Okay, let’s explore this. Given a particular context of your choice.
Are they not good enough because they don’t encompass how one acquires a personal identity out in the is/ought world as you do? And, in how you do, does that assume [as the objectivists among us insist of themselves] that how you construe your own Self in the world of conflicting moral and political and spiritual value judgments is how all others must as well…if they wish to be thought of as a rational man or woman?
As I note to gib here, the options seem to be…
That’s what interest me. Given a particular political conflagration in the news of late and given a particular context, what are your moral, political and/or spiritual convictions? And how do you see yourself as having come to acquire them?
To wit:
Note to others:
See? The same thing! Keep it all up in the clouds:
Any subject will do for me. As long as it revolves around an issue most of us here will be familiar with. And that you note what your moral/political convictions are. And how, in your view, you came to acquire them given the experiences that unfolded in your life, the people you met in regard to the issue and the information and the knowledge you accumulated pertaining to it as well.
My point being simply that, for any number reasons, events may have unfolded in your life such that you came to acquire different convictions.
Again, simply unbelievable. To me anyway. You claim a lack of clarity on your part in regard to this:
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Nothing from him.
This thread, that thread, any thread he pleases.
Just so he and I bring the discussion here around to how he and I construe the actual meaning of acquiring a “sense of identity” in regard to conflicting value judgements given a particular context.
Note to others:
Can you believe this?! It’s like he thinks he’s in a discussion with Satyr here!!!
wiggle wiggle wiggle
Unless of course I’m wrong. So, given a particular issue like the trucker protest, lets discuss and debate this instead.
Or, perhaps, we can try to imagine him taking that to the truckers.
[b]
[/b]
But, then, as with my own Three Stooges here – phyllo, karpel tunnel and felixdakat…remember them? – he has to make this all about me:
Any takers? Lorikeet?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I noted that in regard to a particular issue in a particular community, one or another combination of the above will unfold over time. In regard to both moral narratives and/or political/legal agendas.
Or perhaps he can cite actual historical instances where it unfolded otherwise. Up in the clouds, philosophically, say?
Well, of course, if there is a God and a Judgment Day then mere mortals have access to an omniscient and omnipotent entity able to demonstrate, well, everything, right?
But if there is no God, what then do they turn to demonstrate it in regard to the trucker protest around which this thread was created.
Yes, that is right: Iambiguous has misinterpreted Heidegger’s understanding of “Dasein” and uses this word in a pure Iambiguous-meaning, that is, valid only for himself. Iambiguous is a subjectivist, if not a solipsist, and his understanding of “Dasein” has nothing to do with Heidegger’s understanding of “Dasein”, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein within his fundamental ontology.
Only for those who do not understand what is meant by it.
“Being-in-the-world” can’t be shortened, because every single word in it is very well thought out and makes a very strong philosophical sense that you just do not understand. The term “In-der-Welt-Sein” (“being-in-the-world”) is about the preposition “in,” which has been studied here word-historically and means “in der Nähe von …” (“in the nearness of …”); and it is about the noun “Welt” (“world”) in the important sense that only man has “Welt” (“world”) and not, like other living beings, only a “Umwelt” (“environment”) and that man is “geworfen” (“thrown”) into this “Welt” (“world”) - cf. “Geworfenheit” (“thrownness”); “in” and “Welt” (“world”) belong quite closely together; and even more closely together with both belongs the substantited verb “Sein” (“being”), because only the human being who is in the “Welt” (“world”) can understand “Sein” (“being”) - which means: one needs a complex brain, and only humans have it, and humans are the only beings who are “in der Welt” (“in the world”).
Almost the whole world has dealt with Heidegger’s philosophy, Europe, North America and Australia anyway, but also Central and South America and East Asia in a very intensive way, West Asia and North Africa less, Black Africa not at all.
Are you from Black Africa, Magnus Anderson? Your name does not look and also not sound like that.
Absoluetely agreed.
You have raised a possibility here. And this is also what Heidegger’s “Dasein” is about: Dasein is exposed as a run-up into the actual possibility and at the same time as transcending the inner space of subjectivity. For Heidegger, the subject is not the starting point of “In-der-Welt-Sein” (“being-in-the-world”). This is primarily directed against the Cartesian subject-object dualism. According to Heidegger, Dasein is always already “In-der-Welt-Sein” (“being-in-the-world”). Heidegger has determined the existential that stretches it out, in which it finds its “Ganzsein-Können” (“being-whole-capability”), as “Sorge” (“care”).
The unique way of man to be is to be understood by Heidegger as “Dasein” (“being-there”). This is especially given by the adverb “da” (“there”), which brings us to “being-in” and thus basically back to “being-in-the-world” (see above). What Leibniz achieved with the term “pre-established harmony”, Heidegger achieved with the term “being-in-the-world”: overcoming the subject-object dualism. This is higly, very highly philosophical stuff.
That’s because I can’t address your arguments. They are too powerful for me to deal with. So I resort to attacking you instead. They call it “ad hominem”. I obviously love those. It has nothing to do with you and your nihilistic desire to destroy all certainty so that noone can criticize you. I was wrong when I doubted that you are a saint.
You think you did. But you didn’t. Who gets to decide whether or not you answered MY question? Is it me? Or is it you? Or maybe we should decide it democratically via popular vote?
If there is no goal, there is no game. And you obviously don’t want to provide us with one. You hide behind the word “demonstrate”. “Demonstrate to us that there are moral truths!”, you say, but you do not, and you obviously do not want to, explain what that actually entails. I guess it’s because if you do, it’s game over for you. As it is, you can just drag these discussions on and on.
Look, it’s not that the objectivists are dogmatic about their views. It’s that many insist that others are obligated morally, politically, and philosophically to embrace their own dogmatism in turn. The “one of us” [the smart good guys] vs. “one of them” [the dumb bad guys] mentality. The pinheads here even go so far as to call those who don’t kiss their ass “morons” and “idiots” and “libtards”. They’re not objectivists in feeling no reason to be. They’re objectivists because they feel others who don’t share their own dogmatic reasons are, as Satyr calls me, “iamretarded” and “iamastupidcunt”.
And, yeah, I did say that I believed in the objective reality of mathematics, science, the laws of nature, the empirical world, the rules of language. When have I ever suggested that in regard to the either/or world it’s also me against the world?
Which is why we always need to bring it back to the trucker protest. The crux of the problem there [assuming a free will world] is that the facts of it in the either/or world are applicable to all of us: the covid pandemic, the need for a government policy, the protest against a particular policy.
But how the protest is construed as a moral and a political issue has no equivalent of that. Except for the objectivists among us who insist that there is in fact an objective moral truth and political truth. And they know this because they have already found it. Their own political prejudice.
Again, just ask them.
Then the part here where you and I are grappling with how we come to acquire our own value judgments and the extent to which you claim to have this “there it is”, “brute fact”, “deep down inside me” Emotional Gib that “guides” you to a frame of mind that “somehow” transcends dasein.
Note to others:
What is it of late that brings out the “pinhead” in him? You know, in your own personal opinion rooted subjectively and existentially in dasein, of course.
Let’s just say we understand the meaning of the word “ultimately” here differently.
Mine:
Sure, existentially, who wouldn’t? But to never know for sure if anything that we think, feel, say and do is in fact of our own volition?
Again, you don’t even know if posting this is or is not but an inherent manifestation of the only possible reality. Or does the Emotional Gib pin this down for you too?
Seek power over each other? Here?! Pray tell how that works. And the consequences of it.
And, again, for me all we can do here is to make a distinction between what we claim to think or know or believe is the truth “in our head” and what we can actually demonstrate is in fact the truth for all rational men and women. Whether in regard to the trucker protect and justice or in regard to how the human brain is or is not wholly in sync with the laws of matter.
Huh? It’s how my life unfolded existentially in regard to my views on abortion. The experiences I had, the people I interacted with and the information and knowledge that came my way. Others will have led very different lives. So, of course the communication here will often break down.
So, Mr. Philosopher, Mr. Ethicist, Mr. Political Scientist, given that what’s the best you can come up with?
Or, yeah, those like you and Maia with Emotional and Spiritual Selves that keep you on the right track. Your very own One True Path that no one else can possibly be on. Not as you are.
What else is there but for others, in regard to abortion or some other moral conflict, to note in turn their own existential trajectory…their own experiences, interactions and accumulation of points of view. See if we can narrow the communication gap. Only you have this mysterious Emotional Self to fall back on. To paraphrase what I noted to Maia on another thread…
“The part that, to me, seems to just “be there” for you. Almost as though you were born with a pro-trucker gene or something. Your brain being, what, hard-wired chemically and neurologically to compel you to think and feel what you must about them?”
Sure, if they all embrace the same political prejudices. And then watch Fox News instead of MSNBC. It’s just that for thousands of years now the “one of us smart, good guys” objectivist cliques feel little but contempt for the “one of them dumb, bad guys” claque. While never of course giving much thought to my frame of mind. Too, uh, problematic for those fiercely attached to the psychology of objectivism. It’s just that some like you and Maia have what I deem to be a particularly slick challenge-proof agenda. The “brute fact” embodiment of “there it is”.
Well, maybe if was an Orioles game.
Oh, right. Those who really do believe that the globalist pedophiles in the Democratic Party in cahoots with the CCP cooked up the covid virus in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. Good point.
Okay, but not all of them have a final arbiter…an Emotional Self that allows them to understand things…genetically?
On the other hand, had your life been different you might not have come to think that way about dasein, right?
Which [once again] prompts me to imagine you explaining that to the truckers themselves. Or to the pinheads here.
Beautiful. It’s “just what I feel”. It’s “just me”. End of discussion. And then, as with Maia, what, those all around you are justified in feeling and being who they “just are” as well? I “just feel” the government is right. I “just feel” that the government is wrong. I “just feel” that aboution is okay. I “just feel” that abortion is not okay. That ought to solve a lot of political conflicts.
Or, rather, at least theoretically here in a world of words. And, besides, their worldview isn’t really relevant when push comes to shove because existentially that could have been anything. Nope, re their God or their genes or their brain chemically and neurologically, they need to dig down deep enough to discover their Real Me…their Emotional Self. The “Brute Fact” of it. So, forget about figuring it all out. That part will always be fuzzy.
This just becomes all the more “mystical” to me. You strike out “should” here because it’s not even about that at all. It’s that you just do support them. Like on automatic pilot that just “somehow” comes from your brain. Or from your “heart and soul”?
Note to others:
Take a crack at it. In regard to the truckers, how do you imagine he’d explain it to them?
Sure, but we clearly understand that in very different ways.
Right, like how hard can it be to know when it stops being one and starts being the other? You actually think you know this in regard to your Emotional Self and the truckers?
I’ve got intuitions. And I’ve explained how my thoughts and emotions and intuitions have come to be intertwined existentially given my experiences over the years. I just don’t have them as you do…as practically this “entity” dwelling deep down inside me that propels my reactions to things like trucker protests. What I don’t understand is where you draw the line between emotions and intuitions which you acknowledge are rooted existentially in dasein but then “somehow” transcend that to nail down how to simply “just react” to things like the truckers. And [especially] in how you would go about explaining it to them. And to the fulminating fanatic pinheads here.
You say…
Is it even possible to get any vaguer regarding how this actually unfolds inside your head?
Okay, sure, we all come into the world hard-wired biologically/genetically to experience the emotion anger. But in regard to the trucker protest what and who some are infuriated with others embrace enthusiastically. Now I root this in dasein. And so do you. But you’ve got this “down deeper” emotional Self that propels your reaction to it simply…just as you do. But then those on the other side can say the same thing. It’s like everybody’s brain brings about reactions that have nothing to do with rational or right or should or ought. You just react as you must.
Okay, so how close to or far away from full-blown determinism itself is this?
Then in regard to the trucker protest, whatever this…
…means.
Note to others:
How do you imagine the truckers and the Canadian government officials reacting to it?
