phoneutria and iambiguous don't contend

Over and over again, I make a distinction here that she refuses to examine at all. It is the one between those aspects of the self that can be clearly and objectively communicated to others because they revolve around facts in your life [biological, demographic, circumstantial] that are not just a matter of opinion. You are either this or that because in fact you are either this or that.

Instead, in my view, it is examining the components of “I” that revolve around moral and political value judgments…the “self” when a point is reached where the facts that all can agree on reconfigure into subjective assumptions regarding how one should behave given the established facts in any situation…that is far more fascinating to me.

Thus, for example, she will make arguments in the Marxism thread expressed in such a way that those who do not share them are often mocked. Why? Because she has come to think herself into believing that her own value judgments in regard to political economy reflect the one and the only rational assessment and that therefore anyone who disagrees is necessarily wrong. They must be because she is necessarily right.

But when I challenge her to take that frame of mind to the philosophy forum and explore the arguments that I make in my signature threads she becomes another Stooge here and shifts the discussion to declamatory attacks on me personally.

And I’m more than willing to admit that I am simply not understanding her correctly.

Again, you would think that she’d welcome the opportunity to deepen and reinforce this accusation by bringing “intellectual contraptions” like this out into the world of conflicting goods. Whether in regard to Marxism or any other issue that sustains what I call conflicting “political prejudices” rooted in dasein.

She can scoff at my use of the word all she wants. But that’s not the same as examining it in a substantive exchange in which our respective understanding of human identity is explored more clearly given actual sets of circumstances.

Instead, it ever and always comes to revolve around attacking me personally:

Come on, what “on earth” is this actually supposed to mean?

It is precisely my attempt to examine her own assumption about the person she thinks she is by exploring her own rendition of “I” as I did in the OP here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382 – that she studiously rebuffs.

The problem is that you haven’t gone quite far enough. It’s only after your nihilism has become perfect that you can embrace “yourself” again. As long as it matters to you that you might (just as well) have gone in another direction, your nihilism isn’t perfect yet. When it is, you’ll find your own rooted values present themselves as the most natural and readily available course for you to take. But first, you need to see that the difference between moral/political and biological/demographic/etc. is only relative. You recently wrote that you were running out of time, by which you seemed to mean that you’re getting old. Well, doesn’t this tell you even your biological existence is no “fact”?..

No, my problem is that, over and again, folks here approach nihilism in “intellectual contraptions” like my own above.

But then they won’t or don’t or can’t take their own contraptions out into the world of actual human interactions. Which here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382 – is where I do take mine.

Perfect nihilism?

Given what particular context in which mere mortals in a No God world come into conflict over behaviors derived from conflicting value judgments derived from lives that are often very, very different.

In other words, using the tools of philosophy, how might ethicists describe their own choices as either more or less reflective of “perfect nihilism?” As opposed to deontologists who insist that the rational human mind can, instead, come up with the “perfect morality”.

Hence our moral obligation to choose one set rather than another set of behaviors. As opposed to someone like myself who has thought himself into believing that “I” in the is/ought is “fractured and fragmented”. And that in fact it is reasonable to be so.

You aren’t being very clear. I was quoting from that thread’s OP, but now you’re linking me back to it? I’d just read the whole OP again! Or are you referring to another particular post in the thread? If so, which one(s)?

In any case, I’m not asking, I’m telling you: your problem is that you’re not ready yet, or not anymore, for the world of actual human interactions… Not anymore because your own values aren’t rooted very firmly in dasein anymore, which in turn is because of your fracturing/fragmenting; and not yet because your fracturing/fragmenting is still in the relatively early stages…

I take it this is a question, if only a rhetorical one. Well, the thing is that nihilism is precisely the fact of mere mortals in a No God world! You’re biting yourself in the tailbone.

It’s not the choices themselves that can be reflective of perfect nihilism, but only the choices about those choices. Does one choose, like you, to embrace one’s ingrained predilections only halfheartedly, or to do so wholeheartedly instead?

