Maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue here. The way I look at it, "problematizing value means to take another look at the way we see something or some things, ie., our values. That can and often does become a problem for us, because we’re seeing that the way we perceived things, understood things, cannot be “real” for us anymore. We’re seeing more clearly now. It isn’t necessarily that we were lying to ourselves but just that we were not, back then, who we are, now.
Our values are capable of changing as we change - I know that mine have.
Values aren’t really “facts”, are they? Aren’t they simply akin to man-made structures based on our own subjective thinking and human experiences? Obviously, that can be different for everyone.
Do you mean to say in the sense that we clearly understand what that/those value[s], in essence, mean?
My only interest here is in trying to fathom what this might possibly mean – what it might possibly mean if you were outside that Planned Parenthood clinic confronting those on either side of the abortion wars. I would attempt to convey the manner in which I saw their countervailing values as rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. Either regarding reason or emotion.
But what exactly would you be telling them? And how would Fixed Cross enlighten them by way of putting their conflict in the context of his Grand Scheme?
From my perspective, both sides are able to make reasonable arguments — abortion.procon.org/
They simply start out with a different set of assumptions. And while both sides have objections to raise regarding the others side’s perspective, they are not able to make the points raised just go away.
Thus we can’t live in a world where both unborn babies have the right to life and pregnant women have the right to kill them.
Yet where are the arguments from either side that allow us to derive the most rational frame of mind?
On the contrary, “common sense” is no less rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. And how is it not clearly rooted historically, culturally and experientially?
Instead, what the moral objectivists [some of them] seem to argue is that “common sense” is little more than the prejudices of the yokels, the sheep. That only the truly rational philosophers can sift through conflicting renditions of it and arrive that the truly optimal – natural – frame of mind.
But that’s where I come in, isn’t it? I ask them to bring their intellectual, scholastic contraptions down to earth, to integrate their world of words in actual flesh and blood social, political and economic interactions.
Yes, common sense might revolve around the assumption that aborting a human zygote is more reasonable than aborting a 9 month old fetus.
But others make the assumption that human life begins at the point of conception. And even if everyone in a particular community agrees consensually that aborting a one day old zygote is reasonable, that [in my view] is not the same as establishing [philosophically, scientifically] that it is the obligation of all rational human beings to believe this.
Thank him for pointing that out. Now, ask him to demonstrate why, just because he adheres to his own “value ontology” here, all other rational human beings are than obligated to share it.
Otherwise, he is basically arguing that his own “ontology” is just one of many. That others might not share his ethical conclusion regarding this particular context. Then it just becomes a matter of whether they too insist that their own value judgments here fall within the boundaries of an “ontology”.
And then, finally, who has the actual political power to enforce one frame of mind or the other.
Also, ask him if a woman that he loved chose to abort a two month old baby, what he might be obligated to do. Would he brand her a murderer? Would he turn her in to the authorities if the abortion were illegal in that particular context?
And what if she had been raped? Would she still be a murderer? Would he still advise her that she is morally obligated to give birth. Or, here, is she permitted a different “value ontology”?
Now, for me, an objectivist is someone who believes that anyone who does not share this frame of mind [expressed as it is] is wrong.
And for some [like the Ayn Randroids] that is practically the same as being evil.
But not you?
Rand [as I recall] used to make a distinction here between an acorn and an oak tree. As though others cannot then argue there was never a single solitary oak tree alive [including her] that did not first have to survive beyond the acorn stage.
Some insist we become “human beings” at the point of conception — or when we have a heartbeat or a brain, or when we can survive outside the womb. Others however insist that infanticide is moral for various reasons. Still others [like Hitler and his historical ilk] will argue that even particular human adults do not deserve to live.
In Texas for example they still regularly execute people.
My point however is this: How do the objectivists go about establishing that thier own assumptions/premises are the necessary default here in determining when “in fact” we become [or are] a human being?
Sans God, in other words.
As for efforts like this – when you turn into a fucking poet – what on earth does it really have to do with the points I raise?
The difference is in the quotations marks. Problematizing (or “problematizing”, within scare quotes) “value” means problematizing the whole concept of value. It does not (just) mean problematizing particular values–even if those particular values could be any value or set of values. I think it means making explicit that there are or may well be no objective values, and that values are considerably more prevalent than commonly thought.
I think “facts” (scare quotes!) may well be no more, not fundamentally more, than values. By this, I don’t mean that we always like what we consider facts, much less that wishful thinking is as realistic as any other kind of thinking.
