But I acknowledge that in promoting democracy and the rule of law this is no less an existential contraption rooted in the manner in which over the years “I” came to be predisposed to view these things.
Once I was an objectivist myself regarding these relationships. Embracing either the Bible or the Communist Manifesto. Or the political philosophy of [among others] Leon Trotsky.
Then I happened upon William Barrett’s Irrational Man. That introduced me to “rival goods”. Richard Rorty then introduced me to “ironism”. Then, over still more time, this all became intertwined in the manner in which I came to construe the meaning of Heidegger’s Dasein.
And here “I” am. Acknowledging in turn that given new experiences, relationships and sources of information/knowledge “I” may reconfigure again.
Thus my point here is the attempt to pin down those aspects of human interaction that transcend dasein. Things able to be established as in fact true for all of us.
And I would certainly not argue that this includes democracy and the rule of law. Any number of objectivists stil hold it in contempt.
Right?
It’s just that “here and now” “I” see it as “the best of all possible worlds”.
Yet that doesn’t make my dilemma above go away.
It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it. Or you’re just wasting time with babble. Or maybe you enjoy the idea that people can’t pin you down.
Yes, this was more or less Moreno’s argument. And it’s a good one.
Indeed, I will be the first to admit that “in the moment” [subjunctively] when “I” am making my arguments, it “feels” nothing at all like being predisposed to particular leaps of faith. Leaps of faith embodied in particular political prejudices.
Yet I am no less impaled on my dilemma when I pull back and try to think it all through to The Right Answer.
And what I enjoy is polemics. And yet somehow subjunctively even that seems to be entangled “in my head” in this:
He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles
I just have no illusion that these enormously complex and convoluted “frames of mind” will ever be pinned down definitively such that “I” will finally grasp once and for all what this is really all about.
You know, in the is/ought world.