gib: to IAM…
Why is Urwrong your pinhead poster boy?
K: UR should be EVERYONES pinhead poster boy…
Kropotkin
Ha! Given the distinction in emphasis I noted above, you are several orders of magnitude higher up in the clouds than Heidegger.
And I’m not seeing how it makes a difference to my understanding of your arguments.
I’m still on the specific question of “What is the most rational manner in which to react?”… a true subjectivist has no issue letting this question go.
What, you mean support that hinges on me slipping into an objectivist’s role or support regardless of what role I slip into? Because I’ll tell you from the start, my support for the truckers doesn’t hinge on what “role” I slip into–objectivist or subjectivists–because, as I said in my previous post, my support hinges more on how I feel about the protest emotionally, which doesn’t change whether I’m a subjectivist or an objectivist. So that leaves explaining to them my support for their protest, or explaining to them how I’m a subjectivist but can slip into the objectivist role. The former, I think they would accept with open arms. The latter, I don’t think they would understand or care about.
That there is a covid pandemic and governments reacting to it with policies has nothing to do with you and I having this discussion on ILP–it has everything to do with the truckers and protestors on the ground in Ottawa (or it did) who are not interested in doing armchair philosophy to figure out the metaphysical implications of objectivism and subjectivism in the context of nihilism and idealism. They are chiefly concerned with the question of what the most rational manner in which to react is because both sides, in putting forward their positions as the most rational, are assuming there is a most rational manner in which to react, and verily they are in the middle of an extremely contentious disagreement about what that is. So obviously, the question is of great import to them–if settled, it may well resolve the entire situation. But for us, it is of no greater import than the extent to which we find it philosophically interesting. You in particular would ask the question not only to the extent you find it philosophically interesting, but to the extent you think it possible that there is a most rational manner in which to react. In other words, the question is asked out of ignorance.
If we’re all hard wired for this, yet you’re able to be aware of it (and just how problematic it is), why can’t others also be aware? Why can’t I be aware of this? Why would you continually insist that I’m not?
And do you rise above your own hard wiring? Given that you never fail to remind us of your my-philosophy-applies-to-me trick, I would think the answer is no. But then how on Earth does it strike you as fair to ask this question of others–Why yours and not the countless other answers out there?–but not yourself? And if you do ask this of yourself (in the privacy of your own head?), what’s your answer? Could this answer not suffice for others?
Until you can understand how a stance can be rooted in emotion rather than certainty in being right (and how emotions don’t play by your rules), you’ll never get a satisfactory answer to this question.
You’re missing the part about “I’m not 100% sure I have a solid position…” If you’re asking the question “Why yours and not the countless other answers out there?” don’t you think this makes a difference? If I’m not 100% sure I have solid position, then I’m obviously not saying my answer is the winner.
No, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say I’m in possession of an understanding of the nature of consciousness that you don’t (and never will) comprehend. I don’t claim my understanding is at all correct, just as you don’t claim that your political prejudices are at all correct, but it is an understanding, just as you have an understanding of your own political prejudices, and this understanding allows for being a subjectivist who can accommodate objectivism.
And how well did that pan out for the truckers and protestor? How well did it pan out for their opposition? Each side is claiming to be in possession of opposing science. One side says they have the science to backup the claim that vaccines are perfectly safe. The other side, that the vaccines are dangerous. One side claims to have science showing masks work. The other side, that they don’t work. It doesn’t seem to me that pulling the debate down from the is/ought world to the either/or world makes it any more soluble. Which, given the manner in which our access to the science itself is severely limited, I again see no other option than for John and Jane to throw their hands in the air and say, “I don’t know.”
Now is this the most rational manner in which to react?
And like hell the scientific and medical communities don’t have a political ax to grind. Doctors are losing their jobs simply for wanting to prescribe ivermectin to their COVID patients. Professionals are being silenced for voicing expert opinions that happen to go against the mainstream narrative. And you know as well as I, Big Pharma (particularly Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, etc.) stand to make a fortune in these desperate times. No ax to grind my ass.
Yes, yes they do. But like I said, it’s the distinction between what I believe about my stance on the trucker protest (that it’s rooted in dasein) and how I feel about the trucker protest (I want the truckers to win); NOT the distinction between emotions being rooted in dasein and emotions not being rooted in dasein. The latter is a false interpretation on your part. The only point I’m making is that, despite both being rooted in dasein, my beliefs about the trucker protest (its moral ins and outs) is at odds with my feelings about the trucker protest (wanting them to win).
Because the likes of Urwrong and Sculptor have their beliefs and emotions perfectly aligned. I don’t. And I’ll further add that I don’t care to align them.
You keep making the same mistake that I keep trying to correct. Forget “the right thing to do”. Forget “I think”. It isn’t “I feel… therefore, I think…” It isn’t “I feel it’s the right thing to do”. It’s just “I feel like it.” I support the truckers 'cause I feel like it. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. I don’t have a defense. I don’t draw any intellectual/rational conclusions based on how I feel. It’s just the feeling in isolation–or rather, the feeling leading directly to action (with some bullshit justifications maybe conjured up along the way). You keep wanting to sneak some cognitive/intellectual stance in there. You keep assuming that before one can act or speak in defense of one side of an issue or another, they have to form a cognitive opinion or argument to back up that defense–like it’s impossible to go from the feeling directly to the acting or speaking in defense. Once you drop that assumption, it’s not hard to see how feelings can be both rooted in dasein and drivers pushing us to act/speak in defense of one side of the issue or the other.
Having a preference for which side you want to win is really no different than having a preference for what flavor of pizza to order. Suppose you and a room mate couldn’t agree on what flavor of pizza to order–you want pepperoni, she wants Hawaiian–and so you have a case of “conflicting goods”. Would you honestly expect to get into a debate over who has the best objective moral argument about which flavor you both ought to order? What flavor you both ought to prefer? Even if you both, for whatever bizarre reason, agreed that your pizza flavor preferences were rooted in dasein, that would not make your preferences go away. You would not stop liking pepperoni pizza and she would not stop liking Hawaiian. It would be absurd to get into an argument about suppressing or denying your preferences for the sake of some greater moral good. Instead, you would probably settle on a compromise–half and half–or if you were feeling especially vicious, force and coercion.
Now, obviously, the trucker protest is a much more significant and important issue to have preferences over than pizza–but when someone like myself agrees with your dasein argument, I see no other choice than to abandon any attempt to arrive at the best, most objective, moral justification for supporting one side or the other–and that leaves me with only my preferences–my emotionally based desire to see the truckers win–without a moral justification–without a solid argument in my defense–just a raw amoral, irrational, subjective desire to see the truckers win; the only difference between you and I at this point is that whereas you would panic because you need a moral, rational, and objective argument/justification to have a preference, your “I” fragmenting and fracturing if you don’t get one, I don’t; I don’t panic because I don’t care about having a moral, rational, objective justification for having the preferences I have. I just accept that I have them and strive to satisfy them–amorally so to speak (yes, I’m a horrible, wicked, evil person)–for purely selfish reasons–just 'cause I “feel like it”.
Yes, two people can want different conflicting outcomes–even despite understanding your arguments about dasein–so what?
It doesn’t.
The only reason I brought it up is because you asked me to tie it to the trucker protest. I warned you that it has nothing to do with the trucker protest (and therefore tying it in is pointless), but you insisted that the only way you would understand it is if I tied it into the trucker protest… so I did. Not a huge shock that you couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
This tangent is a dead horse not worth beating. I’ll just chock it up to you not understanding the point I was making. So back to the subject main subject matter.
This is precisely the kind of response that indicates to me that you’re not the least bit interested in understanding. I said to drop the “as the most rational frame of mind” because I thought you were trying to understand the stance I take on the trucker protest. I’m trying to get through to you that I support the truckers but not as the most rational frame of mind one can have on the issue. You want facts? ← That’s a fact. It actually is the truth about the stance I take on the truckers. And as soon as you realize this, you suddenly want me to have a “most rational frame of mind”? You all of a sudden tell me “com on, this is a philosophy forum”–like I’m supposed to have a most rational frame of mind–so that you can (what?) criticize it for not falling in line with your dasein argument? What do you think it means that I understand and agree with your dasein argument? It means that I wouldn’t take a stance on the grounds that it’s “the most rational frame of mind”. And now, here you are, insisting that I do. Why? No doubt, so that you can say, “See? You don’t understand dasein as I do!”
If you really were interested in understanding my point of view, this was a golden opportunity. It seemed like you did understand, but rather than respond with “Ah, I see, gib. You’re not aiming for the most rational frame of mind. That makes a bit more sense,” you respond with “come on, have a most rational frame of mind.” You need me to have a most rational frame of mind because challenging that with your dasein arguments is all you know how to do here.
So I guess at this point, I don’t need to belabor the point–you seem to understand what I meant by “drop the ‘as the most rational frame of mind’” but you don’t want to hear it–so I’ll leave it there and let you do what you want with it.
Whenever I hear about your “fractured and fragmented” self, I fall back on the interpretation which I believe you provided that it means you have lost your sense of certainty in knowing who you are–what you understand yourself to be–a good god-fearing conservative–and later, an enlightened left-wing liberal–and now you find yourself suspended in nihilistic limbo, unable to grip onto any objectively solid definition of yourself, any certainty in knowing who you are; instead, you only have fractures and fragments of a self-concept that you are at a loss to put together.
^ This is what I don’t experience.
However, that’s not to say I don’t experience any kind of similar tension or loss. For one thing, I wish I could close the gap between what I think I know and all there is to know–with respect to the trucker protest or any other issue of serious import; it would be nice to know that my support for the truckers actually contributes to a good cause. For all I know, maybe the truckers are horrible, horrible people who are doing nothing but making the world a worse place–and then what kind of a low-life asshole would I be?–but I’ve resigned to the fact that I’ll probably never know, and that all I have is the limited and distorted information I’m getting from the media–and then my feelings–so I find it relatively easy to give up trying to close that gap, not dwell over it into perpetuity, and instead deal only with how I feel about the trucker protest. And for the most part, this works for me–I generally don’t care that I don’t know everything I need to know about the trucker protest in order to be certain I’m doing the right thing–but if I’m being perfectly honest, I do on occasion feel guilty that I’m not doing more to fortify my knowledge and certainty in regards to all the facts surrounding the trucker protest–usually when I start thinking about it too much. So if your struggle is with your “fractured and fragmented” self, mine is with (among other things) the guilt I feel over not doing more to close the gap between what I think I know and all there is to know (though there seems to be a difference in degree as well).
Can’t get any closer to a God’s eye view than that.
Well, not really. My point hinges on the fact that our emotions are evolved to serve our own self-interest, unlike our moral convictions which are supposed to be universal and apply to all, even if that means great sacrifices to one’s self. This is obvious in the case of a killer hunting you down. You fear the killer for the sake of preserving your own life. But it is no less true of the trucker protest. I want the truckers to win (emotionally) for personal, selfish reasons, not moral reasons. I don’t feel nearly as threatened by COVID than some of the more vulnerable people in society, and I certainly don’t want to live in a police state where the government can force me to receive whatever medical treatments it deems necessary or else be penalized. So for my own self-interest, which doesn’t change whether it turns out that the truckers are in the moral right or the moral wrong, I want (emotionally) the truckers to get their way.
But just to make this more interesting (and more relevant), let’s alter the scenario above (about the killer hunting you down) just a bit such that the killer experiences rage against you instead of elation. He experiences rage because, in his view, you have done him a grave injustice. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what you did, but he feels so horribly wronged by you that it warrants, in his mind, your murder. So in his mind, it would not only bring great elation to kill you but would count as an act of true justice and moral right. You, of course, don’t think so. According to you, whatever it is you did to him, you had every right, or at least it wasn’t your fault, and you certainly don’t deserve to be killed. So not only do you feel profound fear, but you feel that this is a grave moral wrong (not that you didn’t think so in the first scenario but…). Now it’s a question of moral right or moral wrong just like the trucker protest.
So here’s the question… according to my point, even if you were to be persuaded that you did, in fact, commit a horrible wrong against the murderer and you therefore owe him your life, you would still feel fear because your emotions serve only to preserve your own self-interest, your own life. But according to you, if you were persuaded that you did commit a horrible wrong against the murderer and you therefore owe him your life, you wouldn’t feel fear at all. You would feel (what?) anger towards yourself? Such incredible rage that you would take your own life in order for justice to be served no later than you would have the murderer take your life? That you would feel elation at the thought that you were going to die for what you did? And supposing you weren’t convinced that you deserved to die, but just felt stuck in the usual nihilistic limbo you always claim to be stuck in–not knowing how to determine whose morality is correct–yours or the murderer’s–you would feel (what?) ambivalence? Confusion? Emotional numbness? Determination to find the answer? But certainly not fear?
And to me too. They don’t need to not be.
And what do you do differently? Do you feel a certain way about the trucker protest? For or against it? If you do, what do you do with those emotions? Do you suppress them until you can figure out which side is right and which side is wrong? Do you pretend not to feel them? Do you lock them away in your unconscious so that on a conscious level, you feel nothing? An emotional nothing to match your intellectual nothing–that is, your intellectual suspension in nihilistic limbo? How do the dynamics between your emotions and your intellectual position play out in your mind?
Given the degree to which you claim to be utmost concerned over issues like this, I would imagine it’s quite a struggle in there–a struggle between holding at bay any feelings you may have for or against the issue (whatever issue that may be) and your indecision over which side is right and which side is wrong–a struggle you willingly perpetuate because knowing with absolute certainty what is, once and for all, the right thing to do morally and objectively is of tantamount importance to you, a first priority. Well, it isn’t as important for me. Not caring to be as certain as you want to be comes naturally to me. So I would say I’m not putting any effort into trying to make your arguments about dasein go away but rather resisting your efforts to convince me that I should care–just as you resist my efforts to make you not care–something we both have to do only on the rare occasions when we engage each other.
D’uh! That’s not in question at all. The question was: when have you ever made any “objective sounding statements,” remember?
So nice try. You can’t have it both ways. You have to decide, which is it? Do you deny that you make “objective sounding statements” or do you admit it with the caveat that your reasoning about dasein applies to your statements just as much as to anyone else’s? Don’t scurry around the question. Face it like a man. If I rose to your challenge (i.e. cited examples of how you make “objective sounding statements”) just admit it gracefully.
Would you drop your persistence on this point! We get it! Your arguments about dasein apply to you. I don’t think you could be any more clear about this. I’m not denying that you apply your own arguments to yourself, I’m denying that that’s a valid move. Every time you bring up this point, I ask: does that make your points (your “objective sounding statement”) not really objective? Or does it mean it wasn’t really “you” making those statements (you don’t have an “I” after all)? Are you acknowledging that you made a mistake in uttering those “objective sounding statements”? And if so, don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical of you to go around accusing others of making “objective sounding statements”? Hypocritical to deny others the right to regard their own “objective sounding statements” in the same way? As being subject to dasein? You certainly don’t seem to grant me that right.
What about that thing?
All righty then. Round and round we go. This is round two. Tell me if this makes any sense to you:
Does it make sense this time?
You’re forgetting that this is my thread. So sure it’s up to me to go there, but I’m not trying to accommodate your interests. I don’t care what you’re interested in, I post what I’m interested in. That and 90% of the time, I’m responding to your questions and your demands. I brought up my metaphysics of consciousness because you asked about it.
PS - Not having much luck finding a trucker or protester to engage with on my metaphysics of consciousness and its relation to the trucker protest. You might want to drop by this thread and clarify some of the requirements more specifically. Ex, would it suffice if I engaged with Urwrong? He’s not a trucker, and he took no part in the protest, but I think he’d react to my comments about my metaphysics of consciousness and its relation to the trucker protest the same way as your typical trucker/protestor.
I’m not sure you’re any less of a pinhead than urwrong, at least according to Biggy. Biggy reserves the “pinhead” title for those who believe dogmatically that their points of view are the absolute objective truth. The thing is, Biggy is a closet case lefty so he enjoys picking on urwrong waaay more than picking on you or Sculptor or any of the other lefties on this board.
Part one edited
If this is actually how you think about his Dasein and my dasein, we are no doubt wasting each other’s time. Still, in regard to things like abortion or public health policies or feminism, or Nazis, note some examples of how you construe Heidegger as being considerably more “down to Earth”.
That ought to be interesting.
A true subjectivist. And of course how you understand this is by default the starting point here.
Again, for me, until an objective morality can be established – either re God or No God – all of our moral and political value judgments are derived subjectively, existentially, from the life that we live. That’s my starting point.
