Actually most of the posts about ambiguous have not been what could be classed as psychobabble. Why? because they have not attempted to draw conclusions about his psychology. Most have been about his behavior. Some have, in addition to this, guessed as to the psychology behind the fallacies, not responding, shifting context and so on. But Iamb only focuses on whatever he thinks he can most easily dismiss.
If a post such as some of mine, does in fact go into Buddhism, describing Buddhist terms Iamb is supposedly interested, he focuses on the one part dealing with him, and dismisses the whole post as having no substance.
Now what is a justification for us focusing on Iamb as a person: well, he hijacks threads. He presents himself as interested in things he is not. He judges with regularity individuals and groups, but does not take responsibility for his judgments, though he expects this of others. It lowers the quality of discourse and it is socially disruptive.
Actually people have done this, just as they have in relation to the topics of other threads. But he never seems to remember those moments. Nor has he seemed to notice that we are not Buddhists. Nor, as I have pointed out, Buddhism is not a moral system the way, say, Christianity is. YOU DID*T do what I wanted so you bad.
Y
That has happened hundreds of times, where a number of us have specifically responded to posts he made, concrete instances where he misrepresented the positions of others, shifted context, failed to respond, forgot obvious things about who he were talking to, used fallacies to dismiss, acted hypocritically by demanding arguments that proved assertions to all rational people while refusing to justify his own positions. This has happened hundreds of times. His response is to
Well, it’ll probably happen again. But this is just part of his trolling. If we point out what he is doing, he labels us as one of the three stooges, call it psychobabble, even when it is not even a psychological analysis, dismiss it as
about him.
But now he asks for more of it.
That has been exactly my contention. In fact I would guess he realized it because of me, not that he can manage to acknowledge that. I have said repeatedly that he neo-buddhist ideas, that they are partly like Buddhism, that his ideas share some qualities of Buddhism. Yet here, look at him, he says this as if it was his idea. Well, he never started any discussion with pointing out similarities, that only came after it was pointed out by someone he calls a Stooge. And he showed no interest in this when it was pointed out.
If anyone else wrote a sentence like this he would dismiss it as abstract babbling.
But that’s fucking off topic in this thread. That’s his interest. He can never seem to grasp that his desire is not an objective criterion.
I have done precisely this in other threads. Taken a specific moral issue, given a specific case from my life, a real life example and shown how I make decisions. Later in those very threads he demanded that I do this, as if it had never happened.
It changes nothing to meet his challenges. He doesn’t even remember it happens. Further it is a tangent in this thread. That’s fine threads, go on tangents. But suddenly anyone reading this and not knowing him would think he thinks we bear some kind of onus to satisfy his very specific demands. We don’t. The thread is not just or in the main about his desires.
Also he seems to think that if we don’t meet his challenge all the fucked up things he does are justified. They are really rather separate issues. How he can be an adult and no know this I have no idea.
So it’s a bit like that movie Memento, where the main character wakes up each day forgetting everything about the previous day, but having left himself clues as to a purpose for the current day (tattooed on his body)… only to erase any proof of accomplishment within the current day, to be forgotten about, and repeated the next day. Praxis without poiesis or theoria. Like if Sisyphus was purposely rolling the rock sideways around the mountain. Still, the odd comment here or there from him makes it seem self-aware, which would make it trolling. I remember I wrote a piece about the Present King of France—somebody lost in a delusion. And rather than try to refute his points, since when you see a hospital he sees a castle, you see a nurse and he sees a servant, etc… you advocated just asking him how it was going. Or something like that. Maybe that’s the approach to take with iamphibious.
I think every tack has been taken, including that one, but interestingly that fits with the book I am reading The Catalyst : how to change anyone’s mind / Jonah Berger, so I’ll do a quick Western Eastern compare. (and note: that’s a terrible title. The book is humbler and it’s more about questioning rather than arguing and pressuring, allowing self-interest to (perhaps) lead to change). It is no fix all and that would be scary if it was. I mean, anybody could read the book and rule the world.