To me the phrase “what values in essence mean” suggests you’re thinking too abstractly about values. Values are simply things that we value, whether concrete or abstract–though usually, people especially mean abstract things (principles), like “justice”. By “not taking any values for granted” I mean not taking the value of any values for granted–e.g., the objective value of “justice”. Now where this gets really problematic is when one doesn’t even take “facts” for granted–indeed, not even “self-evident truths” like “A=A”.
I know that I solved your problem 2 year ago, and yesterday again.
Its in my post above.
Essentially one solves it by no longer being ashamed that one is a human, and accepting that one is human, and exists. Its only metaphysics that puzzles you.
Youre a guest in this thread.
Welcome, but you have no power to change what the OP is about. Nor is your misunderstanding of my passion a relevant issue.
Besides, who is the objectivist, Iambiguous… could it be the one who tries to draw all others into his own conception of a problem? You? I think so.
I on the other hand, ask everyone to conceive of his own form of problem - I ask only that they make it intimate.
Since man has become aware of death and of himself and time, of being, and required Dasein, his actions have been commanded by whatever he imagined to be his possible futures. Dasein draws as the bridge concept along the banks of the pure flux the cultivating from the self-valuing into the world, its dharma, as it draws itself from its future.
The past has long been dead, war and genocide is just melancholy.
Yeah, and I would attempt to convey–if I’d even bother–the manner in which I saw all of common sense–i.e., not just regarding values but also regarding facts (which I consider a special kind of values)–as rooted in dasein.
There are none and can be none, precisely because of the sets of assumptions the two sides start out with. In order to provide the most rational argument, one would have to start out with the most rational assumptions. Such assumptions would have to be meta-assumptions: assumptions about the nature of rationality itself. They would have to be part of what Fixed Cross has called a “self-valuing logic”.
I don’t see how this is on the contrary of what I said. No less than what? Rationality, pure rationality, would not be rooted in dasein at all.
I’m not at all saying it isn’t; on the contrary…
Philosophy has always been the quest for the truly rational, the natural as opposed to the positive. But since Nietzsche, this quest for the absolute has been moderated to a quest for the relative, for “the more rational” (Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 1, emphasis mine).
“Might revolve around the assumption”? “More reasonable”? I’m reminded of this:
“You have to imagine, as a rather good Scripps student once put it, Socrates talking to Oedipus. Tragic Oedipus. Not Agathon’s tragedy (Agathon wrote a tragedy according to Aristotle whose title was The Flower).
Socrates talking to Oedipus and trying to persuade him: ‘Look here, Oedipus–it wasn’t your fault. And after all, why is incest bad?’” (Harry Neumann, seminar on Plato’s Symposium, May 2003.)
Common sense is the thing that might well burn people at the stake for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun…
Is this some “serious philosopher” thing? You respond to the points/objections others raise by simply noting that you have already solved the problem.
How is this even close to a substantive response to the points I made above regarding an objectivist frame of mind?
Again, he seems merely to assert that his argument is the optimal way to think about these things.
Consider:
So, if I understand you, folks on both sides of the abortion wars can claim not to be ashamed of being human, of accepting that they are human and exists. Then what?
In terms of how you understand the meaning of the words “value” and “ontology”, is it okay or not okay to kill the baby? And is this able to be derived universally or is each and every individual abortion subject to its own particular objective moral truth?
Also, are we to just assume that all reasonable men and women are obligated to accept the premises in your argument regarding the two month old baby baby in the yahoo link above?
Finally, what on earth do you mean by accusing me of being confused only by metaphysics? It is either moral or immoral to kill a particular unborn human baby in a particular context. Unless, instead, this is rooted more in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. How have you managed to demonstrate to us that this is not the case at all?
Look, you will either integrate what you think you mean “in your head” by…
To ‘problematize’ “value”.
…out in the world of actual human behaviors that come into conflict over value judgments or you won’t.
In other words, in a manner in which I am able to understand. Or even perhaps to agree with.
Now, if you believe that you already have…that you’ve “solved” this…that’s your perogative.
But you have not demonstrated this at all from my point of view. Instead, VO [to me] is just one more objectivist rendition of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
As I see it, it is a psychological crutch that you need in order to anchor “I” to something [to anything] that is not embodied in an essentially absurd and meaningless world. You are just one more Satyr/Lyssa to me. Offering up your own Kingdom of Ends.
Okay, how is human passion [human emotion] attached to or detached from dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?
On the contrary, over and again I note how, over the years, I have embraced any number conflicting assumptions regarding these relationships.
And, in turn, I readily acknowledge that in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change, a new experience, relationship, encounter with new information/knowledge etc. can nudge me in yet another direction.
All I do is to suggest that this is also true of you.
Note to others:
Again, how is this ambiguous, abstract observation – so similar to the sort of “general observations” we get in Satyr/Lyssa’s scholastic lectures at KT – relevant to actual existential contexts that we encounter when our values come to clash with others.
