a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

A Philosophical Identity Crisis
Chris Durante asks himself just what makes him the person he used to be.

In conclusion:

On the other hand, this doesn’t make them any less abstract. Medically or otherwise. For me crunch time here always revolves around encompassing any particular theoretical/philosophical/epistemological assessment of “I”…and then at least making the attempt to factor into it descriptions of existing situations in which conclusions are arrived at such that value judgments are attempted in turn. When and where and how and why do the more “academic assessments” collapse into the components of my own moral philosophy? Or, instead, do the facts that are able to be established lead one to an overarching conclusion consistent with a “real me” able to be wholly in align with the “right thing to do”?

Could it be instead that “I” is so profoundly, problematically embedded in all of these factors that in any given set of circumstances one can only go in so far in attempts to extract the most authentic, the most real self? And that when push comes to shove the bottom line always revolves around the extent to which what you believe is true about yourself, you are in fact able to demonstrate to both yourself and others is true because in fact it can be demonstrated to be true to and for all rational men and women.

Let’s presume this is directed at folks like me.

Over and over and over again, he and his ilk refuse to acknowledge the extent to which I make a distinction between the self interacting with others in the either/or world and the self reacting to the behaviors that others choose by either approving or disapproving of them through one or another set of moral and political value judgments.

Let’s note as an example something that has now become “big news” of late. Trump nominating another conservative to the Supreme Court, prompting others to argue for the need to “pack the court” with more liberals.

Does Satyr actually believe that in regard to facts that can be demonstrated to exist for all rational men and women, I am arguing that the self here is an illusion? That if in fact the new conservative court overturns Roe v. Wade, the selves of those women who might be criminally prosecuted for murdering their unborn babies is all embedded in “I” as an illusion?!!

Trust me: The “dissatisfaction” experienced by these women will be anything but illusory.

No, instead, my point is to suggest that the “I” embedded in any particular set of circumstances relating to the facts that can be demonstrated to exist in regard to any particular unwanted pregnancy is indeed a flesh and blood product of the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Genes are everywhere here. But what of the part when different people in different sets of historical, cultural and experiential contexts react to these biological imperatives with very different sets of moral and political value judgments.

What of “I” then? What here can be ascertained as in fact true objectively? And how do Satyr and his ilk demonstrate that only the manner in which they construe nature here reflects the most rational assessment?

So, let’s see if he actually addresses the specific points I raise here. Either in regard to packing the court or abortion. What political policies here are deemed by him to be most in sync with nature.

Stay tuned.

Francis Fukuyama & the Perils of Identity
Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics.

Political identity:

“I am a Communist”.
“I am a capitalist”.
“I am a liberal”.
“I am a conservative”.

And, in fact, historically, far, far fewer of us are likely to call ourselves Communists today than capitalists. But who would actually argue that in regard to “liberalism and democracy”, ideological commitments are not still thriving? There are millions and millions who insist that only the manner in which they embody both reflects what they call themselves but that which everyone else who wishes to be thought of as a rational human being must choose to call themselves as well.

And, to the extent that their moral and political values might be deemed “totalitarian” and/or “authoritarian”, well, you’d have to ask them.

Now, I use a different word. I use the word “objectivism”. And, in regard to any particular individual’s “political identity”, I ask them how convinced they are that right and wrong and true and false and good and evil can be understood by a core, fundamental self able to grasp and to choose behaviors wholly aligned with an objective morality. Either apllicable universally or otherwise.

Next up: Donald Trump.

First of all, historically, when the rise of totalitarianism is not rooted in either theocracy or political ideology, it tends to revolve around one or another systemic crisis. Or a series of them. Today, the concern with Trump is the extent to which he intertwines crony capitalists, reactionary evangelicals and racists at a time when the coronavirus, economic travail, and social unrest have created conditions that are basically unprecedented. No one is really sure what will happen next.