So, we call that a Western cognitive science driven approach: ask questions, present possible options, get to know the person, present other options, present options in the context of the person’s values, desires, needs, motivations…and allow them to choose. On a practical level and potentially on an emotional level much more empathetic. In the book he has as role models hostage negotiators for example. They used to threaten, right off the bat. Now, at least some, have learned to form a connection, don’t point out the obvious, find the goals, present options, let them choose approach. And it works much better. They still don’t get airplanes parked in front of the bank, but more of them walk out with their hands up. It is also effective with potential suicides. Don’t tel the guy that the insurance company will not, in fact, pay the family for a suicide. That can actually trigger a suicide because the person feels more cornered. Ask them why they are upset, find their values, tie potential best solutions and outcomes to their values, then let them choose.
Buddhists on the other hand, when dealing with kind of thing (the Iamb scenario) have done things like
give an analogy - the filling the skeptical seeker’s cup with overflowing tea, then compare this to the seeker’s mind.
repeatedly just suggest they meditate and invite them to the next meditation period
explain the Buddha’s ideas on suffering - note: rather than trying to prove that Buddhism is the best or that the seeker’s demands are wrong, they tend not to engage, at least in the East, with the seeker’s trains of thought, since these are considered the problem
I am sure a vast array of other approaches have been used by Buddhists.
What the two approaches share is avoiding conflict. What the Buddhists are less likely to do is engage in the demand of the seeker. That may be what he or she wants, but since suffering is caused by X, it is better just to present the main option Buddhism presents. Since Buddhism thinks that thinking at least certain kinds is the problem they don’t want to feed the troll in the seeker’s mind nor in their own. In fact that is one compassionate part of Buddhism - they see it as a kind of mechanistic process, not the true identity of the person. Of course this can also be experienced as rude, depending on identification.
This isn’t a hostage situation, though I think it might be closer to a potential suicide, not that he will kill himself.
None of us are Buddhists and oddly he does not take his questions to places where people identify as Buddhists are, and who could, potentially, respond to his inquiry at least for themselves.
Mo meets Curly and out of it comes a very obscure “general description intellectual contraption”.
On the other hand, what it has to do with the points I raise in regard to Buddhism specifically and religion in general is largely irrelevant. Why? Because he seems considerably more interested in coming off here as merely “clever”. And [of course] smug.
Thus avoiding altogether the part where he connects the existential dots between his moral philosophy, the behaviors he chooses, and that which he anticipates the fate of “I” to be on the other side of the grave.
What might be intriguing however is a discussion between the River and the Stooges. An exchange in which they explore each other’s take on these crucial relationships. They can even stay way, way up in the clouds so as to show us how “serious philosophers” go about approaching Buddhism.
Meanwhile, being an inveterate polemicist, I am rather enjoying myself. Unfortunately [so far] it has hardly been what I’d call…challenging?
Nothing like the exchanges I once engaged in the Ponderers’ Guild, at e-philosophy, the cafe dc philo and the old yahoo philosophy groups. Now those folks were a challenge.
The other side of the grave? Maybe you’d like the Two Things argument. (Death is either of two things). Plato’s Apology. I won’t go to the trouble of laying it out. That is for you to do.
My own religion I will lay out as follows, for the benefit of starting a cult (just kidding). Maybe its close to buddhism. Endless time, finite matter in the universe. Hence, limited number of arrangements. Everything that has happened before will happen again. You will repeat your life, and others, exactly as you have before. Battlestar Galactica. Eternal Recurrence. How would you live if you had to live again exactly as before? Other side of the grave is like having your wisdom teeth pulled… total absence of consciousness. An eternity passes in a single night’s dreamless sleep. Socrates. Until you wake up screaming from the womb, again. That’s the bare-bones of it anyways.
Among my chief intellectual influences I count: Battlestar Galactica, Nietzsche, and Plato, probably in that order
Buddhist Retreat
Why I gave up on finding my religion.
By JOHN HORGAN at Slate Magazine
I suspect however there are any number of Buddhists who might insist this is not at all the correct understanding of Buddhist philosophy. In fact, given that there are many “schools of thought” in the Buddhist tradition – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_Buddhism – it is doubtful it will ever finally come down to what the Buddha himself meant to convey about the “self”. Not given all of the countless social, political and economic contexts in which I/“I”/“i” might find him or herself interacting with others.