And what on earth does it even mean to have “no issue letting this question go”? Which question? Pertaining to what context? Whether in regard to a woman contemplating an abortion, or a trucker contemplating a protest against the government.
The questions are, “Is abortion moral or immoral”? “Is the trucker strike rational or irrational?”
Says who? Based on what argument that is not derived subjectively, existentially from the life he or she lived? I’m still waiting for such an argument from you.
And, for the objectivists among us, such questions can be asked, but there is always only one right answer: their own.
Unbelievable. Well, to me. As though you put your emotions up on a pedestal here and worship them instead. As though what we come to feel about things like the trucker protest is not in turn profoundly rooted existentially in dasein.
You to the truckers: “Hey, I feel the same way you do about the government policy. And let’s all agree that this makes us right. And even though others feel that we are wrong our emotions trump theirs in the end.”
How can it really be other than that? Sooner or later, however, you have to get around to explaining why you feel what you do. You have to align your feelings with your thinking. You have make arguments. Arguments in my view rooted largely in dasein.
Right, right. They can just shrug off the points I make here regarding how they acquired their points of view. They have them and that’s that. And it’s the fact they feel that they are right that allows them to huff and puff arrogantly at those who dare not to agree with them. And those on the other side against them. Both sides embody the fulminating fanatic objectivist mentality. But not here. There.
Come on, depending on which side prevails in the end millions might be impacted. So the bottom line is whether both sides insist that only their argument and feelings count, or whether they are willing to negotiate a compromise in which both sides get something but neither side gets it all.
The objectivists are interested only in a “my way, or the highway” solution. They don’t really give a shit about establishing the most rational manner in which to achieve it.
No, instead, you take your own existential leap to the truckers side because you feel strongly it’s the right thing to do. Like those on the other side aren’t going exactly the same thing.
And, sure, if you dwell on questions like that too long, you might find yourself becoming increasingly more fractured and fragmented as well. You’re just less inclined to go after me as scathingly as the hardcore objectivist pinheads here do.
It’s not a question of being aware of it but how we react to what we think that we are aware of. My own awareness less led me to believe that being drawn and quartered when confronting conflicting goods is reasonable. How has it not led the objectivists on both sides of the trucker protest or the abortion wars to feel that way? How have you managed to avoid it? Well, you just don’t feel that way:
We will clearly have to agree to disagree about whether emotions play more by my rules or your rules. They are more embedded in dasein to me. That’s why with few exceptions those who think the truckers are right also feel that they are right, and those that feel the truckers are wrong also think that they are wrong? Just a coincidence?
You claim to be “primarily a subjectivist who can accommodate objectivism”. If you say so. In regard to the truckers protest, I still haven’t a clue as to how “for all practical purposes” that would be communicated to them.
Note to others:
Take a stab at it. What on earth do you think he means by that. If you were able to, how would you explain it to the truckers?
Same with this:
So, you acknowledge that had things been different in your life you might not believe in the truckers protest. In fact, you might be in here taking the side of those like KP and Sculptor. But that, what, you’d still want them to win?!! How you make your own emotions here less rooted in dasein is beyond my grasping. Again, for the preponderance of us, it certainly seems that what we think about something and how we feel about it are pretty much in sync. Except for those like me. Both my thinking and feeling have over the years fractured and fragmented together. Although, sure, given the manner in which the preponderance of my experiences have revolved around left wing folks my prejudices are largely there. But that too is no less existential. Take the Song Be Syndrome out of my life and I’d still probably be a reactionary politically and a Christian religiously.
And then this unintelligible [to me] distinction between what you feel and what you want. What we want is no less embodied in dasein to me.
Okay, let’s put this frame of mind in Vladimir Putin’s head and ask him why he invaded Ukraine. Let’s put this frame of mind in the heads of Alito and his ilk on the Supreme Court and ask them why they’re gutting Roe v. Wade. As supposed to them presenting arguments wholly in sync with how they feel about what they are doing. With what they “want” to do.
No, I just assume that most people have reasons for why they think and feel what they do about things like government policies and abortion. I just explore the extent to which this is rooted [intellectually and emotionally] in dasein. And not in folks saying, 'well, it’s just what I want."
Well some such as you can, others such as me cannot. The crux of the matter. The part about you I don’t understand and the part about me that you don’t understand.
On the other hand, the objectivists – especially the pinheads – are often adamant that both their facts and they opinions reflect the most rational frame of mind.
Fine. But what interest me here are those factors that do have important implications for the truckers protest.
To you perhaps but not at all to me. It’s one of the most important factors of all in grasping the complex and convoluted nature of human identity out in the is/ought world.
Right, you are more invested in what you “feel” about the protest. In the side you “want” to win. The fact that your life might unfolded differently such that you were predisposed to argue against them here wouldn’t change how you feel and what you want? You’d still want them to win?
Again, you may be making a good point here…one I simply am not understanding. But it’s certainly true that I don’t understand it. I can’t recall an instance in my own life where I thought through to one political conviction and still felt just the opposite. Wanting something that would bring about what I thought was wrong. But then, true, I was an objectivist myself then.
I’ve noted the distinction between you and those fulminating fanatic objectivists here who dismiss dasein altogether. They are absolutely fierce in insisting it’s all about “one of us” [the rational, virtuous good guys] and “one of them” [the irrational, immoral bad guys]. But I’ll be damned if I understand this distinction you make between the profoundly problematic nature of what one comes to to think, to know, to believe about the truckers protest and what one comes to feel and want instead. Suddenly the “profoundly problematic” part is shunted aside as you take an emotional and psychological leap of faith to this political prejudice rather than that political prejudice. As though emotions and wants themselves are somehow above and beyond all that existential stuff.
I am just as certain about myself as anyone else in regard to the empirical, biological, demographic, circumstantial etc., facts about my Self. It is in regard to my moral and political and spiritual values that dasein as “I” understand it becomes increasingly more applicable. I am not in possession of your “feelings” and “wants” such that I can just shunt 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.”
…aside, and feel, what, committed to either one side or the other?
Again, this…
…does work for you in a way that it does not for me. As for the gap between what you think you know and all there is to know? How far back do you want to go? To the part where the human species/the human condition itself is understood in the context of grasping the nature of Existence itself?
We don’t even know for certain that free will is the real deal. And who among us is able to fully demonstrate that they are not in a sim world, a dream world or one or another Matix reality. Then the arguments for and against solipsism.
Then back to Rummy’s Rule:
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
What, you don’t think that’s applicable to the trucker protest?
Well, from my frame on mind, really. The fear of someone stalking you is an immediate, wholly tangible experience. No ambiguity, no uncertainty. I’m afraid because someone is trying to kill me and I don’t want tlo die. The fear of covid or of vaccinations or of government policy is far, far, far more complex and convoluted. There are many, many more variables involved. And the variables are understood differently by different people. The experiences are completely different. It’s like the difference between an acute pain in which the cause is clear – you broke your leg – and chronic pain in which the doctors can’t seem to pin down what is causing it. It may even be psycho-somatic.
First of all, how does one construe the “self” here…as I do, as you do, as Urwrong does? And then that great divide between those who insist that morality revolves first and foremost around “I”, while others insist it must revolve around “we”. And those particular fanatic Randroid egoists who will never sacrifice their Self for anyone.
Note a point I made above that would lead you to believe this. Of course someone might think like this. I’m sure there have been many murders in which the killer felt precisely that way.
No, I am not arguing that whatever it is I did to him was right, but that “in my head”, given the manner in which I construe the situation, given the manner in which existentially I was predisposed to construe it based on one set of existential prejudices rather than another, “I” thought myself subjectively into believing I was morally justified. But what’s his side of the story? How do others construe it? Where’s the God-like font that can settle it once and for all?
With you, it seems you’re willing to admit that given different experiences in your life, your reaction to what someone does to you may vary considerably. But emotionally you are able to latch on to, what, the optimal reaction…the reaction that you finally want?
As for this…
There so many different existential contexts that can unfold, given those who have lived very, very different lives, you would have to focus in on an actual event. Examine the specific motives and intentions of the participants. Since I have never had someone stalk and attempt to kill me, I have nothing concrete to fall back on.
Then there are the sociopaths who don’t give a shit about any of this. Everything is simple: what’s in it for me? Fuck morality and who is right and wrong. And the psychopaths who, clinically, are not even able to make these distinctions.
Part 2
I had to split this because my post exceeded the 60,000 character limit!!
Again, I don’t exclude my own value judgments from my own point of view. Yes, my thoughts and my feelings about the trucker protest are more in the general vicinity of the left. But that is because I spent over 20 years as a far-left political activist. I clearly recognize that my reaction as a profoundly embedded existential prejudice that, had my life been different, I might have acquired very different prejudices. And in fact here and now those leftist prejudices have been profoundly diluted as a result of my having become a moral nihilist.
It’s not a question of suppressing my emotions or pretending they don’t exist or feeling nothing. It’s simply recognizing that what I do feel is derived more from the manner in which my life actually unfolded existentially rather than from any argument [philosophical or otherwise] that would allow me to grasp how I ought to feel as a rational and virtuous human being. The way the objectivists/pinheads do. Their own emotions are nothing if not self-righteous, right?
Nope. And, again, the best way to test it is to take it to those protesting any government policy that you yourself protest. Run it by those out in the street actually confronting the government and its policy. Note their reactions and bring them back here.
And how close is your own understanding of projection to this one: “the mental process by which people attribute to others what is in their own minds”.
Again, what is always most crucial to me is what the mind thinks given a particular context. And how close it can come to demonstrating that what it thinks others are obligated to think as well. And, in regard to value judgments, how what it thinks [and feels] is derived from dasein.
Okay, approach it from that point of view, sure. But what I asked is for you to connect the dots between it and the trucker protest.
And then when I noted, “Okay, but your ‘metaphysics of consciousness’ either has profound ‘for all practical purposes’ implication for the truckers or it doesn’t”, you responded that it doesn’t.
So, sure bring it in if you wish. But my own reaction to “general description intellectual contraptions” isn’t likely to change. Well, unless, of course, given a new experience or access to new information and knowledge, it does.
_
TLAR [A = aint]
I say Heidegger is more down to Earth because he is concerned simply with our “being in the world” (that’s how I understand his definition of “dasein”). As I noted above, and as I interpret your words, you seem to be concerned more with the difficulty with which we grapple to find objectivity in our being in the world. ← that’s like an onion around which you’ve added several more layers.
I don’t have any examples for you. Just take those two construals and see how they apply to things like feminism, abortion, Nazism, etc. yourself.
Ok, since you’ve gotten lost (again) I’m going to try to put you back on track. The question was “What is the most rational manner in which to react [to anything]?” And the point I was arguing is that a true subjectivist would have no need for this question, and that since you are stuck on it (indeed, your entire life seems to be stuck on it) I call you out as a closet case objectivist.
I guess to you it’s “as though” but that just betrays the limits of your intellect.
And since they’re rooted in dasein, I don’t. Not when I’m arguing with you, at least. You see what you just did? You told me how you want me to respond and how in turn you want to respond to that. You want me to back up my emotions with rational sounding arguments so that you can point out how they’re rooted in dasein. But I’m afraid I already agree that they’d be rooted in dasein. Sorry that I agree.
I don’t think you can necessarily label simply taking a side the embodiment of the “fulminating fanatic objectivist mentality”.
Aren’t those one and the same?
Just to put this back in perspective, we’re talking about whether the question “What is the most rational manner in which to react?” is asked out of ignorance or not. You claim not to be an objectivist. I point out that you’d have no need to ask the question in that case. But giving you the benefit of the doubt, I speculate that you ask the question out of ignorance–that is, you don’t claim to know one way or the other whether there is a most rational manner in which to act. Therefore, just in case, you think it prudent to ask the question.
Sure, millions might be impacted by the answer to this question, but the majority of people don’t ask it out of ignorance. They not only feel there must be a most rational manner in which to react but that they know what that manner is. If they ask the question at all, it’s rhetorical.
I may be a pinhead, but I’m not a fanatical fulminating one.
Feel what way? That being drawn and quartered is reasonable? I don’t know, I guess staying out of trouble is a much nicer experience than being drawn and quartered? But that’s just me.
And I would like answers to these questions:
No, it’s just semantics. To say “I think the truckers are right” is to say “I think I’m right.” It would be nonsense to say “I think the truckers are right, but I disagree with them.”
I don’t know why I have to explain it to the truckers specifically, so I’m just going to explain it.
Being a subjectivist, to me, means believing that the world is determined by the mind, by one’s perceptions, experiences, beliefs, values, and so on. And as we all know, the mind is easily capable of having experiences of objectivity. We all believe that 2 + 2 = 4, for example. The subjectivist in me says that 2 + 2 = 4 because that’s how I experience the relation between quantities, but I also experience it to be objectively true–and so it is objectively true (for me).
As for the truckers who believe in an entire world of objectivity, my subjectivism goes hand-in-hand with relativism, so I have no issue saying the world is primarily objective for them. But when I say I can accommodate objectivism, I mean a little more than just that. I mean I can agree with them on certain issues. That Trudeau is a tyrant (for example) or that no one should be vaccinated against their will (for another). I wouldn’t personally regard these as objectively true (at least for me) though I would acknowledge that they are objectively true for the truckers. But we don’t need to agree on their objectivity just to agree. They would say Trudeau is a tyrant as an objective fact, I would say he’s a tyrant as a subjective opinion (mine)–and that should be enough for us to get on with things.
Is what I’v been calling ‘emotions’ what you call ‘prejudices’? Glad to hear you at least acknowledge you have them, and that they are at odds with your beliefs on dasein. That’s what I’ve been trying to say about my emotions.
And of course, here comes the part where you conveniently lose the ability to comprehend just at the moment when I clear up the crux of your misunderstanding:
I didn’t once mention “want” anywhere in the above. I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m making a distinction between what I feel and what I want–there is no distinction at all (must be one of your brain glitches again); on the other hand, I did mention the word “think” in contrast to “feel”, which is the distinction I was making. Try reading it again. Maybe it will make more sense this time.
That sounds like a really lame exercise, but okay. I’m Vladimir Putin thinking only in terms of what I want–no justifications–I want to invade Ukraine, so I invade Ukraine. I’m Alito thinking only in terms of what I want–no justifications–and I want to gut the Roe v. Wade case, so I gut the Roe v. Wade case. ← Are we seeing any brilliant insights here?
You’re doing more than just assuming, you’re insisting. I tell you I side with the truckers because “it’s just what I want,” and you inject an extra step: “it’s just what I want, therefore it’s right.”
To be fair, I won’t deny that my desires to see the truckers win comes along with thoughts pushed into my head by those desires. My mind will conjure up all manner of arguments and justifications for why the truckers should win. But because I agree with your dasein argument those thoughts mean very little to me–I see through them, so to speak–they become mere “intellectual contraptions” that pass through my mind and disappear–and I’m left only with the desire to see the truckers win. So if you want, we can get into those thoughts, but I must preface that with the disclaimer that I’ve already dismissed them.
Well, I’m trying. And I think I’m succeeding to an extent, though there is obviously much left to understand.
Well, you’ll have to bear with me then. My thread, my decisions. Then again, I am letting you drive for the most part.
Just to put this in perspective, the tangent I’m calling a dead horse is the one where we started arguing about whether, to the nihilist, values are mere fabrications and illusory. You (eventually) responded to that by bring up the point (for the second time) about the girl who stood me up. ← I was calling that a distraction because it had nothing to do with the question of whether or not values are illusory to the nihilist. I didn’t want to continue on that tangent, however, because it’s stupid, so I called it a dead horse not worth beating. But if you really think it’s “one of the most important factors of all in grasping the complex and convoluted nature of human identity out in the is/ought world” we can bring that horse back to life and ride it into the sunset.
What do you mean? Would it change what I want here and now? No, it wouldn’t. Would it change what I want in this alternate universe where I’m arguing on the opposite side? Of course!
I envy you then… always wanting what’s right. Most people aren’t strangers to the experience of struggling with their conscience. Living up to one’s morality is not always easy. It can be a burdensome chore, so much so that many will fall into nihilism, preferring to dismiss morality as a mere human fabrication, calling none of us to its higher purpose. It demands great sacrifice sometimes; for example, if the greater good requires that you sacrifice yourself to save the many, such as when a soldier is called to war in order to protect his country. He doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want to leave his wife and kids to fight in a foreign land, but he knows he must–it’s the right thing to do–and so he musters the strength and the courage to go fight despite the urges of his more basic desires.
