I think what’s most important about iambiguous’ absurdity, is that without any doubt whatsoever, iambiguous has (like everyone) a really strong opinion of what would be bad to occur to him personally. It’s much stronger than his repeated contradiction of “Dasein”.
He knows for a fact what he doesn’t want to happen to him, and he knows for a fact that everyone else is the same. He’s trying to control bad occurring in his own psyche by claiming nobody is too good for something that has happened to be bestowed upon him - he’s trying to be a puffed up bad-ass, but he’s not, and neither is anyone else.
My approach is eclectic and I pick on generic truths regardless of where they come from.
I agree the Dalai Lama is a very wise Buddhist but he is not an all rounder.
The Dalai Lama is VERY stupid when it comes to the subject of Islam.
How can the Dalai Lama claimed the above when he has not studied the Quran and Islam seriously. He is merely relying on fallacious logic of hasty generalization, i.e.
All religions are peaceful
Islam is a religion
Islam is a peaceful religion.
I am not too sure whether he is really that stupid on Islam or pretending for being politically correct.
Point is I have never come across any Buddhist scholar or expert claiming they are also an expert on Islam and insisting Islam is a religion of peace.
I think you have a problem when you failed to see this 500 pound gorilla in the room.
Perhaps you will only wake up when you or your relatives are stab or killed by Islamists while sitting in a cafe somewhere.
The hole has several facets. There is the philosophical topic you focus on. There are the emotions that the word hole is shorthand for. These need not be solved simultaneously, even if some frustration may remain around getting the answer to the philosophical issue.
Sure, the decision to take approach X to getting out of the emotional hole may be one of trial and error, or research into scientific journals or by following your own sense of what suites your personality better than the others. This last leading potentially to trial and error.
Well, then it does not sound like a hole. You have presented it as something unpleasant, something that other people avoid with great effort and are unable even to admit their own fears around falling into the hole.
Now you are presenting it as something you can distract yourself form via music and film.
To me that is hardly a hole, in the emotional sense, and likely something with a degree of suffereing many people are facing. Why do I conclude that? Because in the holes I have faced - and surely you as a veteran have faced, I would guess - those things I would call holes and think that people go into denial over and run from and lie about, are not remotely soothed by film and music, though I certainly tried. Fears of death or not existing through time or the immanent painful death of loved one, realizations that what I thought I was doing and valued I did not. Memories of traumatic events when they surface with a vengeance over time and not just in flashes. Fears of being damned or made wrong or fundamentally repulsive at a core level. Facing actions I truly regret while at the same time not being certain I will not repeat them. When hit with these kinds of holes - which are often intermingled - your list of distractions do not distract me, in fact they can almost feel worse. I have the same feelings, and their is irritating noise or images on top of it.
Now if you want to call that a hole, fine. It’s a vague metaphor. But when you are making it seem like that kind of existential crisis hole is something all objectivists run from, I truly doubt that.
But now I get a better handle on why you might not feel any urge to climb out. You ain’t that deep down, you have whatever obstacles you hint at above, and you have your own forms of self-medication.
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It’s still framed, above, with objective morals. I do not think there is a right thing to do. There may be more effective approaches given my goals, but it is not right in any moral sense.
I was in a training where there was a consultant. Another participant reacted with open anger when we had to redo a values analysis - ironically in this context. The online instructions were not clear, most of us came to the wrong way of numbering responses. I was curious and didn’t mind redoing it. He was more irritated, at first willing, then picked up the judgment of the consultant team about his emotional reaction and actually stomped out of the room.
During the discussion of this, I came to his defense - I should add I did this even though he was critical of my accepting the task. The consultants had values about emotional expression that collided with ours. I felt empathy for his reaction, and expressed it this way. I argued that ideas about the damaging effects of emotions are not convincing to me. They argued that his way of responding was counterproductive. I argued. Well, it doesn’t really matter but there was some back and forth. He felt supported by me. The situation could have had negative effects for us financially, that is they had some power.
I pushed for having that particular situation and perhaps vaguely also society move in a direction I prefer. I was moved to act by my empathy and understanding of his reaction and my rejection of their beliefs/preferences.