It’s not “opposed”, it’s just that one can be again a deontologist as distinct from still a deontologist…

What’s unreasonable is to say it’s only your opinion that it’s only your opinion… You can’t go back to your old objectivism, you’re currently a subjectivist about objectivism, but somehow that already includes the objectivism of subjectivism, so to say. You’ve never moved on to an objectivism of subjectivism, so you have no right to a subjectivism about the objectivism of subjectivism… You only have a right to a subjectivism about your old objectivism and the likes thereof. And by “right” I mean reason. You’re unreasonable, not just towards others but even towards yourself. Have you ever been convinced of the objectivism of subjectivism?

“Conviction as a means: lots of things one achieves only by means of a conviction.” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 54.)

How much clearer could I be in the OP in explaining how my thoughts and feelings about abortion were shaped and molded along a particular existential trajectory. Just as I would argue that phoneutrua’s thoughts and feelings about Marxism are in turn rooted in an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

The alternative would have to be a philosophical or a scientific argument able to in fact establish what all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to think and to feel about abortion and Marxism.

So, are you suggesting that in fact you are ready? That in being ready your own value judgments in regard to abortion and Marxism are…are what exactly? This is just another “intellectual contraption” to me.

That’s your context? That I’m biting myself?

What I’m after is how your own understanding of “perfect nihilism” can be illustrated in noting how this understanding effects the behaviors that you choose when your value judgments come into conflict with others. What does the “perfect nihilist” do when he impregnates a woman who chooses to abort the baby.

Whereas I noted the profound ambiguity experienced by me when confronting Mary’s abortion in the OP. And how after encountering William Barrett’s assessment of “rival goods” this ambiguity became attached to a philosophical assessment in turn.

Again, until you are willing to focus in on the connection between you’re own understanding of perfect nihilism and how “for all practical purposes” that impacts the choices about your own choices, it’s all just words defining and defending words to me.

Note to others:

What do you think he means here given, for example, the manner in which Kant spoke of lying?

Either you bring "what’s unreasonable is to say it’s only your opinion that it’s only your opinion… " out into the world where an actual flesh and blood human being really does express an opinion about behaviors that some will embrace and others will deplore, or you’re just another one of Will Durant’s “epistemologists” to me.

But not to worry. There are plenty of folks here who will go on and on and on with you in that vein.

Wait a minute!

It just dawned on me that this whole exchange is just a con job! Zeroeth Nature is actually phoneutria or prom75 setting me up!!

:angry-screaming:

You know, if that’s true. :wink:

Neither of those. For the longest time my handle used to be Sauwelios.

I see. So that’s what you meant.

I have no argument with you here.

That in being ready I will embrace my own value judgments no matter what they are—though this “ready embrace” will clarify them, and this clarification may even change some of them, namely the more superficial or weaker ones in the light of the deeper or stronger ones.

No, I was just pointing out that you were basically asking, “Perfect nihilism in what perfectly nihilistic context?”

Yes, I see that now. Well, I have two kinds of answer to this: 1) it depends on which perfect nihilist it is, that is to say which particular existential trajectory led him into nihilism; 2) every perfect nihilist would contemplate “himself”, that is to say the particular existential being that he is, and base his decisions on that.

Well, you’re not John, nor Mary for that matter… Who says you’d feel the same ambiguity if you were in either of their shoes?

Yes, your entrance into nihilism.

[See below.]

It’s paradoxical, I know. What I mean is that the perfect nihilist would choose to embrace wholeheartedly his ingrained predilection for deontology, if that be the case. He would not be a deontologist on the meta-level, you see.

