a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

I would say the odds that you understand nihilism, identity and value judgments – and the existential relationship between them – as I do [here and now] are rather remote. But then isn’t this the point behind the conjecture that capturing these things in language is almost futile. They are no less embodied in dasein.

It’s true however that I am more or less preoccupied only with this: How ought I to live in a world sans God and immortality? And the extent to which philosophy either is or is not of limited value [use] in answering it.

So, sure, I can certainly understand why some would grow weary of the same points being repeated over and over again. On the other hand, new folks pop into ILP everyday. So I figure what the hell: there is always the slim possibility that one of them may actually come much closer to my own frame of mind than you have. And a few have.

And one “lives by it” in part by recognizing that human interaction revolves far more around other things: actually living your life from day to day to day. Eating, drinking, securing [and then sistaining] shelter. Securing and then sustaining employment – a source of income, the capacity to pay your bills. Forming relationships. Interacting with others socially, politically and economically. And then there are countless distractions: art, music, sex, sports, games, hobbies etc… Even philosophy.

I only probe the implications of doing this in the world as dasein. A world in other words of conflicting goods in which “I” is merely the embodiment of a particular existential narrative fabricated and then refabricated over and over and over again amidst the mindboggling complexity of contingency, chance and change.

I missed this response:

I don’t Think so. Some of these one would experience. Even responses from other posters are directly experienced. Effects on those one is in Contact with. Anyone one communicates with. And, of course, if one has the beliefs, and these beliefs affect how one feels, this will also affect other people. My Point was mainly that having a philosophical position that there is a large set of things one cannot know does not, due to its content, have only quasi effects. It has full on effects just like beliefs one can know things in that set. There is no quasi, semi-being in the World. One is here, one has effects.

Good chance we are talking past each other because I can’t connect this to what I meant.

I like this form of nihilism - my apologies for labelling it, but in this instance I want to emphasize that I react to it differently than other nihilisms, even Iambs. It undermines itself.

I don’t Think it avoids the kind of causation I am talking about in the post above, but nothing can. You are stuart, stuarting and your beliefs and metabeliefs and lack of these and shifting and tentativenss of these, will have effects and complete ones. That is part of being alive.

But I don’t feel like I am being told to either Believe or not Believe anything (by your version of N, or whatever it is and isn’t. I also do not feel judged as if you had extricated yourself from some ugly thing but some of those you address have not. You may feel that way at times, I can only react to what I read as far as you.

Yes, there is a kind of Buddhist about you. I don’t know if that is ironic or not. And I am not attributing Buddhist beliefs to you. But anyway, there is a tremendous internal focus.

I dunno but it seems to me you keep a pretty tight focus…
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454
But maybe this works also, some sort of see-sawing from distraction to utter focus.

 That's sometimes a comforting thing, as much as you can bundle all those, you can dispense with them for the time being: while sustaining the undercurrent of thought, that it's always there if you need to bring it up, in it's essential Dasain, as needed.

I was just trying to be technical, I don’t think we really disagree on the issue; or at least we don’t anymore.

Thank you, I had put a lot of time and energy into it.

It seems I’m always extricating myself from something. First it was those unfortunate beliefs, then it was nihilism itself, which was what I considered to be the original source of that extrication.

I’m surprised that you still find me to be that way; recently Phyllo mentioned a negative change in my demeanor. Choosing between the nihilistic philosophy I had months ago and my new “naturalistic” philosophy was a matter of choosing the lesser evil. Obviously six relatively uneventful months can only change a person so much, but I wonder how much different I seem to you.

It sounds comforting. I may disagree that I failed to understand his logic, but I definitely failed to learn to utilize his method.

Not really sure what you mean. The mundane ironist thread is one particular focus for me here. So is the film thread. The focus being experiences that prompt me to think about ideas and the meaning of my reactions to the world around me. The music thread used to be but I more or less abandoned the part about philosophy and now it is more of a “my favorite music” thing. A distraction from ideas and meaning in other words. But that still leaves me with plenty of other activities that take me away from thinking about “how ought I to live my life?”. Everything from the films I view only for entertainment to crostic puzzles to scouring the web for the funniest jokes and comedy bits.

duplicate post

More on the “real me”:

buzzfeed.com/qwantz/thine-own-self-be-true

That raptor doesn’t give any reason why you shouldn’t be true to yourself.

(He doesn’t give any reason why I shouldn’t either.)

True. He just points to the consequences that may ensue when others think that they are. And we see this right here almost everyday, don’t we? And not just from the Kids.

[b]Bret Easton Ellis

The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.[/b]

Folks living in a world that might be described as, say, less than zero. And only some of them have access to Rip.

A child should never even think about being a “good son.” A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the “perfect dad”? I shudder at thinking what that may be.

Besides, a lot of them just make it up as they go along.

The newspapers kept stoking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had ‘unwittingly’ been done. There were ‘feared lapses’. There were ‘misconceptions’ about potential. Situations had ‘deteriorated’. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn’t care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people’s days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn’t help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it.

Still, don’t forget to vote!

I’ve been accused of being vain about my apathy.

Must be like those who accuse me of being vain about my cynicism. But how close to or far apart from each other can they be though?

Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.

