Let’s just say that this…
nytimes.com/2021/09/16/opin … avior.html
…comes closer to my own understanding of dasein than anything you you are likely to come across from the objectivists here.
[b]'Is Self-Awareness a Mirage?
One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do. You can ask somebody: Why’d you choose that house? Or why’d you marry that person? Or why’d you go to graduate school? People will concoct some plausible story, but often they really have no idea why they chose what they did.
We have a conscious self, of course, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion. We know what we’re feeling, just not how and why we got there.
But we also don’t want to admit how little we know about ourselves, so we make up some story, or confabulation. As Will Storr writes in his excellent book “The Science of Storytelling”: “We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorizing as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us.”
Or as Nicholas Epley puts it in his equally excellent “Mindwise,” “No psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts or behavior anymore unless they’re interested in understanding storytelling.”'[/b]
The extent to which “I” is a mirage – or just a story we tell ourselves – depends in large part on how close to or far away from you get in regard to the either/or world.
In regard to moral and political value judgments – or to our likes and dislikes re music and the arts – it seems clearly more an existential “confabulation” than anything the objectivists here will cling to. Some no doubt all the way to the grave.
Even those like Maia who take pride in not being an objectivist are really not all that far removed from the psychological comfort and consolation they derive from being on their very own One True Path. Their precious Self able to anchor them to a “spiritual” essence that allows them to call themselves “a moral person”. No less just their own subjective “story” of course but then that’s all it has to be, right?
Of course, Brooks then needs to put this part in perspective:
[b]"Maybe we can’t know ourselves through the process we call introspection. But we can gain pretty good self-awareness by extrospection, by closely observing behavior. Epley stressed that we can attain true wisdom and pretty good self-awareness by looking at behavior and reality in the face to create more accurate narratives.
Maybe the dignity in being human is not being Achilles, the bold, thoughtless actor. Maybe the great human accomplishment is being Homer, the wise storyteller. In telling ever more accurate stories about ourselves, we send different beliefs, values and expectations down into the complex nether reaches of our minds, and — in ways we may never understand — that leads to better desires, better decision-making and more gracious living."[/b]
Sure, that’s part of “I” here as well.
And that’s why we need to explore actual contexts in order to examine how each part comes into play in regard to our own value judgments.