I know. I suppose I should give you an example from my own life, but I’ve never had an abortion or anything; also, I’ve only been a perfect nihilist—and thereby a post-nihilist—for six months or so. Still, something disturbing did happen to me recently: you may already have read about it in the Satanic Pedophilia thread by now. Here’s the first thing I wrote about that (before I knew it was supposedly a Satanic sexual abuse ring with members in high places…), on the night of October 7th:

As the anger finally subsided, my reaction became more “abstract” if you will, namely more general. My neighbours are only a symptom of the general malady. Thus on October 26th, I wrote:

I trust that thing about my awakening (sublation etc.) is too intellectual for you, but hopefully the purification part has some value or significance for you. (Both those things are references to the three main stages of Holosync by the way: Awakening, Purification, and Flowering. I associate these with (Hermetic) Qabalah’s supernal sephiroth Binah, Chokmah, and Kether, respectively.)

Well at least you got her talking to you, albeit through channeling. ; )

Edited to add: Oh wait, I just read that it’s Sauw… he uses the word ‘tailbone’?
His whole posting style here, couldn’t be any more different from what I’ve read from him previously.

Edited to add, again: After reading his last post, I have to say that he channeled Phon just as well as Phon would have… skills.

Again, until she is willing to take those important “themes” of hers and discuss them given my own important themes, I can only speculate as to why I am able to reduce an obviously exceptional mind like hers down to the level of Larry, Moe and Curly here.

From my perspective, given the many, many contacts I have had with many, many objectivists over the years, this sort of reaction usually gives the game away. She’s threatened by my arguments and at least a part her feels this need to make it personal. After all, that keeps the discussion away from the philosophical elements embedded at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political economy.

Why won’t she take her own moral and political prejudices there? Indeed, if she’s as smart as I think she is there is always the possibility that an intelligent and civil exchange with her can bring me to less grim conclusions about the “human condition” and my part in it.

Yes. And that is precisely what I wish to explore with others here. They have value judgments. About abortion and Marxisn and everything else that precipitates “conflicting goods”. So, how might those opinions be accounted for by intertwining the lives that they lived with all that philosophers/ethicists are able to provide them in the way of rational arguments.

In regard to what set of circumstances?

I have no idea what a “perfectly nihilistic context” is. I know only of particular existential contexts involving particular discussions of abortion or Marxism such that what someone claims to know is true is in fact able to be demonstrated as true for all of us. Why? Because it revolves around biological or historical facts able to be established. Where claims of knowledge become considerably more problematic for me is when some claim to know that abortion is immoral or claim to know that capitalism is rational/moral while socialism is irrational/immoral.

Thus:

Just another intellectual contraption is what I make of these two kinds of answers. Instead, I’d want you to take these answers to, say, an abortion clinic, gather those on both sides of the moral/political divide, make that argument and wait for their reaction. Blank stares is what I’m guessing.

The point however is just the opposite. Mary was adamant that aborting the “clump of cells” was the right thing to do. John was just as convinced it was the wrong thing to do. It was an unborn baby. His. And there I was a committed Marxist siding with Mary. But John’s arguments were no less rational given his assumption that aborting the fetus was the killing of an innocent human being. I was drawn and quartered. Hopelessly ambivalent. Then, coincidentally, I was reading William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon this:

“For the choice in…human [moral conflicts] is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even—or most of all—our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.”

Only, as my moral nihilism deepened, “evil” itself was entirely subsumed in the “hole” I had dug for myself above.

Again, given what context? What particular lie regarding what particular event precipitating what particular consequences?

Do you interact with others? Have you been involved in an interaction in which one of your own moral and political prejudices rubbed someone the wrong way? Now, when this happens to me as a very imperfect nihilist, I find my own “self” more or less fractured and fragmented. I can “take sides” but only in the context 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” I have dug myself down into.

I’m just trying to grapple with and grasp how your own “I” reacts to situations like this. If you are not an objectivist on one end or a “fractured and fragmented” moral nihilist on the other end, how exactly would you describe yourself in regard to conflicting goods at the intersection of dasein and value judgments in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change.