Just imagine Fixed outside that abortion clinic or outside a prison where an execution is about to take place or at a Trump or Clinton political rally, and confronting folks embracing conflicting goods with that?!!!
First of all learn some fucking manners, you boor.
Talk to me when you address my words.
Not to the groupies you imagine having.
Learn some manners and I might acknowledge your petty scrambling for some status as an attempt at philosophy, which it certainly isnt.
But Im a generous man, and I know a lot of people are struggling to get out of the same doofussy cognitive loops as you.
Honor is the first standard for anyone to approach me. Since you havent even thanked me for solving your little conundrum, that would be the first thing for you to do now.
But you have no honor, no intellectual conscience, and dont actually believe in your little problem - it is only a way, as is clear from your hollow threads, to get as many views as mr Reasonable.
I will respond to a polite PM from you. Your trolling will be ignored by me from now on. Sauwelios is at least sable to pretend that you are a serious person, which seems to almost tempt you into considering becoming one.
I can’t be bothered to unravel silly little linguistic conundrum for the fourth time. You have proven that you dont care. I guess maybe you are slightly more intelligent than you let on.
Well, given the manner in which it is expressed, how on earth would we go about determinning it?
In other other words, it’s just one more of Satyr’s “general descriptions” of the human condition.
What I am curious about, however, is the the extent to which Fixed Cross is willing and able to integrate it into a particular existential context in which human behaviors come into conflct over value judgments.
Also, I tend to eschew the exploration of Dasein with a capital D. Once you capitalize it, it becomes this scholastic Thing that Heidegger set out to describe [to encompass, to capture] as a “serious philosopher” in a tome. It becomes an intellectual contraption stuffed into an Analysis of Being and Time.
Or so it seems to me.
I am only interested in the individual dasein. A particular man or woman who is thrown adventitiously at birth into a particular world. And, in being thrown there and not here, in being thrown then and not how, how is that a factor in exploring the values of individuals?
And, of particular importance, this: How are philosophers able to reconcile that with the intellectual contraptions that have come to revolve around one or another deontological morality?
Or a morality that is predicated on one or another rendition of this:
1] I am rational
2] I am rational because I have access to the ideal
3] I have access to the ideal because I grasp the one true nature of the objective world
4] I grasp the one true nature of the objective world because I am rational
As Fixed Cross has repeatedly pointed out to you, all nouns (with a couple of possible exceptions, like “nothing”) are capitalized in German. And Dasein had long been a very basic word (meaning simply “existence”) before Heidegger, and has remained so in most contexts since Heidegger. It would make no sense to use it the way you do, with or without a capital, if it wasn’t for Heidegger.
Don’t italicize it if you’re not capitalizing it–unless you mean to emphasize it (which I don’t think you do here–no more than “individual”, at least).
But your problem–or the problem with your problem; your meta-problem–is precisely the problem of universals. If we’re talking strictly about particulars, then it makes no sense to speak of “a man or woman”. There is then nothing to connect particular beings–for example your precious people gathered outside abortion clinics. They share “facts” no more than “values”:
“The spirit of national socialism was not so much concerned with the national and the social but much more with that radically private resoluteness which rejects any discussion or mutual understanding because it relies wholly and only on itself … At bottom all its concepts and words are the expression of the bitter and hard resoluteness of a will asserting itself in the face of its own nothingness, a will proud of its loathing for happiness, reason and compassion.” (Found in Harry Neumann, Liberalism, “Politics or Nothing! Nazism’s Origin in Scientific Contempt for Politics”, where it is sourced as: K. Löwith, “Der Okkasionelle Dezisionismus von C. Schmitt,” Gesammalte Abhandlungen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960) pp. 122- 123. [sic])
Again, if you choose not to go there – and it certainly appears to me that this is the case – all I can note is the extent to which the distinction you make is something that, to me, is encompassed only in an argument.
From my perspective, there are…
1] facts that either can or cannot be established in the video above and…
2] our reactions [emotional and otherwise] to abortion expressed as individual value judgments
Objective truth or subjective opinion? That’s the most crucial distinction to be made once we leave the domain of either/or and enter the domain of is/ought.
Yes, that is more or less my own set of assumptions here.
But: How then is Fixed Cross’s “self-valuing logic” then made applicable outside that abortion clinic, or that execution chamber, or those political rallies attended by supporters of Clinton or Trump?
How in other words does his “self-valuing logic” enable him to extricate himself from my dilemma above?
How, finally, is it made applicable to the manner in which I consture conflicting human interactions here re the components of my own argument: dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?
To moral and political objectivists, I issue the same challenge: Let’s situate this “out in the world” existentially and explore it.