Are you telling me you’ve never experienced this? You’ve never had to struggle with your conscience? That your conscience and your emotions are always in sync? Are you really saying that there’s never been a moment in your life when you wanted one thing but knew you had to do the opposite?
“As though” to you, I suppose. But to me, they just are. Stubborn little creatures, emotions are. They just don’t listen to your dasein arguments.
Not particularly. I just want to point out that I’m not without my own struggles when it comes to this stuff. My struggles are between what I think I know and all there is to know. You seem stuck on your fractured ‘I’. I don’t suppose these are two sides of the same coin, are they?
These are the questions that will plague me til the day I die.
If the tables were turned, and I was asking you that question, you’d say, “Of course! Everything’s related to the trucker protest.”
I don’t know if that’s the best analogy, but I get your point. Still, I will repeat, my point is that emotions hinge on self-interest. Your point about the complexity of the covid situation and government policy (etc.) adds an elements of uncertainty that nicely contrasts with the certainty of a killer trying to kill you, but I still don’t think you understand how uncertainty plays in here. Knowing you, the uncertainty is over what the morally right thing to do is. But I’m making the point that, while there is uncertainty, it’s the uncertainty of how all these things–the covid virus, the vaccines, the government policies–will effect one’s self–amorally as it were. I’ve never been so uncertain about these things to not know how to feel about them–I’ve always felt relatively certain that I would survive covid if I caught it–I’m a healthy 45 year old man who wouldn’t mind going through a moderately uncomfortable experience in order to gain personal immunity–and I’m pretty certain the government policies Trudeau’s administrations wants to impose in response to the pandemic would make my life miserable. Is it the right thing to do? Lifting all mandates and allowing the virus to take its toll? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But therein lies the differences between what my emotions want (self-interest) and what’s best for everyone (the elderly and vulnerable who actually might die if they catch covid). If I come to the conclusion that my freedoms aren’t worth the lives of the elderly and the vulnerable, then I will have to act against my emotions. But my emotions are still there–they still want what’s best for me, for my own self-gratification, because nothing’s changed in that regard–I’m still a relatively healthy 45 year old man who almost certainly would survive covid–so to act morally, at least in this scenario, requires acting against my emotions.
Maybe you’re not certain which group of people you fall into–the healthy and resilient or the vulnerable and immunologically weak–or maybe somewhere in between–maybe this is what you’re uncertain about; maybe you’re uncertain about how, in your country, government policy in regard to covid will effect you personally. If that’s the case, fair enough. But if you are certain about how it will effect you, even just relatively certain–how it will effect you in the either/or world–then this will impinge on your emotions way more than your uncertainty about the moral standing of the situation. It’s in that sense that my analogy to the murderer trying to kill you is not such a different scenario than you seem to think.
While the concept of the ‘self’ can be quite ambiguous and obscure, there’s actually a simple answer to this question. If you think about what I’m saying–that emotions serve our self-interest–the ‘self’ there is obviously the organism that must survive using its emotions to guide it. Self-interest here means survival or whatever makes survival easier or more likely. So, I guess… the body?
Point is… emotions don’t care for our metaphysical conceptions of this abstract philosophical “self” that varies from person to person, from culture to culture–emotions have their own concept of “self”–the organism, the living body–as that is what they’re there to take care of. So please, Biggy, stop skirting around the point I’m making and focus on the actual crux of the issue. I’m trying to explain to you how my emotions can be out of sync with my intellect, remember? Speculating on how we define the ‘self’ in an abstract metaphysical sense won’t help here.
I’m just saying suppose you don’t think you deserve to be killed (I know, it’s a stretch)–for the sake of this scenario.
I don’t know if it would be the optimal reaction, but if I’m being lead purely by my emotions, then sure, it would be, for all intents and purposes, what I finally want (I guess).
You mean to tell me you’d have to actually experience being hunted down by a murderer to know whether you’d be scared or not?!?!
Just above you made no qualms about the fact that you’d be scared. You said, “The fear of someone stalking you is an immediate, wholly tangible experience. No ambiguity, no uncertainty. I’m afraid because someone is trying to kill me and I don’t want tlo die,” but now you’re saying this depends on if the morality of the situation is in question? Why doesn’t it depend on you having had the experience if the morality of the situation wasn’t in question?
Ok, let’s grant that you genuinely don’t know how you would feel. You’re at least open to the possibility that you’re uncertainty about the morality of the situation–i.e. whether or not you deserve to die because of some allegedly heinous act you committed against the murderer–would prevent you from feeling fear. When you imagine this scenario in your mind–not being afraid even though there’s a murderer after you–does that see normal to you? Is it what you’d expect of someone in that situation?
Let’s do this. Let’s bring it down to Earth, down to a real life situation ('cause I know you love those). How do you feel about the trucker protest? I assume you don’t feel one way or the other. Since you can’t determine the morality of the situation–which side is in the moral right–your emotions are likewise undetermined. Is that correct?
Earlier you mentioned that even you have your own prejudices. What is an example of one of those prejudices? What constitutes this prejudice? Is it that you feel a certain way about some issue? But if so, is this an issue you feel intellectually certain about? That is, you feel you know what the morally right thing to do about it is? If so, how is a prejudice? If not, how is it that you feel any way about it at all–you know, given that your feelings are always in sync with your intellect?
Just as you’re confused about how I can feel a certain way about some issue without taking an absolute intellectual stance on it, I’m confused about how this has never happened to you. I want to know how your mind is able to do this–to always suppress (or just not feel) any emotion until you can be absolutely certain you know the correct moral position to take. So I’m trying to bring to the discussion an example of a time when your emotions were not in sync with your intellect. Do you have any examples from your life, any examples at all? Help me out here.
Okay, so the only thing left for me to inquire about is this: what do you do with your emotions? You don’t suppress them, you don’t pretend they don’t exist, you certainly have them so it’s not that you feel nothing… but then how do they impinge on your intellectual stance with respect to the truckers? And how do they impinge on your actions? If your prejudices are “lefty” as you say, I would think this makes you want to take a stance against the truckers, or to do something to fight against the trucker’s cause. But you don’t. So what is happening in your mind? Are you resisting the urge to take a (biased) stance? Are you resisting the urge to act?
There has to be something that keeps your emotions/prejudices and your intellectual stance (i.e. your recognition that it stems from dasein) out of sync… otherwise, you and I are exactly alike (except for maybe having opposite prejudices). I’m profoundly perplexed, in that case, why my own psychology, as I’ve tried to explain it here, is so unintelligible to you. Are we just using different words?
Well, I’ve got the next best thing, an in-depth analysis of my metaphysics of consciousness with your favorite pinhead, urwrongx1000:
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=197909
He may not be a trucker, he may not have been there at the protest, but he’s such a strong supporter he might as well have been. Alas, he seems to have abandoned the thread just as it was getting interesting. You can read through it if you like and get back to me on how much light it sheds on my metaphysics of consciousness and how it relates to the trucker protest.
Did you wanna go for round 3?
Not close. This is actually the point on which I think urwrong got confused and on which the thread ended. You can read through it and see if it makes any more sense to you.
Ok, but I had to try. You said that you could only understand a person’s worldview if they connected it to a context, in this case the trucker protest–so I had to try connecting my theory to the trucker protest in whatever way it connects… and see if it helped. It didn’t obviously, and I didn’t think it would, but I had to try.
Since I’d like to avoid that 60,000 word/character limit to posting here, I’ll post this in two parts…
Part one:
Well, when you find some examples of him taking Dasein down to Earth in the is/ought world, we can discuss how that might differ from how I take dasein down here.
Note to others:
Same challenge.
Again, we can get into a technical discussion regarding how “serious philosophers” differentiate subjectivism from objectivism, but my main interest still revolves around closing the gap between what we believe “in our head” reflects the most rational reaction [to anything] and the extent to which we can demonstrate why all rational men and women are obligated to concur with our own reaction. Whether in regard to abortion, feminism, gun control or the trucker protest. And [of course] the manner in which I root our reactions here in dasein.
Where any number of objectivists get “lost” because, in my view, they can’t deal with the consequences of their own precious “Real Me in sync with the Right thing To Do” moral and political convictions not being around to comfort and console them. How could they be pinheads if that is deconstructed?!
From my frame of mind, this has almost nothing to do with the point I make above. And “for all practical purposes” we clearly construe our thoughts and our feelings regarding our behaviors being rooted in dasein very differently.
To wit…
Again, here you are supposedly agreeing with me that their value judgments [like ours] are in fact rooted largely in dasein, but they should simply shrug that part off?
I make the distinction here between those like Urwrong who, in my view, are “fulminating fanatic objectivists” – pinheads to me – and those able at least to dig a little deeper into my own assumptions regarding the role that dasein plays in the is/ought world.
I’m still largely oblivious to the point you are trying to make here about me. From my frame of mind, objectivism revolves around the assumption that there is in fact the most rational reaction that one can have in regard to the trucker protest or to the morality of abortion. And this must be the case, the objectivists insist because they already embody it. All that “dasein” stuff that you and I discuss here is completely irrelevant to them. It’s ever and always “one of us” [the good guys] vs. “one of them” [the bad guys]. For them the is/ought world is just another component of the either/or world. Either derived from one or another God or one or another political dogma/ideology or one or another deontological philosophical assessment or one or another screed about Nature.
Where you fit into all of this “for all practical purposes” is still the big mystery to me.
Right, like, philosophically or otherwise, ignorance can be pinned down in reacting to government policy in the health crisis. Or how about this: claiming it is all just a “libtard”, “globalist” hoax!
The objectivists stay out of trouble with their own kind by dividing up the world between own of us [the rational few] and one of them [the ignorant or irrational many]. The pinheads are just all the more fierce in their declamations.
My own hard-wiring? In what sense? I have changed my own moral and political value judgments many times over the years. And my point is that, in the is/ought world, the moral and political philosophies of all of us are rooted existentially in dasein out in a particular world understood in a particular way historically and culturally and in terms of our personal experiences. We don’t “rise above” the past, we merely shift in different directions. Depending on which new experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge we come upon. Only some of which are even in our complete control.
Again, we’ll need a context. Asking and answering questions in regard to what? My own answers “here and now” in regard to the trucker protest and the abortion and the gun wars is no less drawn and quartered.
Right, like nature programs us to feel what we do about the truckers and those who have or perform abortions. Instead, what nature does is to hard-wire our capacity to experience emotions. What those emotions end up being are no less rooted existentially in dasein [to me] than what we end up thinking is reasonable or not.
I thought we were talking about the day-to-day relationship between “I think the truckers are right” being or not being in sync with “I feel the truckers are right”. With most men and women, thoughts and feelings pretty much match here. At least that has been my own experience down through the years as a political activist.
You’re the one here attempting to seek them out on another thread. So, if you do find some you might have to explain to them how, in terms of their actual protest, what “primarily [being] a subjectivist who can accommodate objectivism” means. How are they to understand that in terms of the protest itself?
Yeah, perceptions of reality in the either/or world. My mind perceives that she has 2 apples in her left hand + 2 apples in her right hand. That equals 4 apples in total. And, yes, that happens to coincide with how many apples there are objectively.
But then this part…
Jim ate 2 eggs in the morning and then 2 eggs at night. Jim ate 4 eggs. Jean agrees it is 4 eggs but insists that eating any number of eggs at all is immoral because human beings have no right to consume animals in any form.
Subjectivism and objectivism here.
On the other hand, how are we not back to what we believe “in our head” is objectively true about these things and how we are or are not able to actually demonstrate that Trudeau is in fact a tyrant here and that vaccinations either ought or ought not in fact to be mandatory? What part can be connected to objective reality and what part is just what each of us as individuals thinks and feels is true “in our head”. The part I derive from dasein. And in not making any significant distinction between thoughts and feelings.
Sure, if that works for you. But it sure as shit doesn’t work for me. If what is truly objective here cannot be pinned down, the role that dasein plays in our own convictions [or lack thereof] doesn’t just – poof! – go away.
Exactly. That’s my point. Existentially, their thoughts and their feelings led them to embrace one set of political prejudices, your thoughts and your feelings led you to the opposite end of the political prejudice spectrum. Then this still unintelligible [to me] distinction you make between subjectivism and objectivism. What makes sense to you here simply does not make sense to me. It seems to revolve around this distinction you make between reasons and emotions…a distinction that I don’t make.
Thus…
Yeah, “sigh” indeed.
Yes, those I call the objectivist pinheads.
Then this [to me] bizarre admittance…
Back to this: Huh? How is what we think and feel about the trucker protest not the two main components of “I” in discussing the protest itself? And it’s in how we configure our understanding of the “terminology” we use here into moral and political convictions [or for me the lack thereof] that would seem to drive the exchanges on the Society, Government, and Economics threads.
We are still in two different exchanges here.
When have I ever argued that I don’t have both thoughts and emotions in regard to the conflicting goods that pop up over and again “on the news”? Let alone that either are in conflict with my beliefs about dasein here:
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
I am either completely misunderstanding your point here or we are, if possible, even farther removed regarding the roll that dasein plays in acquiring value judgments.
Encompassed for example here:
All I can do here is to bring this down to Earth.
1] I think the trucker protest is the right thing to do
2] I feel the trucker protest is the right thing to do
3] I want the trucker protest to succeed because I think and feel it’s the right thing to do
Even while admitting that had your life been different you might be here thinking and feeling and wanting just the opposite.
There’s how I understand the existential parameters of value judgments here and what I still don’t understand about yours.
Part two:
He wants to invade Ukraine but offers no justifications for why he wants it? How about because, from his frame of mind [for whatever personal reasons], he thinks and feels it is the right thing to do. Same with the Supremes.
Why do they all think and feel what they do? That’s when I propose the arguments I do pertaining to the self at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy. The part about thinking and feeling and wanting something/anything intertwined in dasein.
Then…
No, I try to understand how you connect the dots between what you want to see the truckers accomplish and how you think and feel about that accomplishment itself. How all three, if not intertwined in the manner in which I construe dasein here as the embodiment of a political prejudice rooted existentially in the lives we live, are intertwined in your own head.
Okay, but how is this really all that different from those here like Maia and MagsJ who embrace an intuitive “intrinsic self”. When push comes to shove they “just know” what they do about things like abortion or feminism or the tricker protest. And since none of us can be them, there is nothing we can really say to rebut their points.
Whereas, from my frame of mind, this “intrinsic self” is no less the subjective, existential embodiment of dasein.
Then back to what is still largely unintelligible [to me] about your frame of mind…
Alternate universe?
To the best of my current knowledge there is only the one that we live in. And in that universe [for me] you live a life that involves – revolves around – an accumulation of experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge that predispose you existentially to support the truckers protest or to protest the protest itself. You think and feel and want everything here in tandem. How you intertwine thinking and feeling and wanting is not understood by me.
Note to others:
If you think you might be able to explain his point here using a different set of words, by all means, give it a shot.
To wit:
Sure, but back again to the part where, for most of us, how we feel about the trucker protest is very much connected existentially to how we think about it. Not many will think that the truckers are behaving rationally but feel that they are not. And then if someone convinces them that the truckers are, instead, behaving irrationally, and the government policy is the correct one, are they going to still feel what they did when they thought the truckers were right and the government was wrong? Yes, there may well be a period where they find themselves feeling ambivalent…pulled in both directions…but once their thinking shifts more fully, their emotions will follow. At least that’s how it has always been with me. Then the part about what they want comes into alignment as well.
Note to others:
How about your own reactions to the trucker protest? More in the direction you think I am going or Gib is going?
Okay, but in being a political activist for over 20 years, my own thinking and feeling and wanting were almost always in alignment. First as a moral and political objectivist and then later as a moral nihilist. Today my thinking and feeling and wanting is just far more “fractured and fragmented”.
Then the part where you note how in some respects you share in the “dasein stuff” I note but are not yourself fractured and fragmented. From my frame one they are both basically one and the same thing.
To the extent one comes to think 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.”
…one is drawn and quartered when, among other things, one follows the stuff in the news.
Two sides of what coin? The Reality coin? And my “I” is fractured only in regard to the is/ought world, or when we go all the way out to the very end of the metaphysical limb and grapple with the Biggest Questions of them all.
Thus…
Me too.
Again, though, given “the gap”, I might say that but how on earth can I possibly really know what I am talking about? What can I possibly even begin to grasp about the trucker protest and that which causes everything to be related to everything else? Back to the Ben Button clip above.
Whatever that in itself means!!!
Right, as though putting people who have led very, very different lives and come to think about the nature of their own reality [cognitively and emotionally] given very, very different sets of assumptions would listen to you explaining that and this would make their reaction to the trucker protest…more or less effable?