I don’t know if the world I would create - if I were unbelievably convincing - would be objectively good or better than the way things are. I reacted, I think, out of yes, ideas, but also near physical reactions to judgments about emotions and emotional expression. I see culture and not always being pitted against culture, but also against bodies. IOW I do not think all reactions and preferences are simple memes. It feels to me like human bodies have preferences.
But I do not know how universal these are. I do not know if it is better, in some objective way, for the human race to die out, and anything making us uncomfortable is just peachy.
I move towards what my empathy and desire say is supportive to that which I love. And move against things I think are damaging to what I care about. Generally my main tools are to undermine arguments for things I do not like and against things I do like. IOW they tend to be skeptical arguments.
I make my best guesses. As far as what moves things in the direction I prefer.
In the specific case I think it opened some space for us to not have to stifle ourselves in the presence of authority. A tiny local victory for my preferences.
Realized that you may see my description as me claiming to have solved conflicting goods. Nah, I do not have that kind of power. This is how one can live even if one does not have objective morals. And one has no reason not to. If there are no objective morals or one cannot know what they are, THERE IS NO REASON NOT to make things more like one likes and one thinks is supportive to the things one loves. There is no reason to withdraw and not act. One can, of course, if that is what one wants to do, but then one might as well be clear to oneself and others that this is what one wants, not some noble waiting for permission to participate - even if it is only online participation.
And notice that sure, people who believe in objective morals have conflicts. So do people who do not have objective morals.
Iambig’s characterization of the hole changes all the time. That’s one reason why I think he is playing a game most of the time - entertaining himself by jerking people around and getting a reaction out of them.
Sure, there have been countless “self-help” narratives/remedies that have been broached and peddled over the years. They pop up on the best seller lists all the time. And they have certainly helped any number of folks out of their own particular holes. Or they wouldn’t be best sellers.
And, yes, I could spend the rest of my days trying them all one by one.
But how many of them have you come across that actually engage the hole that I am in? How many holes revolve around this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
“Feeling better” here is one thing. And, as I noted above, I already have plently of distractions for that. But I still feel no less embedded in an is/ought world that I construe to be embedded in turn in an essesntially absurd and meaningless No God world that ends for “I” in oblivion.
And the crucial part here in this forum is that my frame of mind revolves not only around circumstances but around a philosophical contraption such that I have managed to think myself into believing what I do.
So, I go in search of those who do not believe what I do.
But, out in the world of actual conflicting human behaviors, why don’t they?
And here they will either bring the components of their own philosophical contraptions down to earth or they won’t.
Instead I often get “general descriptions”/“intellectual contraptions” like this:
Let’s explore this as it pertains to your own life. Or to a context “in the news” that clearly divides folks into either the “one of us” or the “one of them” camps. Human interactions that clearly precipitate and then sustain all manner of human suffering.
Morality need not exist for those who are, say, castaways on a deserted island; or for those who choose to separate themselves from all others by living in survival mode out in the wilderness somewhere. Here only their belief in the existence of God would create the need for a moral path.
But once we choose to interact with others, wants and needs come into conflict. And then “rules of behavior” need to be established. And, when push comes to shove, isn’t that really what traditions/customs/folkways/mores/laws/constitutions etc., revolve around?
It just comes down then to how any particular human community configures and ceaselessly reconfigures all of the components embedded in the interaction of genes and memes.
And you think that you understand my motivations and intentions here better than I do myself. Meanwhile, I make it abundantly clear that given the pofoundly problematic manner in which “I” construe even my own capacity to understand that, “I” can never really be wholly in touch with it myself!
And, again, in my view, it is precisely this ambiguous frame of mind that others wish to avoid themselves. And, in order to do so, they must come to believe that there really does exist one or another rendition of a “real me” able to discover and/or invent rules of behavior said to be the optimal or the only rational way in which to interact with others.
Again, what on earth are you suggesting here? Note a context, note a set of conflicting behaviors. We can then engage the respective components of our arguments as they pertain to actual human interactions revolving around identity, value judgments and political power.
Yeah, I get this part. And how in the world would I – could I – ever really know for certain the extent to which it [or parts of it] aren’t true?
