does this apply universally and essentially ? 
God bless
-hth
Okay, what did I call my first dog? Who was my best friend in high school? And how do I know if my exasperation is the right kind to have?
That just exposes the limitiations of language in explicating things like this. Itâs like saying, âthese words are a lieâ.
Yes, but the exasperation is derived precisely from the things we find meaningful in different [conflicting] ways and then canât agree regarding which particular meaning is deemed the most rational.
But in any number of actual circumstantial contexts the emotions are ever stirred. In particular, regarding moral and political conflicts. Who can examine the abortion debate for example without having emotional and psychological reactions to the killing of the unborn. Or to the attempt to force women to give birth against their wishes. Is there a way for the philosopher to examine this conflict in a purely dispassionaite way? What would that argument look like?
How then are you not part of the masses yourself? How would we know for sureâŚwith respect to the abortion warsâŚif we are just following the herd or are instead thinking clearly as a rational and objective individual?
Here are the answers to your threee riddles:
- It was your first blog. If I now knew what it was then it wouldnât be your first blog.
- Your best friend. If I now knew who it was then it wouldnât be your best friend.
- Itâs your right kind of exasperation simply because you are having it.
Go on. Ask me another.
How do you know you knew then what I didnât know you knew I knew just before I didnât know you knew it after I did later?
exactly âŚnot saying you are a liar- but it is you that are using your words
âŚits like someone claiming that there are no universal constants and yet not acknowledging that the claim in of itself would then have to be a universal constantâŚone must truly understand what they are saying in order to reach enlightenment.
Here you seem to assume that meaning must be established rationally. But it doesnât work that way with most valuation - meaning and value are most often based on sensations that have their place deep in the nervous system and which occur to consciousness prior to the process of rationalization and conceptualization and the logic which is thereby allowed to occur. That may be exasperating, I agree, but not incomprehensible or impossible to get a grip on once you let go of the idea that logic or reason creates values.
I keep coming back to this point on this site, that logic and rationality is itself based on a certain type of meaning-giving and valuation. It does not have the power to change those foundations, except when these foundations are part of the revaluation-process. Thatâs the type of thing done in psychoanalysis, where deeply rooted values are dug up and invited to play a part in an at least partly logical dialectic process.
You would have to access and involve the subconscious of the worlds entire population to be able to make a step toward a global agreement on most issues you mentioned in the OP. Even though that seems like a distant fiction, Iâm all for it, I enjoy seeing things emerge from the subconsious.
This may seem strange but here I would propose a rational approach, an evaluation is based on science, the one means by which emotional judgment can be avoided. Unfortunately scientific method does not apply to morality and many other subjective systems, but it does to judging whether a phoetus is a being or not. At least, if it is true that self-consciousness is a biochemical process which is initiated at one point by the production of a specific chemical. Before that point, abortion would not be killing. After, it would be.
The difference in opinion as to whether or not we kill a real being in an abortion, is what drives most of the debate, and not whether it is right or wrong to kill a being. We share a certain collective emotion which says that this is wrong. It would be up to science to determine when a fetus becomes a child, after wich point abortion would be murder.
So there is a clear hierarchy here:
- establishment of value: killing a being is wrong (emotion)
- determining what is a being: a fetus after the point it starts to produce a certain chemical (science)
I am not part of the herd in this one because I have no emotional reaction to the issue. But I am part of the herd on a lot of other issues. The question is always, what is the primary value I seek to attain or protect? If that is clear, then the issue can be approached rationally.
Again, this merely points to the limitations of language in explicating the relationship between words and worlds.
And sometimes when someone speaks of enlightenment they speak of thinking the way they do. In other words, âif you accept my premises about God, morality, justice, freedom etc. then you are enlightened.â
Yes, I recognize [and agree] that valuation involves a complex intermingling of perception, cognition, emotion, psychology and instinct.
In fact we can bring this down to earth:
If Jane says, âI believe abortion is a mortal sinâ, Joe might ask her, âwhat do you mean by that?â
But how would we ever be able to sort through all of these complex relationships [involving factors rooted in both nature and nurture] each and everytime someone asked, âwhat do you mean?â
Eventually we have to take our leap and try to make some sort of connection between how we understand the meaning of the words and how others do.
Whatâs the alternative?
But: The meaning of some things are considerably less exasperating to arrive at than are the meaning of other things. For example, if Bob says, âI went hunting and shot a deer last weekâI have the head mounted on my living room wallâ, most of us will not ask, âWhat do you mean?â
But if John says, âkilling animals for sport is wrongâ, Bob will ask, âwhat do you mean by that?â And it is quite possible they will never agree on what all the words mean in the discussion that followsâlet alone what they should mean in conjunction with the killing of animals for sport.
Thus the exasperation revolves around values that come into conflict when we canât make our words align such that the conflict goes away.
Agreed?
But one distinction is as arbitrary as any other. Everyone has their own: once conceived, once you have a certain chemical, once you have brain activity, once you have a heartbeat, once you feel pain, once you can survive outside the womb, once you are actually born. etc.
Science canât established, âyes, humanâ, âno, not humanâ with the finality of establishing what happens when chemicals interact or planets orbit around a sun. My view is that once conceived, the cells start dividing and thus begins an integrated journey from womb to tomb. You are a human being.
And abortion is killing a human being. But it has to be allowed because, again, if women were forced to give birth against their wishes then gender equality would be an illusion for many.
We can only strive to make abortions as rare as possible.
I didnât have to. Experience is primary, not secondary, like knowledge.