On the other hand, none of this was unfolding in 2016. So, how to explain his election victory then. Here my conjectures revolve around that large swath of Americans who see Trump as at least the possibility of providing them with a conservative value voter foundation when men were men, when boys were boys and girls were girls, when the Christian faith flourished, and when everyone around them looked like they did. The need to have a world around them they could more easily anchor “I” to. The world as it should be, must be, can be again.

The human being is a/the string of nature that is conscious of itself. Same hands, different puppets and the hands DO get tired.

Losing or consciously controlling identity is choosing nature over mankind, it’s a matter of value attribution, like all is. Which symbiotic relationship one wishes to pursue in terms of awareness, spirit, nourishing, etc.

To escape the trap of “I” one must die, but to be on such a path while living one must be closer to source, to be closer to source one must be individual and know self without background noise. The path of least distraction, least environmental shaping without consciously choosing. If one can become clouded by environment, sensory saturation, being byproduct, then one can also be still and clear in environment, a sensory deprivation and shaped to peak ability, one can be the shaper and not the unconscious/subconscious byproduct. This is the fork in the road that is existence, does one wish to be god or does one wish to remain small as a human? The being human, conscious, is the being god.

My answer is to be both in the right ways.

This is what I call “a general description intellectual contraption”. The sort of thing that, in my view, folks like meno and magnus anderson and many others here seem content with in discussing [philosophically or otherwise] things like identity, morality and political power. And, sure, I use them myself.

But, as I noted above:

So, what we need now is an actual context. A set of circumstances in which we can explore each other’s take on both the philosophical and the experiential parameters of “I”.

Let’s settle on one.

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Fully appreciated. But from whose point of view? Whether you knew Roland Barthes intimately or knew nothing at all about him, you will understand or appreciate a book by him only in the sense that you will take out of the book that which you can put into it: yourself. Or, perhaps, even more telling, given only the manner in which you think you understand yourself.

And, even here, the same distinction that I always make: the author writing something able to be proven as in fact true for all of us, and the author writing something that encompasses only his or her personal opinion in closing the gap between the way the world is, and the behaviors we choose and the way the author thinks the world ought to be instead and the way he or she thinks people ought to behave instead.

If Barthes were to write a book about mathematics or chemistry or meteorology what is there to be understood and appreciated in information and knowledge that, by its very nature, is immune to deconstruction or semiotics or any other post-structuralist intellectual contraptions.

The same with identity. There are parts of the self that are considerably less open to translation or interpretation than other parts.

Clearly, if a book is written about race or gender or sexual preference, knowing the race, gender and sexual preference of the author is hardly irrelevant. But there are still facts that can be confirmed as true or confronted as falsehoods. There are simply too many components of human interactions in the either/or world in which ultimately there is only one “correct” meaning.

My own particular self is embedded in any number of biological and demographic descriptions and others can believe them because I am able to demonstrate that in fact these things that I depict about myself are true. Just as you can. Received or intended facts are facts.

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Of course you don’t need the internet to pretend to be other than you are in your interactions with others. Even with those who think they know you inside out – family, friends, lovers, work colleagues – you can “in reality” be anything but. Call it, say, the Ted Bundy syndrome. Or think of all the grifters out there hell bent on stealing you blind by pretending to be only what you want them to be. Or only what they think you want them to be. And I’m sure this sort of thing is not only a manifestation of our post-modern world. Think for example Niccolò Machiavelli.

Instead, what always fascinates me far more are those who are utterly convinced that who they think they are is who they really are. That their sense of identity is not just an “existential contraption rooted in dasein”. And, thus, ever and always subject to change given new experiences, relationships and access to ideas.

It is the “fractured and fragmented” identity that most are disturbed by. Imagine not believing in the deep-down-inside-me Self able to see the world as it really is. Isn’t that the most unnerving frame of mind?

“I” have certainly come to think that.

Here at ILP we can adopt any persona we chose. Exchanging philosophy can become just another sort of video game. Still, the words that we choose to convey opinions about this or that — we are either able to demonstrate their actual truthfulness or we can’t. It all comes down to the context.

For example:

What else: What particular information about what particular Wikipedia article? Edited or not what in the article can in fact be confirmed as true by anyone regardless of of the persona that they choose to adopt in bringing it to the attention of others.