As for all of this:

It is no less embedded in the arguments I make in my signature threads. You and all of the others have lived particular lives that precipitated conflicting ways to think about cults and Christianity and Buddhism and Nietzsche…and all of the other components of this particular “set of circumstances”.

Is there a way in which all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to react to it all? A way able to be concocted by philosophers? Or is it likely that the manner in which I construe “I” as the embodiment of dasein a more reasonable explanation.

Whose “awakening”? Whose “purification”? Whose “flowering”. Whether in regard to the cult, or to Christianity or to Buddhism or to Nietzsche?

Or, as well, in regard to abortion and Marxism?

How do “perfect nihilists” see themselves out in the “is/ought” world in ways that I might be able to make sense of.

This is basically what I would like to explore with her.

She can note how a knowledge of all the most important aspects of Marxism would obligate rational human beings to make decisions which she could then defend as “common sense”.

And, sure, those who own and operate the global capitalist economy are very, very good at pointing to things and saying “that, I want that”.

It’s just that others make the argument that in getting what they want they sustain economic relationships that put others in the position of being exploited…squeezed, taken advantage of such that they are much, much less likely to get many of the things that they want. And, in fact, around the globe millions and millions can’t even get what they need. To subsist for example. Or, for some, even to survive.

Instead, we get another “general description intellectual contraption” from her:

As though many who embrace value judgments completely at odds with her don’t already do that. Might it not be the case then that lots and lots and lots of us do read novels and history, do look at art while making mental notes of how it makes us feel…but still come to embrace conflicting value judgments that can precipitate conflicting behaviors that can result in conflicting confrontations that can result in anything from a glare to an argument to a fight to a brawl to a war between nations.

Okay, but what about the feelings of those who refuse to share her own convictions about Marxism? What about their own right to embody at “sense” of it different from her own?

Instead, objectivists of her ilk often go far beyond just mocking the feelings of those who don’t agree with them. Indeed, can you imagine my fate here if she had the capacity to ban members at ILP?

And look around you at a world where any number of extreme left and right objectivists do have the power to determine the fate of those who refuse to embrace either capitalism or socialism all out.

My aim is to rein in what is clearly an inherent danger embedded in objectivism…when authoritarian types gain access to power and use it to crush the feelings and and a lot more of those who refuse to think exactly like they do. And not just feckless Kids either.

I ask others to explore not what they think is true morally and politically but to examine the manner in which they came to believe what they do in becoming an objectivist.

Right. Well, I will agree that my opinions may be so accounted for, so I won’t have to actually spell out my life story.

Not sure what you mean here. I will embrace my own value judgments no matter what they are or what the circumstances are.

Sure, existentialism, existential nihilism… Different things, I know, but as I said further on, perfect nihilism is post-nihilism. In fact, due to your imperfect nihilism you’re a nihilist, not an existentialist.

We’ve had this discussion before. You seem to expect me to talk to those objectivists and to convince one side that the other side is right. But that’s not how it works, because neither side is right. I mean, sure, here’s something I wrote in the last six months:

This I consider a biological fact. But that’s not to say that the pro-Choice side is “right”.

What I might be able to do is raise some of those people out of their objectivism. Even if it’s only one person, and that changes that person’s stance on abortion, it might put the other side in the majority. And majority is what matters in elections, on some level at least.

Still, you were not Mary, and Mary wasn’t drawn and quartered, hopelessly ambivalent, etc.

Deontology is not just about lying, you know. Anyway, you seem to be missing the point here. What I’m saying is that if Kant had had an entrance into nihilism, like you and me, he could still have become a deontologist if he’d perfected his nihilism. He would then be an existentialist on the meta-level and a deontologist on the level of the crowd in front of your abortion clinic.

Very little, actually.

