Pardon these long rants. I am working out this as I write. Thinking out loud. And who else but you could possibly understand.
But I do go on and on below. No worries if you can’t find the interest to go to the end. Imagining you reading this was part of me exploring a few ideas below and that was useful regardless. I think it is actually important because we all have a bit of iamb in us.
I think with most things, there needs to be some sense on both sides that there has been game playing. And the internet is not a great environment for change since both parties have so much control over what is shown. All self-doubt, fear, mixed feelings can be hidden and the best foot put forward. Calling out the game might affect someone, but I think that’s rare. And there needs to be some motivation for someone to want to end the game.
Of course this was mainly speculative fun. But I have found that responding to and thinking about iamb has led me to a lot, I mean a lot, of insight into people in general.
He even helped me today with the concept of Jouissance, Lacan’s version…
IOW at face value this is all about finding answers to important questions: how to resolve all moral claims - I mean, that would be great, we’d all get along and treat each other well - find out for sure if we are free or not, find a way to be authentic (have a capitalized ‘I’ and know what one wants. Important stuff, at least possibly. So the enterprise has a spirit of seriousness, even, ironically a moral imperitive. (implicitly he is claiming to be doing good: ‘how could anything else be more important?’ he has said a number of times.)
But when presented with experiential approaches to alleviating his pain - which has been presented as the motivation - he is absolutely not interested unless he can be convinced in advance that it will work for him and treats these attempts as objectivism and some kind of proselytizing situation. When present with philosophical approaches, there is often avoidance of actually dealing with the positions presented and they generally elicit him restating his positions.
He always makes it clear that he is not convinced - in a sense as if this is evidence. And then also gives out criteria for the solution that all rational people would be forced to agree.
IOW an impossible goal and also the first criteria gives him a kind of final say. Try to get me to believe something. See it didn’t work. As if his motivation and his experience and willingness to explore are necessarily unimportant.
So, perhaps, what is happening is actually what he enjoys. What happens is the main goal.
And Lacan was clear that even if one also experiences pain, it can still be because one enjoys, gets satisfaction out of the process.
He wants us to fail against him over and over.
Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t also want answers. I am sure he would also like to resolve conflicting goods, etc. But I don’t think that’s the main thing that is going on.
I am not quite sure what yo mean here. Like if you could convince him that we don’t need to be 100 percent sure to live and act, the discussion would flow better, we could get down to practical application…? Things like that. Yes, I can see that. I mean, that might work with someone else, or might work here in a year. Or those criteria of his might be part of the game, since they lead to dead ends. Or both.
I used to try to point out that he was, in fact, acting in the world, already. And that his choice of actions were based on things that he believed. If he was certain 100% about those beliefs, well, how? If he’s not, well, then he is acting in the world without being 100% certain, so it isn’t necessary. He could minimize even further his influence on others, by not posting here. He could protect the world even more from his actions since he cannot be 100% sure he knows how one ought to act. That line never got anywhere. Though it was interesting coming up with it.
I generally tried to treat the dialogue itself as moral ground and a concrete one. IOW for me Mary’s abortion is not concrete. Though i did respond to his requests for concrete actions I had made in specific situations with conflicting goods. This however, did not solve his problems (suprise surprise) and then he quickly forgot about it starting demanding I do it as if it never happened.
Since our interaction with his is a shared concrete experience and as concrete as possible since it is there on the ‘page’, it seemed to me the best possible set of examples. But he simply cannot follow such things. Even when presented with direct quoted evidence of what he did, he glides away from it and places the interaction in some other context.
So that failed too, though it was also interesting.
I and you have tried a wide range of approaches. Now we don’t agree about things. It’s not like we have some unified position on life.
I think though we share a common belief that we are doing nothing wrong by living. I think there is something very anti-life in what he is implying and doing. How dare you all go around, more confident than me - in different ways - and not suffer like I am.
For different and perhaps overlapping reasons, we don’t feel like we are doing anything wrong by being alive and trying to accomplish things and interacting with other people. And so the message is
Prove to me you are not sinning.
As ironic as it is for a nihilist non-objectivist to have that message.
Now most people think that the words they say are what they are doing.
But what we are doing is actually about the dynamics of the process of interaction.
So despite the irony, I think our nihilist here is telling us we are sinners. (though he may be wrong, lol, it is our job to convince him we are not sinners.)
And he gets pleasure when we fail to convince him. And even more pleasure if we get irritated.
Because it indicates we are not happy, he thinks.