Back again to how each of us connect the dots existentially between I think this about the truckers, I feel this about the truckers, I want this in regard to the truckers. I know by and large how “here and now” I connect those dots.
How about others here?
And then there’s you:
As though this is more about me not grasping what you are imparting here about emotions and not more about you not grasping what I am trying to impart here about them.
Or, again, maybe your emotions and your intellect here are intertwined very, very differently from mine.
I’m clearly not understanding your point. Whatever I think and feel and whatever the killer is thinking and feeling is derived existentially from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. There are the facts able to be communicated objectively about the circumstances. Then there’s my side and the killer’s side regarding whether I deserve to be killed.
Thus…
Just more confusion here from my end. I feel what I do, sure. But unlike the objectivists who justify what they feel based on the assumption that they feel what any rational and virtuous man or woman is ought to feel, “I” recognize that my feelings are rooted more in my own set of subjective assumptions.
For example, I killed the killer’s dog because it barked all night keeping me awake. Even after I complained to the killer about it. The killer feels I deserve to die for doing that. I feel I don’t deserve to die for doing that. Conflicting emotions. Derived from how existentially we both perceive the situation differently. Now, is there a way to determine how all rational men and women are obligated to feel here?
Again, unless you are thinking about it altogether differently.
Okay, now back to how we construe all of this differently given our different understanding of how dasein factors into our thinking and feeling and wanting.
To wit…
Again: as though we are in two different exchanges.
Yes, we all come into this world hard-wired to experience a wide range of emotions. And with a survival instinct:
“survival instinct: noun. the instinct in humans and animals to do things in a dangerous situation that will prevent them from dying.”
So, presuming we still very much want to live, fear will be felt if our life is in danger. On the other hand, we are also equipped to feel despair. So, we may actually take our own life instead. It all comes back to each of us as individuals understanding our “self” existentially, subjectively.
Huh? Depending on the situation as “I” perceive and understand it “in the moment”, morality may or may not be a factor.
What you’re focusing on here…
…always depends on the subjective, existential, circumstantial parameters of any particular one of us as individuals.
Here and now, I feel ambivalent. Why? Because there are conflicting accounts regarding the covid pandemic, the role of government, lockdowns, wearing masks, vaccinations. Both sides are able to make reasonable points in their arguments. Now, when I was a hardcore radical leftist, I would have felt the protest was wrong. Unequivocally wrong. Why? Because it was out of sync with my objectivist Marxist dogma. I would have fit all the facts into my dogmatic assumptions.
Today, however, I recognize those convictions as but a manifestation of a particular set of political prejudices “I” derived existentially from dasein. In other words, now, instead, I am more willing to take into account that both sides do have reasonable arguments to make. Just based on different sets of assumptions about, among other things, capitalism and socialism, the role of government, polices revolving more around “I” or “we”.
Here, of course, we are back to the fact that you can’t be inside my head understanding the world around me as I do given the life that I lived. Nor I inside your head understanding the world around you given the life that you lived.
And there have been any number of situations in my past where my thinking and my emotions were shifting dramatically and thus up to a point out of sync. When I first became a devout Christian. When I became a Marxist and an atheist. When I flirted with the Unitarian Church and with Objectivism. When I shifted from Lenin to Trotsky. When I abandoned Marxism and became a Democratic Socialist and then a Social Democrat. When I discovered existentialism and deconstruction and semiotics and abandoned objectivism altogether. When I became moral nihilist. When I began to crumble into an increasingly more fragmented “I” in the is/ought world.
I don’t know how to explain it to you better than I already have. Once my thinking “I” in the is/ought world came to revolve more and more around 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 feeling “I” followed. For those like me, at best, they can act only in accepting the ambivalence that they feel. And that will probably revolve around the political prejudices they embody rooted in dasein. Thus for me, the existential “I” is more on the left end of the political spectrum. But that doesn’t stop me from recognizing that had my life been different “I” might have felt more committed to the right end of it.
So, sure…
First of all, my political activist days are long gone. But, again, if I were younger I’d still be no less ambivalent. Yeah, I could take that existential leap to the left. But that wouldn’t make my thinking here…
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
…go away.
Then this part:
There are simply too many genetic/memetic variables involved – re nature and nurture – in understanding any particular human identity. Many of which go back to our indoctrination as children. And many of which were, are and will be beyond our either fully understanding or controlling.
I look forward to that with maddening anticipation.
Yes, we can, but all I want to note is that I don’t understand what kind of subjectivist you are to bother wondering what is the most rational manner in which to react… I mean, objectively.
Now that has (almost) nothing to do with the point I was making.
Yes, you know what happens to people who don’t shrug it off? They become like you.
Exactly. And you don’t believe that there is a most rational manner in which to react, right? So what puzzles me is why you would bother asking whether there is or isn’t. Are you not sure? Not sure whether to be an objectivist in search of that one most rational manner in which to react, or a subjectivist who puts the question to rest feeling that, at least for you, there is no (objective/universal) most rational manner in which to react? <— This is what I speculate. It’s the only scenario that would put my puzzlement about you–a subjectivist who still wonders about the most rational manner in which to react–to rest. And only you can tell me if this scenario is, in fact, true.
ugh Yes, the hard wiring that you brought up:
Get a hammer and some nails cause I want that quote securely fastened in your mind when I ask this question: do you rise above your own hard wiring? Given that you never fail to remind us of your my-philosophy-applies-to-me trick, I would think the answer is no.
Did you nail that quote tight and secure? Because that quote is your context. That’s right, it’s your context, it’s your question. You asked it. And yet, you’ve already forgotten it, like you forget anything you write just one post ago. No wonder you’re always asking for a context; even contexts that you establish slip your mind in only one round. This is a cognitive disorder! And your laziness to go back and read where the conversation came from doesn’t help either. At this point, I’m wondering whether I should even bother re-asking my questions? This very paragraph I’m writing has probably caused you to lose track of the conversation so that in your reply you’ll be asking “what questions?”
Well, here’s what you said:
You’re still thinking in terms of feeling that things are right or wrong. I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but it’s not about right or wrong. Consider “I want the truckers to win” or “I hate the truckers” ← feelings without any mention of right or wrong, without any thoughts of right or wrong.
This is why I don’t believe you’re trying to understand my point of view one bit. Why do I have to keep correcting this false assumption of yours? Is it really that hard to grasp? Have you even attempted to grasp it? I haven’t seen you ask “Wanting the truckers to win without thinking they’re right? How can that be, gib?” which leads me to believe you’re just ignoring my point, or blocking it out like all the other things you don’t want to hear or care to understand.
It would be the same as how I explained it to you.
If Jean thinks this is an objective fact, then it is an objective fact for her (relative to her, according to her, in her world, or any other relativistic phrasing). It is not an objective fact for the likes of you and I.
If you don’t want to distinguish between thoughts and feelings, then we’re talking strictly about the pinheads only (here I’m gonna have to as gracefully as possible bow out of that category). I’ve only been making a distinction between thoughts and feelings because they are not aligned within myself (nor within you I take it). In my opinion, there is no way to demonstrate beyond everyone’s ability to deny or disagree that Trudeau is(n’t) objectively and irrefutably a tyrant nor that vaccines ought (not) to be mandatory. These propositions are by their very nature subjective opinions and have no place in the world of facts (your either/or). And I’m fine with that. I don’t need them or their opposites to be objective facts.
Then I guess it’s a problem for you but not for me.
It’s strange that you don’t make this distinction as I would think you’re own thoughts on the matter put you at odds with your emotions. You’ve admitted that you have your own political prejudices which I would think come with emotions and thoughts, and sure they’re probably aligned–but those aren’t the thoughts and emotions I would distinguish–I would distinguish (in your case) the emotions that come with your political prejudices and your thoughts on dasein, which for all intents and purposes seem to oppose at every turn any allegiance to or against any of the hot moral debates that rage in today’s political foray. The trucker protest–for or against it, Biggy?–it’s neither, right?–you can’t decide whether to be for or against it because you recognize that any position you take on it would stem from dasein–right? For or against abortion? For or against gun control? For or against vaccine mandate? You can’t decide, right? Yet you have certain political prejudices, isn’t that right? Having said you lean left, I would think you are anti-trucker–at least insofar as your prejudices are concerned (as opposed to your thoughts on dasein). How you think and feel about the trucker protest when it comes to your prejudices, therefore, is at odds with your thoughts and feelings in regards to dasein. ← That’s the distinction I mean to draw. Unless I’ve sorely misunderstood you, this has been your entire campaign at ILP since you began here–so I would think of all people, you understand this distinction the most. If I’m wrong, help me out here–help me understand how your thoughts on dasein are aligned with your political prejudices.
If you think our thoughts and feelings on a particular political/moral subject constitutes the ‘I’, it’s no wonder you feel fractured and fragmented. I simply don’t identify my ‘I’ with whatever “isms” I believe in. Sure, I may call myself a subjectivist, but that’s not who I am at the core of my being. I’m also a father. I’m also a software developer. I’m someone with ADD. I’m a white Canadian middle aged man. I’m a cycling enthusiast. I’m a writer and an artist. If my subjectivism were to fracture and fragment one day, or even if I just stopped believing in it, I’d still be me. I just wouldn’t call myself a subjectivist anymore. I wouldn’t feel that I’ve “fractured”. Same for all the other peripheral aspects of who I am. My “I” survives their death.
So maybe this is your problem. You feel you can’t identify yourself with anything other than a moral/political ideology. You need an “ism” to cling to just to feel you are someone. You think?
What else am I supposed to conclude based on everything you’ve said so far. You’ve said that you have your own share of political prejudices, and that where there’s thoughts involved in political prejudices there’s feelings in sync with them. But your thoughts on dasein, from what I’ve gathered, preclude you from actually believing in your prejudices as they seem to suggest that all prejudices are acquired via arbitrary life events and experiences and what circumstances we’re born into, that you could just as easily have acquired the opposite prejudices, and that all such prejudices are groundless and vacuous. And if these are your thoughts on dasein, then what feelings are in sync with them? I’ve surmised something like confusion or ambivalence—a not knowing what to believe—or maybe even a numb apathy, a not caring what to believe. But then aren’t these thoughts and feelings at odds with those of your political prejudices? When your political prejudices illicit feelings of anger towards the truckers (or whatever they make you feel), isn’t this anger at odds with your feelings of confusion, ambivalence, or apathy (or whatever) that come with your thoughts on dasein? Aren’t your thoughts on the wrongness of the truckers’ cause at odds with your thoughts on dasein which tell you that you have no grounds to say that what the truckers are doing is wrong?
I dunno, I think you’re just trying to avoid consensus.
I don’t think there’s enough strike-through on this board to correct the number of times you make this mistake. I think the problem comes down to you’re inability to leave out the “right thing to do” part. For some reason, you seem incapable of imagining someone having thoughts about some prominent political issue without it being about right or wrong. For my own part, I don’t have a whole lotta thoughts about the truckers that don’t stem from my feelings about them. And as for the thoughts that do stem from my feelings, my understanding of dasein and the arbitrariness by which we acquire our political prejudices pretty much squashed them out, takes the wind out of their sail, removes the grounds on which they would stand, and makes them feel hollow and vacuous. So they don’t even seem like reasonable premises with which to start an argument, which is why I often decline to make such arguments, at least in discussions with you. So that scratches 1] out.
As for 2], my feelings about the truckers were never about right or wrong to begin with. They couldn’t be. They depend on thought to connect them to right and wrong. That’s why our emotions typical drive our thinking. They are attempting to come up with some rational in order to justify themselves, usually morally, to make it ok to feel and act upon them. But as I said above, my understanding of dasein stomps out any thoughts my feelings about the truckers could come up with, and therefore I’m left only with my feelings—feelings in a state of disconnect from right and wrong, of dissatisfaction for want of a justification. But you cannot imagine that, I gather. You cannot imagine a person having feelings about some major political issue without those feelings being about right and wrong, let alone feeling without even any thoughts about right and wrong.
If you want a more accurate picture of the logical structure of my argument here, it’s like this:
1] I’d like to see the truckers win (the emotional part)
2] I don’t really have any thoughts worth adding to this (since it’s all vacuous anyway).
3] Ergo, I’d like to see the truckers win (what else can I conclude?).
Well, you tell me: if all I can conclude from the above is that I’d like to see the truckers win (which is just an either/or fact), how is that so incompatible with admitting that had my life been different I might be here thinking and feeling and wanting just the opposite? Without drawing any moral conclusions here (which seems to be your handicap), it’s all comfortably within the realm of either/or.
And now we know why.
Well, that isn’t the frame of mind in question. You said, “Okay, let’s put this frame of mind in Vladimir Putin’s head…” referring to the frame of mind I’m trying to get across to you. It’s a frame of mind of pure raw desire, of unadulterated, unsullied want–the kind an animal might have, an animal without the ability to reason, to tell right from wrong, or to even think abstractly–what do you think a wolf might offer up for his moral justifications for killing its prey? ← That’s the frame of mind I’m talking about.
Sure, but then perhaps you should give up asking me what my reasons are for thinking and feeling the way I do–because I don’t really have any–not even in regards to the truckers; I want them to win, but this is more like an animalistic desire that stems from a sort of survival instinct, an intuition that says I’d be better off in a world where the truckers got their way–and any “reason” that comes out of this desire I recognize as simply dasein doing it’s thing–so it’s hard for me to take them seriously (unless I think they can actually work for me in a particular situation) which is to say it’s hard for me to treat them as my “reasons” for wanting the truckers to win.
You’ll have to break this down for me. I’m not entirely understanding. Is this like connecting the dots between the means and the ends? I want to see the truckers accomplish a world in which all covid mandates are lifted and we can go back to our normal lives. The way I think and feel about such an accomplishment, such a world, is that I would enjoy it a lot more than a world full to the brim with covid mandates of all kinds, a world in which I cannot do anything without government approval all in the name of keeping people safe from covid. Is the former a morally superior world? Well, I’d have to give that some deeper thought before I commit to an answer. What I know right now is that I’d be happier in such a world, that it’s more desirable to me (it’s kind of odd putting it this way as the covid mandates, for the most part, have been lifted, but you obviously understand that this discussion began in the thick of the trucker protest before they started lifting the mandates).
I think we should worry less about Maia and MagsJ and focus more on you. You’re the one who insists that our prejudices come with thoughts that are in sync with our emotions, and here I’m only trying to meet you half way, admit that there are indeed thoughts that come with my feelings on the truckers (it’s just that I dismiss them in light of what I understand about dasein). And you’ve even admitted this about yourself–you’ve said that you have your own political prejudices that come with thoughts and feelings in sync with each other. And if all this makes us like Maia and MagsJ, then I throw it back to you… How are your prejudices all that different from those like Maia and MagsJ?
You have this strange way of bringing up the suggestion that had one’s life been different then they would have been here arguing the opposite of what they are arguing, yet completely denying that this counts as an alternate universe–as if the thought of one’s life turning out differently isn’t just a thought but an actuality–as if we live many lives at once in some kind of quantum superposition where my support for the truckers coexists with my condemnation of the truckers.
Whatever it is you’re thinking here, to the rest of us, yes, it is an alternate universe.
I would argue the same point I’ve argued countless times before–that for me it’s not a matter of wanting the truckers to win while disagreeing with the trucker’s cause, but just wanting the truckers to win without any thoughts on the matter (none that I don’t dismiss as groundless anyway)–but I know that’s in that foggy/cloudy region of incomprehensible thinking to you, so I won’t bother. Instead, I’d like to see how you respond to some of my inquiries above–notably, how your own thoughts on dasein don’t “nullify” your own thoughts underlying your own political prejudices. How does your understanding of dasein not make your thoughts underlying your political prejudices seem totally vaccuous and arbitrary? If you can explain to me how you fully understand the problems posed to our political prejudices by your points on dasein and yet you still fully believe in the validity and objective reality of your own political prejudices, then I might be able to explain to you how my own psychology on this point differs.
And why do you think you’re the only one this is true for? Every time I try to tell you my feelings on the matter of the truckers are not in sync with my thoughts on it, you seem to think that’s an impossibility, or worse an incomprehensibility. (And note I never said there was a third element called a “want”–a want is a type of feeling, one and the same with it–but you misperceived a distinction between them in something I said earlier).