All I know is that, in being down in the hole, “I” feel profoundly fractured and fragmented in engaging moral and political issues. Conflicts that, as an objectivist, I was able to obviate by embracing a frame of mind enabling me to believe that I was in fact in touch with a “real me” able to grasp those truly right and those truly wrong sets of behaviors.
And, as a devout Christian, I was destined once to attain both immortality and salvation.
But in order to embrace those enormously comforting and consoling idealities once again I’d have to betray…what exactly?
Being trapped in am is/out world, is like seeking confirmation. to allay that feeling.(or being trapped. But there is no exit , because the social safety valve has dropped out many years ago, dropped one into total doubt.
The will habe abandoned is, into a world of choices , too many to evaluate, hence we only can drop all of these choices into two: the a capable acceptable and the unacceptable. We forced to go ahead with it, or get back where where tho choices kept narrowing into plausible , rational decisions, where the authority and final fimal judgement judgement waa divided into a jury of opinions
One thinks, might as well keep the choice open between a jury of many, or Yourself being the only instinctual arbiter…
Can I trust myself to be that, when others feel the same?
Can the be each and every one think the same?
Can my self trust be grounded in such successful conclusions in the past? Or with the risk of a failure of judgement be prey to a self condemnation?
If so, hesitation at first steps in and then that into absolute reversal of any future attempt of judgement.
This becomes a perceived crisis in ethics.
Everything is permitted, as long its grounded in the rational expectation of how such a man would judge. Appraising reason.
A reasonable man can discern singular, empathetic leeways of applicability, predominantly based on reduced either this or that: are we innocent or guilt in declaring any value to stand on what can be allowed, and what can’t?
Morally, there is no such choice, what is right is right, and what is wrong is wrong
It is based on what should. R done, and there really is no two ways about it.
This, from my point of view, is a classic example of what some philosophy here has devolved into.
Is the point true?
In other words, are the definitions and the meanings and the order that have been given to these words able to encompass that which all rational men and women are obligated to share?
Well, let’s bring this “absolute hole” and “idealism” and “dual logic” and “confusions” regarding moral relativity down to earth and explore it given the manner the manner in which I have come to situate the meaning of dasein out in the world of actual human interactions.
Those Those comforts that allow one to think thataybe are caused by moral necessary consideration, and not due to ethically confusing patterns necessitating a choice.
A choice between a consciable necessary moral act suspending a moral self condemnation, or one where not acting in accordance with acceptable standards result in unconscionable acts resulting in confusion and self doubt…
Examples are necessary here and those acts such as saving someone to whom one owns an unqualifies debt to , such as saving saving a daughter from drowning a daughter , or saving saving a host of giving said daughter medicine to save her life, even if, itnhaa to be stolen from a drug store, mad worry about the consciable judgment of others’ opinions after that, and plead non contest after that
Moral imperatives do not allow any finding of.truth and false, by definition , they are categorically true and allow no false-mess to distill into a further choice based on even a modicum of doubt
Does abortion not conflated between ethical and moral consideration s? Does an ethically inclined doctor soint his own consciences. and necessitates his suspension of judgement, because of the necessary implementation of going going aheadnof am abortion, or, could he refer the procedure with someone less consciable?
You have been presenting your hole as something so scary to objectivists they must oppose you and deny the validity of what you are saying and hide the truth from what you are saying. And yet now it is described as something you watch films and listen to music to distract yourself from. We thought you were really deeply upset 1) because you called it a hole 2) because of how powerful the effect you attribute to this hole having on objectivists when they get somewhere near it.
But here is turns out to be on a part with everyday stress such as that at the average job, given the list of self-medication techniques you use. And yes, I understand now why you feel little motivation to find a way out of your hole and I now see no reason to point out that there are methods to help you out of the hole. You can,however, back off from the - my ideas threaten you so much, I can face the discomfort of the truth and you cannot posturing. That’s just silly, now that you’ve revealed what can soothe your dark night of the soul, even if it is only temporary.
