From my vantage point [whatever that means], it really all comes back to whether or not you could ever have freely chosen to be a friend of determinism in a world that is ever and always determined to be only what it ever and always can be, must be, will be.
Some folks seem able to wrap their minds around it and embrace what is said to be a “compatibility” between autonomy and determinism.
And, as I have noted a number of times, maybe they are on to something that I am just not able to grasp. Here and now. But then I go back to the extent to which in a wholly determined world I was ever able to grasp it if grasping it [up until now] was never meant to be.
Then I go back to imagining how some folks might be comforted [psychologically] in embracing autonomy, while others might by appalled.
Comforted by determinism because whatever happens to you is only as it ever could have been. And, if your life is in the toilet, “it is beyond my control”.
Appalled by determinism because you are convinced that what has in fact happened to you is only because you were able to achieve it. Thus, if you are an uberman, it is something that you were able to freely accomplish. Just as those who are in the toilet have no one to blame but themselves.
Really, though, where does “I” begin and “we” end? Where does “we” end and “they” begin? And, for the religious, where does “I” begin and “Thou” end?
Can the “bigger picture” ever really be fully grasped by any one particular individual in any one particular historical and cultural and experiential context? My own understanding of human interactions here revolves instead around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
But, again, that is no less an existential fabrication/contraption embedded in my own extant “lived life”.
Here though I always note the inevitable gap between understanding this as a “general description” of human interaction and the manner in which, once the words come to be reconfigured into actual behaviors out in particular worlds, folks are either more or less entangled in my dilemma.
And those the least entangled – in fact many not entangled at all – are the moral and political objectivists. For them, the “general descriptions” are ever and always in sync with behaviors deemed appropriate only for those who have proven to be “one of us”.
Sometimes with God, sometimes without.
Indeed. Somehow [or other] it is all intertwined in turn in “dark matter” and “dark energy” intertwined all the more [given the precise relationship between very, very small and the very, very large] in what may well be an infinite number of additional universes with, perhaps, an infinite number of additional Gods.
And here we all are as individual reacting to things like, say, the Las Vegas shootings:
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
Again, with or without a God, the God, my God?
Where are we on the continuum between what our ancestors knew a few thousand years ago, what we know now and what must still be known in order that we acquire any degree of certainty about Reality/Existence itself.
In fact, what makes the discussions on this thread all the more surreal is that the focus is not on what may or may not be, but on what, given our enormously complex social, political and economic interactions, conflicting renditions of what ought to be.
In order that we acquire the necessary attributes to be judged eligible by one or another conflicting renditions of God to attain immortality, salvation and access to an understanding of divine justice.
We simply do not know yet just how more or less our “basic ideas” really are.
We have this tendency instead to look back thousands of years and marvel at how much more we know today, rather than looking forward thousands of years and imaging how much more our descendants will know instead.