Not in the past six months, I don’t think. I mean, not in a way it became a problem for me. People tend to just, duck their heads or something…

On the one hand I’m a nihilist (not just a moral nihilist) who’s so fractured and fragmented that there are no fractures or fragments anymore; there’s just a clear night sky. On the other hand I’m an objectivist as much as any finite being… or maybe not. Look, maybe it’d be helpful to look at all this in the light of the classical distinction between body and mind. Mentally, I’m a perfect nihilist, but that hasn’t really negatively affected my coming from strong stock, being in good physical condition, etc. And it’s from these biological, historical, demographical circumstances etc. that those more elusive moral-political value feelings emerge.

“[Odysseus’s] knowledge saves him from Circe’s enchantment. Her enchantment consists of transforming a man into a pig, with its head, voice, bristles, and build, but the mind (noos) remains as it was before. His knowledge, then, is the knowledge that the mind of man belongs together with his build. They are together as much as the [black] root and [white] flower of the moly. There cannot be a change in one without a corresponding change in the other. Menelaus’s encounter with constant becoming, in which there are no natures, must have been an illusion.” (Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre, page 86.)

I say it’s precisely “natures”, like the nature of man or of the moly, which are illusions—but very persistent illusions. For example, a second nature is already much less persistent. The only absolutely persistent however is zeroth nature—constant becoming, the eternal flux of phenomena. What I’ve been getting at is that zeroth nature embraces one’s nature and second natures etc.

But what about the universal within which all these particular lives and sets of circumstances “precipitate”? Christianity and Buddhism and even Nietzsche are concerned with that:

“In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates tells of his unsuccessful youthful efforts to uncover the reality of things by looking directly at them. He soon came to believe that this direct approach blinded him, leaving him with nothing but incoherent experience. Unable to leave it at this nihilist chaos, he needed what Nietzsche called a world, and therefore a god or cosmic mind, an integrating principle, uniting immediate experience’s chaotic diversity into a coherent, rational whole. Socratic positing of this intelligible reality or universal good ‘saves the appearances’ from nihilism. […] It is precisely to rescue this apollonian world and its eternal return from nihilism that Nietzsche’s superman must will everything’s eternal return. Unredeemed by his dionysian will, reality is nothing but a nihilist chaos of empty experience easily drowned in modern democracy’s shallow waters. Only the superman’s will prevents this drowning, saving reality—a noble reality—from nihilism’s inability to resist democratic-socialist leveling. It thereby saves every being ‘standing over it as its own heaven, its round roof, its eternal security’, protecting it against the death of god.” (Neumann, Liberalism, “Nietzsche”.)

Yes: resolutely, authentically, existentially.—

No, not more reasonable. Less, in fact, because your reason, your grasp of reality, is flawed, as I’ve said. You do not adequately grasp the universal that all your words imply. You fumble in the dark for some counter-universal: let me explain. You grant the objective reality of biological, historical and demographic circumstances etc.—you treat this as a given, you even call such circumstances “facts”—, but you miss the same kind of thing with regard to values (moral, political, etc.). Plato of course taught that the only universal was precisely that counter-universal, the objective reality of moral values, political ideas, etc.—the Idea of the Good—, and that biological, historical, demographic circumstances etc. were only shadows or pale reflections of that reality. Well then, the death of God actually means the death of the Idea of the Good. Such ideas are now seen to be mere clouds temporarily obscuring the clear light sky:

“Together did we learn everything; together did we learn to ascend beyond ourselves to ourselves, and to smile uncloudedly:—
Uncloudedly to smile down out of luminous eyes and out of miles of distance, when under us constraint and purpose and guilt stream like rain.
[…]
And what have I hated more than passing clouds, and whatever tainteth thee? And mine own hatred have I even hated, because it tainted thee!
The passing clouds I detest—those stealthy cats of prey: they take from thee and me what is common to us—the vast unbounded Yea- and Amen- saying.
These mediators and mixers we detest—the passing clouds: those half-and-half ones, that have neither learned to bless nor to curse from the heart.
Rather will I sit in a tub under a closed heaven, rather will I sit in the abyss without heaven, than see thee, thou luminous heaven, tainted with passing clouds!
And […] rather will I have noise and thunders and tempest-blasts, than this discreet, doubting cat-repose; and also amongst men do I hate most of all the soft-treaders, and half-and-half ones, and the doubting, hesitating, passing clouds.
[… A]ll things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Before Sunrise”, translation Common.)