And here I can only note the gap between what any particular individual thinks is true “here and now” and how the “universe” reconfigures that into this or that reincarnation and this or that encounter with Nirvana.
And the stakes remain the same: morality here and now, immortality there and then.
So, by all means: keep it vague.
Okay, you may jettison all of these negative frames of mind in embracing selflessness, but there are any number of contexts in which the “selfish” neighbors might object to what you think or say or do. They may insist that you should feel guilt or shame or embarrassment or self-doubt for particular behaviors you choose.
But, again, given a particular context, how is feeling selfless actually understood by Buddhists. Suppose a Buddhist named Mary is confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. The Self here being embedded in the objective either/or world of human biology.
Now given this take on Buddhism and abortion from the BBC…
[b]'There is no single Buddhist view on abortion:
…Most Western and Japanese Buddhists come away believing in the permissibility of abortion, while many other Buddhists believe abortion to be murder. James Hughes
‘Buddhists believe that life should not be destroyed, but they regard causing death as morally wrong only if the death is caused deliberately or by negligence. Traditional Buddhism rejects abortion because it involves the deliberate destroying of a life. Buddhists regard life as starting at conception.’[/b]
What if Mary chooses to abort her baby. The neighbors find out and, given their own religious faith, believe she has committed a sin. That unless she repents, she will burn in Hell for all of eternity.
How then does Mary explain her behavior to them given what conflicting Buddhist accounts understand enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana to mean.
And is she able to feel no guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt etc., because neither she nor the unborn baby even have a Self in the manner in which most of us have come to understand personality here?
Okay, given Plato’s account, what do you suppose his fate ended up being on the other side of the grave? And then there are the accounts of the a God/the God/my God Western denominations and the No God Eastern denominations.
Morality/enlightenment. Heaven/Nirvana. Insofar as they might be understood given the lives that we live from day to day to day.
And here most of us around the globe are mere mortals figuring there may be a connection between the behaviors we choose on this side of the grave and our fate on the other side. Let’s call this religion.
Now, me, I don’t believe in God. And from this I take an existential leap to an essentially meaningless world in which human interactions are rationalized from any number of conflicting historical, cultural and experiential moral and political agendas. And then one by one we die and topple over into the abyss that is nothingness. Let’s call this my own existential contraption rooted in dasein rooted in the arguments I make in my signature threads.
Clearly, it is hard to top this as yet another entirely obscure “general description intellectual contraption”.
But, okay, bring it on down.
Note particular contexts from your life such that what you mean by this explains why you choose one set of behaviors rather than others.
And as for eternal recurrence, I still prefer Kundera’s account myself:
[b]'[Nietzsche’s] idea of eternal return is a mysterious one…to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it and that recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
'Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal returns states that a life which disappears once and for all…is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than a war between two African kingdoms in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a 100,000 blacks perished in excruciating torment…
'Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit…?
'Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler’s concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period of my life, a period that would never return?
‘This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.’[/b]
For one thing, it’s a bit more substantive. I don’t think he was just trying to sound witty or clever.
Good old Iamb. He used to lament the non-presence of Von Rivers and Moreno, who are both right here and who both have tried all sorts of approaches with him. Now he has to to lament the loss of other forums where he was really challenged. Poor soul. And it’s true, it isn’t much of a challenge to dismiss and label rather than responding to points made. Perhaps they made so many posts in those forums that cutting and pasting his usual posts and dismissing and not responding while posting was, well, a lot of keystrokes. I can only imagine his feelings of loss.
And now he is expecting you, in a thread on Buddhism, to respond to his standard cut and paste, put it in some specific scenario. If you do, the thread moves even further from Buddhism - in nearly every post I bitched about Iamb’s non-contributions I put it in some kind of Buddhist context or actually went into Buddhism proper. If you don’t, the you are afraid of what his questions and demands make you feel about what comforts you. Can’t we do a mass ignore? Pretty please.
Take a look at Felix’s post which is called psychobabble. The last two lines could be called psychobabble, in that they then draw conclusions about his psychology. Though generally psychobabble is this…
I am sorry but insight is not jargon or esoteric.