Unless, of course, you are satisfied with this explanation:
The covid virus, the truckers, the government and rocks. They all exist. Let’s just leave it at that?
Raise about what? The trucker protest? Or arithmetic?
We think and we feel what we do about the world around us based on the historical and cultural and social and political and economic contexts that we are existentially familiar with. And on our indoctrination as children. And on our own uniquely personal experiences. After I met Reverend Deerdorf and became a devout Christian, I came to think good things about God and feel good things about Him. Then in Song Be I met soldiers who changed my thinking about both religion and politics. My emotions began to shift as well. Instead of loving God I began to feel that religion itself really was the “opiate of the people”. Instead of feeling good things about capitalism, I began to feel bad things about it. But never do I recall having a deep down inside me Emotional Self that was “somehow” completely immune to my new accumulation of experiences.
Again: good for you. But that is not at all how thinking and feeling became intertwined for me over the years.
Thus…
No, I believe that in many profoundly problematic ways, our thoughts and our emotions are rooted in sets of circumstance that we can never fully grasp or control. That’s what political prejudices are for me: existential leaps.
That’s a far cry, however, from “I have these emotions that happen to be pro-trucker and I can’t help it!!!”. We can change our thinking about things like capitalism vs. socialism, I vs. we, genes vs. memes, idealism vs. pragmatism, religion vs. atheism. And when we do, over time, that can prompt us to feel differently about them too.
It’s just that for the objectivists among us that can become disturbing. Why? Because what if it dawns on them [as it did on me] that the whole point of sustaining their thoughts and feelings revolved around finding something that would allow them to anchor their Self to the psychology of objectivism.
Now, in my view, your own rendition of objectivism revolves not around ideology or religion but around these “deep down” emotions you anchor your Self to. It’s having the anchor itself that counts. What the anchor is can be anything. For you, your emotions. For Maia, her spirituality.
Sure, but given the extent to which both my thoughts and feelings are deemed by me to be profoundly rooted in and derived from dasein, how much actual trust can I put in them by way of feeling comforted and consoled? So, since I can’t react to my emotions as you do how is that not a fundamental difference?
Right, like those on the other side don’t feel equally as angered at the truckers for protesting what they see to be vital, necessary policies given the over 4,000,000 cases and 47,000 plus deaths. And like for them your own “mantras” aren’t equally banal and trivial.
Only unlike most of them, you’re here admitting that you might be against the truckers and for the government had your life unfolded along a very different trajectory. But even if you thought that way, you’d still be angry at the government. Why? For pursuing policies that you think are good ones!!!
No, my focus is mainly on the “psychology of objectivism”…on the part where someone has found a moral and political font into which they can anchor their Self. It’s that which allows them to maintain a crucial distance between feeling like an “infinitesimally insignificant speck in the vastness of all there is” and being convinced there is a part of them that is “somehow” connected to something more substantial. For Maia, it’s a spiritual connection to the Goddess, to Nature. For you it’s, well, damned if I know what that is yet. Let alone when it comes from. Other than in you being able to tell yourself, “there it is”!! That mysterious [to me] “wellspring” of your “satisfaction”.
Then whatever this…
…means to you. And, yeah, I’m not foolish enough to insist that there is no possibility that I might figure out a way to yank myself up out of the hole that, after all, “I” dug for myself. But let’s just agree to disagree regarding what constitutes healthy vs. unhealthy comfort and consolation. Yours seems [to me] to revolve around the “brute fact” of the Emotional Gib. Whereas to me it sounds like you are being led around by nose…by something that you flat out admit you don’t really understand at all. Instead: “There it is. I feel like supporting the truckers. Why? Because it satisfies me. Why? Because that’s just how I feel!!”
Also, those on the other side. Those "fulminating fanatic objectivists here who support the government intellectually, emotionally and intuitively.
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From my frame of mind, you’re both just different sides of the same coin. But, sure, any folks here who embrace the government given an emotional impetus similar to gib’s?
Again, back to the truckers. In a No God world, what is the “reality” that either cares or doesn’t care? There’s only the reality of the covid pandemic, the government response to it and how those policies impact on actual flesh and blood human beings. I’m merely noting that there are any number of objectivists who do anchor their sense of reality essentially in things like God and Nature and political ideology and, philosophically, deontological assessments.
Again: unbelievable! My point is not that human beings don’t come into the world with the inherent capacity to think and to feel and [in the complex ways thinking and feeling can come together “in our head”] to intuit. But that these “gut feelings” are no less derived existentially from dasein. And in ways that are considerably more integrated than you believe.
Thus…
Right, at least until the Emotional Gib takes charge and hammers the memes [like Satyr?] into that which satisfies you most.
But maybe…robotic? It’s more chemical and neurological, but it’s our brain that calls the shots?
No, really, how is it not robotic if it is pretty much beyond you understanding or controlling your own reactions to things like the trucker protest?
Again, let’s be clear about this. The all but robotic emotional folks who support the truckers come upon the all but robotic emotional folks who support the government. They then pat each other on the back, and shout “there they are”?!
It’s a good thing, perhaps, that you don’t think this through too deeply. What with that all but robotic satisfaction on the line.
Thus, from my frame of mind…
Come on, either your emotions and intuitions comfort and console you or they don’t. And you will either do what you can to sustain them [cling to them] or you won’t. I’m just noting that when I was myself an objectivist [spiritually, ideologically] that comforted me Intellectually and [eventually] emotionally. But as an objectivist, others were successful in challenging me as I flitted from one objectivist font to the next. It’s when objectivism itself crumbled for me that my thinking and my feeling both began to fracture and fragment. And trust me: not much of this was “theoretical” for me.
Where does that come from? How on Earth does Maia strike you as a 14 year old? She is certainly a mature woman to me.
This must be the “emotional Gib” apprising you. I don’t see much thought going into it.
What am I obsessing about? I accept that she has lived a life very, very different from mine. I accept that her experiences predisposed her to value judgments very different from mine. I accept the circumstantial gaps between us.
So, while, yes, I would love to be a part of her life emotionally, sexually, and romantically, that is simply unrealistic. And however she feels about me. And a part of me is, after all, “after” her own objectivist Self. I want to bring her more in alignment with my own frame of mind. Why would I not?
But: I can’t rule out the possibility that something she posts might click with that the part of me open to acquiring a more spiritual assessment of my own life.
But then I have always been attracted to intelligent, articulate women and so, over the course of our exchange here and in emails, sure, a part of me wondered if perhaps I could manage to bring her down into the hole with me. To share that. To feel closer to her in being able to share that.
But. yeah, she may well be thinking to herself, “no fucking way that will ever happen”! She might feel repulsed at the thought of it. But that’s something I have no real control over at all. But it doesn’t change how I feel about her. At least “here and now”.
Back to Charlie and Donald.
Unbelievable!
Again, in other words. How many times do I have to point out that I don’t exclude my own point of view from my own point of view? All of my own value judgments are political prejudices. And I would be an objectivist here only to the extent that I insisted that all rational men and women are obligated to embrace them in turn.
I can’t demonstrate that objectivism is dangerous…objectively. Any more than I can demonstrate that any particular objectivist among us is wrong.
Yet, here you go…
Incredible. Over and again, I suggest to those who are objectivists among us that we focus in on a particular moral conflict given a particular context. Explore our respective moral philosophies at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy.
Here it revolves around the trucker protest. But any other one will do for me. Some objectivists among us are intent not only with applying their own philosophy to themselves…but to everyone else as well.
As well, how many times have I noted that moral nihilism can be equally dangerous to the world. How many times have I pointed to the “show me the money” moral nihilists who own and operate the capitalist global economy? How many times have I connected the dots between moral nihilism and sociopaths?
Instead, on the constructive side, I note that moral nihilism can provide us with considerably more options in life. After all, the objectivists among us describe their own moral philosophy as revolving around one or another rendition of “what would Jesus do?” Their lives revolve entirely around ever and always doing the right thing. You, pleasing the emotional Gib, Maia pleasing the Goddess. MagsJ pleasing her “intrinsic Self.”
I challenge you to note a single instance where I have ever suggested anything of the sort. The fact that I attribute my own reactions to political prejudices rooted existentially in dasein and ever subject change given new experiences…what on earth do you think that entails “for all practical purposes”?
I’m sorry, but this sort of thing from you only confirms for me that you may well be more of a pinhead than I feared. Or, at any rate, the Emotional Gib is. How demoralizing to be this far along in our discussion and to get this from you.
No, because that focuses entirely on how we think and feel about each other “here and now”. Based on our past exchanges. But something I post in the present and the future might convince her to come down into the hole with me. And, once down here with me, a more intimate relationship between us may be possible. And, of course, the other way around. Something she posts might prompting me up out of the hole.
Like hell I do. All of my “intellectual contraptions” pertaining to a Real Me, an Intrinsic Self, a Spiritual Self, an Emotional Self are yanked down to things like the trucker protest and abortion and MAGA.
Fine. We can agree to disagree about that too. I just didn’t possess an Emotional Iambiguous to provide me with a much smugger assessment.
Note to others:
Carefully consider both of our points about this. Then get back to us on this shit angle. Your own conclusions.
I do note time and again on various threads that in regard to the either/or world one’s Self can be intact. How on earth could we go about the business of interacting from day to day if that were not the case?
You make what, in my view, are ridiculous accusations of this sort more and more of late. Time to have a sit down with the Emotional Gib, perhaps?
I addressed that:
Note to others:
Is he cracking up?
Indeed, just as in regard to the trucker protest there aren’t nearly as many conflicts revolving around the fact of the covid pandemic, the fact of the government’s policy in response to it and the fact of the trucker protest.
Why? Because they revolve less around the facts pertaining to baseball and football and more around value judgments in conflict over which is the better sport. So, which sport does the Emotional Gib garner the most satisfaction from. And does that clinch it for you regarding which is the better sport?
Yeah, as long as you are able to convince yourself that one team – uh, the home team? – is better than any other team, you’re intact. Gasp! Who woulda thunk it?!! Even if the home team is dead last in the standings?
Again, who here is saying that? What I’m wondering is how being a father, an artist, a software developer etc., is connected by the Emotional Gib to supporting the truckers.
And then all of this…
How on earth could I possibly have a clue as to what this all has to do with the trucker protest since I don’t have a clue as to what on earth it’s like being the Emotional Gib.
Again, the title of this thread is not, “Hey Biggy, we GOT a context!!! I’m a father, an artist, and a software developer”
The link that just took me back to this thread from last February?
Okay, where in that wall of words there do you address my point here? And the 16-year-old girl isn’t really the point. It could be anyone over the course of your life that for one reason or another you might have met [re the Benjamin Button clip] that, had you, did manage to change your life dramatically.
For me, Danny, Mac, John and Steve in Song be. And then later right here in Baltimore, Supannika.
It’s really no different [to me] from the answer I gave you regarding being a fathers, an artists, etc. and supporting the truckers.
Hitler’s intact self from the perspective of the Nazis or the Jews? Instead, where we part company here is in how my “self” is fractured and fragmented in regard to conflicting goods and you have access to the “brute fact” that is the Emotional Gib.
Right, and what does feeling dogmatic have to do with feeling intact? And what I seek is a frame of mind that convinces me that my own life is not essentially meaningless and purposeless, does not end in oblivion and is able to differentiate between good and evil behavior.
Though, sure, of course any new objectivist font I anchor myself to might be deemed dangerous by others. But at least I’d be snuggly comforted and consoled again. My point here always revolves around an omniscient and omnipotent God. If He is not around, why my intactness and not yours? Why our intactness and not theirs? Which mere mortals get to decide that? Either the Wrong thing or the Right Thing?
When have I ever not intertwined objectivism and dogmatism? No, what really becomes crucial here is the extent to which these dogmatic objectivists are, in any communities [online or off], able to obtain power.
Think for example Twitter and Elon Musk.
Again: however one might explain your thinking, with the thinking part itself ever and always under the heel of the Emotional Gib what difference does it really make what you think at all?