Yes, I definitely think this is where the crux of our disagreement/misunderstand lies–in the fact that we both claim to understand the “dasein stuff” yet this fractures and fragments your “I” but it doesn’t my “I”. I’m not sure I get why they are inextricably one and the same, though I see how they are tightly connected–as I’ve gathered from earlier discussions, a substantive understanding of your “dasein” would entail understanding how much in the is/ought world lacks a clear and demonstrative basis for being accepted as objectively real and objectively justified, and is rather more arbitrary and meaningless–and further to this point, insofar as one’s “I” is understood in terms that are defined in this is/ought world, one’s “I” is equally lacking in any objectively real and justified basis (thus the fracturing and fragmenting). But as I pointed out above, I don’t define my “I” in terms of anything in the is/ought world, not essentially–to me, they are separable–sure, I may call myself a subjectivist, but like I said above, this isn’t core to my being, to my understanding of who I am–so my subjectivism could be torn to shreads one day, or I could simply choose to drop it, and however much this might cause me great consternation, I don’t think it would shake my core sense of who I am, that I am an “I”.
I mean, are these two different ways of expressing the same struggle? If you don’t know what “coin” this struggle could possibly be, then I guess the answer to my question is no, they are not two sides to the same coin.
Then I guess my “I” is fractured too. I just don’t invest much in that sort of “I”. I much prefer to identify with the “I” that’s part of the either/or world–that I am a father, a software developer, an ex-drug user and alcoholic, an artist, an active member of ILP (though not as active as I used to be), and so forth and so on. That’s more what I pride myself on. So if some abstract conception of my “I” that hinges on an “ism” in the is/ought world has to be tossed, I don’t lose sleep over it.
Yeay! Agreement!
What does effability have to do with it? I’m making a point about the way I think emotions work, the role they play in our biological functioning. Sure, I may be wrong, but my intention is to render it as a fact of human nature. What does it matter whether people listen to me or not, whether they have led very different lives and had very different experiences, or think of their reality in very different ways? What does it matter whether my explaining this to them makes their reactions to the trucker protest “effable” (whatever that means)? It wouldn’t change how I think emotions work any more than how I think digestion or blood circulation works.
Last I checked, I was having this discussion with you. I don’t know what having this discussion with others would contribute.
Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s the former.
Fine, let’s suppose you did think you deserved to be killed. Or let’s supposed you were ambivalent, or perhaps didn’t care. Are you honestly telling me that there is not a single scenario in which your emotions would not be in sync with your thoughts on whether or not you deserved to be killed by the murderer? Or your thoughts on what dasein has to say about which point of view–yours or the murderer’s–is the correct one? So if you believed you deserved to die, you wouldn’t be afraid but would anticipate your murder with eagerness hoping that justice will soon be served? Or if your thoughts on dasein left you in your typical nihilistic limbo, not knowing whose morality is correct–yours or the murderer’s–you wouldn’t be afraid but would sit there in apathy or indecision as the murderer comes at you with a knife?
^ I think you’re afraid to answer this question. I predict you’ll attempt to avoid it at all costs.
That’s not the issue here; you’re trying to avoid admitting that you’d be afraid. “I feel what I do” doesn’t cut it. You’re trying to avoid admitting that this represents a scenario in which your thoughts on dasein would, like any other scenario, say that you don’t know of a way to decide whose morality is right–yours or the murderer’s–yet you’d still feel something definite (fear) that one would not describe as “in sync” with your thoughts on dasein. You’re thoughts on dasein would sync up (I presume) with feelings of apathy or indecision or ambivalence, or something of that nature, whereas your feelings in regard to the murderer looming over you with a knife would be in the ball park of fear.
Perfect! You fleshed it out nicely. Now take it a step further and suppose the killer was in the midst of trying to kill you. What are your thoughts on the morality of what he’s trying to do? What are your feelings on what he’s trying to do? Synced up?
Oh, clearly I am.
Ok, suppose you take your own life in despair (what an odd emotion to feel when a murderer is coming at you with a knife)… how is that “in sync” with what your thoughts on dasein have to say about the matter?
Absolutely, but this isn’t some mysterious undefined scenario in which we haven’t pinned down the numerous variables that play a role or who is involved. We know what all the parameters of the situation are, we’ve defined them. We know who’s involved–you! It’s a situation in which you killed the murderer’s dog and the murderer thinks this warrants your death. You don’t. So he sets out to kill you and you, in some manner, want to avoid being killed. So what do you feel? What do your thoughts on dasein say about it? Are the former and the latter in sync?
It’s not that complicated a question. In fact, you know how to answer one of them. The question about what your thoughts on dasein have to say about it. Don’t they always say that you can’t determine whose morality is correct? Yours or the murderer’s? So that’s one question down. All that leaves is how you would feel given that a murderer is looming over you with a knife. Are you really saying “Well, gee-whiz, it depends, you know”?
Ok, this is better than nothing. It’s not the example I hoped for of a situation in which your political prejudices brought with them emotions that clashed with your thoughts on dasein, but at least I can see that you have no problem answering the question when your feelings are in sync with your thoughts insofar as dasein is considered.
Excellent! So now you can take any one of those examples and use it to relate to my frame of mind when it comes to my feelings toward the trucker protest and my thoughts on it. Take for example your transition into moral nihilism (I assume that’s when you discovered dasein). When you are just transitioning, there are typically remnants of old feelings attached to the prejudices you are attempting to leave behind, and these are, at least temporarily, out of sync with your new outlook (this is the point you’re making, right?). So when you made your transition into moral nihilism, you must have still felt, to some degree, feelings attached to certain moral issues tied into certain political/social events going on at the time, no? So would it not be fair to say that, at the time, you remember being in a state of mind in which your thoughts (believing in moral nihilism and the implications of dasein) were out of sync with your emotions (favoring, let’s just say, pro-choice abortion laws)?
My state of mind with respect to the trucker protest is not all that different from this–except that I seem to be stymied in a state where my pro-trucker feelings are not going away yet my understanding of dasein and its implications for the trucker protest also aren’t going away. My thoughts on dasein telling me I have no reason to feel one way or another about the trucker protest, yet my feelings are definitely pro-trucker–as if I’m going through one of your transitions.
We’re just about there, Biggy. You have nicely laid out the relation between what your thinking “I” in the is/ought world thinks and what your feeling “I” feels–the thinking “I” thinks the above quote (that you might just as well have gone in the other direction) and the feeling “I” feels an emotion that aligns perfectly with that: ambivalence. Then you also mentioned your existential “I” which thinks and feels something more aligned with the left–something like disapproval of what the truckers are doing? Right?–which I would say is at odds with your ambivalent “I” who is unsure you should even have such thoughts and feelings as disapproval of what the truckers are doing. I would say your existential “I” and the “I” aware of dasein and all its implications are not in sync with each other.
Right, so what does happen to your left-leaning feelings when they do arise? Do they clash with your ambivalent feelings that stem from your understanding of dasein? And what about your left-leaning thoughts? Do they get “cancelled out” by your thoughts on dasein? Or are you somehow able to reconcile “Those truckers have no right to protest!” with “I have no idea whether or not those truckers have a right to protest since my understanding of dasein gives me no way to decide!”
Is this an answer to my question about whether or not we’re using different words to express the same concepts? Are you saying that all the genetic/memetic variables involved in our respective lives and all the indoctrination we received as children make it nearly impossible (or fully impossible) to determine whether or not we’re using different words to express the same concepts? Surely it’s not that hard to figure out, is it?
Part One:
I’m a subjectivist who acknowledges that the objectivists – one of them – might be right. There may be the most rational manner in which to react to the trucker protest or to abortion. I never deny that going back to all that one would need to know about existence itself in order to fully explain how and why the “human condition” fits into it.
Then for now we’re stuck.
Yes, and, predictably enough, given my understanding of dasein, I did become me. What I don’t understand is how, given the extent to which you claim to understand my own understanding of dasein, you didn’t become me. or more like me. Thus, from my frame of mind, given your own take on subjectivism and emotions, you are still able to delude yourself about your support for the truckers.
In other words, “yes, it’s rooted subjectively in dasein, but I’ll just shrug that part off because ‘somehow’ I ‘just know’ emotionally that they are right.”
Thus…
No, I don’t. But that’s just “here and now”. Given a new experience, a new relationship, and access to new information and knowledge I might change my mind. Back again to what we believe about things like this and what we can demonstrate that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to believe in turn.
Am I not sure about what I believe here and now?!! That you would ask me that given how many times I come back to “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule” in my posts just boggles my mind. My point is that given both of them how can any of us really be sure about anything we believe? I merely make the distinction between beliefs in the either/or world [there was or was not a trucker protest in Canada] and beliefs in the is/ought world [the trucker protest that was in Canada was a good thing or a bad thing].
Not sure what you are getting at here. All of us are hard-wired biologically to answer these questions. But with nature comes nurture. And that allows us and others to shape and mold our answers to our own historical and cultural and interpersonal contexts. And in a world ever bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change. What you’re noting here doesn’t [to me] make that go away.
Note to others:
What point is he making here? Because whatever it is, damned if I know how it relates to the point that I am making.
Again, note to others:
Give us your “thought through” argument regarding whether the truckers were right or wrong to protest. Now, if someone were to ask you how you feel about the protest does it or doesn’t it coincide with what you think about it?
You hate the truckers. Why? Because you think that their protest is part of the problem and not the solution to the covid pandemic. You think that if they prevail, things will get much worse and that means a shittier world to live in.
Then this part…
Why do you suppose he always assumes this is about me not trying to understanding his point of view, and not him not trying to understand mine?
Yes, I would ask him, “Wanting the truckers to win without thinking they’re right? How can that be, gib?”
Does anyone here want them to win while thinking they are wrong?
I can only assume that I am not really understanding his point here about thinking and feeling and wanting. There’s how they are intertwined existentially in dasein to me and how they are intertwined existentially in dasein to him. Again, unlike the pinheads here [urwrong’s ilk], he accepts part of my narrative regarding dasein, but clearly understands it other then as “I” do.
What does that have to do with my point? Eating four eggs is the objective fact. For all of us. Jim did in fact eat four eggs. Nothing pertaining to dasein as I understand it here. But when the discussion shifts to the morality of human beings consuming animals as a part of their diet what is in fact true for all of us then? That is the part where Jean thinks it is wrong for Jim to eat the eggs. Where she feels it’s wrong for Jim to eat the eggs. Where she wants Jim to stop eating eggs. Dasein down to the bone. Why? Because had Jean’s life been very different, she might be eating the eggs herself.
Well, they’re not aligned for me because “I” am fractured and fragmented in regard to the trucker protest. Given the assumptions the truckers make about the role of government in our lives, they make reasonable arguments. Given the assumptions those opposed to the truckers make about the role of government in our lives, they make reasonable arguments. “I” am tugged and pulled in both directions. As with abortion and gun control and all other “conflicting goods”. Instead, I take an existential leap in a generally liberal direction because I spent nearly 25 years of my life as radical leftist. It’s now practically hard wired into me as a frame of mind. But these days I recognize it more as a political prejudice rooted subjectively in dasein. But given that, my thoughts and feelings and wants are generally aligned.
Right, you are “somehow” still able to “just know” or to “feel” that siding with the truckers is, viscerally, a more comfortable fit.
And “somehow” I’m not able to. Sounds almost mystical to me.
Then around and around we go:
Both my thoughts and my emotions are fractured and fragmented.
Yes, exactly! Instead, as just noted above, “I” am left with an existential “me” drawn and quartered time and again when confronting those newspaper headlines. My thoughts and feelings against the truckers are no more than components of the life I lived on the left. Just as the thoughts and feelings of those for the truckers are no more than components of the life they lived on the right.
Of course, all that “existential stuff” would go away if philosophers and ethicists and political scientists were able to sift through the “personal opinion” quagmire and come up with the optimal manner in which all rational and virtuous human beings were obligated to think and feel and want here.
And that’s where the objectivists among us come in, right? Their God. Their ideology. Their philosophy. Their assessment of nature.
Again, if this assessment of all the components that you think make you you don’t result in you feeling fractured and fragmented in regard to your moral and political arguments here, fine, that works for you.
It doesn’t work for me. I don’t have MagsJ’s or Maia’s “intrinsic self”. I’m not able intuitively to “just know” the truckers are right. I don’t feel connected to your own “core self”, enabling me to “somehow” obviate all that “dasein stuff”.
And how exactly would “I” go about not feeling drawn and quartered in regard to this too?
I do what everyone else does. I read the news and I think about what I am reading. I react intellectually, emotionally, psychologically to what I am reading. I have a set of moral and political prejudices rooted in dasein that predispose me to think more one way rather than another way. Only, unlike you and others, my own understanding of all this comes back around to the points “I” make on these threads:
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
Then the part where, in regard to things like the trucker protest, I ask others to explain how and why they don’t react as “I” do at all. In particular, the objectivists.
Well put!
That’s the quandary. That’s the “for all practical purposes” consequences of thinking and feeling and wanting as a “fractured and fragmented” persona out in the world with others.
“I” can never really be certain that how I think and feel about the things I react to in the news might be reflective of what is really true or what is just a component of political prejudices derived existentially from dasein. Ever and always pulled and tugged ambivalently in conflicting directions.
Then the part where “I” recognize how sociopaths and those moral nihilists who own and operate the “show me the money” global economy are able to rationalize a purely selfish frame of mind in a No God world. Fuck morality altogether.
Note to Urwrong:
1] Do you think the trucker protest is the right thing to do?
2] Do you feel the trucker protest is the right thing to do
3] Do you want the trucker protest to succeed because you think and feel it’s the right thing to do?
Any non-sequiturs here for you?
No, there are probably those who read about things like the trucker protest and don’t think of it in terms of right or wrong. Perhaps they just like following the drama that is embedded in the confrontation itself. Or, with no dog in the fight, they’re just curious to see how it ends. Or it has nothing to do with right or wrong for them but only in how it effects the size of their bank account.
Then [of course] your own profoundly subjective rooted existentially in dasein reaction to it…
Bottom line: In not being inside your head and having no real clue regarding all of the uniquely personal experiences and relationships and access to information and knowledge that constitute your own lived life, I’m not able to fathom how this led you to connect the dots between your “I” and the trucker protest.
I only have access to my own life.
Next up: encompassing all of this “logically”?!
Note to others:
Does this make sense to you? How would you compare and contrast it to your own reaction to the truckers, the role of governemnt and the covid pandemic?
Part two:
Back to how we think this through differently. The moral conclusion to draw here [mine] is that liking/wanting the truckers to either win or lose is largely dependent on the experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge that predispose us existentially to want them to either win or lose.
To me, it’s like you going up to the truckers during their protest and saying “Look, I want you guys to win, but please understand that had my life been different, I’d want you to lose.”
As though they will just shrug that off. They want to win because most of them dismiss all that existential “dasein stuff” completely and insist it is both rational and virtuous that they do win.
Right, and this “pure raw desire” to want to invade or to strike down Roe is what really counts, not how they think the situation through and accumulate actual reasons for invading Ukraine or overturning Roe.
On the other hand, the wolf thinks nothing through, does it? It has no reason to kill other than the fact its instinct propels/compels it to. Only [to me] you come off as another Satyr here. Biological imperatives tossing historical, cultural, social, political, economic, etc., memes onto the back burner. If not completely off the stove.
Then back to the part where you explain your own reaction to the truckers…
Again, you go up to the truckers and they give you a list of actual reasons why they think and feel what they do about the government’s policies. You tell them, “forget all that, it’s the animal in me that wants you to win because the animal in me ‘just knows’ the world will be a better place if you do prevail”.
Try that at the next protest. The “monkeypox” protest? Then get back to us with their reactions.
Of course, the problem with speculation of this sort is that we just can’t know for certain how the covid pandemic would have played out in Canada had the government policies been the exact opposite of what they were. No masks, no social distancing, no lockdowns, no vaccinations. Instead, those on both sides merely assume things would have been either much better or much worse.
And what you seem to be suggesting is that Canadian citizens and the government should have just ignored the advice coming from the scientific and medical community and, what, went with their gut?
Because I acknowledge that those political prejudices are derived existentially from the life I lived. A life I only had so much understanding and control over. With MagsJ and Maia, that part is merely subsumed in their “intrinsic self”.
My understanding of dasein in my signature threads has left me “fractured and fragmented”. With MagsJ and Maia, they can simply ignore the points I raise there and stick with, “I just know what I do about abortion and the covid pandemic and the role of government.” It’s their “intrinsic self” that becomes their own objectivist font of choice.
