What is Dasein?

With dozens and dozens that have already come down the pike over the years, why would I suppose I’ll actually bump into the one most likely to work on me?

Besides, I can always slump down into one of my own distractions in order to feel “comfortably numb”.

Though, sure, if I come upon a regimen that actually appears to address the hole I have come to think myself into, my interest would be considerably more piqued.

My hole is a numbingly complex intertwining of circumstances, psychology and philosophy. But what are the odds that I could successfully convey that to others who have no substantive understanding whatsoever of how the existential variables in my own life came to predispose me to this “sense of reality”.

Better [for me] if they aim to persuade me to try something that has actually worked for them. But only in the sense that, when they are confronted with conflicting goods [re their interactions with other], they are not consumed themselves by the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here.

I actually feel better immersed in one of my distractions as well. But, if others are down in the hole that I am in, that will only last until the next newscast. Or until the next spasm in their aging body reminds them that oblivion really may well be just right around the fucking corner.

What I do is to note that when I was an objectivist myself, I was able to embody the comfort and the consolation of imagining that the real me was in touch with a self-righteous truth on this side of the grave and with immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

That [here and now] is beyond my reach.

But would appear [here and now] to still be within their reach. Depending of course on the particular objectivist frame of mind that they subscribe to.

Indeed, here we are again: at the fucking epicenter of dasein.

How on earth would I go about making you understand my frame of mind? Hell, even if you knew me for years, there would still be any number of crucial gaps between my “I” and yours. The vast, vast number of possible permutations built into the evolution of our own particular sequence of existential variables is for all practical purposes incalcuable.

And then we would still have to confront what I construe to be the reality of conflicting goods out in a world where the bottom line always revolves around who has the political power to enforce one or another actual set of rules.

Why on earth would I back off? Only in reminding others how they may well be susceptible to my own frame of mind someday am I likely to provoke them into making an attempt to demonstrate why they are not now.

But only to the extent that they are willing to broach their own sense of self [in the is/ought world] by noting their own equivalent of this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

In other words, taking us through the existential intertwining of a sequence of actual experiences and a sequence of actual ideas they came across in the course of actually living their life.

There is only one self, one “true self”, one “real self” … it’s the self that exists now, in the present moment.

Again, there is that enormous existential gap between what I think I am trying to convey to you here about my frame of mind and what you think that I think I mean instead.

So, you hold me responsible for what…pointing this out?

I think the sort of hole that you are talking about here revolves far more around particular sets of circumstances. One is in constant excruciating pain. One is being battered from all directions. One’s life is in the toilet. One’s options are few.

And then if, on top of all that, you feel human existence is essentially meaningless and absurd, it can sure as shit become all that more unbearable.

I have absolutely no illusions that any day now one or another rendition of the “big one” will descend down upon me and I will be in that hole you are now imagining of me in your head.

But I don’t think that they are necessarily deluded. After all, how on earth would I go about demonstrating to others that they are? And over and over and over again I point out that my own narrative here is no less an existential contraption.

I think basically you confuse my provocative polemicist persona here with what you are actually able to imagine is instead the real [or realer] me.

Which just reflects how far removed we actually are from grasping the manner in which I have come to think about “I” in the world of value judgments. Or in discussions that revolve around “the meaning of life”.

But then I have come to expect that in exchanges like this.

It truly deflates me when you allow your contributions here to be reduced down to this sort of thing.

Yes, here and now, there is only one particular “I” embodied in each and every one of us in any one particular context confronted with any one particular set of options.

But why in the same context do so many different people go in so many different directions:

Morally.
Politically.
Aesthetically.

Is the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein above an important component to be considered here?

And, if not, how, in your own conflicted interactions with others, is it basically nowhere to be seen?

Iambiguous, we’re going to have a little talk here.

You see, there are people who want to be in charge and send people to hell forever. The only people they can round up are people like you, by consent, by spiritual mandate. Why would you do that to yourself?

I’m not trying to be mean here…

You skipped over this post though…

viewtopic.php?p=2701754#p2701754

You’ve lived long enough… what do you think really happens to someone who repeatedly denies their innate morality repeatedly in the universe…

It’s called consent iambiguous!

Since many of them have positive effects in most participants, the odds are very high their would be a reduction in suffering after trying just a few. But, again, I see why you have little motivation in part because the hole is not very deep.

Right and duly noted. But this places the way you contextualize you and the objectivists in a light that is not flattering. You have your distractions. You are fine being comfortably numb. The hole you are in does not have a particularly serious emotional depth. So to judge the objectivists as running away, unable to face the hole, is grounded on nothing.

Sigh. Read it again. Back off from the way you couch the issue, not the issue of conflicting goods. I have said this time and again.