But notice that most of what Felix says is focused on behavior. What is lacking in his responses. That is not psychological in focus, it cannot possibly be psychobabble. It is responding to another poster, me, pointing out behavioral patterns that we consider negative. A perfectly rational thing to discuss in a community. Maybe we are wrong. Maybe he does respond to points made. Perhaps the many specific examples of non-response and fallacies and so on have been correct, that’s possible but since he merely dismisses these complaints about his behavior, the evidence is on our side.
A number of people have taken time to point out the patterns. This means nothing to him. Even when they are people he claims to respect, there is never any possible truth in any of it.
He oftens says ‘once again focusing on me’ or the like, as if that category of posts or portions of posts is wrongheaded per se. But of course if someone is behaving poorly in a community it makes sense to point out this behavior and since this has been done countless times with specific examples and a near consensus in the threads that these patterns exist, this is all quite rational. Of course groups will focus on what they consider disruptive behavior. He doesn’t justify dismissing this category of posts or portions of posts. As usual his dismissals require no justification, just as most of his assertions never need justification. He’s is the worst kind of troll, a slightly complex one.
Can we please all ignore him? It will be easier if we all do. If not, well, so be it.
Try to put yourself inside his head. Try to imagine why the actual points I raise above about Buddhism and religion reduce him down to this sort of caustic, scathing histrionics. Ever and always huffing and puffing that it’s all about me.
I mean it’s not like the fate of the world hangs in the balance here. What really lies behind outbursts such as this?
Let him think about it and get back to us.
Me, I almost never get this riled up in an exchange of this sort. Well, not counting the occasional “human all too human” mood. And in part because I recognize that, given the infinitesimally tiny insignificance of my own existence in the context of all there is what are the odds that what “I” think is true here is in fact true going all the way back to an understanding of existence itself.
In fact this is the part that he points out puts me in sync with Buddhism’s notion of the “self” as an illusion.
But, as well, there is also the flesh and blood self out in the world interacting with other flesh and blood folks all of whom grapple with figuring out “the right thing to do” in this or that context. Then the religious folks who connect that dot to the fate of “I” on the other side of the grave. The part that encompasses all the rest of eternity.
And, sure, as with phoneutria and others, foe me. You can then insist it’s for the reason you give. And I can then suspect it’s for the reason I’d give.
Is Buddhism incompatible with eternal return? I don’t think so. Eternal return does imply a kind of permanence, but not one that is experienced. Each time Von River posts his philosophy, as he did a few posts ago, with Battlestar Galactica and the eternal return, it will be exactly the same, but this will include it’s experienced impermanence. There are also endless cycles in Buddhism (and its root religion Hinduism). There is a hint that achieving Buddhaness or nirvana might break an experiencing out of the chain. But heck even that could recur.
I would say that such a thought, eternal recurrance, is similar in some way to the detachment of Buddhism. In Buddhism you actively disidentify with yourself and notice what is. In N you hopefully begin, after the initial horror of the idea, to embrace your fate. Love what is. To me there is something passive about both, not a denial of agency but a criticism of actively not being satisfied. Which ends up being a criticism of, well, being human.
I have to say I have never quite gotten what N was on about, why he thought it was so important an idea. He seemed to use it a bit like Buddhists who meditate on death. Here’s somethng that we are afraid of, so let’s focus on it until we feel lighter and freer. Isn’t there enough with determism, the lack of a persistent self, the distance to over come for true intimacy and actually knowing another…do we need another more ornate meditation point that is, at least at first, very unpleasant sounding?
Let’s follow their exchange as they connect the dots between Nietzsche and Buddhism. Between an “I” that ever recurs, an “I” that is reconfigured through reincarnation or an “I” that, from my point of view here and now, is obliterated for all time to come.
Then pick the one most likely to comfort and console you. The one most manage to think themselves into believing.
But I’m not asking you if my life is not the norm; I’m asking you if that’s what you said–you should know what you said.
