Another way to look at it: With pragmatism, our choices are multiplied considerably because we are not obligated to behave in accordance to one or another God, one or another political ideology, one or another deontological philosophical contraption or one or another assessment of “natural” behaviors.
Idealism [objectivism] often revolves around reconfiguring the is/ought world into but another manifestation of the either/or world.
It’s just that with determinism the laws of matter themselves are the propelling and compelling force. “I” is only another domino toppling over onto all the other ones. But “I” is like no other matter that has ever been. Right?
What determines your preference for one possibility over another depends on multiple factors and especially what the possibilities are in relation to each other and what objections if any there may be to some of them.
Well, assuming that “I” is in possession of at least some capacity to choose freely, I agree. That’s when I make what I construe to be that crucial distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world. Between those things that appear to be “in fact” true for all of us, and those things that seem predicated more on the manner in which I construe identity, value judgments and political economy at the existential intersection of a particular context.
With the choice being between all actual possibilities the reason for choosing one over another may not even be practical but something else such as moral.
Morality, however, is, for all practical purposes, an “existential contraption” in my view. It is rooted out in a particular world historically, culturally, experientially. A profoundly problematic intertwining of genes and memes. And ever evolving over time in a world of contingency, chance and change.
There are no objectively right and wrong choices here only subjective ones and the one which is chosen will for you be the least harmful choice of them all.
Yes, but out in the world that we live in socially, politically and economically, what is construed by you to be the least harmful choice may well be deemed anything but by others.
Here I am in my “hole”. I have come to conclude that the choices we make here are the embodiment of dasein, interacting with other daseins in a world awash in conflicting goods such that what counts in the end are those who have the actual political power to enforce one set of behaviors over another.
“I” for me here is fractured and fragmented. I am not able to even imagine anymore a moral or political foundation into/onto which I can anchor my sense of identity. Instead, the world around me appears to be essentially meaningless on this side of the grave; only to topple over into oblivion on the other side.
But I have no way in which to assess the accuracy of this frame of mind because a complete understanding of it would surely be connected inherently to a complete understanding of existence – this something instead of nothing at all – itself.
I don’t even seem to have access to a complete understanding of whether anything that I am typing here and now was only ever what I could be typing here and now.
And yet there are still those here who argue that I am the smug one. I’m the one convinced that others here should think like I do.
But how on earth would I ever go about the business of demonstrating it?
I’m in the same boat that everyone else is in. I just think about it [here and now] differently.