You couch the issue as objectivists cannot face what you have managed to face. They cannot deal with the discomfort. Now you reveal

as justification for not bothering with any method that might alleviate your suffering

that TV and music work. You have your self-help method.

That these work reveals that the suffering is very mild. Those things do not work for depression, PTSD, existential crises, etc.

So your positioning yourself as having faced something so tough objectivists in general cannot face it

is something you should back off from because it is false.

When someone talks about you, you raise dasein issues

How could you possibly know me? and we get a short lecture in the effects of dasein.

But you know why objectivists do not join you in your hole and can know, somehow, all of their minds.

Of course I am reacting to the kind of person you present yourself as here.

Of course when you present yourself or a polemic self as bravely facing a hole
and present objectivists as running from it
and then say that you can distract yourself from this hole via media

I will respond to what I have to work with.

You are acting in the world, to whatever degree it is polemics.

In these acts you have judged others who do not agree with you.

I found these judgments wanting going by what you put forward about yourself and the objectivists.

Iambiguous:

If you are going to judge and insult people, you may find that someone will respond by pointing out the contradictions inherent in that.

It is clear now, why you do not need any new methods, since everyday methods that pretty much everyone uses to destress and distract themselves from daily life problems (and not crises) are working.

Your point about refusing help on the emotional side, now seems completely justified. It would be silly to suggest any other methods since your hole is not that deep emotionally.

Argument won on your side on that issue.

On the other hand, it puts into question the way you judge others, not just becuase of your own sense of how tough this is to do (re:dasien) but because your discomfort in the hole is not much.

When this is pointed out…

No, I am noting how you justify your judgements of other people and finding your justifications weak.

If you have lied in the name of polemics about your level of suffering or something else, that is your problem.

I can only work with the justifications you present me with and they are weak.

You seem to think this is only about information. But once you act in the world interpersonally, it doesn’t matter if what I am dealing with is polemics or something else. If it’s a fucked up polemical insult, then I may notice this and point it out.

If your conclusions seem binary, I may notice this and point it out.

I am now going to use an extreme example to show how silly your response was here. I do not think you are evil.

I am sure Hitler was using polemics a lot. If he implicitly compared himself to Jews, he has to accept that how he presents himself and the Jews will be looked at.

He can’t say, you are confusing my polemicized self with the real Adolf.

No Adolf, I am working with what you are trying to get away with.

I don’t need any help, I am fine.
The hole I am in is so fucking dark and uncomfortable no objectivist can face it, though I can with a little tv and music to distract me.
LOL

I did also in the post I linked to explain very quickly how I did in a concrete situation deal with conflicting goods. I think in that situation I made a small change for what I prefer and what someone else preferred. I have no miracle cure for the end of conflicting goods. I know objectivists who do not think there will ever be a cure. I see no reason to remove myself from acting in the world, nor will I, like you recently claimed about yourself, decide to remove myself from acting in the world or making political statements etc, until such time as someone demonstrates objective morality. That would imply, to me, that it would be bad to do things, in case it turns out they are objectively wrong. My inaction could turn out to be objectively wrong. I might as well, and in fact I want to make things move in the direction I prefer which includes may care for many types of lifeform.

I believe you see three possible categories to change things in the world

Might makes right
Right makes might (not quite sure what this one means)
Compromise, etc.

My reaction to this is that 1) they are not mutually exclusive 2) they likely are value laden choices. If one thinks compromise is the way to go this is likely based on values. I think you have presented it as the approach if one realizes that we do not have access to objective values. But once we do not know what objective values are, we still have all options for attaining on the table. If using these, given the epistemological conundrum seems wrong, well then you have access to objective morals. If it seems impractical, I think this is either 1) a cover for a moral judgment or 2) not paying attention to history or oneself. If someone comes into my house and tries to rape one of us, I will not compromise. Yes, an extreme example. Figuring out when using power over might be practical is not going to be simple. It would be currently beyond any scientific proof, as a rule that is.

I do the best I can weighing the various options and consider any option on the table, in general.

The example above includes a situation where it is very hard to not compromise neutrally. IOW violence or threat of violence is likely necessary. In a lot of more mundane situations I may not compromise, even though the stakes are smaller. Often in these situations, I can refuse to participate. Or refuse to approve. IOW not compromising need not be violent. As, say, Martin Luther King often demonstrated. Though he would also compromise and certainly believed in objective morals. My point being that in practical terms one can use non-compromise based methods without being violent or oppressive. Though I am not ruling out those options, they are generally not necessary, at this point in my history, given where I am.

Like other social mammals I live and struggle without objective morals, trying to make things work for me and others I care about, including abstract care, which would be less common in, say, wolves or even elephants. Though the latter have been known to rescue members of other species, even.