Consensus or credentials there is still the part where the information and the facts and the opinions and the evidence that are imparted is or is not able to be demonstrated as true for all rational men and women. At least to the best of our ability in a No God world.

Here though we don’t have “experts” to scrutinize our posts and fact check them. Besides, my point is that with regard to moral and political value judgments there are no actual experts – deontologists – among us able to resolve any disputed claims. Or, rather, if there are, they haven’t convinced me of their prowess.

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Of course art and identity will often encompass a particularly problematic relationship. After all, art itself is often anything but a linear or literal exploration of either the “human condition” or of “reality” itself.

Now, I’m not sure the extent to which “I” becomes “fractured and fragmented” in art but it is intertwined in all of the many different aspects of what it means to be a human being out in a particular world understood in a particular way. All of the mind-boggling complex ways in which genes and memes can become entangled. Only expressed at times in “abstract art” or “surreal art” or “pop art” or “impressionistic art” or “post impressionistic art.” And on and on and on.

Dada anyone?

Then [of course]: to censor or not to censor. And not only in the “hyper-real internet world” either. In fact to the extent that any particular individual finds his or her own “self” maligned in a work of art the fusillades can come from any number of directions. Art is hardly exempt from the culture wars. Though many artists wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, the internet, with its broader unanimity tends to mass-produce especially obnoxious reactions to art. The “real me” objectivists in particular. After all, they’ve got the most to lose, right?

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

The “post-modern” persona is clearly all the rage in many parts of the globe. Capitalism has in fact hastened the disintegration of a world in which the social bonds revolving around a far more homogeneous community – the village – has given way to the “me, myself and I” mentality more in sync with a “lifestyle” than a communal ethos.

More to the point, capitalism has created a vast surplus labor pool that revolves around so many outlets not directly involved with subsistence itself. There are endless distractions to choose from. Sports, film, music, pop culture. The focus on consumption and acquiring all of the things that advertisers are able to convince “the masses” they cannot live without.

And along with a the increasingly decentralized social agenda comes a shallower and shallower sense of identity itself. There are simply less and less people intent on diving into the deep end of the pool — intellectually, politically, culturally. We have a large swath of citizens who are barely literate regarding any number of things that don’t pertain to their own small world.

It’s not for nothing that philosophy itself attracts fewer and fewer young people. And, for many who do pursue it, the philosophy itself becomes further and further removed from the lives that we actually live. A sterile technical approach that almost never comes down out of the analytic clouds. Technically as it were.

Who knows how close to or far away from the actual reality of the human condition [over the past 100 years] this intellectual assessment is. But it seems to be clearly the case that all of the factors that once did enable communities to sustain whatever actual existential consensus held them together politically, socially and culturally, is being frayed by all of the factors that reconfigured modernism into postmodernism. My own assessment is just one more attempt to make sense of it.

On the other hand, the objectivists among us, atop their very own soap boxes, will still insist that they and only they can slay the dragon that is “identity uncertainty” and tell us all who we “really” are.

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Yes, and what does this encompass but the extent to which “I” in our postmodern world revolves more and more around lifestyles. Rather than more substantive, historical demographics. Lifestyles that by and large become part of one or another market. It’s not just a matter of attaching your identity to “one of us”, but of all the things out there that you can then purchase to demonstrate that you really are “one of us”.

And, given this pop culture/mass consumption mentality, some of the most absurd confrontations can unfold. For example, in the film Twentieth Century Women there a scene where a character is confused when she walks to her car and notes that someone had spray painted ART FAG on one side of her car and BLACK FLAG on the other?

Why? Because her son happened to be listened to the Talking Heads, the Art Fag band, instead of Black Flag, the hardcore punk rock band. “I” reduced down to something as idiotic as this.

And here the lowest common denominator mentality is writ large across the entire globe for literally millions of us. We attach our ego to the dumbest fucking things to at least to be counted as “one of us” and not “one of them”.

Again, it’s not what you believe but that you believe. Something, anything.