Trust me: it’s not even close to being one of the worst.

…if you’re alone nothing bad can happen to you.

Wanna bet?

By “you”, I meant the rhetorical “you”. I actually find it necessary to be true to myself. Some may say that looking back it’s entirely opinion whether one has been true to himself. – You’re opinion, they’re opinion; yes. My opinion?? – No it’s not my opinion, and that’ll be my opinion for as long as I can opinionate, or should opinionate; that being about as long as I’m true to myself.

Okay, give me a specific example of when you were true to yourself. True in what way…in what sense? This is just way too abstract for me.

I’m not sure what it is you are suggesting here. Are you saying that, based on the manner in which you have come to understand “who I am”, you choose to do one thing rather than another? That this is a necessary choice lest you not be “true to yourself”?

That, in other words, no matter how many existential variables had been different in the life you have come to live, there is still this “core self” that somehow transcends [among other things] historical and cultural parameters…contingency chance and change?

I hesitate to respond to iamb above, but I want to confirm that one can know this. It is by intuition one decides, though reason may be able to help. One can ultimately feel when something that does not fit or suit us has been shoved into our minds. Getting an experience to compare with that is the tricky part, often. One must experience how others lives and how others Think. Like I know damn well that I do not like wearing wool. There’s a chance, if all the clothes in my Culture had been made of wool, including the ones like underwear and shirts that directly touch the skin, I might not have known that my core self is happier with cotton, but can tolerate a woolen sweater over a long sleeve shirt.

This is not cultural. This is me, period. Given that I grew up where I could choose and hence had experiences of wool and not wool, it was easy for me to know. If not I might simply have felt that somethign was wrong, perhaps with me, since other people seemed ok or less whiney about wool. The water we swim in and all.

With many facets of Culture, family, psychology, language - we have nothing to compare it too. If one really trusts oneself - not easy to do, even brave - one may take seriously the feeling that somethign is wrong, things do not need to be like this, that sounds logical but I have the gut feeling it need not be the case or something better suited to me is out there. But it is hard to know…

If however one engages deeply with and in other Cultures, learns other languages, goes into altered states, is drawn to outsiders or alternative communities, radical thinkers, criminals, anything outside or different, one can begin to actually notice what one is ‘wearing’ so to speak, and see it as not simply the way things are, but one cultural garb amongst others. (If one is lucky and one’s parents are from different Cultures - not just different sexes from which one can also learn a lot - and who are fairly open to you exploring, this can get you off on a good start).

Nothing perfect or infallible in this, but one can feel when one is aligned or not aligned. There is a core self.

But one can Think one’s way out of respecting it.

Another way to put it is that a body has a most pleasant set of cognitive ‘part’ and sensory experiences/relation with the Environment. Intra-relations and inter relations can run smoothly and feel right or not.

Now, it’s true, some people can be made to Think that what feels bad is good. That’s why you need to trust your intuition. If you cannot suss out what does not fit, you will find excuses for it and reasons not to notice what you feel.

It transcends nothing, that’s why it’s true. I determined who I am, and it happened to be through nature; what I assumed to be natural. Now I continue to use the same criteria to determine who I am.

In the film The Hairdresser’s Husband, the protagonist has an aversion to wool. Why? Because as a child his mother made him wear woolen bathing trunks at the beach and, as you might imagine, the experience was rather tortuous. Now why do you have an aversion to wool? Is there a “wool gene” that some folks get and some don’t? Maybe. But I suspect that if hypothetically someone followed all of us around from the cradle to the grave recording all that we have ever experienced we might be able to pin down the variable[s] that cause us to think, feel and do a lot of things that we attribute to a “core self”.

But, sure, it can be construed as a “core self” in the sense that you did have these experiences and as a result of them you were predisposed to one frame of mind rather than another.

But when others speak of a “core self” they link it to necessity…or to a “soul”. That somehow they were “destined” to be who they are and that no changes in the past would have made any difference.

And then how does this work with respect to value judgments? Are you in alignment with your “core self” when you are opposed to rather than in favor of abortion?

But folks have conflicting gut feelings about the same thing. One person rushes towards it, another person feels compelled to flee. Okay, let’s bring out those recordings and see if we can spot the variables that created this “intuitive” self choosing to embrace or to reject particular behaviors. But unless the variables are there of necessity the things we choose to do are buried deeply in a past we may have had litte or no control over and/or have only a subjective capacity to understand.

Yes, but this can only unfold in a particular way. It is existential. And depending on how it unfolds for you [in a world of contingency, chance and change] we will merely be adding more footage to the recordings.

Depending of course on how you have come to understand the meaning of it. Now, is there a way in which all rational people must understand it?

Again, give me some examples of this in your interaction with others. In particular, interactions that revolve around a conflict such that you are confronted with “how ought I to act” here.

What behaviors did you choose because they are in alignment with your core self? What behaviors are “naturally” in alignment with it?

Reminds me of the Mu response in Zen, I may be repeating myself.

I have not had a ‘now Stuart seems different experience’. I would probably take your posts in the context of what I read before, in ways that may or may not be fair. And I may also miss things because this format leads me to shorthand my experiences.

Can you sum up your more naturalistic philosophy or link me to posts where it has come out.