I think I get the main idea of the post the above is from and you may be right. I think I have reached an endpoint, at least for now, related to the line I was following which did focus on Iamb. For me it is often important to ground things in the interpersonal and the personal. If someone is putting forward a set of beliefs AND interacting with other people - which is always the case here - then I get curious how those two things fit with each other. If part of those beliefs are about that person and other people then I may want to connect the paradigm to what the person says about themselves and other people. If contradictions seem to be present yet are completely denied, I will want to probe until I get a sense of what is going on. Lived philosophy, not just ideas on paper. Just as Iamb wants concrete solutions to conflicing goods, I’ve wanted to understand how having his beliefs fits with his concrete behavior and judgments. It does become very to the man, ad hom, and I do realize this may also be problematic. But on one issue at least I found a fairly final point of understanding. His hole is not that distressful. That makes a lot much more clear to me. I see other things that seem like contradictions. I see often things being couched as if it is clear that there are two or three options, when I see more. But truly it is rare to get any clarity when it comes to being-in-the-world type issues.

And truly all that is directly tied to the topic of the thread, which is Dasein.

And people are often confused about what they believe, not just how they arrived at their beliefs. Further, they are often confused about what it would mean, in terms of attitudes and behavior, if they actually believed what they think they do or should believe.

That’s an area that interest me.

But as said, I am going to move away from Iamb for a while, because finally something became clear and that small clarity must be celebrated and given some air.

Another reason is that , if an analogy can be seen between a personal ‘hole’ and something broader, is, that a Dasein effected solution has a tendency to self question -doubt similar to a person who questions whether the lightbulb in the refrigerator works.

To check , the door has to be opened, bit when it’s. closed it can’t be certAin if the light didn’t go out, so one can’t really be 100 % certain. It’s an attempt to match bio feedback with probability.

Again, to the extent that there are self-help regimens that actually address the hole that I am in, I would certainly take the time to note what they have to say.

But with distractions already able to take me away from “the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty”, I’m covered.

As for the fact that, in your view, my hole isn’t deep enough to qualify, well, what can I say? You got me there. :wink:

No, my point is that when I cannot face what I construe to be the grim consequences of being down in the hole [re morality on this side of the grave, oblivion on the other] I still have at my disposal distractions able to take me away from it.

At least until circumstantially the hole swallows up even those as well.

As for the objectivists, they don’t have to deal with the discomfort. Why? Because they have managed to think themselves [here and now] into embracing a world in which the hole doesn’t even exist.

So, I think, perhaps they can describe for me how, when their own values/behaviors come into conflict with others, they are able to subsume dasein and conflicting goods into a sense of self that is grounded in one or another essesntial, objective sense of reality out in the is/ought world.

Perhaps, but imagine being afflicted with one of these and being down in the hole with me?

That you imagine complex mental, emotional and psychological positions of this sort can be pinned to the mat as either true or false speaks volumes regarding your frame of mind from my frame of mind.

Any number of objectivists don’t “face it” because they do not experience it. I note the manner in which I construe “I” [as dasein, as an existential contraption] in the is/ought world; and, for the first time, many objectivists are actually confronted with a new narrative; and, in turn, the possibility that someday they might have to “face it” themselves.

All I can do is to ask them to bring “I” out into the world of conflicting goods and to note how their own frame of mind is deemed [by them] to be more reasonable than mine.

You call this a “lecture”, not me.

Over the years, I have had any number of exchanges with folks here in which there was little or no huffing and puffing. Or name-calling. Or, for that matter, polemics.

That you now judge me as judging and insulting others is something I will always allow others here to judge for themselves.

The good news: no one is required either to read my posts or to respond to them.

Let’s keep it that way, I say.

As for the extent to which I accuse objectivists here of not having the intellectual integrity and/or courage to agree with me, that’s all mostly “in your head” in my view.

All I can do is to note the extent to which being down in the hole is disturbing to me. And then to imagine that if others were to tumble down into it as well it would be disturbing to them.

Then I note how, in order to avoid this, many folks come to embody one or another existential rendition of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

What I call the “psychology of objectivism”.

Here the shoe either fits or it doesn’t.

Yes, but unlike him [I suspect] my views on polemics [in philosophy exchanges in forums such as this] revolves more around this:

What does this mean to be a polemicist? It means that I enjoy provocative exchanges. A provocative exchange is one in which folks take opposite sides on an issue and aggressively pursue their own point of view. A polemicist might employ such devices as red herrings, irony, dissembling, sarcasm, needling, pokes and prods, satire. But it’s almost never meant to be personal. It’s just a way to ratchet up a discussion and make it more invigorating, intriguing, stimulating. When the best minds are goaded they are often driven in turn to make their point all the more forcefully. It’s like both of you are down in the arena using words for swords. From my experience these are almost always the most interesting exchanges.