Or just finding a way not to change while accusing his opponents of being afraid. It is a pretty standard ad hom. You run from the truth of my arguments, you cannot face them - I mean the know thyself crowd uses this approach regularly. But when suggestions come at him to come out of his hole, then it is not so bad. Convenient answers at different points in time that do not reconcile. Who knows? I have noticed oddities and probed them and at times I am sure it is something like what you say, at times something else. I really don’t know. A form of trolling. An angry stance covered by a more ‘I just don’t know what to do’ stance. I don’t know how much self-knowledge there is, how much intent to piss off or hit back on people he thinks are making the world worse. Or…
In the end I just see the inconsistancies and get the sense something other that what he is presenting is going on.
Again, I take it all back. I thought your hole was a deep existential and painful crisis. I do hold you responsible to a great degree for that impression, even here above your use of language makes it sound extremely painful. But given how easy it is to distract yourself from it and your lack of interest and need for any way out of the emotional hole, I have a better sense of what you are facing on a day to day level. I took your rhetorical attack on objectivists too seriously. You do think they are deluded but you are not remotely as troubled yourself as it seemed. It was just a good way to attack those you see as deluded.
OK, now I know you do not identify as Buddhist. You kept mentioning Buddhist Noble Truths and presenting ideas that are experienced only by advanced meditators as if you knew them to be the case, again within the Buddhist tradition. You took umbrage, elsewhere, to criticisms of the Buddhist community and masters and the judgments and behaviors I find there. You were sure it would not hold for those masters in South Asian Buddhism, I believe it was. My experience is that those masters also are very critical of public judgments and speaking about meditative states one has not yet experienced and even then very carefully. But I see now you have just taken what you like and are not interested in why masters who actually have attained those states over decades - and in their belief system, lifetimes - universally warn people off some of the behaviors you exhibit, and because they consider it to slow down their development as meditators thus increasing their suffering. IOW evil, in their non-Western sense of the term. You know better than them despite your novice status what can be tossed to the side. Which if fine with me, I do not like that tradition anyway.
I was not referring to public statements on Islam. I was talking about daily practices that lead to deeper meditation and the specific states that Buddhist practices are aiming at. And then what obstacles one can create to accomplishing things there. But you are in the mall of Buddhism, shopping for what you like, like many a Westerner.
What the heck are you on about? My views on Islam are extremely negative.
What an ugly thing to say. Furher it is a stupid thing to say. My relatives are vastly more likely to die from corporate conscoius negligence, wars and their effects carried out for corporate profit,than through terorrism and so are yours, but we’ll never see you writing threads critical of the philosophies of life and value inherent in corporate culture will we?
And just to be trebly clear. Those methods engage the emotional suffering related to any hole. They do not solve the conundrum and they will not elimate all suffering, but they reduce it, often to a remarkable degree. And as said repeatedly and repeatedly ignored by you, you can then continue to seek an answer to the conundrum while suffering less. But now I understand that your suffering is not so great, given your self-help methods, and, for your information, that level of suffering is likely NOT something people are terrified of, or those books would not be so popular, nor would more serious players be looking for methods that help people deal with really heavy stuff and true existential crises.
It would be better perhaps not to focus on one particular person but generalize a discussion. toward shared problems that need not descend into am absolute abyss for I do not think that even exists.
The reduction toward such descent is the backbone of existential reduction and this befits all mankind.
The reduction traps any one into nihilism, since phenomena are out pointiillystically into.an expanding canvas, where the edges seem to blend into one another
But it’s an illusion and the illusion. Is which we are all trapped in. In particular illusions into more illusions with the optics becoming more fabulous.
So if Lambigious’ problem with reduction is worthy of closer examination into it , he is not doing his own reduction , unless he wants to become self destructive, and listening to him over the years. that is not my impression of him, but that he is not attuned to , literally the increasing impressionist interpretation. Who he is, probably not worth his while to transcend, because he may not view transcendental reality the way to so it.(phiilosophically) in fact I do not believe for a second that he is a tranacendentalist.
This is also my preference, to connect the points by a visual correspondence between equally spreading and seemingly disembodied visual clues which have taken up residence in usual roles without actually believing them.
Its like six characters searching for an author, while remaining in an accustomed characterization.
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.
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?