I’m sorry, but how preposterous is that?! Of course it matters. For over two decades these prejudices were hammered into me.
No, still an existential prejudice from which to understand you “here and now”.
What mystery? To me it’s plain as day. No, what’s mysterious to me is how one acquires an Emotional Self…and one in which he acknowledges he has little true understanding of and control over. That it is largely “just there”.
Huh? They are already diluted down to the point where on issue after issue I have become considerably more ambivalent. And let’s not forget, I wasn’t just in contact with leftist ideas…I was a full-blown political activist. The prejudices were particularly deep.
Again, in my view, this is just the Emotional Gig calling the shots. The Gib that really does believe he “gets me” better than “I” do myself!
Spock?!!!
Name a context.
To wit:
Right. Just not counting the truckers at the protest? Or the fulminating fanatic objectivists here?
Sure, there are historical and cultural and interpersonal continuities and overlaps. But, come on, when we get down to the “there they are”, “brute facts” embedded in the Emotional Self? And, after all, if the focus is on the continuities and overlaps, then how do you explain all of the teeming conflicts that erupt in regard to issue after issue after issue? When have the newpaper and the news media ever not been full of them?
[/quote]
Cue the pinhead:
Note to others:
How many here are “nearly the same” as gib in their thinking? Now, on the plus side, if you embrace your own Emotional Self you can then care about and be satisfied with, well, practically anything right? Left, right… liberal, conservative…Nazi, Communist…God, No God. It’s all “just there” for you.
Is that something like being a “free will determinist?”
You can’t pat the truckers on the back and exclaim “I’m with you all the way politically!”, but you can give them a wink and assure them, “you might be completely wrong about protesting but I don’t feel guilty about supporting you!!”
Again, what I wouldn’t give to note their reaction to that.
Who is saying anything about you being wrong here? If you genuinely feel that it is right, then, again, good for you. It comforts and consoles you. You’ve found something to anchor the Real Me to: your emotions. Derived from dasein, sure, but not enough to leave you unsatisfied.
And, besides, as you point out over and again, how much understanding and control can you ever really have about “there it is”.
But you don’t really know for sure why they are there to make things right for you. Just as those like you on the side of the government don’t really know either. Lucky for both of you then and it is all “just there” for everyone.
Why shock? She’s not entitled to have her own frame of mind, her own feelings about her own sexuality? No, what I’m curious about is how she connects the dots between being blind and choosing to remain a virgin. If there is a connection. But no way would I ever criticize her for doing what she is herself most comfortable with. It brings her satisfaction and it surely does not bring any harm to any others.
Of course. Given the extent to which we have been exchanging thoughts and feelings online and through emails.
Again, as I noted to her, sexual matters can be discussed in a philosophy forum “without things getting creepy or salacious”.
I don’t demand any rigor. I request only of others that to the best of their ability they attempt to describe their own “sense of identity”. And, in particular, as it pertains to their value judgments in the is/ought world. Also, given a particular set of circumstances. Especially one in which how others have come to understand their Self/“self” precipitates “social, political and economic” conflict. The part where the assessments are not “good enough” to end the conflict.
And, given the points I rasie in my signatute threads and this…
…someone might expect me to know?
Yes. Existentially, subjectively, given the life I have lived to date, this is how “here and now”, I think and feel about conflicting goods.
On the contrary, in my view, the Emotional Gib is “for all practical purposes” nothing at all like the fractured and fragmented iambiguous. He gets to sustain his comfort and consolation and satisfaction when supporting the truckers. And when he says “I don’t know” he gets to fall back on the “brute facts” embedded in “there it is”.
In other words, there’s only his introspection. If iambiguous is not satisfied with his own assessment of “I don’t know” then he is not really able to introspect at all.
Introspection equals satisfaction. Just as, in my view, objectivism equals satisfaction.
Or, perhaps, you’re not asking the right question?
How many times must I repeat it: that mine like yours, in being derived existentially from dasein, is derived from lives lived that can be very, very different. So, in the absence of a definitive assessment that renders mere prejudices obsolete, I would never insist that in regard to things like the trucker protest, it’s mine and not yours.
And “black” and “white” in regard to what aspect of the trucker protest? That it occurred in Haiti and not Canada? That the protesters are the good guys and not the bad guys?
Again: huh?
I’m arguing that there does not appear to be a way [philosophically or otherwise] to resolve that. And of course when someone notes their prejudices one will be curious as to how they came to encompass them. No, it’s only when the objectivists among shrug off the part about dasein and insist it’s “resolved” when everyone thinks like they do that I demur…
But…
How it works?
1] you have basic needs like all the rest of us…the need for food, water, clothing, shelter, defense
2] these basic needs revolve around “the part where we are born and raised in different historical and cultural and social and political and economic contests”
3] this comes to play an important part in how we come to acquire a “sense of self”
4] but while we all share this in common, each of us as individuals may have lives that unfold given a truly eclectic collection of very, very different experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge
5] some, however, still manage to stay more or less intact all the way to the grave…even in regard to their value judgments
Exactly! That’s the whole point of bringing all of this to bear in regard to our individual thoughts and feeling and intuitions pertaining to things like the trucker protest. We can anchor ourselves to the facts of it. But less so to the moral and political conflicts that swirl around it. Only considerably less so here for me because I don’t have access to this genetic brain induced Emotional Self that is “just there” for me.
Okay, but did taking a shit come up in the media reporting on the protest? And reasonable from whose point of view? From whose Emotional Self?
To those things that all rational men and women can agree are in fact true for those on both sides. But what of those things they are in conflict regarding?
All I can do here is to note that if I am in a discussion with someone about taking a shit as a biological function and an inning-by-inning assessment of the Mets game, how controversial is it going to get? But if I take a big shit on his living room floor and jeeringly mock him for being a Mets fan…?
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Again, though: Right? You do need your precious Emotional Self to – presto! – just be there for you so you don’t start to fracture and fragment.
That doesn’t work for me. Relativists might assume that while there is no universal truth applicable to the trucker protest, if you grasp the facts as all rational men and women ought to, a truth relative to those facts is possible. This is how I always imagined von rivers here approaching morality. Only, to the best of my knowledge, his own “local” objectivism was rooted philosophically in ethics. And not in anything analogous to an Emotional Self.
Thus…
Yeah, but I note that in order to explain how it is an important factor in my having become “fractured and fragmented”. You admit you don’t fully understand or control your Emotional Self…but so what: it’s still “just there” to keep you supporting the truckers. And it’s the support you feel that sustains your comfort, consolation and satisfaction.
Which I then suggest is the reason you are able to “think up” this assessment of your emotions. That it does comfort and console and satisfy you. But you won’t go there because that’s too close for comfort to how I think and feel about it.
You’re just another objectivist with a particular unique rendition of the “psychology of objectivism”.
Over and over and over and over again: when I express things like this, I am always acknowledging that I am no less included in my own point of view. I’m not saying that people are weak here in that I can demonstrate this such that all rational men and women are obligated to agree with me. I’m merely noting that in my own personal opinion “here and now”, rooted subjectively in dasein, those who embrace God and religion appear weak to me.
Face it? I’m terrified of it. And precisely because I lose all of this…
Also, Heidegger does not stand for all of German philosophy. I mentioned Leibniz, for example. Leibniz was a genius, a philosopher, mathematician, physicist and thus scientist and technician, besides being a political advisor. Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus and built the first functioning calculating machine. In the age of reason belong on the German philosophy side also e.g. Wolff, who knew nothing but reason, and e.g. Kant, who however also, namely with his late philosophy, as the first recognized the borders of reason and thus accomplished the transition from reason to idealism. The age of reason was now over. As far as the rationalism of the 19th century was concerned, on the German philosophical side, Frege, the founder of logistics as the modern mathematical logic and founder of modern semantics, and e.g. the Viennese School as well as e.g. the logistic-methodological direction of the Neu-Kantianism, were the most prominent. Now Heidegger was quite open-minded towards all these directions; but he saw in them a dead end, and in my opinion rightly so, because the whole direction everywhere at that time had already left the area of philosophy, especially its actual core area (ontology or metaphysics), to a large extent, some of them even boasted to have left metaphysics or ontolgy behind. But what is the use of a philosophy that only wants to be mathematics and physics? For both mathematics and physics had left philosophy long ago. And philosophy must also be more than philosophy of science. It must do justice to its own claims. Otherwise it will perish. Heidegger wanted to save philosophy.
Please do not always quote excerpts from my text for rhetorical purposes, but the whole text or at least a context from it, so that the argumentation is not lost.
I find that Iambiguous has a very stubborn concept of “Dasein” that is far different from Heidegger. He misuses this term, namely to conceal his subjectivism or, what is more likely, his solipsism on the one hand, and to substantiate it “objectively”, i.e. pseudo-objectively, on the other hand. What he does here is rhetoric!
Well the writers are, in my view, in the same boat we’re all in: blind to things in their lives that others see more clearly. Not literally blind but in regard to things that different people see in different ways. The part that for me revolves around dasein…and for you as well. But the part which, unlike you, I don’t have access to a spiritual Self to guide me.
The part where, as a result of that, those who do have access to a spiritual Self are likely to be less ambiguous, ambivalent, confused or uncertain regarding things which I experience in more fractured and fragmented pieces.
Here, of course, all we can do is attempt to explain our respective thoughts and feelings to each other about these things. Maybe something will eventually click, maybe not. What’s crucial in my view is this: either one of us encountering a new, truly dramatic experience that prompts us to think and feel about things like moral values and sexuality differently. Though, again, to the extent that you retain your more instinctive “core spiritual self”, you are, in my opinion, likely to just subsume the experience in that. And that is because, also in my opinion, psychological defense mechanisms exists in order that we might sustain the “most comforting and consoling” frame of mind. With exceptions like me.
Well, if it is just an event that occurs once a year around the Summer Solstice…an event that Pagans attend and then go back to their respective homes…that’s not the same as a community of Pagans interacting as a community of Pagans all year round. That would interest me less than a Pagan community more along the lines of the Amish. Those who live “apart” from the larger society as a result of their religious or spiritual beliefs.
I think you’re right. But I’d still suspect that their reactions would revolve less around probing my points introspectively and more around rejecting them because if my frame of mind was something that they might come to concur with in regard to themselves, that might result in them having to abandon their own “comforting and consoling” frame of mind. As I did once myself.
After all, from my frame of mind, objectivism itself revolves around the psychology of objectivism.
In other words, it’s not what one believes but that one does believe in something – anything – that allows them to anchor their Self to that which makes them feel less like an “infinitesimally, insignificant speck of existence in the staggering vastness of all there is”.
Okay, in regard to the trucker protest or to some other “moral conflagration” of note, let’s explore our respective moral philosophies.
As for Heidegger’s Dasein, I’m less intrigued with it as a philosophical contraption, and more intrigued with how he might have made that applicable to, say, the Nazis?
You’re basically agreeing with me but just wording it differently so that it seems like you aren’t.
Well, if you’re going to deny it’s the dogmatists you’re really pushing against, then you’re essentially generalizing to all objectivists, which makes you a hypocrite in regards to the either/or world.
Maybe you need to.
Oh, I don’t know, maybe when it gets to the point where it’s more productive to troll you than to take you seriously.
Oh God, now we have to worry about that?
Sure! You want to be right, don’t you? To win the debate? You want to look smarter than me, don’t you? To the many onlookers reading this thread? You want to impress Maia, don’t you? You want to convince me of your point of view, don’t you? Spread your doctrine to as many listeners as you can? Don’t kid yourself, that’s seeking power. It’s just fortunate that the search for truth sometimes coincides with the search for power, and we can sometimes share in greater power when we cooperate together to find the truth than to battle each other for power kept all for ourselves. But I don’t know if you’ll ever know the former since you’ve grown so accustomed to being a contrarian and a leftist that you probably don’t know any other world.