I suspect that, re the Jews, this was not Adolph’s intent at all. The real Adolph was intent on eradicating all Jews from the face of the earth.

But, down in the hole, can one argue that [philosophically] this is necessarily evil? That all rational and virtuous men and women are intellectually and emotionally and morally and politically obligated to agree that it is evil?

In a No God world?

Folks either get how disturbing questions like this can become for the moral nihilists or they don’t.

So basically, you say it’s no good to be you, and not only that, you also think that because we lose continuity of consciousness after we die. For some strange reason, you think continuity of consciousness relies on god …

So, basically, you’re telling people that you believe there is no continuity of consciousness because god doesn’t exist, and for this reason, you are trying to not be evil, because evil is your deepest desire, but there’s nothing stopping you!

Not much sympathy here

I love the refrigerator light concern as a metaphor, but I am not quite sure what it is relaed to in the thread. I see ‘hole’ mentioned. Perhaps you see Iamb’s hole or existential holes in general as being something similar to the person who keeps checking the fridge but cannot be satisfied, but I can’t be sure what you meant. what did you mean?

First of all, my own decision to remove myself “here and now” from political commitments, revolves more around issues of health. As you get closer and closer to officially being “old”, the body itself has considerably more to say about what you either can or cannot do.

And while I do continue to make my own “existential leaps” to what are generally construed by most here to be a “liberal” or a “progressive” political agenda, I have no illusions regarding the extent to which “I” here is an “existential contraption”.

And most objectivists [from either the left or the right] will have none of that. So, you more or less learn your lesson after a while. To the extent that you suggest to others that their own political commitments may well be “existential contraptions”, is the extent to which many will back away from you. You are pointing out that the manner in which you are down in your hole here may also be applicable to them someday. And that is precisely when “I” here begins to crumble. It crumbled for me, why not for them?

Others are either willing to grapple seriously with the implications of that [re their own sense of “self” in the is ought world] or they aren’t.

Look what’s at stake after all.

Sure, out in the real world – the world of actual conflicting goods – the social, political and economic permutations can accumulate dramatically. All three approaches become entangled in any one particular context. Depending in part on the extent to which the objectivists and the nihilists and the narcissists/sociopaths are themselves entangled in either assessing the situation or in resolving it.

But to the extent that the choices/values here are in fact rooted in dasein more so than in philosophical contraptions like deontolgy, is the the extent [in my view] to which moderation, negotiation and compromise reflect the best of all possible worlds.

Unless of course someone is able to contoct an assessment and a resolution that he or she is able to demonstrate to others as the optimal or the only rational way in which to embody human interactions out in any particular world.

Here again though [aside from one extreme context] you are noting this only as a general description of human interactions entangled in conflicted goods.

With issues like abortion, capital punishment, animal rights, the role of governemnt, gay marriage, gun control etc., there are considerable numbers of people on both sides of the issue.

And, even with regard to extreme contexts like rape, child abuse, genocide or slavery, the nihilists are still able to argue that in a No God world, it is perfectly reasonable to embody choices that revolve basically around “what’s in it for me?”

The sociopaths main concern is not whether their behviors are right or wron, but whether or not they can get away with doing something that gratifies what they construe to be in their own best interests.

But to what extent is this frame of mind itself just one more “existential contraption”?

The point is that many religionists will make this very point in arguing basically that even if God does not exist, He would have to be invented. Why? Because otherwise, any and all human behaviors are able to be rationalized from any one particular point of view rooted in any one particular sequence of experiences embodied by any one particular individual out in any one particular world construed from any one particular point of view.

And, from my frame of mind, objectivists more or less sense that if this is ever construed as applicable to their own “I”, then, like mine, it will begin to crumble. At least with respect to value judgments.

And, sure, it would be fascinating for someone like me to engage in a discussion such as this with someone like Martin Luther King. To the extent that he was an objectivist re the existence of God, his own “I” would have had a rather rock-solid foundation. But was he? Or, instead, was his faith more problematic. As, for example, embodied in the character Father Ralph de Bricassart from the novel The Thron Birds?

Here, again, there so many different possible manifestations of “I” because there are so many different lives that any one particular inidvidual can lead.

Then, from my point of view, you have accumulated a particular set of political prejudices rooted largely in the manner in which your actual lived life predisposed you to go in one direction rather than another.

You can never really know for certain then how things might have been very, very different had the course of your life been very, very different. Here I always go back to the man I was before being drafted into the Army and the man I was after being discharged from it. It is almost impossible for me to convey just how radical the change really was.

And only because my number was low enough to be drafted. And that was an accident of birth.