the values.
An objectivist also have an evolution of values from childhood until the present moment.
One would have to evaluate the reasoning behind his values to determine whether he is right or wrong.
Change does not imply that there are no correct values or correct positions.
That’s the crucial factor for you and that’s precisely the problem in your approach. You think that it revolves around one’s own personal experience. You can’t get out of your own head. You can’t look to the outside.
The evaluation does not depend on one person or a small number of people … it depends on the entire society. A communist society is overall sicker than other systems.
A small number of people lived wonderful luxurious lives. That in itself is an argument against it.
If you bring it down to earth, then you evaluate the situation based on what many people experience. After all, the situation involves millions of people.
Morality applies to the many, not to the one narcissist who can rationalize his own behavior purely based on his own desires.
You never get out of the clouds of dasein and abstract conflicting goods, so you don’t actually listen to the arguments. Therefore, it always about an objectivists insisting something …
I could write about lack of food, limited goods in the stores, dirty boarded up buildings, waiting lists for apartments, waiting lists for getting a telephone line, informants spying on people, arrests in night, imprisonment without trial, limits on travel, limited access to books, movies and entertainment …
But why should I bother?
You’re just going to say that there is no way to evaluate that sort of stuff. You’re going to say that there is no right and wrong way to think about it.
As for professionalism in philosophy, I would say that I agree with you.
Yet, I do not think you really explain what that is.
Does that explain epistemology? Or professionalism in philosophy?
What is ‘academic’ analysis? Maybe a fetishistic use of words to give the impression to be really on top of the game? Per se that is not analysis… And anyway, in that respect, how would the use of “identity principle”, for instance, differ from “dasein”, or “existential contraptions”? That the identity principle may be written as A = A while the other two hint to something for which everyone probably has a different version?
Analysis in philosophy has been used since Plato, at least. An argument may become more or less plausible by using analysis, and I really fail to see that as being exclusive to epistemology – which, by the way, normally is not concerned with politics.
What I get from your post is that whatever is not concerned with something ‘existential’ is dishonest philosophy. And it seems that this adherence to ‘existence’ must be very, very tight.
Else
(I do agree on “invariably”).
A theory must be a theory of something… It’s got to mean something, else it would be nonsense, and that something has to have some relationship with “on earth” too. But it seems that to you it has meaning only inasmuch as it supports the business of daily life.
Now, to be fair, you concede that philosophy has not to always go there. Happily, I would add.
James – correctly in my view – points out the inadequacy of the fabric of concepts to represent the perception (or conception) of them. Yet he’s not claiming that it is meaningless, rather that it’s fatally flawed. But, see, a statement like that is… epistemology. Because even if everything must be sucked and confined into dasein, it does not exempt from asking what knowledge is, what does it mean knowing something, what makes it certain or non-certain (and what ‘certain’ is). Even if everything has to end up in ‘valuing’ and valuing in the context of dasein (which seems to be what philosophy is for in your view, but I may be wrong), you should presumably be valuing something that you think you know in a way – and analysis may come in pretty handy for a task like that.
Yes. In my view philosophy is not self-help.
This thing, philosophy I mean, would have never got started without the attempt to embrace an horizon that transcends, in space and time (and in value too, if you ask me), the floundering perspective of the ‘existential’. Of course, you might argue that that attempt is doomed. But then you are pretty likely to find yourself tangled into an epistemological argument.
The crux of the difference of arguments may lay in the perception of indeterminacy that exists between ontology (1+1=2), and epistemologically determined primacy.
In short I am Groot (1).
That is I am Groot (2).
with love,
sanjay
Well, sure, if I think about it in the manner in which you do, I will come to that conclusion. Of course, if you think about it in the manner in which I do you will come to my conclusion.
We can agree on that, right?
No, it merely situates my own values – situates them existentially out in a particular world. And then notes how over time my understanding of value judgments became intertwined in my understanding of identity, conflicting goods and political economy. Which then precipitated my dilemma above.
And then I ask folks like you to react to that. How is the manner in which I have come to understand these relationships existentially not the manner in which they do? How are they not entangled in my dilemma when their own value judgments come into conflict with others?
Yes, but, in my view, the objectivist then refuses to see this evolution as an existential contraption. Instead, many argue that their own values [re either God or Reason] reflect the optimal values. In other words, if you don’t share them you are not “one of us”.
Indeed, you might even be a “retard” or a “moron”.
Or an “infidel”.
And how is this evaluation any less embedded in daseins defending conflicting goods out in a world where political [and economic] power ultimately prevails?
I’m not arguing that correct values and positions do not exist. Instead, I’m asking those who argue that they do exist to close the gap between what they believe or claim to know “in their head” about right and wrong behavior and what they are then able to actually demonstrate all rational and moral men and women are obligated to do.
I’m only arguing that one’s personal experiences [at a particular historical and cultural juncture] are important factors to take into account when any particular individual tells you that he or she believes this or that about an issue like abortion. There are factors that transcend dasein: human sexuality, the biology of pregnancy, abortion as a medical procedure, the fact of this or that actual abortion etc.
But, with regard to the morality of it, where is the equivalent set of objective truths applicable to all of us?
And how is the manner in which you “look to the outside” with respect to Communism not just a political prejudice of yours? How do you demonstrate that those who do not share your own assessment of it as a “sicker” society, are necessarily wrong. How do those who assess capitalism as the “sicker” society able to do the same?
“Morality applies to the many”?!!
What on earth can that possibly mean when there are almost always many, many, many people on both sides of any particular moral and political conflagration?