That doesn’t answer my question at all. I’m asking why you always need a context? Is it because a) you get lost without a context, or b) you find it pointless to discuss without a context… and you can’t even answer that. It would be fine if neither a) nor b) was the case, and I’m missing important point c) which you draw to my attention, but I’m not even gathering that from your response. One would think you’d at least try to be clear in your responses, give me a direct answer–a) or b)… or even c)–as that would clarify your position and where you’re coming from–and I assume you want to be clear–but you seem to be a master obscurantist, dodging questions and blurring the focus in discussions as much as possible–so much that no one can make heads or tails of what you’re saying. And it’s happened consistently in my encounters with you–I ask a question to get some clarity from you, and you do everything in your power to avoid answering it, offering in it’s place some extraordinarily convoluted run on sentence about what your general interests are in discussions like this. It’s all mind games as far as I can tell.
Well, you definitely gave a context. Now how is this an example of the kind of response that has something to do with the manner in which you construe ‘I’? Your quote from the link states…
^ So I take this to be an example response that has something to do with the manner in which you construe ‘I’.
My earlier response, which you said has nothing to do with the manner in which you construe ‘I’, was this:
So what’s the difference between the response you gave and the response I gave? Is it that the response you gave is a statement on the Buddhist position with respect to abortion? Whereas my response is more a statement on how I would behave? And why is it that statements about one’s position have something to do with the manner in which you construe ‘I’ but statements about one’s behavior do not?
And again, you didn’t answer any of my questions. Not even close. Just gave me yet another rendition of your general interests in discussions like this. You’re having a one way converstion, asking others to tell you what they would do in this or that situation, reminding them to be specific about the context, but completely dismissing their questions to you, even if it’s to gain clarity on your meaning and intent, which one would think would help you with your goal.
But isn’t that what I gave you? Didn’t I say that I would react to the murderer by trying to alleviate as much suffering as I can–both on the part of the murder and his family, and on the part of the victim and his family? The only thing I left out is what I, as this Buddhist character, think of the murderer’s actions morally speaking–but that alone is more or less what I said it is–an assessment of the act of murder in moral terms, something the Buddhist can argue with the murderer over–which you said is not the reaction your looking for.
So if it’s not the Buddhist’s moral assessment of the murderer’s actions your looking for, and it’s not the Buddhist’s own moral response to the murderer’s actions (try to alleviate suffering) your looking for, that leaves… what?
Ah-hah! That’s the kind of response which gets your juices flowing! It’s just like I said–a response describing what I think, or what I would say, rather than what I would do.
On this idea that B
uddhism is against abortion. Well, it’s not that simple. First Buddhist is not like Catholicism with a central decreeing body. There are different takes on Buddhism and this includes, certainly, some places or traditions that can weigh in other factors like the health of the mother. But we also need to put the Buddhist position on protecting and not destroying life.
Buddhism is not anthropocentric!
Life includes animals and trees and even, potentially objects. All much be cared for. So, what does this mean. Everyone is going to kill, even vegans, sorry guys.
There are also pro-choice Buddhists, and not a few.
That one bigwig in one Buddhism.
So 1) you cannot avoid killing, so it is generally a choice between lesser evils and also one’s intent.
2) There are different Buddhisms with different views on abortion and while most view it negatively, not all do.
3) It’s not really a moral system. It’s a practical system. One is nice because this helps the process of being attached loosen. In fact the goal is to transcend good and evil, or what get called that. The conceiving that way. Buddhism it not a direct parallel to Christianity. There is no arbiter of good and evil, no deity (except where buddhisms are syncretistic with older religions). Now while individual Buddhists may believe in objective morals, just as many people who believe in Darwinism think Lamark was completely incorrect and that natural selection is survival of the fittest (they’d be wrong on both counts), Buddhism is not objectivist in relation to morals.
It is pragmatic - what reduces suffering via reduction of attachment and identification with a non-existent self and thus reduces suffering in what was thought to be a SELF.
Some people may want to put Buddhism on the rack and see if they can torture out some unprovable moral position. But they are just projecting their own religions (which they may or may not believe in any more) on something they don’t understand, and I mean fundamentally.
First, allow me to shift gears from the Stooges to what will hopefully be a more civil and intelligent exchange…
…okay, ready.
I’ll concede that if you’ll concede that “good points” of this sort are rooted existentially in dasein.
How about this: We’ll need a context. Then you can illustrate more, uh, substantially how you make this distinction.
Then we may well have to agree to disagree regarding the one and the only way that someone can answer questions like this from you.