Now I don’t even know what question you think you’re answering, so I’ll bring it back into perspective. The question was: how do you expect people to rise to your challenge–to give you a demonstration of their beliefs that all people must agree with if they are to be seen as rational and virtuous–when the only way to do that is to give you intellectual contraptions, the very things you invariably dismiss because they’re intellectual contraptions? ← Think you can keep focused on that for just one post?
Ok, existential trajectories and past experiences instead of intellectual contraptions. Is it possible to meet your challenge with existential trajectories and past experiences? What does that even mean? What would an example of that be?
The brute fact that I have certain emotions? Geez, what a radical claim I must be making. I mean, who could ever introspect to find–gasp–emotions in their own head!
But seriously, I’m starting to see this kind of venting from you more and more… almost as if you’re getting comfortable telling us what you really think–what you think of the pinhead objectivist dogmatists–as though bitching about them is what you really want to do here, and there’s becoming exceedingly less holding you back. I just wonder if there’ll ever come a day when you look in the mirror and see exactly that which you’ve been bitching about.
Ok, let’s pause on this, because this is not a proper response. I already told you I don’t get what this would prove (to you or to me). Which means that I’m left still saying that I support the truckers but supporting them falls short of saying I believe they’re morally right. All I get out of imagining saying this to the truckers is that it would sound weird–and it does! Even to me!–but I know what I mean by it and I stand by it. Do we need to go in depth about what I mean by this? Do you understand what I mean by this (other than your own concocted interpretation that I have an “emotional self” that transcends dasein)? Or does the prospect of inquiring about this scare you too much? Does the prospect of exploring a point of view or a mind set different from your own mean having to leave your cognitive comfort zone, that narrow mental sanctuary you built for yourself to preserve your comfort and consolation?
Note to others…
Don’t you just love how this drives Biggy crazy. He just can’t stand that people can feel the way they do without having a reason. Without knowing why. They can know how they feel. They can introspect and see it. They can admit how they feel. They can do so without hesitation. And they can accept how they feel. And there’s nothing he can do about it. It infuriates him to the point of insanity. I can even say literally. Look at the delusions he has to come up with to convince himself it’s nonsense:
I picture Biggy stomping his feet and waving his fist in the air as he bellows out this temper tantrum.
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I’m not saying I have no free will, I’m just saying this is true about what stirs my emotions. ← That seems to be on auto-pilot. Now what I do in response to these emotions is, of course, my choice. I could suppress them. Deny them. I could let them run wild with my thoughts (but I think that’s the path to pinhead-town). I could just sorta let them pass through my mind. Or I could let them govern my actions, or my decisions on what actions to take.
While the trucker protest was in full sway here in Canada, I chose the latter. I even went to a pro-trucker meeting to see how I could help. But alas, the protest was soon squashed and died a quick death, so that was the end of one of the rare occasions in my life when I almost became politically active.
Another thing I could do with my emotions is allow them to drive the construction of arguments and philosophies about why it’s morally right to support the truckers and why the Trudeau government are the “bad guys”… but I never really did that, not in earnest. ← I think this is what you’re expecting people to do when they feel a certain way (emotionally) about this or that contentious topic. I never did. I never committed myself to this anyway. Sure, I let my emotions push certain pro-truckers/anti-government thoughts into my head, but nothing I didn’t immediately second guess because I understood they were coming from a (very) fallible source (you call it dasein). So whatever pro-trucker/anti-government thoughts my emotions pushed into my mind, they kinda left my mind just as easily. Nothing really “stuck”.
Still, I think I have to say my “position” on the trucker protest is pro-trucker because I think a “position” can still be grounded in emotion, not always intellectual/philosophical thought. And so long as my emotions are “automatically” pro-trucker (on auto-pilot as it were) so is my position.
This is good, Biggy. This is progress. You made the right move by isolating the should. I know this makes my point seem mystical to you, but stay with the mystery for a bit. Don’t run from it and hide behind the protective wall of your invented interpretations. Stay with it and let’s mull over it a bit so that slowly, eventually, with your best listening cap on, we can (hopefully) make it less mysterious.
Actually, we don’t. Not as much as you’d like to think. You just look for the differences so that you don’t have to agree with me, and then those differences become important.
Then admit it. Admit there is a part of yourself that wishes not to understand.
YES!!! Exactly!
Beats me. All I know is that the emotions we carry with us are pretty powerful determining forces. Whether that makes it “full blown” determinism depends on what you mean by that. Do you mean the entire universe is fully, exhaustively deterministic? Or just our lives? Just our emotions? I certainly don’t think that the fact of our having emotions, even if we can’t help it, rules out free will.
Yes, Biggy, please! Pretty, pretty please with whipped cream and a cherry on top! Because that’s all I ever meant to say. I have nothing to say about what exists in your is/ought world.
What boggles my mind is why this should boggle your mind–you know, since you of all people should understand what implications dasein has for the is/ought world–that nothing really definitive can be said therein
A couple things…
You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. You’re trying to say we’re governed by forces we don’t understand and can’t control and yet we have full control over our attitudes and what we believe–over a time span no less of (what?) 5 years? 10 years? Even if I sincerely intended right here and now to change my attitude about the truckers (going from pro-trucker to anti-trucker), it likely wouldn’t be long (maybe a week) before I changed my mind or gave up on the prospect. Why? Because of psychological and social forces outside my control. If it were true that we have full control over our attitudes and beliefs such that we could change them over a certain period of time, you’d have a way out of your dilemma. All you’d have to do to pull yourself out of your hole is adopt a different attitude and set of beliefs. But instead, you’re waiting for someone to come along and pull you out, to change your attitude and beliefs (despite all your efforts to the contrary)–IOW, you’re waiting for some external force to do it for you.
You’re not asking me what my emotional state towards the truckers will be in 5 years, 10 years, however long–given the assumption that I will willingly change my attitude and beliefs in regards to them–you’re asking what it is now; and right now, I am pro-trucker in my feelings. And that’s not something I can turn on and off at will like a light switch.
Because you’re still seeking emotional gratification.
So tell me… do you equate coming from dasein with being unreal or untrue? As in, I have an opinion, but since it comes from dasein it must be wrong. Or I intuit X, but since intuition is a product of dasein no less than anything else in our heads, my intuition must be false. ← Do you agree with these statements?
You see? You can’t accept agreement, can you? You were born for conflict!
Sure, I could go with “robotic”, but it all depends on the nuances in the meaning you attach to that word.
The fact that you would ask this puts you on the cusp of insanity. One small step over the line and you’ll be consumed by madness. How do you bridge the gap between brute facts that are “just there” with everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya in a blissful state of joy and comradery? Oh yeah, the leaps and bounds you make know no limits.
Pay attention Biggy, it’s really this simple: emotions can be “just there” in one’s head while another harbors opposite emotions, equally “just there”, and they can still go to war with each other. How does this self-evident fact escape you? It’s not rocket science. It’s like you’re no longer debating a person but reality itself. It’s like you want to fight “brute facts” now. Like if I say “It’s just a brute fact that when I look at the sky, I see blue,” you want to fight that tooth and nail? Like it can’t possibly be true! Like you just can’t accept that there’s something about a person’s state of mind that you can’t poke holes in, that you can’t undermine, and it drives you crazy.
Ah, good ol’ Charlie and Donald. Those guys… uh… who are they?
And since when have you ever granted that excuse to anyone else? You never have! And so I don’t grant it to you. And I’ve already told you that so you can quit with the “How many times do I have to point out blah, blah, blah…”–you can point it out 'til you’re blue in the face for all I care–I’ll still call you out on your hypocrisy.
Besides, I don’t really believe it anyway. You say you apply your philosophy to yourself, but then why don’t you put your money where your mouth is? Show us an example of you applying your philosophy to yourself. Show us an example of when you have treated yourself the same way you treat others here. Why don’t you follow up your apparently prejudicial objectivists statements with the same responses you give everyone else? Why don’t you accuse yourself of having a “deep down inside [insert adjective here] Biggy” that “just knows” that your objectivist prejudices are true? Why don’t you undermine your own prejudicial objectivist statements with the demonstration challenge? Or why don’t you ask yourself to go argue your points to the truckers (or pro-life advocates, or second amendment advocates, or [insert your preferred group here]) and come back to us with the results? Why don’t you admit that you hold onto the prejudicial objectivist beliefs expressed by your statements because it brings you comfort and consolation? Why? I’ll tell you why… because you don’t really challenge yourself with the same arguments you challenge others with. You don’t really charge yourself with the same accusations. You don’t really apply your own philosophy to yourself. You just say you do because you know you’d be exposed as a hypocrite if you didn’t. And once you say it, you feel 100% comfortable and free to express whatever prejudice or objectivist statement you want, because in your mind, the narrative goes: “Well, I can always play the ‘I apply my own philosophy to myself’ card and get a free pass.” ← Well, not this time, bro. I don’t take that card.
And yet that’s not an acceptable answer for anyone else. Why should it be for you?
I have no idea how many times you’ve done this. But no excuses! You get drilled!
It entails that you think this gives you a free pass to express your prejudices all over ILP like a stumbling drunk pissing in a urinal. It’s like you think it’s a diplomatic immunity card–immunity from all the charges, challenges, and accusations you throw at others, even those who consistently admit their prejudices don’t rise above dasein and that they don’t think they are infallibly right and that everyone must think like them. We’ve all said this to you–over and over and over–I have, Maia has, Mags has, Magnus has–we’ve all done the same as you–admitted our prejudices and fallibility and applied your dasein philosophy to ourselves… yet you don’t accept that from a single one of us. You instead paint caricatures of us and insist that we think we’re like the pinheads, that we think we rise above dasein, that while the “bad guys”, the “wrong ones”, are victims of dasein, we are “special”, that our “Real Me” selves “just know” the truth and the right thing to do. You accuse us all of this despite our numerous attempts to convey that we don’t think like this–that we think much more like you–and yet, you don’t allow us to say that we apply your dasein argument to ourselves… so why should we allow you to say it?
Hey, if this makes me a pinhead, that speaks volumes about your pinhead status. All I’ve said here are the things you’ve said to others countless times. Seems to me like you can’t take the heat, can’t swallow your own medicine. Be demoralized all you want. You’re only exposing yourself as a hypocrite.
But not in my case, right? It’s not a problem if someone else’s self is kept intact because they anchor it to being a father, an artist, a software developer… but when I do this, it makes absolutely no sense to you… that about right?
And I answered that in turn:
…or did this fall into the “to be ignored” bucket.
Well, as I explained, it’s not connected, not in any direct meaningful way. Remember, you’re puzzled over a concept you invented. To a certain extent, it’s pointless to ask what connection my ‘I’ that’s anchored to being a father, an artist, a software developer… has to the Emotional Gib since the latter is a conjured up fabrication of your own making. You might as well ask me what my ‘I’ that’s anchored to being a father, an artist, a software developer… has to do with the tooth fairy. How would I even begin to answer that?
Now, clearly the tooth fairy is an exaggeration I’m using to make a point. Your Emotional Gib concept isn’t that bad, but it isn’t totally rooted in reality either. I’ve given you some slack with that concept to the extent that I do have these pro-trucker emotions and that these emotions drive me to do and say trucker-supporting things, but I never said this constitutes an inner emotional self. I don’t know why I would think of my trucker-supporting emotions as a kind of “self”–as though there were a whole other “me” inside me that could be contrasted with all the other “me’s”. It’s not a “me”–it’s just an emotional state that I tend to go into when the topic of the truckers comes up.
The whole point of bringing up the fact that I’m a father, an artist, a software developer, etc… was to explain to you that I anchor my self onto things other than my emotional reactions to the truckers, things other than my thoughts and opinions on the trucker protest. I was trying to explain, in other words, that if you want to understand how my ‘I’ remains intact, forget about my emotional reaction to the trucker!!! ← It’s not there. My ‘I’ is not to be found hanging around my emotional reaction to the truckers, as though trying to anchor itself there. By obsessing over my emotional reaction to the truckers, I’m saying, you invented a fabrication!!! And you continue to do so now. You continue to insist that my emotional reactions to the truckers is exactly where to look for my ‘I’, so you (unconsciously) invent this concept of an “emotional gib” that, in your mind, explains the “real me” self, a self that keeps itself intact by anchoring itself to my pro-trucker emotions. But the reality, the thing I’m trying to say, is that there’s nothing there except a few fleeting emotions.