And find me a single narcissist willing to concede that the way in which you value any one particular behavior reflects the one and only epistemologically sound manner in which to behave.
On the contrary, I am far more interested in examining what is thought to be “honest philosophy” as it pertains to this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Go ahead, take a shot at it.
In other words, in the course of living your life you bump into someone who strongly disagrees with a value judgment of yours. They come into conflict.
What then are the limitations [if any] of an “honest philosophy” in resolving this conflict?
Is there a philosophical solution?
Are the tools of philosophy able to assess the conflict such that you can derive your obligations as a rational and virtuous human being?
I am saddened of course that I have managed to reduce even you down to this sort of thing. 
[i][b]Bryan Magee
What Kant scholars are trying to understand, I take it, is Kant; and what Plato scholars are trying to understand is Plato; and so on. In that sense such writers are not objects of ultimate interest to me. What I am trying to understand is the world in which I find myself. I read the great philosophers because they enlighten me about what I am trying to understand…But in the final analysis what matters to me is not what they believe but what I believe. I am interested in their work in so far as it is grist for my mill. So I treat them not as objects of study in their own right, as a scholar would, but as life-enhancing companions and guides, shipmates cannier than I in a voyage of discovery on which we are all embarked. As for scholars, I respect their labor and have drawn great benefit from it, but the fact is that at the banquet of philosophy they are neither the cooks nor the gourmets but the waiters that run between the two.
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the pre-consciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What IS all this—what is the world?[/b][/i]
Now this immediately takes us to the immortal words of Tom Cruise from the film Days of Thunder. You know the ones.
He is in a bar with Robert Duvall and Duvall is explaining why he keeps losing all the damn races. Duvall goes into all of the technical jargon about tires and heat and racetracks and turns. Cruise is completely lost however and says so. That, of course, is the epiphanic moment. Cruise you see is a great race car driver. He has a ferocious passion [and gift] for it. But Duvall points out [and rightly so] that loving the sport and being exceptional at it are not necessarily interchangeable. You have to know how to drive Duvall tells him…professionally.
Same thing with philosophy. You might have a yearning to understand what the Great Minds are saying. And you can study them for years and years so that, in the end, you are able to finally say: “I understand Kant! I understand Hegel! I understand Heidegger!” But if that is largely the whole point of it for you…to be admired and respected as a great scholar…you are likely to be missing my point here.
Yes, it is certainly true: You can’t become a competent philosopher until you understand philosophy as a discipline. That, in fact, is why I will never be a great philosopher myself. Or, sure, even a competent one. Quite frankly, I lack the necessary mental acuity to be an exceptional thinker. I simply wasn’t born with the inherent cerebral credentials requisite to becoming A Brilliant Mind. Yet I feel my own contribution to the banquet is just as crucial. And that is because the motivation behind my own philosophical bent has always been a soaking curiosity about who I am and what I am doing “out in this particular world”. To, in other words, connect the dots between the words and concepts that evolve from philosophy as a discipline and the thing that matters most to us: grappling with this: How ought I to live?
The psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists determine what is rational and reasonable. Got it. :-"
Well… perhaps.
But it sounds terrific anyway. I enjoyed it.
No, sorry, I’d rather pass. I can neither go ahead, nor take a shot at it. I can just tell how much I find all this confusing.
I suppose the part in bold characters it’s some sentence that have been with you for some time yet and that every single word transudes meaning to you. But not to me.
I don’t get the exact meaning of dasein, but I guess there is no short answer for that. And even if there was one, I guess that also the choice of the expression “rooted in dasein” would deserve some explanation. (If that is to mean that discern right, wrong and desirable outcomes in a way that is deeply influenced by a (historical) context, where a person personal history and character have a part, then I would have no problem with it). Then, also “reaching a value” has not a clear meaning to me… Maybe it’s another way of saying “I can’t live according my own moral code”, because there’s a sort of decision problem, and you swing between conflicting judgements because you can’t tell which one is right. You acknowledge that there is a fracturing and fragmenting “I” in the way, but it’s not clear if decision is impossible because of the fragmenting I or for some problem inherent to values. Anyway you present this thesis that there are no objective values. If there were such objective values, then then there should be some philosophical device that makes the decision possible.
Surely this can be only wild speculation and in fact you have never meant anything like that. I just tried to figure that out, I am not claiming that’s the way it is.
How do I react to this? Well… as I am so unsure whether I understand that, I don’t feel I have much to say. It’s a way of framing things I am nowhere near to. Anyway, I am not defending any position you attack.
It seems to me that there is a conspicuous amount of assumptions to review, like that men are virtuous and rational and therefore they should philosophically dispel all ethical conflicts… free will for “reaching” values, “how I ought to live?”, “moral/political leaps”…
Thanks for your concern but you need not worry about me.
Did you forget that i am an objectivist, and objectivists does not change that easily!
By the way, you use to steal other posters quotes while i am looting yours.
At least you know what i am doing with your quotes, and can reply too.
with love,
sanjay
Or how about this:
Those on either side of any particular moral/political conflagration of note [especially the extremists] will often see those on the other side [especially the extremists] as precisely those things.
Why? Because they are not “one of us”.
My point is merely to suggest that those who insist that rational and virtuous behaviors can be embodied deontologically [re either God or Reason] have no philosophically sound argument to give to those who propose that, instead, in the absence of God, all things are permitted.
In other words, that all things can be rationalized from the perspective of self-gratification.
You merely shift gears to not getting caught.
Note to others:
Is there a philosophical argument that thumps the sociopath’s and the narcissist’s point of view once and for all?
Without God in the picture in other words.