This isn’t a mathematical relationship however. Our thoughts and feelings in regard to our value judgments often shift about given new sets of circumstances, new information, new insights. Sometimes we feel confused or uncertain or ambiguous or ambivalent. Why? Because we do live in a world awash in “contingency, chance and change”. And I focus in on the objectivists among us. Those who, however jumbled their thoughts and feeling might be on any given day, eventually come to anchor “I” to one or another objectivist font. Their thoughts and feelings then go goose-stepping to the next protest.
No, I said back when I was an objectivist myself my thoughts and feelings were often interchangeable. But I never attributed that to an “intrinsic self”. I attributed it to what I believed about myself in the world around me. As a Christian, a Unitarian, a Marxist-Leninist, a Trotskyite, a Democratic Socialist, a Social Democrat, a liberal Democrat.
Then I bumped into William Barrett and existentialism, into Supannika Rongsopa and deconstruction/semiotics. Then “I” began to crumble in the is/ought world.
But it’s not an alternate universe, is it? Not in the sense that some argue in regard to the “multiverse”. They’ll suggest there are an infinite number of universes. In some you support the truckers, in others you don’t. Complete and utter conjecture. Whereas my point here is rooted right here on planet Earth in this universe. Or, rather, given “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”.
Then let’s agree to disagree regarding what an alternate universe is.
That’s your take on what I am doing, not mine. I’m merely noting that given new experiences, relationships, information and knowledge, etc., my thoughts changed over the years. I denounced previous thoughts only because “I” shifted to a new objectivist font.
Just another example of how we think about the “for all practical purposes” existential parameters of dasein differently. Though I’m certainly not suggesting that my way is more reasonable than yours. I’m merely pointing out the obvious: that our individual lives were no doubt so very, very different in turn, what could either one of us really grasp about the other. I simply make that distinction between what can be communicated coherently in the either/or world because there, an objective reality does in fact exist – barring sim worlds mind-blowing Matrix scenarios – and what gets communicated far more turbulently in the is/ought world.
Back to this:
No, over and again I’m merely pointing out that there’s how I have come to understand dasein in regard to my own thoughts and feelings – and my own thoughts and feelings and wants – and how I don’t understand yours.
Actually, the best of all possible worlds here would be you and I confronting truckers in a new protest, and attempting to explain to them our own understanding of dasein. How, for me, it engenders this…
…in regard to their protest. And whatever it provokes in you in regard to their protest.
Okay, then let me ask you what you asked me: how would you make a distinction between your sense of self in regard to the trucker protest and how MagsJ and Maia would come back to their “intrinsic self”? They are not fractured and fragmented because there is this deep down inside them “real me”, “core self”, “soul” that allows them to “just know” – viscerally? intuitively? spiritually? – how to react to it.
Only I suggest that this so-called “intrinsic self” is no less the existential embodiment of dasein.
Okay, but how interested would the truckers be in the either/or Gib? Maybe some might be able to identify with it, but mostly they are going to be interested in whether you are “one of us” or “one of them”. And here, your “ism” can often be the only thing that matters to them. It’s certainly the only thing that matters to Urwrong and his ilk here.
Come on, you’re at the protest discussing the government and the covid pandemic with the truckers. For them, a hell of alot will come down to what you think about human emotions – their own for example – and how it can be encompassed and described in words they can then relate back to what they are doing there. And how what they want is connected to what they think and feel about the government’s healt policies re the pandemic.
Ask them why those things matter.
And you don’t know what “new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge” down the road might do to how you think emotions work. As though our emotional reactions to conflicting goods is on par with what how we think “digestion or blood circulation works”.
Please, others here are following this exchange. Just check the view count. And they might have insights into the relationships we’re discussing that neither one of us have considered.
Unfortunately, however, the New ILP isn’t likely to generate much in the way of serious feedback. Ten years ago it almost certainly would have.
Indeed, our exchange here may well be among the very last actual philosophical discussions there are at the New ILP. That’s why, by and large, I’ve gone over to this forum: forum.philosophynow.org/
Lots of folks there I have little respect for [nor they for me] but it is still in the general vicinity of the Old ILP.
I know! This being the New ILP, let’s create a poll!! 
Of course! Given different scenarios understood existentially re dasein, my thoughts and my feelings might be all over the board. I might experience considerable ambiguity, uncertainty, confusion. But what doesn’t change is that my thoughts and feelings are, by and large, derived existentially from dasein. And that, in the absence of God, there does not appear to be a way to establish definitively that I did or did not deserve to be murdered.
Hell, a sociopath might have raped and tortured and chopped into pieces a child of the killer. And still argued that he doesn’t deserve to die because from his frame of mind doing what he wanted to do, what gave him pleasure and satisfaction in doing, is…reasonable.
Okay, Mr. Philosopher, Mr. Ethicist, where’s the argument that demonstrates that this frame of mind is necessarily irrational, is necessarily immoral.
That’s how frightening moral nihilism can be. That’s why millions are inclined to believe in one or another objectivist font. To make that go away. It’s just that for most it is God. And here “leaps of faith” or “wagers” are all that are needed to make the religion font true.
For them.
No, I think that the objectivists among us are, on some level, afraid that my arguments above and below might one day become a part of their own arguments. And that their own “precious Self” in the is/ought world might begin to crumble.
Only, with you, I’m all the more curious as to why you own sense of self hasn’t crumbled even more.
There you go again, asserting something about me that is far more reflective of how existentially you have come to be predisposed to think about these things. That you seem considerably less ambiguous and uncertain about me than I am about you speaks volumes about you from my frame of mind.
And I’m afraid of many things. Of death. Of this “always never nothing” world where something unsettling – even devastating – is always just around the corner. Of going to the grave not having a clue regarding why I was even born in the first place…and not knowing what the “human condition” itself might mean in the context of “all there is”. Let alone my part in it. Of being ultimately ignorant of what the answers might be to the Big Questions. Afraid of all the things that anyone of us might be afraid of in this turbulent and ofttimes brutal world.
Instead, from you, I get “insights” like this:
Psycho-babble in a particularly ponderous “intellectual contraption”, let’s call it.
Well, the next time I kill someone’s dog and he tries to murder me for it, I’ll let you know to the best of my ability, how “I” came to intertwine my thoughts and feelings.
Again, the problem here is that I have never killed someone’s dog, who, because of it, comes after me in order to kill me. All I can suggest is that if that ever happens, my reasons for doing what I did and then reacting to what the killer chooses to do [in a free will world of course] will be rooted existentially in dasein. And here the variables can run into the hundreds and hundreds. Only some of which I will fully understand and control. The sheer complexity of human psychology in situations like this is far, far, far beyond my grasping. Only the objectivists among us, even here, will insist that they do.
No, I say that “here and now”, I am not able to determine whose morality is correct. That, from my frame of mind, only the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God would allow mere mortals to insist that Judgment Day makes sense. He would know if I deserved to die. Why? Because would He not transcend dasein here? Then the part where we attempt to determine if one or another secular “ism” can determine if I deserve to die.
And, yes, if the killer is about to stab me with the knife, my reaction is still no less the embodiment of dasein. How could it possibly not be?
Well, I am still stuck with the philosophical prejudices “I” have come accept “here and now” given the arguments I make in my signature threads.
Only I also argue here that given “new experiences, new relationships and access to new information, knowledge and ideas” in a world awash in “contingency, chance and change” there’s no ruling out the possibility that I might not think this way at all someday. Again, I never exclude myself from my own point of view.
Still…
Well, do your best to articulate the example you would have hoped for instead.
No, from my frame of mind, the only thing that might help here are the sort of examples that you are looking for.
Yes, I discussed that above. When you encounter brand new experiences in a world that never stops changing, sure, your thoughts and feelings can start to slip and slide in any number of directions. It’s just that for most all the directions end up revolving around one or another objectivist font. As they did for me.
Then [for me] existentially this part…
In other words, the manner in which my own thinking became entangled in all of these new experiences, engendering new thoughts.
What can I say? My own thoughts and feelings by and large are not like this. Not about the truckers or abortion or feminism or gun control or all the others conflagrations in the is/ought world. My understanding of dasein here eventually led me to my current “fractured and fragmented” frame of mind.
But not you.
Go figure?
Again, a part of me accepts that there may well be a more reasonable and virtuous argument to be made about the trucker protest. It might be from the left or the right.
But that always comes back to whether there are, in turn, more reasonable and virtuous arguments to be made about these things:
- capitalism more than socialism?
- big government more than small government?
- politics revolving more around “I” than “we”?
- rationalism more than empiricism?
- genes more than memes?
- idealism more than pragmatism?
And on and on.
Again, we don’t even know for certain if this entire exchange is or is not only as it ever could have been given that both our brains are necessarily in sync with the laws of matter in the only possible reality in the only possible world in the only possible universe.
With or without the only possible God?
No, my main “thing” here revolves around the extent to which words and worlds can or cannot be intertwined objectively in the is/ought world. Interacting concepts vs. actual interacting flesh and blood human beings.
Differentiating the trucker protest as an actual event and our reactions to it in being either supportive or not supportive.
Good enough.
Ugh Forget it! I’m tired of correcting this mistake. Just be confused.
Not able to answer the question, huh? Not surprising. But I think it’s fair to say the answer is “no” (despite how much you act like it’s “yes”).
That’s pretty much like asking “what question?”. Never mind. I’ll simplify all this by reiterating your quote (the one that started this tangent) and just give my thoughts rather than try to do the impossible–extract answers from you.
My thoughts are that you’re being a complete and utter hypocrite. You ask this question of me–“Why yours and not the countless other answers out there?”–but never yourself–even though you tirelessly claim to apply your own philosophy to yourself!!! When? Only when it’s convenient? You’ve already admitted that you have your own political prejudices–which is another way of saying you have your own answers (presumably arrived at by the aforementioned hard wiring)–yet you don’t see fit to ask yourself the question “Why yours [Biggy] and not the countless other answers out there?” and apply whatever answer comes up to me.
What can I say, Biggy? I’m an anomaly. Yes, I am one of those rare individuals who doesn’t know what to think about the trucker protest (whether it’s right or wrong) and yet I find myself wanting them to win. But that’s not even the weird part. The weird part is that you are exactly the same (except maybe wanting the truckers to lose instead of win). You claim to have left-leaning prejudices (which, to me, means you probably want the truckers to lose) and yet you claim not to know what to think about the trucker protest morally speaking. Why you are incapable of drawing a link between your frame of mind here and mine is beyond me.
But hey, if you’re so desperate to understand me, not believing me when I explain myself sure seems to be working out for you, doesn’t it?
What is there to not understand? You’re point is far more simple than you try to make it out to be. It’s nihilism 101 (mixed with a bit of relativism, I guess). All I see is you ignoring the points I make and make monumental mistakes in the few you actually attempt to interpret, mistakes the likes of which only someone with a cognitive disorder can make. I first have to attempt to correct these mistakes before I can even begin to attempt to understand what you’re saying.
That doesn’t count now. You should have asked when you had a chance of convincing me you were interested.
You were asking what I mean by “I’m a subjectivist who can accommodate objectivism”. I explained that I can accommodate it with relativism. Then you gave your example of eggs. I don’t know. Were you done with your question at that point? If so, you must have moved onto another point, but it would have been nice to know you made this transition (and what you transitioned into).
Jean thinks it’s wrong to eat eggs. I think she’s right relative to her own ideology. Now what’s your point?
Still waiting for you to make your point.
Ok, let’s pause here for a second. First of all, I want to thank you for being clearer than you’ve ever been. This really helps. Second, I want to contrast this:
…with this:
On a first reading, these seem to be in contradiction, but I think it’s fair to assume that by the first one you’re contrasting your leftist feelings (from whatever’s left of your leftist points of view) about the trucker protest against your nihilist thoughts on dasein (which tell you you shouldn’t have any feelings about the trucker protest, leftist or rightist). Or maybe visa-versa (i.e. your nihilist feelings about dasein contrasted with your leftist thoughts on the truckers). But by the second, you must mean your thoughts on dasein are aligned with your feelings on dasein. Or maybe your leftist thoughts on the truckers are aligned with your leftist feelings on the truckers. Or maybe both. Is any of this remotely correct?
I’ll bet.
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
In regard to what? Not clinging to an “ism” for a sense of identity? I think you ought to first come to grips with whether or not this is in fact your problem.
And BTW, what do you mean by “drawn and quartered”? Do you mean you feel pulled in multiple directions?
Their mothers never raised 'em right.
It didn’t.
Just a simple note: 2] is not really a premise. We can remove it to get:
1] I’d like to see the truckers win.
2] Ergo, I’d like to see the truckers win.
Good ol’ law of identity. Can’t get any more logical than that.
Right, and thank God I’m not in a situation where I would be compelled to say that. But the way I read that bizarre quote above is like this: “Look, I want you guys to win, but please understand that had I been raised a leftist, I’d (probably) want you to lose.” I’d expect they’d think that was obvious (though still weird to say).
But I gather what you mean to say is that though I want the truckers to win, I don’t support them morally, and they might take offense to that (even if they understand I don’t support the anti-truckers morally either). IOW, so what if I want them to win? What they want is moral support.
Have I got that right?
Look, I’m not saying that I’m literally like a wolf–incapable of giving my desires the rational forethought they deserve–it’s just that as soon as my thoughts on what you call “dasein” enter the picture, it’s all moot. Any thoughts I might have about why the truckers should win get “snuffed out” because, like you, I suddenly realize it’s all just intellectual contraptions, arbitrarily inherited from my upbringing, past experience, journey through life, etc., and I lose any faith I might otherwise have in them. Then they just sort of “fizzle out”.
How is this not exactly what you’re saying about yourself? How do you not see the parallel? I suppose the only difference is that, with me, this doesn’t seem to make the emotions go away. It still pisses me off that Trudeau treated the truckers the way he did. It still fills me with joy to know that the truckers stood up to that tyrant. I just can’t seem to come up with any rational moral justifications for it–that is, none that can withstand the quelling powers of my thoughts on dasein when they enter the picture.
You really want those reactions, huh? I gotta be honest, I still don’t quite get what you want from their reactions to me putting my arguments to them. Whatever your reasons, it wouldn’t change what I’m saying here. It might get me beat up, but I don’t see how it would get me to suddenly understand what you’re saying like a revelation from God. Is this more for your understanding or mine?
I can forgive you this time for repeating the same mistake as you made it in a much more subtle way. You see that word in deep bold red ^^^? What does it say? It says “should”, doesn’t it? “Should” carries moral connotations. It’s like saying, “It would be the right thing to do if…” And you know what I have to say about my feelings in regard to morality, right? Right??? Come on, no second chances now. The pressures on, Biggy. You should know this.
And which scientific advice? The one supporting the covid mandates or the one against them?
Then we share the same difference between them.
Having seen the way you misinterpret me, I’m starting to have my doubts this is true of them.
And I suppose that if it wasn’t for my subjectivism and if I were a lot more zealous, I might join them–the ones whose prejudices I could align with. But I’ve never been that good at making a case for the moral correctness (or incorrectness) of a personal prejudice or a social movement, so even then, it would be more following the heard than making a case for our cause. I’ve always been far more attuned to my own flaws and mistakes to believe in my own bullshit, always seeing through the holes in my own arguments (even when I don’t put them up front in arguments with others) and this puts me in a position to understand my primitive/animalistic self better than my intellectual self (who is really only a puppet of the former anyway). Again, driven by emotion and impulse over intellect and virtue.
It’s an imaginary “universe”. We are imagining an alternate route our lives could have taken. Our lives didn’t actually take this alternate route–not here on planet Earth–it took this alternate route in our imaginations. Perhaps I should use scare quotes when I call this a “universe”.
And what about now? Do your thoughts on dasein not compel you to denounce your “previous” leftist thoughts? Is “denounce” just not the word you would use? What about “invalidate”? How 'bout “discredit”? Cause doubt in? Make you less certain about?
So what does this mean? Does it mean that now, in regards to your present thoughts on dasein, they do or they do not nullify (make you doubt) your previous thoughts relating to your (past?) political prejudices? Because if your thoughts on dasein do cause you to doubt your thoughts on your political prejudices, I don’t see how this is any different from what I’m saying about myself.
Well, there was my thread Any truckers, protestors, or supporters here? Your favorite pinhead replied but he seems to have abandoned it. You can always attempt to revive it. Urwrong’s not a trucker (not that I’m aware of) but it’s the closest thing we have. Will that do?
Well, first of all, I have no idea what they mean by “intrinsic self” (or what you think they mean by it) nor do I know what you mean by “in regard to the trucker protest” but I think I can hazard a guess.