But you did have to if what passes for knowledge is later discovered to be what used to pass for irony. What is the most ironic experience you almost had?
Some people can succeed in pondering these issues. Not everyone will succeed, but some do.
You go on answering this yourself:
Bob will likely not ask âwhat do you mean by that?â because he understands all the terms but disagrees with their position in the statement. Unlike when Jane speaks of a âmortal sinâ, which is a term which holds only an allegorical, mythical meaning. It does not refer to something as concrete as, say, âwrongâ or âa mistakeâ. I agree that there are different levels of effectiveness in word-choice. Winston Churchill aimed at that when he said:
âBroadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.â
I detect a specific position here, which is that we should all hold the same values.
I do not share this position, and I find it not exasperating that we cannot just formulate our differences away by reformulating our positions. I really do not think that valuation or revaluation is a rational process. So where you feel exasperation I feel the motivation to attain my own values in such a way that the results will be of use to those people who will come after me holding the same type of values. I am fine with the fact that the great majority of the human race holds different values on many issues.
At this point in scientific development you are right. We do not have a definite frame to establish what is an individual entity and what is not. The most basic position is your cell-dividing definition. Let me step aside to retain my own position, which is very different and which is based on theory that does not fit in this context (DMT, the pineal gland).
But the position of gender equality stems from values which only a minority of the worlds population hold. I for one think that men and women should have equal rights but that the two genders are not themselves equal and that both men and women will, regardless of any law, have to live with the properties of their gender. Your argument for abortion to protect a womans position and opportunities is tempting, but using the logic of which it is constructed, we might extend this argument to a plea to allow people (men or women) to kill their new born children when they form a burden. If we consider a fetus to be a human being, then there is no essential difference between a born and an unborn child in terms of parental rights to dispose of them.
(that is why I am in favor of establishing exactly when a fetus becomes a full human being. In my view, cell-dividing does not by itself amount to that. But this is a debate we should not pursue here!)
There is a way⌠Understanding that what you believe is what you believe and not what you know. With that most things we lean towards should be understood to have a possibility of being wrong and as such adamancy about what the truth is should take a back seat to understanding that we know we do not know. I find many to ultimately be somewhat closer for those who delve into the known unknowns of life. While certainly there are certain people that know more on various subjects and such than you do and vice versa⌠Some people do think illogically on many matters and that is just the way it is. Its not necessarily though that you know the answer that distinguishes their belief (or what they perceive as fact) perhaps, but that you know it is unknown. This is where wisdom comes into play, understanding there are alternatives, even for your own leanings.
some people wl remain lost as they are fenced with eloctromagnetic fence o
ignorance because u care u end up exasperated
I get exasperated with internet philosophy, because it gets to the point where you cannot adequately explain your ideas in a 1000 word post anymore. Okay, you can say âthis is thisâ, and âthat is thatâ, but because most of those thisâs, and many of those thats are unintuitive, getting readers into the mindframe where they become so within such a short space, is impossible.
EDIT: Fuck, Iâve become such a nerd. Thanks ILP.
Exasperation is not the problem; thatâs natural. How can something that is a natural occurrence be a problem? Anyway, the body absorbs all such emotions and when it does, itâs finished. Being exasperated about exasperation is the problem.
iambiguous wrote:
But if John says, âkilling animals for sport is wrongâ, Bob will ask, âwhat do you mean by that?â And it is quite possible they will never agree on what all the words mean in the discussion that followsâlet alone what they should mean in conjunction with the killing of animals for sport.
What Bob will want to know is what John means when he speaks of hunting and mounting a deer as wrong. Why is it wrong? And John will give him reasons. And Bob will then give John reasons why he believes it is not wrong.
The exasperation comes for both them hours later when neither can convince the other of something each thinks makes perfect sense.
There is a limit here beyond which philosophers canât go in settling it. It canât be settled. Thatâs the source of the exasperation.
iambiguous wrote:
Thus the exasperation revolves around values that come into conflict when we canât make our words align such that the conflict goes away.
My position is precisely the opposite. We can never all hold the same values because we live in the world and view it from so many utterly vast and varied existential perspectives. At best we can strive to embrace moderation, negociation and compromise [democracy and the rule of law] when interacting in the political [legal] sphere.
No matter how often John and Bob reformulate their positions they will never be in alignment if they refuse to acknowledge that neither of their arguments is the most rational. Instead, they have to agree to modify their convictions and pass legislation that allows for hunting but places restrictions on it.
In a world without God any behavior can be rationalized. And we all make our own existential leaps. But very very few equate the killing a new born baby or a child with the killing of the unborn in the first trimesterâwhich is when the overwhelming preponderance of abortions [over 90%] occur. But I agree that allowing them at all is just a rationalization in turn. And this rationalization revolves around the insistence that in the first trimester, itâs not really a human being that is being killed.
Well, I disagree.
But you then argue:
No, letâs pursue it.
Letâs take that to its logical limits.
Suppose science is able to determine the precise point when âa clump cellsâ becomes a âhuman beingâ.
Suppose a woman you know finds herself pregnant. Suppose for whatever personal reason she decides she wants the abortion after that point is reached. Would you argue that she must go through with the birth or be charged with first degree murder?
Suppose the pregnancy was as a result of rape or incest. Same thing? Give birth?
After all, it is not the fault of the fetus.
But the exasperation occurs more when folks are convinced there really are arguments that reflect the most rational manner in which to think about something.
And when that something revolves around moral and political values the exasperation can easily shift gears to outrage.