I was talking about my reaction to those false accusations, and how I then broadened that into a purification with regard to Christianity… And yes, that will include the Christian reasons against abortion, and the secularised Christianity called Marxism. But I will give you an even stronger example. My initial reaction was an example of this:

“One should never forgive Christianity for having destroyed such men as Pascal. One should never cease from combating just this in Christianity: its will to break precisely the strongest and noblest souls. One should never rest as long as this one thing has not been utterly and completely destroyed: the ideal of man invented by Christianity.” (Nietzsche, workbook 1887-88 11 [55], translation Kaufmann.)

But what it then broadened into is an example of this:

“In moving the doctrine of selflessness and love into the foreground, Christianity was in no way establishing the interests of the species as of higher value than the interests of the individual. Its real historical effect, the fateful element in its effect, remains, on the contrary, in precisely the enhancement of egoism, of the egoism of the individual, to an extreme (—to the extreme of individual immortality). Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human sacrifice— […]
The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force; it further enhanced that instinct in the weak, already so powerful, to take care of and preserve themselves and to sustain one another. What is ‘virtue’ and ‘charity’ in Christianity if not just this mutual preservation, this solidarity of the weak, this hampering of selection? What is Christian altruism if not the mass-egoism of the weak, which divines that if all care for one another each individual will be preserved as long as possible?—
If one does not feel such a disposition as an extreme immorality, as a crime against life, one belongs with the company of the sick and possesses its instincts oneself—” (Nietzsche, workbook Spring 1888 15 [110], translation Kaufmann.)

—Causing me to write things like this:

Is man-made climate change a subject like abortion you and I might talk about? I have some very strong opinions on that

If an intuitionist was able to demonstrate this merely by pointing to Heidegger complex yet simple explanation of the distinction between das ein, and dasein, and go from that into deontology (as Kant, Nietzsche )could such tracings be the anti-derivatives, which could only be postscibed. backwards? , upholding Kant’s a-priori synthetic on basis of the ought of the naturalistic principle?

And the fact it is a reversed form of ’ what is’ : to give some creedence to intentionality as determinitive of the will ?
Without the will , through Schopenhauer’s understanding, such intentionality could not be spliced from something fated in a religious mode.

But it was really the cogito which determined the course this would take, and that razor which slices the 'self" between them.

My existence is not assured by my consciousness, my pet myth is Narcissus’ blindness of the Other, and that goes directly into the heart of Being. My existence is the nothingness of the content of my intentional being, and the existential despair of nihilism, is more like a sickness unto death, because it can not be overcome by das- ein, or, a singular being. In fact such a term is nihilized, and not contradictory ( in it’ s self)

The reason for taking the ontological , rather the deontological starting point, is not a way to get carried away by pompous words, but it has been always my starting point, because of the fact, that all we are able to expresd, in terms of intentionality, is, as Brentano, I believe expressed it initially?, and it was that everything we know about it, comes to us in retrospect, we learn starting with particulars, and form thicker symbolism on the way down.

Symbolic structure in the beginning , to my mind , at least, always was more literal, appealingly so, the logic inferred many things that could literally be tied to it on the way down, and expecting the gaps to be filled , kind of magically, perhaps even by way of a Deus ex machina inflection, proved the basic logical harmonic consistency, drawing consubstantial and previously unsupported ideas into it.

So, my question, or series of enquiries really reduce toward an absurd confession : of being able to tie together, the various forms of the ideas and feelings about what Husker and Heidegger were about, and even in loose form, they inherently retained a hidden power. Tie unearth that power by a will, transcends an object, about which we must sustain, without giving the impression that negating it , it totally contradicts ‘It’ , as if such contradiction diametrically nihilizers if into a ‘real’ nothingness.