The “self” to me is very much anchored in the either/or world. The self is just the person I see in the mirror. It is, if nothing else, the body. But obviously, I think it’s more than just the body; it involves our being alive, our consciousness and personality. This more intangible/abstract aspect of the self defies an easily pinned down definition but I harbor no doubts that it’s there, that I am conscious and alive, that I do have a personality with thoughts and feelings and opinions and likes and tastes, etc… While hard to wrap my head around conceptually, I have no doubt these are facts about me–facts in the either/or world. And I have no reason to assume they would cease to be facts if all my cherished ideologies and philosophies, if all my morals and values, one day crumbled before my mind’s eye and blew away as dust. My personality and thoughts and feelings and all that might change but it would remain a fact that I have them and that they constitute who I am in that moment.
I don’t know what it means for these things to be “intrinsic”. I don’t think of them like some integrated, though intangible, object like a soul. I don’t think they’re “infused” into my body like water in a sponge, or floating around my head like words in a cartoon thought bubble. They’re just somehow “there”–associated with me… or just with me. And certainly they come from dasein–from my life’s experiences and the circumstances I was born into and grew up in–but this doesn’t make them any less part of the either/or world–I either am or I am not a supporter of the trucker convoy–I either am or I am not a subjectivist–these are facts about me, things that I can definitively say are true or not true about me. Whether this makes them “intrinsic” depends on what Mags/Maia mean by that word, or what you think they mean by it.
As for my sense of self in regard to the trucker protest, I assume you mean that part of me that has thoughts, feelings, opinions, likes/dislikes, maybe even memories and experiences, about the trucker protest. It wouldn’t be all that different from the above except narrowed down to very specific things about me that come to the foreground when the topic of the truckers is raised (or events involving the protest arise). But these would be no less either/or facts about me–it’s an either/or fact that I want the truckers to win, an either/or fact that I could have had my bank account frozen, an either/or fact that Trudeau fills me with disgust every time I see him on my TV screen, etc… ← There’s no ambiguity about this stuff for me, so my sense of self stays intact.
^ Note that nowhere in the above did I have to use moral language. I didn’t have to specify what my moral position is on anything. My sense of self doesn’t extend all that much into the is/ought world–not that there is no extension but the bulk of it remains comfortably in the either/or world such that if anything of myself in the is/ought world were to be compromised, there would be enough in the either/or world to survive a sense of integration so that I don’t feel fractured and fragmented.
Maybe, but why should I lose sleep over that? And who’s to say they won’t accept my support for them even if I can’t fully subscribe to their ideology and morality on an intellectual/abstract level? Don’t you think the vast majority of them would recognize support as valuable regardless of the ideological leanings of the supporter? Would they even care whether I agree with them on such a lofty abstract level? I think most of them would be far more pragmatic than that.
Having said that, I’m sure there would be a small handful of truckers who really, really, really care that I believe in exactly the same things they believe in and share exactly their values, and against them I might run into trouble. But if you had seen the side of the protest that I’ve seen, you would know these people as a very tolerant and friendly bunch, not requiring strict dogmatic conformity at every level–mind, body, and soul–but ok, let’s consider the infinitesimal few who are dangerously fanatical in the most radical, arrogant, bigoted way. What would I do if confronted by the likes of them? Is that what you’re asking? Run away! Or lie! Or tell the truth and get beat up! Or maybe I’d give in to my political prejudices and allow my emotions to have their way with my thoughts, weaving all manner of intellectual moral contraptions in defense of the trucker’s cause. I don’t know. What kind of answer would be most relevant to you? What are you getting at?
This time, I get to say to you, what does that have to do with my point? Seriously, I’m making a point about the way I think emotions work, the role they play in our biological functioning. I don’t know how explaining this to the truckers amidst a protest would change anything. I suppose you’re trying to get some understanding of what I’m saying by trying to get me to paint a picture of how I would explain it to the truckers. Does this help you to understand? Is this what you’re asking of me?
I don’t think I’d explain it any differently than how I explain it to you, but here goes… So imagine I’m at the protest. I’m up on stage in front of a podium. The mic is on. Hundreds of riled up truckers are anticipating my words of wisdom. And I say… “Hear ye, hear ye, oh truckers of Canada! Listen to my words! Let me tell you about the nature of the emotions you are feeling! Your anger, your frustrations, your angst… Emotions are the product of millions of years of biological evolution. They serve but one purpose–to ensure our survival. They perform in the service of our self-interests. These feelings of anger you feel, why, they are there to protect you from government overreach, from the potentially harmful effects of an experimental RNA vaccine, from living in a world where the powers that be can determine your lives as though you were livestock, bred and raised only for the slaughter, to feed their greedy appetites! This is why you were driven (snicker driven snicker) to Ottowa to protest. That it is wrong what the government is doing may or may not be true, but you have convinced yourselves that it is in order to feel justified in doing what your anger compels you to do–otherwise, you might feel you have no right–or you might be indecisive–or you may not be able to sell your campaign to others and gain followers, convince the public, or come out looking like the good guys in the media–that certainly wouldn’t serve your self-interests and it may be hazardous to your survival (re: the potential harms of a sketchy vaccine or the blood soaked consequences of living under a tyrannical maniac)–so you are biologically predisposed to come up with and believe in some morality that supports the aims of your emotions, to help you feel all right with what you’re doing. That’s not to say your morality isn’t true but it is at least one of the reason, maybe the only reason, you believe in it.”
^ Off the top of my head. Now I don’t know if this would go over so well. I’d probably get booed off the stage. But I never said my point on emotions would help the truckers cause, nor that I wanted to convince the truckers it was true. You just asked how I would explain it to the truckers in the midst of a protest, presumably because that would help you understand my point better. Well, did it?
Obviously, I’m not “as certain” about how emotions work as I am about how digestion or blood circulation works, but that’s not the point. The point is how I mean it. Quality, not quantity. I mean for my view on how emotions work to be taken in the same way one takes how digestion or blood circulation works–as a biological fact about reality. How certain we can be about it is beside the point.
And so what if my opinion about it changes down the road. My opinion on how digestion and blood circulation could change down the road. Any of my opinions or the things I think I know could change down the road. Is that a reason to bite our tongue and not express what we think?
And I couldn’t be happier. But still, I’m having this discussion with you, not them. Spectators are not interlocutors. It is no defense to recruit others to change my mind if you can’t.
Well then, sir, you are a very odd human being indeed. I think most would instinctively be gripped by fear and be compelled to run away or defend themselves or whatever… no matter how much they thought they deserved to die. I guess I thought you would be like them and this would be a great example of how your thoughts on dasein (which say you should feel ambivalent) would clash with your feelings in that moment (fear). But alas, I guess your feelings are always–always–aligned with your thoughts. “Alas”, because that prevents you from understanding a frame of mind like mine and most others–one that permits the occasional clash.
Oh please, this is pinhead speak. This is what pinheads do to stroke their own egos. You know the narrative: everyone is blind to the truth because they are afraid. But not I. I, the ultimate ubermensch, have the courage to see the truth! How ‘bout we bring back my theory: that the most frightening thing is to change your outlook–whether that’s yours, mine, or the pinheads’. ← And if that’s true, you’re the most frightened of all. Just look above. You couldn’t even admit that if a murderer was after you, you’d be afraid–to admit that would be to admit I might have a point.
I’m trying to explain it, Biggy, I’m trying.
Are any of these not in sync with your thoughts? Things you believe? how 'bout your thoughts on dasein?
Could it be that your fear of the afterlife–your fear of God–is what drives you to incessantly search for an ultimate answer to the question: is there an absolutely, fully objective, morality that we are all obliged to follow (lest our fate is eternal hellfire).
Care to hazard a guess? Surely you’re not opposed to guessing? According to what you’ve been saying, I would think you’d guess that you wouldn’t feel afraid but ambivalent. I personally wouldn’t.
I don’t think it’s that complex.
Just out of curiosity, are you considering genetic predispositions as part of dasein? Even predispositions that we all share in common, like we are all predisposed to develop sight?
And that’s perfectly fair. But then those prejudices must conflict with your feelings of ambivalence to a certain degree, no? Or maybe you just wouldn’t describe it as a “conflict”. Maybe something like feeling ambivalent with a slight pull to the left (to disdain against the truckers)?
A situation in which your political prejudices brought with them emotions that clashed with your thoughts on dasein. So your thoughts on dasein say you should feel ambivalent about some issue. But your political prejudices on that issue make you feel anything but ambivalent (angry, sad, elated, etc.). Any examples?
How is it that you start that sentence with a “No”?
Sure! So then you just admitted to being familiar with exactly the state of mind I’m trying to communicate to you. You had feelings that stemmed from a political prejudice of yours which were out of sync with your thoughts on dasein. This is exactly the state of mind I’m in with respect to the truckers. I have a political prejudice in favor of the truckers. There are feelings of anger that arise when I see the way the truckers are treated. But my thoughts on dasein (or my subjectivism/relativism) say that I could just as well have had the opposite political prejudice feeling joy at the thought of the truckers being forced to get vaccines, and this leads me to think there is no one “right” way to feel about it, or at least that I don’t know what the right way to feel about it is; so if anything, I should feel ambivalent… but I don’t. ← CLASH!!!
Oh no, don’t go down that road. 
Sooo… are you not going to answer my question?
Part one:
Look, don’t get me wrong. I don’t exclude myself here. I may well be deluding myself about all this. All I can do is to note how “I” connect the dots [in the is/ought world] between thinking, feeling, wanting and doing in my signature threads and then given a particular context ask others to explain to me why they don’t.
Exactly! Confusion, ambiguity, ambivialence, uncertainty and the like goes with the terriotory when you think as “I” do. What on earth do you suppose I am trying to convey here when I connect the dots between dasein and having “fractured and fragmented” value judgments. Again, that you are not fractured and fragmented in turn is still the part that escapes me. From my frame of mind your frame of mind seems analogous to MagsJ and Maia’s “intrinsic self”. You “just know” what you do about what you “feel” and “want” in regard to the truckers. Even while seeming to acknowledge that had you lived a very different life, you would “just know” that you “feel” you don’t support them.
In fact, in a recent email exchange with Maia she explained why she does not post here anymore: “I just found the whole thing soul-crushingly tedious in the end, to be honest. ILP, Know Thyself, and whatever. I might be many things, but a philosopher isn’t one of them.”
I have my take on that but my take still alienates her. The exchange didn’t last because [in my view] she recognizes my own philosophy for the threat it is. Though she disagrees and I certainly respect her own take on my take.
Again the question: “do you rise above your own hard wiring?”
In regard to what? the trucker protest? the morality of abortion? the right to bear arms? What does it even mean here to understand the role that our “hard-wiring” plays in our reactions to them? I must still be misunderstanding your point.
I flat out acknowledge “over and again” that my own value judgments are no less rooted existentially/subjectively in dasein. That my reaction to the trucker protest is but a political prejudice rooted in turn in over two-decades as a radical leftist. In my view, I’d be a hypocrite if, in acknowledging this, I still insisted that the trucker protest reflected only the way in which “I” think and feel about it. And that if others wish to be rational in turn, they are obligated to think the same way.
Note to others:
You explain it to me. I have never argued that we are hard-wired to arrive at particular value judgments…only that we seem hard-wired to reduce the world down to rational/irrational, moral/immoral answers. For most culminating in God. Though for others in God’s secular equivalents: ideology, idealism, deontology, assessments of Nature.
The objectivists from my frame of mind.
I can only assume I am not really understanding his point. So, maybe you do.
All I can suppose/speculate/conjecture is that when it comes to what we feel and want in regard to the trucker protest, the role that dasein plays here is understood differently by me. I’m not an anomaly in the sense that “here and now” I seem more like most people. In other words, how I came to think and feel and want – re “I” in the is/ought world – was intertwined profoundly, problematically in the existential trajectory of my life.
I’m not desperate to understand anyone. I’m just curious as to how you can grasp my own understanding of dasein in a way that the “pinheads” here are never likely to, yet are able to make this distinction between thinking on the one hand and feeling and wanting on the other that “I” simply do not experience myself.
On the other hand, grasping human psychology itself is about as difficult as it gets. There are simply too many variables – re nature and nurture – that are both beyond our fully understanding or fully controlling. Just fitting in our indoctrination as children makes it beyond our pinning down fully. Hell, most of us don’t even remember anything at all until we are about 5 or 6 years old.
Okay, and Jim thinks it’s right to eat the eggs. You think he’s right relative to his own ideology. But like me you note that had his life been very different he might have thought it was wrong. That’s my point. Right and wrong here predicated not on objective morality but on the subjective morality we acquire existentially.
Yes, it’s a question asked in the is/ought world.
That is the part where Jean thinks it is wrong for Jim to eat the eggs. Where she feels it’s wrong for Jim to eat the eggs. Where she wants Jim to stop eating eggs.
Sure. For those of us who are not anomalies here, when we think something is wrong and we feel something is wrong, we usually want others to stop doing it.
Still waiting for you to explain how on earth you believe that I have not made it here in regard to questions asked and answers given re the either/or world and the is/ought world. There’s nothing wholly subjective about someone eating 4 eggs. They either did or they didn’t. But where is the wholly objective answer regarding whether human beings ought to eat eggs?
Well, they’re not aligned for me because “I” am fractured and fragmented in regard to the trucker protest. Given the assumptions the truckers make about the role of government in our lives, they make reasonable arguments. Given the assumptions those opposed to the truckers make about the role of government in our lives, they make reasonable arguments. “I” am tugged and pulled in both directions.
Right. Like both sides here in regard to the role of government pertaining to health care policies effecting citizens don’t have access to a set of facts that they claim backs up their own political prejudices. As though arguments and “the facts” are only out of whack for the other side.
…with this:
Yes, I’m “fractured and fragmented” about being “fractured and fragmented” too. At times, I’m closer to feeling hopelessly drawn and quartered. Why? Because I think that both sides have crucial points to make. But, other times, I seem able to feel much more adamant about one point of view. Why? Because “in the moment” the arguments of one side strike me as more rational. Perhaps because of an experience I have, or something I read or something I hear on the news.
Yes, and “Bingo!” for you too. It works the same way for all of us in my opinion.
Indeed. But I’m not arguing that philosophers and ethicists and political scientists haven’t already accomplished this. Or, if not, can’t accomplish it. Only that if they already have, I’m not privy to it. So, sure, if someone here is convinced that they have, link me to it. Along with all the hard evidence backing it up.
Yes, the most popular One True Path by far.
Again, there’s a part of me convinced that my own “fractured and fragmented” moral perspective may well be irrational itself. That in fact there is an optimal “ism” that ties everything together. God or No God. In other words, if what we construe to be problems and solutions are no less rooted subjectively in dasein out in a particular world understood in a particular way – i.e. existentially – what then?
It’s just another way of encompassing “fractured and fragmented”. Only easier to visualize because the uncertainty, confusion and ambiguity are reduced down to quarters.
Sure, if you can acknowledge them to be but “political prejudices” rooted existentially in dasein, but still “feel” that what you “want” is enough, good for you. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Once I think myself into believing that my value judgments are but existential fabrications/contraptions derived basically from the life I lived, thinking and feeling and wanting are not things to be juxtaposed but intertwined in my “sense of reality” about the world of conflicting goods. At any given time.
For many sociopaths however “show me the money” reflects the “right” way to live. They have both wealth and power in a world many believe is “all there is”. They live “the good life” all the way to the grave. What else is there from their point of view.
It is [to me] in how I connect the dots between dasein and moral convictions themselves. You live one life that existentially predisposes you to argue their protest is a just cause or you live another life altogether predisposing you existentially to argue their protest is an unjust cause.
Why do you suppose philosophy was invented in the first place? In order to take things like that into account and come up with the optimal or the only rational ethical assessment instead. The “wisest” “philosophy of life”.
If it’s not illogical why would it be odd? Just imagine their reaction to you if you said it. Wouldn’t it basically be the reaction I get from the pinheads here? I’m not questioning what they believe so much as how they came about believing one thing rather than another. I’m questioning the very nature of identity itself in the is/ought world. That is what perturbs the objectivists the most. Me introducing them to a “fractured and fragmented” self. What if they start to construe their own “I” in that manner?
Of course they would! That’s what the self-righteous objectivists always do. It’s one of us [the good guys] vs. one of them [the bad guys].
What’s bizarre about it? You agree that you might think the opposite of what you do now had your experiences predisposed you to. You tell them that. But insist that you still feel that they ought to win, you want them to win “here and now”. Why? Because you were not a radical leftist yourself. Just that you might have been. That you might have been and been there castigating their protest.