So how else can I answer your question but by saying “there is no connection between my father, artist, software developer ‘self’ and this Emotional Gib self that you seem to have concocted”? I can’t answer a question about a link between something real and something imaginary. Just understand (if that’s possible) that all I’m trying to do is answer your question: How is your ‘I’ kept intact? And my extremely simple answer is: it stays intact because I don’t anchor it onto my emotional reaction to the truckers; it stays intact because I anchor it to something completely unrelated to my emotional reaction to the truckers, something a lot more certain and real (you know, being a father, an artist, a software developer, etc.).
Now, if you reply to this by still insisting that there’s a connection, then this is clearly a psychological need you have, not just a simple misunderstanding. It would show that you need there to be an Emotional Gib for me to anchor my ‘I’ to–you need to believe in this caricature of me in order to preserve your comfort and consolation in “knowing” that you’re right, that you’ve got it all figured out. I don’t buy this crap that you’re just trying to understand. It’s all clearly laid out above. It’s yours for the taking. But if you don’t take it, then there’s no possibility that you just want to understand. Instead, you want to preserve your fabricated world where I’ve got an Emotional Self, Maia’s got a Spiritual Self, Mags has got an Intrinsic Self… a fabricated world where everyone has a Self and only you are fractured and fragmented–because at least that means you’ve got it all figured out, that unlike the rest of us, you understand how the world really works–and that kind of comfort and consolation is more addictive than crystal meth.
Oh My God!!!
Yeah, Biggy, you gotta read it.
Like, for example… oh, I don’t know… Liz, Eric, and Uccisor? The one’s who I clearly mentioned at the link above as having profoundly altered my thinking and thus the course of my life? ← But why would that count as an example of what you’re asking for? Clearly, it’s the 16 year old girl who is of the utmost significance to this story.
Well, if your intact-ness has to go to war with my intact-ness, put up your dukes.
I like that Elon took over Twitter. And besides, who gave you the inside scoop on whether Elon is an objectivist?
Miraculously, I think you might finally be understanding what I’m saying. Though I wouldn’t say the thinking part of me is “under the heel” of the emotional part–as though the latter is keeping the former suppressed–rather it’s that the emotional part of me drives the thinking part–and in my better moments (when the thinking part takes control) I’m able to more rationally assess the emotional part of me (specifically, the thoughts it drives) as being more emotional rants intended to make me feel better–and so the thinking part (when it’s in control and is thus more able to be rational) doesn’t think much of those emotion driven thoughts. It also happens to be the part of me capable of recognizing the power of dasein over our lives–indeed, over my own life and the fact that I’m emotionally driven to support the truckers–to come up with irrational, emotionally driven, trucker supporting thoughts–and therefore sees very little ground to erect its own opinion about the trucker protest–whether it’s right or wrong, whether to be for the truckers or against them–which is why I don’t have much of a response to your accusations that I think my emotional self brings me above dasein. Clearly I don’t.
But I digress… the point is, you’re more right than you might realize–with the thinking part at the beck and call of my emotions (not under its heel per se, but at its whim)–it’s the emotions which are the real significant players, not the thoughts–except, of course, in my better moments when I put a concerted effort into taking charge with my thoughts and expending the effort to “think rationally”–but those are the moments when my thinking is aligned more with your thinking–more aware of dasein and its all-encompassing prowess over our lives–and it’s extremely difficult to get a political prejudice–for or against the truckers, for or against abortion, etc.–off the ground when you’re that aware of dasein.
It’s just as mysterious to me–almost as mysterious as how you can invent such a concept in your own head and accuse me of saying it.
If what we’ve seen of you here at ILP is “already diluted down”, I can’t imagine how extreme your prejudices were when in full sway. My point is, I don’t think they’re ever going away fully–not when the road you’re on is that of the nihilist–they just can’t be pushed that far.
How bout Star Trek: The Next Generation!
What trucker protestors do you think are reading this? And the fulminating fanatic objectivists? (Let’s just call them FFOs.) Yeah, I think the FFOs would understand and agree with me for the most part. They might disagree about my take on dasein (which is more aligned with your thinking whether you want to admit that or not) and they may not understand my brand of subjectivism, but for the majority of this thread, we haven’t been talking about my subjectivism. We haven’t even been talking about dasein–not in relation to the trucker protest or any other political/social issue. Our conversation has been a lot more meta. We’ve been talking about your psychology vs my psychology–and given that you’re the one with the mental disorder (weirdo) everyone here probably understands (and agrees with) my psychology far more than yours. Even if they take an opposing stance on the truckers, even if they disagree with our take on dasein, they can at least appreciate where I’m coming from far more readily than where you’re coming from–which, from what I can tell, is a truly bizarre and wildly aberrant mental state that I don’t think anybody understands.
Besides, whenever the topic of you comes up with other ILP members, I’ve had nothing but agreement from them.
Yeah, especially this part. I’m still unclear on exactly how you’ve misconstrued what I’ve said about the “brute facts” about my emotions, or how when I introspect “there they are”, or how feeling certain pro-trucker emotions gets translated into an “emotional self”–but the way I originally conveyed these concepts is a lot more down to Earth than your warped misconstruals. So would most people here understand them? Depends who they’re hearing it from. If from you, then they probably wouldn’t (I mean, I don’t even fully understand you). But if from me, I don’t see why not. After all, I’m not conveying some exotic mysterious mental state unique only to me–I’m conveying something that I think most people experience; I think most people, when they introspect to find whatever emotions are stirred in response to things in the media, things people say, events in politics, etc., they will find (well) those emotions. You know, “there they are!” They’ll probably also find that they have little control over the fact that those emotions are stirred. I don’t think they’d have any issue agreeing that those emotions being there are just a “brute fact”. All this regardless of which side they take on an issue. And as for their “emotional self”–well, that’s a construal you invented, so if they don’t understand that one, that’s on you.
Disagreement. There’s a difference between understanding one another and agreeing with one another.
Yes, Biggy, get over it! And who says I can’t pat them on the back and exclaim “I’m with you all the way politically!”? Who here is 100% sure of anything? I don’t feel guilty about driving my kids to school, but who knows–maybe the environmental radicalists are right! Maybe by driving my truck everywhere I’m committing the gravest of sins polluting the atmosphere and I should feel unredeemably guilty. But you know what? I don’t. You know why? Because I’m not mentally sick. If I had to feel guilty about every move I make, every thought I think, every emotion I feel, just because I can’t be 100% certain I’m right, then I would be stultified–maybe even fractured and fragmented–torn by life defeating indecision–on the one hand, if I drive my kids to school I might be polluting the environment, one the other, I’d be depriving my kids of an education–a mental disorder indeed.
If you’re not saying my emotions being rooted in dasein makes them wrong, what the hell are you saying?
A lot more than you think. I don’t know where you got this idea that “there it is” is mutually exclusive with “that’s how it got there”. All I said is that I can’t be 100% certain about how it got there, but I can be 99% certain. But regardless of how certain I am, “there it is” means just that–there they are, my emotions when I introspect. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical and natural reason why they’re there, but to the extent I’m uncertain about that reason, I have to speculate (a huge part of it most certainly being my backstory I linked you to which you refuse to read even though you asked for it).
Yes, Biggy, that’s exactly right. You know, you really gotta stop doing this. You’re trying to make it sound ridiculous in an attempt to (I guess) hold a mirror up to me so that I can see how ridiculous I sound. But to your surprise, you consistently keep getting it right and I keep reinforcing it. It’s not gonna convince me of anything. You get it right because, as hyperbolic or sarcastic or patronizing or whatever it is you think you’re being, it’s only you who thinks it’s ridiculous. For the rest of us, it’s just common sense.
I realize your interpretation of this comes with a whole bunch of hidden assumptions (ex. the one I had to cross out… again) so no doubt that’s why it comes across as ridiculous to you. But hidden assumptions aside… yeah… I don’t know with 100% certainty how my pro-trucker feelings got there… and yeah, those on the other side don’t know either how their anti-trucker feelings got there (though no doubt there are those on either side who will say they know with 100% certainty)… and yeah, these emotions are “just there” for all of us, “brute facts” for all of us… if you could just get over this (what do you call it?) existential leap you make from the brute facts of our emotions to the moral positions you seem to think this irrevocably leads us to take, you wouldn’t have a problem. But you seem to be so oblivious to the fact that you take this leap that you probably can’t even process what I’m saying here.
The result of all this is that we’d go to war, not hold hands around the Canadian winter fire and eat poutine, drink Kokanee beer, and sing Kumbya.
If only you spoke such respectful words of everyone else.
Just bringing up someone’s sexuality is creepy and salacious.
You are so pretentious to say this. This is not all you request. It’s only the bait and switch, the trail of bread crumbs that leads people into your trap. Once there, you attempt to mock and destroy their values and beliefs until all they have left is a fractured, fragmented soul, one that has no choice but to hop in the hole with you–like you think you can beat people into being your friend. It’s like an injured person who wants to form a club of injured people, so he goes around looking for healthy people and “challenges” their health to see how much they can take, the result being obviously that most of them will fail the challenge, become injured, and be compelled to join your club–only most people recognize what you’re doing before it gets too bad and they either back off or they “challenge” you more violently than you challenge them.
Well, then your problem is not with how I answer the question: why yours and not someone else’s? It’s with how my ‘I’ remains intact such that I’m comfortable with my emotions. Only you erect a fabrication to explain why I feel so comfortable: it’s that there’s this “emotional gib” that thinks he’s above dasein. ← And this keeps you coming back to the question: why yours and not someone else’s? I urge you to not be so hasty when you desperately forage the recesses of your mind for an explanation of why I feel comfortable in my own skin in the midst of the trucker protest. I urge you, as uncomfortable as it might be, to sit with the mystery for a while, to sit with not knowing how I can feel so comfortable with my pro-trucker emotions–without falling back on your “emotional gib” theory–and have a talk with me. Try to get at the actual reason why I feel so comfortable and intact. If you find yourself still asking “why yours and not someone else’s?” then you know you’ve gone too far. If you find yourself asking “how do you feel so comfortable?” or “how do you keep your ‘I’ intact?” then you’re still with me.
Oddly enough, I’ve seen you screw up something as overtly distinct as that–which is why I think it’s a cognitive disorder rather than mere misreading or misinterpretation.
That’s a very cryptic answer (but what else is new). I guess you mean to say that, for example, all rational men and women can agree that we all take shits (you’d have to be pretty irrational to disagree with that). But when it comes to things like the moral rights and wrongs of something like the trucker protest, there is no end to the factions and divisions–no unanimous agreement among all rational men and women.
But I don’t know if this is the correct interpretation as it seems inconsistent with other things you’ve said. For one thing, it would seem to suggest that one cannot anchor one’s ‘I’ to things like being a father (we don’t have to go so far as to bring in taking a shit) since I see no reason why all rational men and women would disagree about one’s being a father. Yet elsewhere in this thread you agreed that “who wouldn’t be intact [in the case of things like being a father]?” ← So which is it? Have I got the interpretation right? Do you even remember the question?
Ah, you finally let the cat out of the bag. You’ve wanted to call me an objectivist for the longest time, haven’t you? Too bad I beat you to the punch. Remember? I called you out on several occasions for being a closet case objectivist tormented only by the fact that he can no longer seem to justify his objectivism. But that doesn’t mean you’ve given up objectivism. You call yourself a subjectivist, but you’re not a true subjectivist. A nihilist maybe, but nihilism can be a form of objectivism. And only an objectivist would be tormented by the fact that he can’t justify objectivism, by his clinging to objectivism despite his understanding of dasein pulling him away from objectivism. A subjectivist is not tormented by this–he lets go of objectivism–he embraces the letting go, he embraces dasein–it’s the whole point–but if you’re fractured and fragmented like you say, if that’s what pains you, it can only be because you haven’t let go of objectivism.
