Come on, I note these things in order to elicit from others reactions relating to their own lives. How are those things deemed to be problems for me not problems for them? How are they not down in an existential hole when their own particular “I” is confronting conflicting goods?
The help I am asking for revolves basically around three things:
1] figuring out if, on this side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the nihilistic hole that “I” am in when confronting conflicting goods
2] figuring out if, on the other side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the abyss
And on this thread in particular
3] figuring out if my thoughts and feelings regarding the first two are in sync with at least some measure of autonomy pertaining to “I”
I still do’t know what “figuring out” means or how one would go about “figuring out” anything with you. I don’t see any sort of progress at all… and therefore no “figuring out” going on.
What else can it mean? There is what I think I know about morality on this side of the grave and oblivion on the other side. There is what I think I know about my own capacity to choose things with some measure of volition.
And, in thinking about them as I do, it precipitates frames of mind that trouble me. I come into places like ILP and note this. How then are others either able to empathize with me or instead are completely at a loss in understanding them.
Exchanges commense. And they are either sustained with a mutual respect for each other’s intelligence or they aren’t.
In time, with many of them, one side or the other [or both] will pull out of them. For any number of reasons.
But here I always come back to the gap between what any of us think we know about these things and all that there actually is to know.
You’re always going to find that gap and so it’s unlikely that you can “figure out” anything.
My advice is not to focus on the gap.
Right, that will make it go away.
Huh? You’re comparing taking aspirin for a headache to embodying distractions able to numb the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless world that tumbles over into oblivion?
Yes I am. Your distractions are aspirin or morphine for your mind.
Well, here we will just have to agree to disagree. The gap between them is, in my view, enormous.
Yes, I really would like to come upon arguments that might “for all practical purposes” help me to “figure out” the three things I noted above. And I am more than willing to at least make the attempt to understand the experiences of others that helped them.
Whatever they say, you’re going to find “the gap” or “the existential contraption”.
Well, yes, the gap is always there. No matter the context.
But the part about “existential contraptions” can only be explored as it pertains to a particular context. In other words, there are things we seem able to demonstrate to each other are true for all of us and there are things we seem unable to.
With things like Communism there are any number of facts that are “existential contraptions” only in the sense that actual individuals had actual personal experiences with it in actual contexts.
But when the discussion shifts to judging those experiences as more or less rational and more or less virtuous, that’s a very different kind of “existential contraption”.
Unless, of course, we do live in an entirely determined universe. Then they are essentially interchangeable.