If by “purely rational” you mean that which we believe to be true “in our head” is able to be demonstrated as in fact in sync with the objective world around us – re physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology etc – then I would agree it transcends dasein.
But what can be spoken of as “purely rational” pertaining to conflicting value judgments?
It would be one thing if we were able to establish rationally that one side in the abortion wars was right and the other side was wrong.
But both sides are able to make entirely reasonable argument given a particular set of assumptions that the other side’s arguments don’t make go away.
And that’s before we get to the argument of the narcissist who asserts that morality for him or her revolves solely around self-gratification.
Which is precisely why I argue that to the extent you [u]do[/u] situate the values of any particular individual out in a particular world is the extent to which you bump into the limitations of philosophy in its pursuit of the truly rational.
But over and again I point out that just because I argue for these limitations doesn’t mean that they exist. It simply means that of late no one has managed to convince me that there are no limitations here. If, in fact, believing that your own values are the “natural” one enables you psychologically to ground “I” in a wholistic point of view, then that “works” for you.
After all, for all practice purposes, the behaviors you choose will be predicated on what you believe to be true. And that may or may not be in sync with what is in fact true.
I’m just arguing that to me it does not appear reasonable to suggest that, in using the tools of philosophy, one or another deontological morality can be established.
Exactly. How on earth would philosophers ever be able to actually establish that incest is necessarily immoral? How would one’s own attitude about it not be embedded existentially in dasein, in conflicting goods – debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index … ult_incest – and [ultimately] in politics?
Yes, but here common sense is able to be examined, explored and tested by science. It can be shown that in fact the earth does revolve around the sun. But: what of those who insist that it is common sense that God created both? Or of those who insist that it is common sense that billions and billions of dollars ought to be allocated for space exploration, while others insist it is common sense that these dollars be spent solving more pressing problems right here on earth?
Indeed what though?
How does this assumption manage to align itself with FC’s Grand Scheme when we are among those embracing conflicting value judgments in a world where behavior must either be prescribed or proscribed legally/politically?
“On earth” one could bring up birth-defects, pressure that would be brought onto the young and the weak to engage in relationships that they don’t want and the Westermarck effect.
In other words, are you actually mocking “serious philosophy” here by caricaturing it? It has even occurred to me that you are trying only to trick us into taking VO seriously.
Or, sure, maybe it’s all just meant to be comic relief.
Why not just put me on ignore like the Turds here?
Note to others:
I suspect that a reaction like this is a clear indication that I have begun to unravel his own carefully calibrated Intellectual Contraption. Indeed, I have been doing this with objectivists now for years.
And not just for entertainment.
Unless, of course, he is actually succeeding in unraveling mine.
I have been engaging objectivists for many years now. But few folks that I have come across virtually embody objectivism quite as flagrantly as he does.
He is practically a caricature of the genre.
On the other hand, he is also clearly 1] intelligent 2] articulate and 3] passionate about philosophy.
And the contempt that he levels at ILP for allowing discourse here to sink down to the level of fucking Kids hurling spitballs is right on the mark.
Well, when he is not himself in huff and puff mode.
Point taken. But the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein is reflected considerbly more in, well, lower case. Here for example: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Sure, I will admit that you may well be pointing out something important here that I keep missing.
But I really don’t know what it is.
If Mary did have an abortion at that clinic then this is an objective fact that is true [and able to be shared] by everyone — inside or outside the clinic.
And there are actual facts that may or may not be demonstrable regarding the pregnancy itself.
And there are the biological facts embedded in performing an abortion as a medical procedure.
None of this comes down to subjective opinions. Not the facts themselves.
Sure, particular individuals [as “subjects”] may hold opinions that are not in sync with the facts. But the facts are either able to be demonstrated to all rational men and women or they are not. But once they have been demonstrated to in fact be true it would seem to be the obligation of all rational men and women to accept them.
Until we do come to the part where we react [reasonably, emotionally] to abortion as a value judgment.
But to claim that Nazis embody “a will proud of its loathing for happiness, reason and compassion” is just another political prejudice. In other words, the author imagines certain beliefs and behaviors as being in sync with happiness, reason and compassion. His own for example. And then he concludes that Nazis in choosing other beliefs and behaviors knows nothing of them.
Science ultimately rests on empirical verification.
One only needs to read Aristotle to find many common sense explanations for physical phenomena - most of which were subsequently shown by experiments, to be wrong.
For example :
“Hot water freezes faster than cold water.”
Is this true or false? How does common sense evaluate the statement?
No, not ultimately, as empiricism itself in turn rests on common sense–albeit on more basic common-sensical (mis)understandings than the (mis)understanding that the sun turn around the earth.