And thus you appear strong by comparison.
Terror comes with facing it. Otherwise, what’s so “uber” about it?
You’re the one above who makes this all about “me against the world”. I’m just [once again] noting that in regard to the either/or world I’m no less in sync with it than others. Thus, the conflicts revolve not around whether the truckers protested in Canada but how each of us reacted to it as either a good thing or a bad thing.
Thus…
Okay, how is this point related to the arguments I make about the trucker protest? I’m “pushing” against those – the dogmatic objectivists – who argue that how they construe it as either a good thing or a bad thing [in the is ought/world] is how all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to construe it in turn. And that, if they don’t, then they are not either rational or virtuous.
How am I a hypocrite here in regard to the either/or world? On the other hand, some of the truckers might react to you supporting them “emotionally” while, in having lived a different life, concluding that the protest itself is wrong, as in the general vicinity of…of what exactly?
You’re the one who started the thread. You’re the one who chose the trucker protest as the context.
On the contrary, over and again I note that in regard to my own reaction to the trucker protest [morally and politically], I am “here and now” fractured and fragmented. That “being right” and “winning debates” is embedded existentially/subjectively in dasein.
On the contrary, as with you, I am grappling to understand her own rendition of MagsJ’s “intrinsic Self”. Her “spiritual Self”. And, with her, part of my aim is to bring her down into my “hole”. To forge a more intimate [if virtual] relationship with her around that. Though, if anything, that may well just push her farther away from me.
Sure, if that’s what you want to believe about me, let that comfort and console you. But to equate having power with believing that your own existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless, is completely estranged from objective morality and is just inches away from oblivion…?
At best, I might find others able to empathize with me.
Though, sure, I can’t rule out coming across a frame of mind able to allow me to yank myself up out of the “hole”. It’s just that, unlike you, I don’t have this “emotional Self” to anchor it all to.
That’s here of course. Here all we have to exchange by and large are words. But, come on, gib, you know there are any number of folks “out in the world” who claim to have found the One True Path. In fact, HBO just completed a documentary pertaining to precisely that sort of mentality “acted out” among an actual flesh and blood community: hbo.com/the-vow
And, who knows, maybe Keith Raniere was in touch with his own emotional Self here. That and his bank account. And his penis of course.
All I can do is to ask those who do embrace one or another set of beliefs to note how they act it out in regard to a particular context. For example, how do those on both [extremist] ends of the abortion wars demonstrate that they embody the One True Path? A path that results in no abortions but also encompasses equal rights for women in a world where only women get pregnant?
And again, I don’t expect anyone to “meet my challenge” in a No God world. Sans God, in my view, and it all comes down to conflicting value judgments given lives that can unfold very, very differently. That’s why I focus in on “narrowing the communication gaps”. In particular, convincing the objectivists to consider my own arguments regarding dasein.
With you, however, that is rendered moot. Why? Because you can always fall back on the mysterious “brute fact” of your own “there it is” emotional Self. Nothing that anyone says can get around that, right? In fact, morality and politics themselves are basically irrelevant here. Emotionally, you “just know” to support the truckers. Again, even had your life been different and you thought that the protest was wrong.
Note to the pinheads and the fulminating fanatic moral objectivists here:
You explain it to him.
Oh, and starting Thanksgiving day, lorikeet might be back. Take it up with him.
[nope, no lorikeet so far]
Come on, we all have emotions. But not many describe them as you do in regard to their moral and political narratives:
“Yes, as with my thoughts, my emotions are derived from dasein. But my emotions also transcend that philosophical/thinking stuff when I go down deeper. Down there in ways I don’t either fully understand or control, my emotional Self takes command. I am “guided” to support the truckers. Just as, no doubt, the emotional Selves of those like PK “guide” them to reject the truckers. It’s all “somehow” buried down really, really deep in my genetic makeup and in the chemical and neurological “stuff” that my brain engages in”.
Again, sure, if that floats your boat here. But actually, what is far, far more intriguing to me is how this emotional Self works for you. With the pinheads, it’s almost always about their God or their ideology or their political prejudices. Black and white. The is/ought world being just another component of the either/or world. That’s why they come here and feel most at home taking on those who are “one of them”…the evil, dumb guys.
And that’s why those on both ends of the objectivist spectrum see me as particularly disturbing. I’m not after what they believe so much as intent on exploring how they came to believe what they do given the arguments I make in my signature threads. That’s what perturbs them.
With you though all of that is moot. With you, you just feel that you should support the truckers. And if those on the other side just feel they should support the government? So be it! It’s all just perfectly…natural?
Then, however you rationalize this to yourself:
Note to others:
Let’s get some other reactions to this. In regard to your own value judgments does this resonate with you in some way. If so, please explain how. And why.
And again: What cognitive comfort zone!!! Being down in the “hole” I’m in existentially…enduring my essentially meaningless and purposeless existence, awaiting the Grim Reaper, anticipating oblivion, being drawn and quartered regarding every single moral conflict?
Why on earth does he suppose I collect “distractions” to keep all of that at bay?!
Because if I were ever able to grasp an emotional Self that allowed me to feel considerably less fractured and fragmented in regard to conflicting goods, feeling “scared” would not be something that I would imagine at all.
Note to others:
Sure, just as a part of me still envies those who are able to believe that God provides them with an objective morality on this side of the grave and will be there to provide them with immortality and salvation on the other side. Of course a part of me covets the comfort and consolation gib is able to sustain. And, again, the beauty of it all for him is that he doesn’t need any reasons. It’s all just “there it is” for him. Not only that, but this “take charge” emotional Self of his is something that “somehow” exists beyond either his comprehension or his control. He just “introspects” it into existence.
Like magic. Well, to some of us.
How on earth, for all practical purposes, is my point here a delusion? Is gib suggesting that when those on the other side “just feel” they should support the government, that doesn’t count? Even Maia admits that among Pagans it is perfectly understandable that the spiritual Selves of some will support a woman’s right to choose an abortion while the spiritual Selves of others will not. How that works “for all practical purposes” within a Pagan community is what I don’t understand.
So, is this somehow different with emotional Selves?
Again, just imagine your Self at a demonstration/protest of those on both sides who all embrace emotional Selves. Wouldn’t both sides be justified in their support for entirely opposite conclusions?
No, in my view, what you don’t acknowledge is that once you take “should” and “reasons” out of your support for the truckers, you are impervious to the arguments of anyone who includes them. As certainly all of the moral objectivists here do. You get to just fall back “somehow” on the intangible deep, deep, deep down inside you emotional Self that merely has to be there! You can’t have a more impregnable moral philosophy than that!!
Thus…
No, not wayward…rooted subjectively in dasein. Just as your own interpretation is here. Only without that “extra” emotional part that leads you around by the nose. And what else can you call a “guider” you don’t really even fully understand or control?
Note to others:
Enough said? Here I’m thinking of the cartoon characters with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other tugging gib about. Only there is no right or wrong here, is there? It’s just one “feeling” this and the other “feeling” that.
Oh, so you have this emotional Self for some things but not for other things? Do you think about the things you choose here? Do you have reasons why you suppress or deny them? How does that work specifically in regard to the trucker protest? What emotional reactions did you suppress or deny here? And where does the thinking gib stop with its reasons and the emotional gib begin with its supportive or unsupportive feeling.
In fact, the next time you’re confronted with being tugged in different directions regarding your behavior, apprise us of how it does all unfold in that tug of war between your head and your heart.
You chose the latter because you had reasons to? Because you thought you should do it? Where was the emotional Gib when all of this was unfolding?
Okay, but let’s not forget that those on the other side who fall back on their own emotional Self can be going through much the same thing but come down on the side of the government.
In the end [for me] it always comes back to what I still don’t understand about this “there it is” emotional Self which you flat out admit you don’t truly understand or control yanking you in one direction while those like you on the other side are simply yanked in the opposite direction. Both sides then being equally legitimate in their support.
Which, again, is not all that far removed from my own frame of mind regarding dasein. I just don’t have access to the equivalent of the Good Guy inside me guiding me to something that allows me to feel comforted and consoled in “choosing”/“supporting” the “right” side. Ultimately, the “brute fact” of it.
What can I say: Good for you!! This “works” for you allowing you to anchor your Self to something that, to me, seems every bit as comforting and consoling as the hardcore objectivists.
On the other hand, as with shifting magnetic field governing planet Earth is there a shifting emotional Self governing gib? In other words, is it possible that some day your emotions might shift to the government’s side? Or is this a genetic factor with you from the day you are born? Something congenital inside your brain that is with you until the day you die?
No, should and reasons are both still very important factors to me. I just recognize how they are subjective contraptions rooted existentially in dasein more so than truths that can be derived scientifically or philosophically given the tools available in both disciplines.
And you’ll either take us though a “real time” experience pertaining to both thoughts and feelings you have in which there is a tug of war inside you or you won’t. That may or may not go a long way toward making it all less mysterious to me.
No, I tap the moral and political objectivists on the shoulder and introduce them to the arguments I make regarding dasein given their own “one of us” [the smart, good guys] vs. “one of them” [the dumb, evil guys] frame of mind. I shift the discussion to how existentially we come to acquire particular set of political prejudices, rather than what the reasons and the shoulds are.
Now, you tap them on the shoulder. Explain how if they “introspect” in a more sophisticated manner they might come into sync with an emotional Self that allows both sides to celebrate who and what they support
Okay, then back to a world where those who support the truckers react as they must and those who support the government react as they must.
Now, explain to me again how that is completely different from…determinism?
Note to peacegirl and BigMike:
Another “free will determinists!!”
Oh, I get the part where we overlap: you have your emotional Self, I have dasein. Meaning that our thoughts and feelings are in some crucial respects both beyond our fully understanding and controlling.
But you still get to nestle down snuggly in your comforting and consoling “leap” of support to the truckers, while my “I” here remains “fractured sand fragmented”.
On the other hand, suppose the covid pandemic really was just a sinister plot by either liberals or conservatives to take command of the government for their own ideological purposes. Or by the “deep state” nihilists to sustain their own selfish economic interests. That fact. You’d still have your emotional Self to keep you intact. I’d still be drawn and quartered.
That’s ridiculous. The fact that my in-sync thoughts and feels about the Christian God gave way over time to opposite in sync thoughts and feelings about Marxism and No God doesn’t change the fact that in both contexts there were still any number of things beyond my full understanding or control. It’s that in an objectivist frame of mind you come to embed your experiences in one or another overarching narrative. You come to see what you believe precisely because you can be comforted and consoled given the psychology of objectivism. Whereas you have this [to me] largely ineffable emotional Self buried down deep in your psyche such that any new experiences you have are subsumed in it.
Again, what is this but that mysterious Inner You that puts you on “automatic pilot” in your reaction to conflicting goods. And in order for me to come out of the “hole” I need to come up with an argument that allows me to transcend the existential trajectory I note above…while at the same time resolving the conflicting goods themselves. I believe that the unborn are human beings and aborting them is killing them…murdering them. But I also believe that forcing women to given birth thoroughly undermines any realistic possibility of women achieving political equality with men. Only I don’t have this mystical/magical Emotional Self to anchor I to as you do.
So, instead, I embrace “moderation, negotiation and compromise” as was embedded in Roe v. Wade…legislation that gives both sides something but not any one side everything.
How about you? What does the emotional Gib come up with?
Again, as noted above, I’m asking you if your emotional Self is even capable of making such a shift. Or is it completely – ultimately – beyond your understanding and control? Sort of like Satyr’s take on race and gender and sexuality?