How about a context?
Nope:
Yet another god awful intellectual contraption which serves only to establish all the more the gap between how you don’t “get” Buddhism and how I don’t “get” it. For me, my interest revolves around closing the gap between what Buddhists think enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana mean “in their head”, how they reconfigure this into the behaviors they choose in a world of conflicting goods…given how they then connect those behaviors here and now to the fate of “I” there and then.
And, in particular…
By exploring the parameters of their spiritual commitment given the components of my own moral philosophy. In what I presume to be a No God world.
But: If what you aim to “get” is something entirely different, fine. We can chalk it up to one of Curly’s “category errors”. Or some other technical transgression on my part. We can then move on to others.
At least we didn’t take to sliming each other.
Now on to my “context thing”…
Well, first, of course, my “I” and your “I” in regard to the subject of Buddhism itself is rooted existentially in the lives that we lived. After all, it’s not for nothing that there are many, many more or less conflicting “schools of thought” regarding this particular spiritual path. Now, that’s either because there is only one true path derived from the the life that the Buddha himself lived, or, given all of the many different lives that different Buddhists have lived in different historical, cultural and experiential contexts, there were bound to be various “spinoffs” in other directions.
But: with so much at stake in regard to enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana, are all the different schools merely interchangeable? And what of all the millions of men and women who lived before the Buddha was even born…or since his birth but have absolutely no experience with Buddhism.
That makes no difference to whatever is out there in the universe factoring in any particular individual’s beliefs or behaviors on this side of the grave? Ierrellus’s rendition of the Christian God?
Again, with a God/the God, that is all explained in God Himself. But a No God religion?
My point is always to make a distinction between points raised that are able to be demonstrated as true objectively for all rational human beings…given autonomous communication and accepting that this communication will always be subsumed in what must certainly be a really, really big gap between our exchange here going all the way back to an objective understanding of existence itself.
Whatever that might possibly even mean.
Whether the conflicting good revolves around capital punishment or abortion, there are points raised rooted in facts rooted in the either/or world able to be rationally communicated, and there are subjective/subjunctive value judgments derived form conflicting understanding of those facts, rooted in the manner in which I construe the meaning of “I” here given the points raised in my signature threads.
And again, whether someone answers a question of this kind to your own satisfaction is no less a judgment call rooted in your own subjective assessment of the exchange. All I can do is react subjectively in turn.
My own reaction to things like this…
“My response to your latest question is simply that I can’t guarantee, in this particular case, that my attempt to alleviate suffering won’t backfire and cause more suffering, so it’s a gamble. But it’s one I feel confident in taking. ← Is it the gamble that makes my response seem less important? Are you saying the stakes are so high, nothing but an absolute guarantee would suffice?”
…is that once you focus in on “this particular case”, distinctions can be made between the actual existence of suffering, embedded in the actual facts of the situation, and the extent to which our own understanding of being “confident” in our own role, in our own particular value judgments is, instead, more the embodiment of how I construe “I” here [psychologically or otherwise] in the profoundly problematic nature of identity and personality…in the sheer number of genetic and memetic variables involved. Factors in which in so many crucial regards we have only so much understanding and control over.
But however you react in any particular situation involving a murder involving value judgments is in turn going to be judged by others given the gap between how they do react subjectively to your behavior and how any particular Buddhist reacts given his or her own understanding of enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana. Then given the gap between the extent to which philosophers can establish how one is obligated to react given intellectual contraptions like Kant’s.
These interactions are all rooted in the manner in which “I” have come to understand the existential parameters of identity rooted in daseins confronting conflicting goods.
So, when you ask me things like this…,
…it’s just another reminder of how we have come to understand “I” in particular contexts differently.
It’s not the assessments themselves that interest me, but the extent to which assessments of this sort are rooted in my own understanding of this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
The philosophical “hole” down in which my own “I” remains largely “fractured and fragmented”.
Oh, yeah.
That film is based on an actual true story. And if, after watching it, someone is still unable to grasp how what “we think, say and do” is profoundly embedded in dasein, well, we can keep plugging away at it in exchanges like this or they devolve into Kids like Wendy and her ilk or Stooges like Curly and his ilk.
