Well, here [to me] it is not so much a question of “believing” it but of trying to grasp [in my own mind] what it is that I think you think you are trying to convey.
Have I ever felt like this? I don’t know. Not that I can recall. It seems to encompass more an overall intuitive sense of being or not being “happy”. As though at any particular point in your life all of the most important variables that encompass it [to you] come into alignment such that what you feel is an overall sense of being situated out in the world in just the right way.
On the other hand, most times people speak of being happy when they can point to particular things in their lives that make them feel this way.
But unconditional happiness? That I find much harder to imagine.
But this still seems embodied more in dasein – a subjective/subjunctive frame of mind – than in an objective philosophical assessment of what constitutes Happiness. Or so it seems to me.
Okay, I can accept that others might see the distinction differently. But how does that then constitute the manner in which I make my own distinction here less reasonable?
Or less applicable with respect to conflicting goods?
A woman might pursue the goal of becoming pregnant. And she can conflate that [in her own mind] with being a good thing. Bringing children into the world may even be construed by her as the moral obligation of all women.
But what of the woman whose goal is not to become pregnant? And then because of a faulty contraceptive device [or as a reult of rape or incest] she does become pregnant. Her goal then is to abort the baby. She might even make the assumption it is not a baby [a human being] at all. Just a “clump of cells”.
And in her mind aborting the baby is deemed to be a good thing. She might rationalize it for any number of reasons.
But others insist that, while aborting the baby is in fact her goal, it is NOT a good thing. The discussion has shifted to a whole new focus on/for the word “good”. As, for example, the opposite of evil.
How we perceive our own well-being [in terms of either goals or goods] will always become entwined in the complex interaction between nature and nurture. And who really has an objective understanding of where one ends and the other begins? At least pertaining to the practical relationship we come to embody with respect to our moral values and our behaviors.
What’s crucial then [for me] is that regarding either one we can only have so much understanding and control. Or, rather, this appears to be the case in a world that comes bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change.
That’s why for folks like James it seems crucial this is all dissolved away by taking the relationship up into the clouds of abstraction and theory and conceptualization. Up there you only have to synchronize the definitions [the meaning] that you give to the words. The argument then becomes everything. Why? Because the argument often is everything. Or that’s been my own experience with James here.
From my perspective, James’s perspective [RM] is more a psychological defense mechanism than an actual coherent intermingling of nature and nurture.
I’m trying to imagine an actual situation I had been in which I felt what I would construe as “happy”. But how could that possibly described/captured without conditions precipitating the feeling?
And how close would “feeling happy” [feeling happy “at the time”] be from “being happy”? Being happy in a sense that philosophically such a state of mind would then be applicable ro everyone?
How would such a frame of mind be shared without each of us attaching conditions to it?
It’s like the quote in my signature now: “We can see other people’s behavior, but not their experience.” R.D. Laing
Again, through the evolution of life itself, we all come into the world predisposed mentally and emotionally to share this state of mind.
But how is that then extracted [purely?] from dasein? Here I get stuck in what I [and others] call “the limitations of language”.