Sauwelios is the real MVP

:-k What about an “inherent danger embedded in non-objectivism”?

Which seems to be the requirement to accept all behaviors and to compromise and negotiate with anyone.

One can’t ban slavery. One can’t ban child labor.

One has to compromise with serial killers and pedophiles.

If one doesn’t compromise, then he/she is a dangerous objectivist, an authoritarian.

Ok then ill become the unreal one.

I’m not asking for anyone’s life story. I’m asking them to think about a political prejudice of their own and, introspectively, go back and connect the dots between experiences they have had in regard to that prejudice, along with any philosophy they have encountered that reinforced it.

With you, I’d like you to connect the dots in turn between that and what you construe “perfect nihilism” to be. In regard to the behaviors you choose in a world awash in conflicting goods. I’m “fractured and fragmented” here. How about you?

To which you respond:

I don’t know how to make it much clearer. People on both sides [all sides] of the conflicting goods that have rent the human species down through the ages can say, “I will embrace my own value judgments no matter what they are or what the circumstances are.”

And that is when I broach dasein. Shifting the focus from what political prejudices they embrace to the manner in which they came to acquire them existentially out in a particular world historically, culturally and experientially: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529

And that’s when I broach as well the “psychology of objectivism”: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

All of it culminating in an examination of a particular political prejudice of my own here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529

No, I’m addressing my arguments to those who insist that, on the contrary, in regard to Marxism or abortion or any other conflicting goods, one side is right. Their side. To the extent that, in an essentially meaningless No God world, you share my assumption that no side is right, I am then curious as to how you deem your own “I” in the is/ought world to be, like mine, “fractured and fragmented”? How you react to 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.

…given your own interactions with others. And how all of it relates “for all practical purposes” to being a “perfect nihilist”. Same with phoneutria regarding her own sense of identity with respect to value judgments.

As for this:

Even the “biological facts” are construed differently. Some insist that human life begins at conception. And that however “primitive” the unborn is when it is destroyed we were all that stage ourselves. And then those who have no qualms about killing a baby even after it is born. If, for example, it’s not the right gender. Or those sociopaths who might kill both the pregnant woman and the unborn baby for whatever personal reason that sustains their own perceived self-interests.

Even here “I” am no less fractured and fragmented. And still far from understanding how a “perfect nihilist” might react.

Right. As though the points I make above are completely irrelevant.

Note to others:

How would you explain his reaction here?

All I can do is to point out yet again that what I construe to be abstruse intellectual contraptions of this sort gets me no closer to understanding how your thinking here gets translated into the behaviors you choose in your interactions with others who confront you with political prejudices that challenge your behaviors. Kant seemed able to concoct his categorical and imperative moral obligations said to be incumbent upon all rational human beings. Though here [as with Plato] he had to assume a “transcending font” of course. God most call it.

Instead, in my view, you go straight back up into the stratosphere that is the domain of Will Durant’s “epistemologists”:

Imagine taking this to a thread on the morality of abortion or a discussion examining the merits and demerits of Marxism.

Yes, that’s the polemicist in me…provoking. But I don’t know any other way at this point to bring you down to the parts that are of most interest to me. As I noted above, there are any number of others here who will go on and on in the philosophical vein I construe that you are most comfortable in.

Though, sure, it may well be me who is missing your point. And to my detriment.

So, being a “perfect nihilist” allows you to note when another’s “grasp of reality” is “flawed”. In other words, when it is not in sync with yours?

Which you then encompass in a “world of words”:

Seriously, how is this not basically intellectual babble bursting at the seams with that crucial assumption that how you and Nietzsche define the meaning of some words allows you and him to defend the meaning of all the other words. At least in her arguments regarding Marxism, phoneutria brings the words down to earth. Her own existential meaning may not be in sync with silhouette or prom75 but at least it’s intelligible.

Or, rather, it is to me.

We’ll need a context of course.