That’s hardwired into all of us. It’s what we feel gratified regarding and how that is intertwined in experiences that generate value judgments over the course of our lives that count. Value judgments that can change resulting in emotions that can change. I didn’t have access to an emotional Self that kept me on the One True Christian path or the One True Marxist path or the One True Socialist path. My feelings changed more or less in sync with what I believed was the most reasonable manner in which to construe the world around me.
No, of course not. Why? Because those on both sides of the trucker protest are able to make reasonable arguments. Dasein comes into play here in regard to how our personal experiences tend to bring us closer to one side than the other. Thus given my own trajectory in regard to abortion above. With you however all of that is moot. Your brain and/or your genes has created this emotional Gib such that the arguments themselves are not even relevant at all. You “just feel” driven to support the truckers over the government.
Well, suppose the covid virus afflicted men and women with the same symptoms and mortality rate that the AIDS virus once did. Only unlike the AIDS virus it was easily spread? In fact, suppose it was as virulent as the Bubonic plague? Would or would not the emotional gib make adjustments for that?
What agreement? My point is that historical, cultural, social, political and economic memes can have a powerful impact on how, existentially, we come to accummulate individual value judgments. Then those like Satyr scoff at this and insist that how they construe biological imperatives is what really counts. Same with you. Only it’s more in the way of emotional imperatives.
Okay, then “robotic” it is. Gib…the terminator? Gib “programmed” by his genes, his brain to [emotionally] support the truckers? Gib…nature’s machine?
Seriously though, when you equate your support for something in the is/ought world as somewhere in the vicinity of “robotic”…?
Thus…
Of course, this is merely how you feel about me…“robotically”.
You lost me here. What leaps and bounds do I make to “singing kumbaya in a blissful state of joy and comradery”? Some will do this if, rooted in dasein, they are predisposed to go down this path. The brute facts here will almost certainly revolve around the existential trajectory of their lives. But what of those who do so because their “robotic” emotional Self is yanking on the leash?
How does that work with an emotional Self? Are some born to sing kumbaya while others are not?
Okay, but they are going to war with each other because “robotically” their emotional Selves are calling the shots. Neither side is right or wrong, moral or immoral…their respective “support” is, instead, “just there”.
Huh? The “brute fact” that you see the sky blue is on the same level as the “brute fact” of you supporting the truckers is on the same level with the “bnrute fact” of others supoorting the government?
I must be misunderstanding you.
Note to others:
Weigh in here please.
Simply unbelievable! Not only does your emotional Self tell you to react to Maia as though she were a 14 year old girl, it tells you that how I react to her as a desirable mature woman is not at all as I myself think and feel that I do.
No, even my own reactions to her must be in sync with your emotional Self?!
What I accept is that given new experiences in our lives, I may existentially come closer to her frame of mind or she may come closer to mine. I don’t possess your emotional Self or her spiritual self that just “somehow” exists and renders dasein as I understand it moot.
Thus…
I agree it is not very likely to happen. But “ain’t”? Nope, I’d need to possess a magical/mystical/robotic emotional Self to be that certain in asserting something like that.
Now this [to me] is typical of those who seem convinced that in order to become a serious philosopher one must come to embrace “wisdom”. And that wisdom must revolve around, what, a positive, hopeful, optimistic frame of mind? Like the fools who follow Nietzsche even though if God really is dead, we’d live in a world live where all things are permitted? Who would want to live in that world? So it must be false.
Also, again, down in the hole one has access to so many more options in life. It might be argued that you are basically a slave to your emotional Self, Maia to her spiritual Self. Not only are you both guided – compelled? – to support the truckers or the government, the pro-life or the pro-choice camps, but the part we all accept regarding dasein gets swept under the rug for the two of you. There’s always this “there it is” deep, deep, deep down inside you Self to keep you up on the One True Path.
Well, again, there’s what “I” accept given my interactions with her, and there’s what the emotional Gib really knows is going on between us.
You know, I made reference to them above:
That’s Maia and myself here from my frame of mind. There’s what I’d like to see unfold between us and, perhaps, what she would never be interested in herself.
This is complete nonsense to me. In regard to individual value judgments, when have I ever made a distinction between my own and others? I construe them all to be prejudices rooted existentially in dasein. Mine, yours, theirs. Only in acknowledging that, I am, in turn, acknowledging that, sure, there may well be a wholly rational and virtuous manner in which to react to the trucker protest. If others think so, let them try to convince us. But I certainly don’t set myself up as the final arbiter. As, for many here, they do re God or deontology or ideology or nature. Or “feelings”.
Come on, gib, what you believe here is rooted in dasein. It’s what you feel about it, right? And while that too is rooted existentially in dasein there’s just enough of it that is not to allow you to “robotically” pass judgment on me here.
Note to others:
Decide for yourself if, given all of my posts here at ILP pertaining to conflicting goods, I don’t flat out acknowledge that my own reactions “here and now” are “fractured and fragmented”. If I were to confront the truckers or protesters outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic, I would note that both sides make reasonable and convincing arguments. I’d note the existential trajectory of my own life predisposing me more to the left rather than the right. I’d note that, given new experiences, I might change my mind. I’d note that I may well be wrong about an objective moral narrative in a No God world.
But I’d never use that to give myself a “free pass”.
Whatever that even means to gib’s very own brain induced, near robotic “my way or the highway” emotional Self.
As I noted above:
Also…
Note specifically where I argue that. All I can do is to suggest that, given a particular context like the trucker protest, the objectivists here attempt to demonstrate why, if they were in power, others who disagreed with them would not be in danger.
Cite some example of what you believe he is accusing me of here.
Why do I suspect that what you mean by this is not at all how it is construed by me? But how about the top 3 instances so we have something more substantive to go by.
Ah, of course! The feel-it-all emotional gib clambering up to the surface to set us all straight!!
We’ll need a context, of course. How about the trucker protest?!
Come on, gib, you admit your emotional Self prejudices, Maia her spiritual Self prejudices, MagsJ her intrinsic Self prejudices, Magnus his up in the clouds intellectual contraption prejudices. But unlike me you all have this deep, deep, deep down Self that finally does provide you with the One True Path to “comfort and consolation”. You just won’t consider the possibility that it is in fact the comfort and the consolation itself that sustains your own psychology of objectivism.
As noted above, my interest in gib the father, the artist, the software developer, etc., revolves more around how, in being those things, they are applicable to the emotional Self gib supporting the trucker protest. Again, you did not entitle this thread, “Hey Biggy, we GOT a context!!! Being a father, an artist and a software devoloper”.
Thus…
Then why keep bringing them up in a thread that revolves around the trucker protest as the context?
Note to others:
What do I keep missing here?
I didn’t invent it. I was questioning how you could agree that had your life been different you might be here protesting the trucker protest itself yet still support the truckers. That’s when you introduced me to the emotional gib. The part that, even though you don’t really fully understand or control it, still allows you to be comforted and consoled in supporting the “right side”. The truckers. Whereas the emotional Selves of others, more or less better understood and controlled, still allows them to be comforted and consoled in supporting the right side as well. The government. Whereas being a father, artist and software developer are more in sync with the either/or world. They are things that you are. And, after all, how many people are going to argue that you ought not to be them?
Again, in my view, that’s up to you to distinguish for us. That’s up to you to explain to the truckers after you tell them that their cause is neither inherently right nor wrong, good nor bad. You just happen to think what you do about it because of the life you lived. Another life another moral narrative and political agenda altogether.
Fine. But who among us is that not applicable to? We are all fathers or mothers or brothers or sisters. We are artists or athletes or musicians. We are plumbers or garbagemen or bricklayers. So, how is any of that related to our support for the truckers or the government? Perhaps it is. So, okay, let’s explore that.
Again, the next time you find yourself confronting something in the news that pushes you in one direction of support rather than another take us through what unfolds in your head, in your heart, in your gut.
Note for us how you do manage to keep your Self intact. Meanwhile I do the best I can to explain how, given my own understanding of dasein, I continue to remain “fractured and fragmented” regarding my own capacity to support sides.
Also, over and again I note just how wide the gap might be between how you and I understand ourselves out in the world simply because I am not you!!! And our worlds no doubt were and still are dramatically different.
Note to others:
How about you? Did you not believe that gib was linking his support to the truckers to his emotional Self? What nuances did you pick up that I missed? Because this all sounds like bullshit to me given all that he has posted above.
Yeah, and I think I understand that better now: You basically ignore entire chunks of my posts here. Whereas I try to respond to almost everything that you post.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticizing you here. Sure, there may be points I post that really don’t interest you all that much. Or you may feel we’ve been over something enough already. Or that my reaction is so far removed from what you would expect, you just cross me off the list as someone who will never understand.
No problem. We are just different here in that respect.
Again, I’m not talking about someone you interact with online. I’m talking about someone who comes into your life and lives it with you month after month. For me, Danny Williams, Michael Bell and Supannika Rongsopa. Someone who not only impacts your thinking, but your emotions as well. Someone whom had you never met, your life might have turned out very, very differently.
It would certainly seem [to me] that those who think and feel most intact are more likely to be dogmatic in regard to value judgments than those who do not.
Yes, of course. But I can recognize the danger of intactness leading to dogmatism and yet want to feel intact myself. Just because I feel intact doesn’t mean I will demand that others feel intact in the same way. Over and again I note it is those objectivists who are intent on going after those who refuse to think and feel like they do that pose the danger. In other words, once they attain power and can enforce their own dogmas. From the theocrats to the ideologues. To those like Satyr with his dungeons and his “respect me – think like me – or I will ban you”.
Okay, again, for “me” an objectivist is someone who…
1] believes that they are in sync with the Real Me and
2] the Real Me is in sync further with the Right Thing To Do
Such that many/most will then divide up the world between “one of us” [the good guys] and “one of them” [the bad guys]. The objectivists here who are not content with merely explaining why they support the truckers or oppose the truckers but contemptuously attack those on the other side as “one of them” [the bad guys].
These are ones that are least likely to embrace “moderation, negotiation and compromise”. Instead, they are more likely to embrace “right makes might”.
Earth to gib. How many times do I have to agree that nihilists can be just as dangerous here? Or even more dangerous. Whether in regard to the “show me the money” moral nihilists who carve up the planet in order to sustain their own narrow interests, or the sociopaths who target anyone you gets in the way of “me, myself and I”?
I don’t doubt that you do. His political prejudices seem clearly more in sync with your own. Also with the MAGA crowd. It’s not for nothing that Trump is reinstated there.
On the other hand, here we go again: you’ll agree that had your life been different you might be here thumping Musk yourself. Instead, it’s however you construe your emotional Self that supports him. “Robotically” as it were.
Here, once again, it is you who emphsizes the role that your emotions play over the thnking part. It drives you…though you’re not under its heel.
Whatever “for all practical purposes” that means. Then [for me] it gets murkier still because the thinking part sometimes interjects and recognizes that the emotional Self as there only to make you feel better. But: On the other hand, had your life been different the thinking part itself might be entirely different about this as well!
Can things possibly get more convoluted “in your head”?
Clearly. At the same time, you have to admit that if you yourself are struggling to fit all the pieces together here in your own brain, what are the odds that I and others will manage to get even that far? So, from my frame of mind, you are managing to keep the fractured and fragmented gib at bay based largely on an emotional Self that you yourself acknowledge you only have so much of a grasp of.
Note to the pinheads:
Your turn.
What’s mysterious [to me] is not how thoughts and emotions and intuitions become intertwined – entangled – in us as our experiences in life evolve [sometimes dramatically] but how one acquires an emotional anchor that keeps them from fracturing and fragmenting in the is/ought world.
To which you note…
Although I’m just as drawn and quartered regarding this concept I’m supposed to have invented here.
Note to Maia:
Remember our “machine”? The one where I get in one pod, you in another and I get to think and feel what you do. I get to know what it’s like to be you? I get to be inside you.
Well, gib seems convinced he’s got one now. Only the links are all inside his head. But his virtual machine is all the more extraordinary. For example, he notes things about my political prejudices that I didn’t even know myself!