I mean, what are you telling them? That there is no way in which to determine if they are right or wrong objectively. It’s all rooted subjectively in dasein. But, hey, you still want them to win anyway?
I’m trying to imagine their reaction to that. Are you really with them…or not?
Well, here you would have to take your point of view to the next anti-government protest you feel supportive of, run it by the protesters and get back to us.
IRL? In real life? Yes, I’m most interested in what motivated Putin and Alito “in real life”. Ask them why they did what they did. What were their reasons. How they connect the dots between thinking and feeling and wanting.
No, I’m suggesting that the reason we choose particular behaviors in particular contexts is embedded in a profoundly complex, problematic intertwining of genes and memes. Something that wolves and other animals know nothing about.
Moot to you, of fundamental importance to me. And our moral and political convictions are not just “intellectual contraptions” once the discussion revolves around a particular set of circumstances like the trucker protest. Here there are plenty of facts that can be established regarding both the covid pandemic and the government policies. What comes into conflict is our reaction to those facts given conflicting sets of assumptions about genes vs. memes, capitalism vs. socialism, big government vs. small government, I vs. we, idealism vs. pragmatism, deontology vs. consequentialism…and on and on
Ever and always back to how we construe thinking, feeling and wanting in reaction to Truedeau and the truckers differently. If your life had been very different it might have pissed you off that the truckers protested in the first place. You’d want them to lose. And a government’s reaction to covid – or, next, monkeypox with a homosexual factor? – will revolve around how dangerous they think it is.
After all, some of the protrucker pinheads here insist it’s all just a “libtard” a hoax. Do the facts support that?
Of course! We can speculate about what those protesting a government policy you feel is wrong but don’t necessarily think is wrong, but only when you actually present your arguments to them and get back to us can this move beyond conjecture.
Look, all I’m noting is that if the protesters do beat you up then it is not likely that they make that distinction between thinking and feeling as you do. They’s not “anomalies” themselves. They’re like most objectivists instead who feel they are doing the right thing because they think they are doing the right thing. And the two in tandem is why they feel justified in wanting to win.
Part two:
And you should know by now that even though you express your own frame of mind regarding the existential relationship between thinking and feeling and wanting and doing, I think you are not grasping the nature of dasein in the most reasonable manner. Or, rather, given my own existential assessment of what a more reasonable manner encompasses.
As for the word “should” here the distinction I make is between those in the scientific and medical communities who have both the background and the education to assess the covid pandemic most rationally and those in one or another political community who seem less concerned with the virus itself and more concerned with linking it to their hatred of government. There may be those in the medical and scientific communities who have a political axe to grind but I suspect there are far fewer of them there than in the moral and political objectivist communities.
Well, you can Google “science and covid” and get websites like this: coronavirusexplained.ukri.org/en/
In fact, any number of those in the scientific community are now predicting that Covid is on the brink of becoming endemic.
How many times can I note that in not being you or them, what can I possibly know in depth about how you or they construe a sense of identity. All I can note is that in regard to “I” in the world of conflicting value judgments, your frame of mind strikes me as similar to theirs. Maia like you will agree with me regarding some aspects of dasein…but falls back on this sense of what she “just knows” is true about things like abortion or vaccinations. And then when I press her she backs away. And that’s because like you [in my opinion] she knows what is at stake if she loses that sense of “feeling” that some things are worth wanting more than others. It’s the “fractured and fragmented” “I” that repels her.
Then this part…
Okay, but in acknowledging that they are just subjective prejudices rooted existentially in dasein, how zealous can one be? Viscerally I want the truckers to win, but if my life had led me politically in the other direction then, perhaps, just as viscerally, I’d want them to lose. As though the “feeling” part of “I” here has a mind all its own. It just doesn’t compute for me.
All I can do here is to imagine you explaining this to the truckers…or to those here like Urwrong and observr.
When you have become as “fractured and fragmented” as “I” am in regard to value judgments, you don’t denounce much at all. Instead, uncertainty and ambiguity and ambivalence come to prevail time and again. Instead of subsuming what I see and hear and come to know through the news media as I once did in being an objectivist [in God or in ideology or in deotology], I am pulled and tugged in conflicting directions. Both sides [many sides] make rational arguments merely by embracing different sets of assumptions about the “human condition”. The ones I’ve noted a number of times above.
Back to not being them myself. I have not lived their lives, had their experiences, sustained their relationships, read what they read, heard what they heard etc.
All I can do is to expose them to the points I raise in my signature threads and, given circumstances involving things like government, covid, abortion, guns etc., try to grasp how they arrive at their own conclusions regarding behaviors deemed either right or wrong. If they are not fractured and fragmented as “I” am, how then do they explain – to themselves – what enables them to feel whole…to feel committed to one political agenda rather than another.
On the other hand, assessments such as this…
…are [to me] mainly abstract. Again, take it to the truckers or the objectivists here. Imagine their own reactions. The “either/or facts” can be shared with some but not others. But the bottom line will be what either can or cannot be encompassed factually regarding the righteousness of any particular political protest. Here “I” think and feel as a “broken” man. While on some level I still cannot grasp why you don’t.
For Maia and MagsJ, what is “intrinsic” is that which viscerally, intuitively, instinctually they have over time come to just know in their gut is true about something. Though, sure, you’d have to run that by them. On the other hand, if you do make sure they bring their grasp of it down to earth. Pertaining to something like the trucker protest.
Even when you do focus on more specific things like this…
…I’m unable to grasp how this works for you given the extent to which you share my own understanding of dasein. Yes, you either want theses things to happen or feel these things about others or you don’t. But, for me, once I grasp that had my life been very different I would not want or feel these things at all – or even want and feel the opposite – an intact self seems out of reach. Both philosophically and in terms of my actual life experiences.
This is largely unintelligible to me. It makes no sense given my own understanding [here and now] of the existential relationship between identity, morality, conflicting goods and political economy.
Thus…
That will often depend on how deeply immersed you are in political activism. When I was an activist moral and political convictions were always very, very important to me. And in part because what I thought about right and wrong was often very much in sync with what I felt was right or wrong was very much in sync with what I wanted to see happen “in the news”.
You’re asking me something here that only you can answer. You have to go out there and become embedded in political struggles. Note the reactions of others to your own level of commitment. All I can do is imagine myself back then noting what I think you are arguing here to my “comrades” and political allies. I think they’d think my points were…irrelevant. More for the classroom than the streets.
I still recall the truculent reaction of many to my own post William Barrett perspective. Marxism/socialism and “moral nihilism”? Eventually, it took me out of political activism altogether.
No, what is more important is what you convey to the truckers regarding the existential relationship between your point and their protest.
Yeah. Based on my own many years as a political activist, how emotions work for most who protest government policies is this:
1] they think the policies stink
2] they feel the policies stink and
3] they want the policies to be changed
Right. And someone on the other end of the political spectrum is making the same sort of point to those who are politically and emotionally committed to backing the government’s policy. In fact, some will argue the polices don’t go far enough.
Then what?
That those on both sides of the protest put their political activism on the shelf until it can be determined precisely what the nature of the emotions they are feeling are?
Then imagine them reacting to me. Imagine them reacting to my own sense of being “fractured and fragmented”…of suggesting that at best they can grapple with attempts to forge government policies that revolve around “moderation, negotiation and compromise”.
Not really. I suspect that what you believe here about emotions allows you to keep your distance from a “fractured and fragmented” sense of self. But from my frame of mind that’s because you don’t construe emotions themselves in regard to moral and political value judgments as “I” do.
Okay, but my aim is to take “philosophical” discussions like this down out of the clouds and introduce them to the protesters of the world.
Maybe to you, but certainly not for others. And how emotions work for the objectivists here is simple: you feel what I do about the protest and the government or you’re a “libtard”. Maybe even a “Commie”.
Go ahead, ask them.
Again, if you equate your opinions about justice and the trucker protest with your opinions about digestion and blood circulation, I’d say we are truly far removed here.
Human biology isn’t such that anytime soon digestion and blood circulation is likely to be construed any differently.
Again, thinking and feeling with respect to the either/or world is such that if someone attempts to kill you, you will almost certainly have an emotional reaction. Deserving to die or not here can be irrelevant. Where the ambivalence can arise is when the discussion focuses in on whether you did deserve to die. Some people might feel strongly that you did, while others might feel strongly that you didn’t. But even here ambivalence can follow. You might feel there are reasons you did deserve to die, but also reasons that you didn’t. Or, with those like me, it can reach the point where you are simply unable to decide. Or, again, for the sociopaths deserving to has nothing to do with it. They want you dead. End of story.
No, that’s what you think I think you are trying to argue. Instead, I think that thinking like this is what the objectivists will try to argue. What I don’t understand about you is why you don’t argue as I do if you grasp the existential relationship between dasien and value judgments in the general vicinity of my own conclusions.
Please note where I noted above that I would not be afraid if someone was out to murder me. I don’t want to die. On the other hand, someday the pain in my life might so outweigh the pleasure I kill myself.
And [to me] your “assessment” of me here is so preposterous, I might just as well be having this discussion with a pinhead.
How about if we chalk it up it up to a bad day. You’re just not, uh, thinking clearly here and now. 
To wit:
Unless, of course, Urwrong.
Again, my thinking and my feeling here are pretty much in alignment. In fact, where the distinction is made here [by me] is between the “circumstances” of my life [pretty good] and my philosophy of life [still grim]. In other words, I enjoy my day to day experiences by and large, but it’s only a matter of time before The Big One sends me hurtling toward the abyss. And in what I construe to be an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence.
Fear of them? Please note where you think I expressed that above. As for an objective morality, sure, why not. It might exist. All any of us who don’t believe that it does can do is to listen in on the discussions of those who think that it does. What have we got to lose?
Then I don’t think you think enough about the staggering gap that must exist between “an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence” like you here on planet Earth and all that can possibly be known about the existence of existence itself. Just in terms of the “unknown unknowns…the things we don’t even know that we don’t know.”
That’s always tricky. You do what you do. So, where do the genes stop and the memes begin. And that’s just one aspect of why things are “that complex”.
All I can do is make the distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world here.
As I noted above, sure, when my thinking changed over the years my emotions were only more or less able to keep up. There is no definitive dividing line whereby I tell myself, “now I think this instead so I must feel that instead too”. But over time if I felt comfortable with being a Marxist but abandoned it for Democratic Socialism and then for Social Democracy and then for existentialism and then for deconstruction and then for moral nihilism, my emotions eventually did catch up. Only for someone like me what does that really mean given the extent to which intellectually and emotionally “I” am “fractured and fragmented” in the is/ought world.
Then there’s your own rendition of this:
On the other hand, I spent over two decades embodying one or another religious or political font [as an objectivist] before I even became acquainted with dasein as construed by William Barrett existentially regarding “rival goods”.
And “out of sync” as I noted above.
As you say, however, you are an anomaly. What would happen if, given new personal experiences, your political prejudices did change such that you thought that all citizens should be forced to get vaccinated. Then, what, your feelings would be more in sync with your thoughts?
That they are out of sync now is just something that encompasses the “self” you have come to experience. Why? How on earth would I know?
Yes, arguing with you is soul-crushingly tedious.
Again, you should know the answer to these question. You were the one who brought up our hard-wiring. In regards to what were you saying we are hard-wired?
Yes, you would be a hypocrite if you did that. But that’s not the only way to be a hypocrite. I’m pointing out another. Accusing others of doing the same without leveling those same accusations at yourself is another.
Note to others:
Notice how he uses this irrelevant minutiae to dodge the point I was making. He still refuses to apply the question to himself. As much as he claims to apply his own philosophy to himself, he will never ask himself–why your philosophy and not someone else’s?–because then the answer can be applied to me (or whoever he’s debating with) and I become no longer a fanatical fulminating objectivist pinhead.
And why do you have a problem with morality predicated on subjectivity and acquired existentially?
Ok, well… you own that.
Beats me. Let me know when you find it.
Huh? Where have you been living the past 20 years? On an Amish commune? Have you seriously never noticed how each side presents facts (or “facts”) that contradict the facts of the other side? Or wait… unless you’re saying that because I don’t know whose facts to believe, that means I think the pro-trucker arguments are right.
Let’s just leave it at that before you change your mind.
So then, back to what I said:
Where’s the moral element in this? [size=50](hint: my point is that there isn’t one)[/size]
Philosophy wasn’t “invented”. Humans have been doing philosophy ever since they could think. We do philosophy because we like thinking. We like to figure things out in our head, and some of us go so far as to take it several degrees into abstraction and come out with new insights to suit our purposes. Sometimes that turns out to be moral philosophy or simply justifications for our cause, but it certainly isn’t the raison d’etre of philosophy.
Because things can be odd to say without being illogical. I once tried to strike up a conversation with a girl I liked once so I said “you’re tall.” It was definitely an odd thing to say–awkward and embarrassing–but certainly not illogical–she was tall.
This is the part of your philosophy I understand all too well.
Sure, they might be confused by that, but I don’t need them to understand in order for me to want them to win.
You’re brain’s glitching again. I asked if I interpreted you correctly and you answered a different question (who knows what).
That’s your job.
And neither do I, at least not which gene/meme combination is the correct one to have in order to get it right. But that doesn’t make my pro-trucker feelings go away. I might as well be an animal like a wolf.
Right, and that’s where they become intellectual contraptions again. Those are the thoughts that, for me, become moot once dasein enters the picture because there is no way to decide. Obviously the facts aren’t moot. Facts, once exposed, are crystal clear. But I thought we were talking about the is/ought world.
This tired old point you keep bringing up–that had my life been different, I would have felt different–means nothing to me. It’s an obvious and trivial truism. Of course I would feel differently if I were, say, raised to think like a leftist. For you to say this should (what?) “cancel out” how I feel about the truckers in actuality sounds to me like saying that the cuttlefish couldn’t really be a cuttlefish because if it had evolved differently it would have become a different species. Now your point might make sense if I were saying that my feelings justify coming to the conclusion that the truckers are morally right, but I’m not saying that, am I? And I suppose I could say it a thousand times and it still wouldn’t sink in, would it? To you, everything must come down to moral statements.
But I’m not speculating about what the protesters feel or think is wrong.
Just to be clear, I don’t think I’m an anomaly. I just figure I must seem like one from your point of view.
Well Biggy, I think I’m going to throw in the towel. I’ve reached the point of exhaustion and I’m no longer getting anything out of this discussion except a headache.
I definitely think we’re talking passed each other and there’s no way to fix that. We’re speaking different languages. Yours sounds like English to me but it isn’t the English I was raised on. And I can’t maneuver around your bizarre cognitive algorithms. It’s not so much what your saying that I can’t grasp but how you think, the way your brain processes information–it’s so different from anything I’ve ever encountered that “cognitive disorder” is the most descriptive label I can come up with. What seems to have significant logical implications to you, I see as total nonsense or irrelevance. What seems to allow you to draw particular conclusions, I see as non-sequiturs. For example, you seem to take the fact that had one’s life been different one would be arguing and feeling different things as a reason to doubt or reject the arguments and feelings one currently has, but to me this sounds like saying had I been born in a country that spoke a different language, I wouldn’t speak English, therefore English is invalid. Or your request that I take my arguments to the truckers/protestors… you seem to think that if I imagine what their reactions would be that this would change what I think/feel. To me, at most, it just means that some people might disagree with me. And last but not least, the fact that you seem to think everything I say is leading up to an argument in defense of a definite moral position… even things like “I don’t take a moral position on the trucker protest,” seem to be somehow construed as in support of the truckers’ moral position.
^ Bizarre cognitive algorithms indeed. And the best I can surmise is that it’s psychodynamic in nature, that you are a master in leveraging your own psychoanalytic defense mechanisms to control not only what you believe and feel, but how you interpret others. I can’t get by that. All my attempts have resulted in frustration and despair. And at this point, that’s all I find myself doing. It’s soul-crushingly tedious! So I have to do what’s best for my psychological health and detach myself from this conversation while I can. I won’t be reading part 2.
So long, Biggy. It was a pleasure (up to a point).
My initial analysis of this thread was that you let him get away with too much without defining “reasonable people,” a fundamental, pivotal point of his position.
Deeper analysis, though, because you did this like a gentleman and many of us were following in awe, leads me to a more subtle conclusion:
In the end, what scares him the most, what terrifies communists the most was a key point that you kept getting stuck on: that you don’t think there is an objective morality that supports your position on the truckers. In other words, what terrifies a communist is somebody not being ideological.
Or better said, not acting as if they believed in ideology.
No pinheads please!!!
#ideasMatter