Unfortunately, that mentality can also be attached to far more serious things like politics. Here the consequences of being or becoming “one of them” can be literally a matter of life and death.

Yes, but that doesn’t make “I” here any less virtual. And even the virtual identity that we choose is no less anchored to dasein. As for “me myself and I” that’s clearly rooted out in our own particular world.

But genes and memes aren’t virtual, are they iam? Not rooted in dasein?

How are our virtual personas even possible unless they are derived from the genes that constitute our biological existence?

As for memes, which ones? Our virtual personas can discuss social, political and economic interactions online that can in fact be bursting at the seams with particular memes.

These things:

“A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.”

But: an idea, behavior or style in regard to what? And in what particular set of circumstances viewed from what particular point of view? Why your memes and not mine? Why my understanding of them and not yours?

We’ll need a context of course.

That’s not the question, is it? I know their objectivist theories seem objectively true to objectivists (in reality the gene meme paradigm is a scientific theory and pretends no truth value).

The question is:

All I can do here is to appeal to others:

What point do I keep missing here? And, if you think you understand it, how would you respond to it?

How are our virtual personas even possible unless they are derived from the genes that constitute our biological existence?

As for memes, which ones? Our virtual personas can discuss social, political and economic interactions online that can in fact be bursting at the seams with particular memes.

These things:

“A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.”

But: an idea, behavior or style in regard to what? And in what particular set of circumstances viewed from what particular point of view? Why your memes and not mine? Why my understanding of them and not yours?

We’ll need a context of course.

I know, I know, you just want to keep telling me what they are and how they are objectively true. My question is:

Anyone else? :sunglasses:

How about you, son?

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Okay, but what doesn’t change are all of those aspects of your existing self that the most imaginative writing in the world won’t, don’t, can’t make go away. The either/or world self is there “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health” until [of course] death do we all part…

Still…

Yes, as long as your interactions what others remain virtual by and large. My point though is that in regard to the manner in which others judge us by our “social class, our gender, age, ethnicity etc.” is the extent to which the self embodies precisely the manner in which I construe “I” as a existential contraption rooted historically, culturally and circumstantially in dasein.

Here being “fluid and indefinite” can only be assessed in a particular context given the moral and political prejudices. of others. What is in fact true in regard to these subjunctive judgments is no less “fluid and indefinite” for a reason.

My own, for example.

But all of this is true about us only to the extent that individuals allow this to happen to them. If someone succumbs to pop culture, mass consumption and the lure of celebrity [our 15 minutes in the spotlight] then yes, their identity becomes just another manifestation of the lowest common denominator.

In fact there are any number of individuals right here who wish to reconfigured the identity of ILP into just another outlet for chit-chat.

Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.

Sure, this sort of thing is fascinating to some. Online you can become any “character” your imagination is able to think up. And clearly there any number of individuals who take this option and go all the way out into the deep end with it. They can spend hours and hours and hours in one or another virtual reality. There are now even psychological afflictions being thought up and discussed in regard to it: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23374170/

But this aspect of identity is of little interest to me. Why? Well, in regard to who in fact you really are or in regard to any virtual or pretend identity that you invent on or offline, the points I raise about “I” in my signature threads don’t go away.

And that, in my view, is the part that disturbs the objectivists. Whether “in reality” or in a “make believe” world they cling to the comforting and consoling assumption that they truly do know themselves, And that they can make an objective distinction between “I did the right thing” and “I did the wrong thing”

Here in turn is as aspect of identity that I construe to be more a manifestation of political economy than dasein. Mindless consumption can precipitate moral and political contexts. For example “commodity fetishism”. Here people are so “programed” by our sub-mental materialist culture to define their lives in terms of things that advertisers lead them to, that the actual social, political and economic relationships that that go into bringing these things to the market are completely blocked out. And not just sweat shops and blood diamonds. And not just kids thinking that Santa and his elves are especially busy this time of the year creating all their presents.

But it’s still not my main interest in exploring the nature of identity given the components of my own moral philosophy.