How about asking him to explain things about you that you didn’t even know.
As I noted before, my point here is this: that it is one thing to discuss your support for the truckers in a philosophy forum given the “emotional gib” above and another thing altogether to take that support to an actual anti-government protest. For me it’s not a question of them understanding you perfectly but of them understanding you at all. After all, in order for that to be the case they too would have to possess an emotional Self. Right? Otherwise, they might be more inclined to focus in on the reasons they are doing what they do. On their own moral narrative and political agenda. But then you tell them that had their lives been different they might be embracing the government’s policies instead.
Note to the FFOs:
Let’s hear from you. Left or right.
“Meta” for you perhaps, but I am always far more intrigued with how actual flesh and blood human beings react to things like the trucker protest or the abortion wars. Especially when given particular contexts they are right in the thick of it. Their livelihood or their health or their body is on the line.
Though, sure, you zoom in on their emotional Selves [if they have one] and I’ll focus more on dasein in the absence of one. See how most react to our own respective assessments.
And of course most will be extremely reluctant to see things my way. After all, here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296 – I don’t call it the psychology of objectivism for nothing.
With you, if you do get through, their precious Self remains intact. With me it fractures and fragments.
Well, let’s just say that your conveyance of “down to Earth” in regard to your conveyance of “brutes facts” and “there they are” emotions doesn’t bring me closer to grasping how they work in tandem for you in regard to your support for the truckers.
Note to others:
Okay, in regard to your own support for either the truckers or the government here, do you experience it as gib does? Would you agree that had your life been different you might be here supporting the opposite side…but that there is a deep down inside you emotional Self that would always put you on and then keep you on the right path? That those on the other side can as well be “guided” somewhat “robotically” by their own emotional Self?
And thus suggesting [to me] that there is no right or wrong side at all here. Why? Because there is only the side that you are compelled – genetically? chemically? neurologically? – to support?
Okay, but there’s also a difference between disagreeing with others about the trucker protest because you don’t share their own moral narrative or political agenda and disagreeing with them because for reasons you don’t even fully understand or control yourself, there’s this emotional part of you that either supports them or it doesn’t.
Thus, from my frame of mind…
Well, sure, you can…but then you’d have to note further that had your life experiences been otherwise, you might be there instead protesting the protest itself!
Note to the pinheads and any number of FFOs [left and right]:
You’re up!
And then however this…
…is relevant to your support for the truckers.
My point however is that given how 1] our thinking and feeling [often combined “in our gut” to form intuitions] are derived existentially from dasein, and how 2] the thoughts and feelings of those on both sides of the trucker protest can be deemed reasonable, right and wrong themselves become but subjective/intersubjective points of view embedded out in a particular world understood in a particular way.
So, I suspect that in whatever manner it came about you “thought up” this emotional Self as a way to keep the manner in which I construe dasein – precipitating a fractured and fragmented “I” in the is/ought world – at bay. It’s just your own rendition of an objectivsts font to me. Unless of course I’m wrong.
And then back to the part where I’m not you and have lived a life very, very different from yours. So: what can I really grasp about your emotional Self? All we can do is to sustain this exchange and try to get closer…or give up and move on to others.
All I can note here is that above you often left me with the impression that the reason you referred to your emotions as “there they are” is because you were nowhere near 99% certain of why you support the truckers and not the government. Once you recognize that morally and politically it could have gone either way.
And your backstory like all backstories is, in my view, profoundly rooted in dasein as I understand it…lacking this emotional anchor to steer me in one rather than the other direction.
It’s not ridiculous so much as ineffable. To me. If those on both sides of the trucker protest all behaved in accordance with their emotional Selves then to speak of just or unjust government healthcare policies in Canada would be, what, moot? If those on both sides might have flipped sides given different lives then it all comes down to these emotions and the extent to which they are rooted in genes or biological imperatives derived largely from how our brains function chemically and neurologically. Much beyond our control. That’s why my point above regarding how close this is to determinism itself.
Note to others:
Is the manner in which his emotions are rooted both in dasein and in this deep down inside him emotional Self just common sense to you?
If so, given your own value judgments relating tp things like the trucker protest, abortion, gun control, homosexuality etc., note how that unfolds for you when confronting someone who strongly disagrees with you.
As long as I see the “leap” that you are taking as embedded in emotions that I do not experience in the same way at all myself, I’m going to have a problem grasping what you mean here. From my frame of mind, new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge drawn out over weeks and months and years are going to result in thoughts and feelings and intuitions more rather than less in sync. Why? Because that is how it always unfolded for me in the past. And, given my past…
…I’ve had plenty of existential leaps.
And how do I seem to think she is? There are simply things that I am curious about given the manner in which I had come to construe sexuality in Pagan communities as more reflective of the Dionysian lifestyle.
Note examples of this. Of me criticizing her for the behaviors she chooses. Not understanding them is one thing, suggesting that she ought not to pursue them another thing altogether.
To wit…
Come on, gib, I can’t be both critical of what she does and at the same time be respectful of what she does.
Again, she was the one who broached sexuality – her own sexuality – in our exchanges. Her commitment to the Goddess to remain celibate for a number of years. And she didn’t object when I proceeded to explore that in regard to the Pagans depicted in the Wicker Man.
Also, in a philosophy forum, discussing sexuality is not necessarily either creepy or salacious. It’s just that philosophers can often be no less squeamish when the subject is raised. It creeps them out so others become creepy when it’s made a topic of discussion.
Bullshit. The only people here I go toe to toe with are the fulminating fanatic objectivists and the pinheads. And it’s the danger posed by the hardcore objectivists once they acquire power in any particular community that I am most intent on going after. I belittle those like Satyr and the Urwrongs here because in my view they strike me as particularly worthy of it.
But of late I don’t even go there much anymore. I do just ignore them by and large these days.
Okay, if you need to believe that this is applicable to everyone I exchange posts with here and not just the FFOs and the pinheads, fine. I’m sticking with my understanding of my own “win/win” proposition above.
You seem to equate introspection with satisfaction. You seem to equate introspection with remaining intact. As though when I introspect [sans an emotional Self] and conclude that in a No God world it is reasonable to construe my existence as essentially meaningless and purposeless, and to conclude that “I” am fractured and fragmented in the is/ought world, and to conclude that death equals oblivion, my introspection, in leading to dissatisfaction and a lack of intactness means…mean what? That your introspection is more philosophically and psychologically sound because it makes you feel better?!!!
That true introspection should comfort and console you? Whereas I start with the assumption that in order to be comforted and consoled objectivists often “think up” a frame of mind [any frame of mind] that does satisfy them, that does keep them intact.
Over and again: it’s not what the objectivists believe…
…but that they are able to anchor their Self to something. Anything to make them part of something “out there” they can subsume their own “infinitesimally insignificant existence in the vastness of all there is” in. All the better if it includes immortality and salvation.
Does yours?
No, that’s what you do. Only I would never call it a fabrication. Not if in all sincerity you do believe what you do. All I can do here is to grapple with how you managed it. To wonder if it might be made applicable to me somehow.
Though, yeah, as a polemicist I do enjoy truly provocative exchanges. So, with some, as with you, the exchange can get feisty at times. We “go after” each other from time to time in “huff and puff” mode. That works for me however precisely because I respect your intelligence.
Why on earth would I imagine that another would not feel comfortable with an emotional Self that can subsume dasein in a consoling sense of Reality. I’m fractured and fragmented in regard to the truckers. But you feel entirely intact in your support for them. Why not just leave it at that?
Please. To the extent you cannot pin down where and how and why this emotional Self is “there” for you, you yourself can’t really even be with yourself here. All you seem to know is that even had your life been entirely different and you were here arguing a fiercely pro-government political perspective “somehow” you’d still be supporting the truckers emotionally.
And then when the truckers and the anti-government FFOs here react to that with bewilderment, you tell them what exactly?
And this has what to do with my point above?
Yeah, basically. Taking a shit is a biological imperative. The covid virus is a biological imperative. It is rooted in the evolution of life on Earth. It is also imperative that governments enact healthcare polices in response to things like Ebola and AIDS and SARS and covid. And there are facts that can be accumulated by the medical professionals. By the scientific community.
But: which healthcare policies are the most rational, the most effective, the most just? And what if you are one of the millions who don’t have access to an emotional Self to yank you along in supporting this instead of that. What if, instead, you actually fall back on reasons…reasons that you think are the right ones?
Again, I must be missing your point here. Of course: if one becomes a father [as both of us are] that can have a deep impact on how one sees himself out in the world. It can change one’s priorities. It can make one rethink any number of things about one’s life, one’s responsibilities, one’s obligations.
It certainly reconfigured mine. But what does my daughter have to do with my thoughts and feelings regarding the trucker protest? The context of this thread. What does being a father have to do with your emotional Self support for it?
On the other hand, just because you are a father doesn’t necessarily equate with being intact. I’m a father and in regard to “I” in the is/ought world I’m not intact. I have my political prejudices rooted problematically in dasein but I still think and feel in a splintered, drawn and quartered manner.
Only you have this emotional Self that, what, becoming a father is no less subsumed in? Can becoming a father upend one’s emotional Self orientation such that one shifts from supporting the truckers to supporting the government?
Why? Well, you become a father and suddenly the covid pandemic is a threat to your kids too. You find yourself feeling more inclined to back the government in efforts to quell it.
But: re dasein as I understand it, it’s different for everyone.
How can someone who posits an emotional Self able to “somehow” guide him to support the truckers not be an objectivist? How is your emotional Self not the equivalent of “the Real Me in sync with the Right Thing To Do”?
You’re just in sync emotionally rather than morally and politically. Just as, from my frame of mind, Maia is an objectivist given her spiritual Self.
No, the crucial distinction I make here is between being an objectivist, being a FFO, and being a pinhead.
It’s the respect I have for the intelligence of both you and Maia that doesn’t take me beyond objectivism itself. Although, sure, from time to time both of you post things that strike “me”" as something “I” would expect from the FFOs and the pinheads. But that is itself no less an entirely subjective rooted existentially in dasein reaction on my part.
How am “I” an objectivist other than in how subjectively you understand the meaning of the word? In fact, not in how you understand it at all. After all, had your life been different you acknowledge that you may well have come to understand it otherwise. No, it’s in how the emotional Gib feels about it.
Which neither one of us fully understands. Well, “here and now”.
Again, you’re forgetting…
That we bring points and accusations like this back around to the trucker protest. How, in your view, would a true subjectivist react to it? How would a nihilist in regard to all meaning react to it as opposed to a moral nihilist who focuses in only on conflicting value judgments in a No God world?
And I don’t think or feel tormented by objectivism…or cling to it…because here I always go back the “the gap” and to “Rummy’s Rules”. Instead, all I can do is to hear others out in regard to their own value judgments pertaining to the trucker protest. Are they objectivists given the manner in which “I” understand the meaning of the word? And, if so, can they convince me that they are correct in their conclusions by demonstrating to us why all rational and virtuous men and women are [re Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or Kant etc.] obligated to think and to feel the same?
And how many times do I have to point out that, sure, being fractured and fragmented can be profoundly problematic in a world where most are not…where most are actually disturbed by the arguments I make in defense of it…but it also provides you with so many more options in not being anchored to one or another rendition of “What Would Jesus Do?”
What Would The Emotional Gib Support? What Would The Goddess Countenance?
Though, by all means, if your emotional Self is adamant that “I” can’t let go of objectivism myself, anchor your posts here to that.
Back to my “strength” again. Strength given my own existential assumptions that my very existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless, that “I” forever flounder morally and politically, that oblivion might extinguish me even before I post this.
To wit:
…for eternity.[/b]
[/quote]
Only this too is rooted existentially in dasein. After all…
“Nearly 800,000 people die by suicide in the world each year, which is roughly one death every 40 seconds. Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in the world for those aged 15-24 years. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide.”
So, how does your emotional Self tackle it? Do you feel there is an “afterlife” in gib’s future? Salvation even?
