Intuitions [like dreams] are always going to be tricky. At least from my vantage point. After all, what are they but a murky [and ultimately mysterious] amalgamation of the ego, the super-ego and the id.
Genes and memes compacted down into a particular “hunch”, a “feeling”, a “sense”.
For example, I have a “hunch”, a “feeling”, a “sense” that this exchange is not only as it ever could have been. Why? Because, if it is, right and wrong, true and false, good and bad etc., would all get reduced down to a mere complex “mechanistic” rendition of, say, an internal combustion engine. An agglomeration of matter/energy “designed” by us to propel a car. Only “nature” too has actually “designed” us in turn. In other words, such that, “for all practical purposes”, it’s all just cosmological dominoes toppling over in accordance with the immutable laws of physics.
Or, sure, a God, the God, my God designed nature in turn.
For me, it’s the extent to which what is foreseen is only as it was ever going to be foreseen.
To the extent I do have some measure of autonomous control over the behaviors I choose, the future is embedded in yet more existential contraptions. I then go back to the past. To, for example, the “I” that I was before my experiences in Vietnam and the “I” that I became after. Lots and lots of choices I would never have dreamed I was capable of.
This is the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in the is/ought world.
Yes, as a “general description” of human interactions, this seems an entirely reasonable point of view. But, when it’s crunch time, and this “frame of mind” needs to be fleshed out in choosing particular behaviors in particular contexts, I [as an existential contraption] become entangled [sometimes numbingly] in my dilemma above. Sure, I can choose to be active but only to the extent I am willing in turn to be pulled in many different directions with respect to all of the many “conflicting goods”. And it is this grating ambivalence that [in my view] the objectivists [with or without God] choose – “choose?” – to vanquish in one or another rendition of “one of us”.
In other words:
Yes, perhaps.
But only to the extent one is willing to apply this to an issue we might come into contact with in the course of living our lives from day to day. Say, for example, the issue of gun control given the shootings in Las Vegas. Folks like me become entangled in my dilemma. What is the most reasonable political agenda that the collective should embrace…and then enact in the form of actual prescriptive and proscriptive laws?
I see this as a conflicting good derived from dasein embedded in a particular political contraption [out in a particular world] where ultimately those with the most power are able to enact what they construe to be in their own best interests.
Subliminal, yes. But, from my frame of mind, this is relevant not only pertaining to communication between people but to communication we have with ourselves. Thus Sartre’s, “hell is other people” is no less applicable to the hell that we endure in considering only our own frame of mind. We not only objectify others but “I” as well. That is the whole point of objectivism in my view. It is far more a psychological contraption than a moral, political or philosophical agenda.
But again: What truth? Whose truth? And in what context seen from what point of view? That [at times] gnawing gap between the “general description” and the “agony of choice in the face of uncertainty”.
Again, this seems reasonable. But [for me] only up to the point – the crucial point – where the words here become intertwined in a particular world — a world in which there are very, very different moral and political and religious and philosophical and narcissistic agendas regarding what constitutes “having a clear conscience based on what we know is good for life on earth.”
And then there are folks like Ierrellus who seem to argue that, from his God’s perspective, whatever we choose “here and now” we all become at one with His Kingdom.
But: why should others believe that? Other than to sustain a psychological font assuring them of comfort and consolation until the day they die.
And then, if they are wrong, well, so what?