What is Dasein?

Me, I can’t get enough of it, right? :wink:

You don’t even see that “fastest from NY to LA” is a particular context, a particular point of view selected by a particular person as being the criteria for ‘optimal’ travel. You can’t see the similarity in the two situations. #-o

“Fastest is best, therefore fastest is optimal”.
Another person will say “Cheapest is best, therefore cheapest is optimal”.

“Fewest dead bodies is best, therefore fewest dead bodies is optimal”.
Another person will say “Least unemployment is best, therefore …”

No, you don’t get it at all.

That’s what you live for. Or so it seems to me. :-"

My point of course is that there actually are flesh and blood human beings intent on traveling from New York to Los Angeles. And each and everyone of them has a reason. And, given that there are not likely to be two situations that exactly overlap, we are not likely to get the same reactions when these folks are questioned about the trips.

And, if a situation ever arrives where there is a moral component involved in making the trip the fastest, who would/could/should determine which individual’s agenda is the either the most rational or the most virtuous?

And yet over and again I concede that I may well not be understanding your point. And that, if I did, my own thinking would begin to shift.

I can’t do better than that.

Then it’s exactly the same as people having different ideas about morality.

So it’s not really about the dichotomy that you have proposed - is/ought.

And if people can agree that “fastest” is in fact the best in a particular context, then they can also agree that a specific moral criteria is the best in a particular context.

And in both cases, there will be people who disagree. But that disagreement does not negate the objectivity of the evaluation. IOW, some form of travel is objectively “fastest” and therefore best in the context and some form of morality is objectively best in the context.

Well, that’s you speculating that being down in this hole, is, for me, only and always about polemics and playing games in venues like this.

That it really and truly does disturb me – the part before and after the grave – is just incidental to me in these exchanges.

Nope, not even close.

Just try to imagine how comforted and consoled you would feel if you thought like me.

If there is oblivion after the grave, then there is nothing you can do about it.

If there is something after the grave, then there is nothing you can do about it.

If you think that you ought to do something before the grave, then do it.

If you can’t think of anything to do, then don’t do anything.

This hole seems to differ in intensity depending on the context.

Again, I can only assume that I am misunderstanding what you are getting at here.

If an optimal achievement is the best that can be done, and one scores a 1600 on a SAT test, hasn’t one achieved the optimal score?

But:

Suppose a college practices affirmative action and admits students of color with lower test scores than white applicants?

Is there a “best argument” here that either justifies this practice or justifies reversing it?

And what is the difference between a particular argument here being thought of as the best of all the arguments made, and one that is declared to be the only truly rational argument that can be made?

That’s your rendition of the “problem” here. My rendition revolves around the refusual of moral and political objectivists claiming to understand Heidegger’s meaning of Dasein in BT to, in turn, bring that meaning out into the world of actual conflicting goods.

From Wiki:

In German, Dasein is the vernacular term for “existence”, as in “I am pleased with my existence” (Ich bin mit meinem Dasein zufrieden). The term has been used by several philosophers before Heidegger, most notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with the meaning of human “existence” or “presence” *. It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there/there being—though Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein.

  • my emphasis

I demand that Heidegger scholars demonstrate objectively that only his rendition of Dasein in BT reflects the one true epistemologically sound description of it.

And that is precisely what the objectivists wish to avoid here with respect to their own particular “I” out in the is/ought world: a “big mess”.

Everything must be reduced down to the one and the only technically correct philosophical “jargon” here.

Your own, for example.

Or, sure, their own.

So here you are using ‘optimal’ in the sense of maximum. Like “what’s the optimal amount of water that fits in a jug?”.

I’m pretty sure that most of the time you don’t use it in that sense.

If you ask … “what’s the optimal way to achieve a maximum SAT score”, then you’re going to have some problems figuring it out. Same with a question like “what’s the optimal way to design and build a car?”.
Or “what’s the optimal amount of water in a jug so that I can carry it to the table?”

I’ve addressed this above [or, eventually, below]. Others can decide for themselves which of us makes the better existential argument.

I was myself born and bred into the belly of the white working class beast. I used that word over and over and over again. Then circumstances reconfigured my thinking. Can I then say with all certainty that no new circumstances will come along to reconfigure my thinking back again?

How on earth could “I” or anyone possibly know objectively which new sets of variables might come along in our actual lived lives to change our thinking about anything other than that which is demonstrably true for all of us in the either/or world.

Can it be shown [re both genes and memes] that racism is inherently irrational and immoral?

Well, if it can be so demonstrated, then it would appear that any and all racists could be shown to be acting irrationally and immorally.

You can go here – google.com/search?q=scholar … ce&ie=&oe= – and peruse all the arguments. Decide for yourself “here and now” which frame of mind seems more reasonable.

I have certainly made my own existential leap here. A political prejudice. But how on earth could I possibly demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated [deontologically] to share my point of view?

And then there are the far more problematic moral conflagrations – abortion, animal rights, sexual proclivites, gun ownership, capital punishmnet – in which the conflicting goods are all that more wrenching.

With racism of course the psychological layers can become profoundly entangled:

I generally agree. The sheer number of historical, cultural and experiential variables embedded in the interactions/experiences of any one particular “I” here [precipitating profoundly complex subjunctive reactions] may well be beyond calculating. Philosophically or otherwise.

And then the part where racism is said by some to be but one more hard-wired component of a wholly determined universe.

Again, that’s just your “I” interpreting, reacting to and then judging my “I” in this exchange pertaining to these relationships.

And, sure, who am “I” here to argue that your rendition is less reasonable than mine? It’s just that “here and now” “I” don’t share your frame of mind.

This is all hopelessly abstract.

Choose a set of conflicted behaviors out in a particular context that we are all likely to be familiar with. Which particular points will be made regarding which particular behaviors? What [in those points] can or cannot be demonstrated to be “good”?

In other words, points in sync with that which philosophers are able to determine that all reasonable men and women are obligated to share.

Fine, this is your opinion. I do not share it. And for all of the reasons above [and no doubt below] that I addressed to Prismatic.

Since, out in the is/ought world of conflicting value judgments, I root my own sense of self – “I” – in an existential contraption embedded in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change, I will certainly acknowledge that some day I may not think as I do “here and now” at all.

But that’s basically the beauty of my own frame of mind here: I don’t exclude myself from my own point of view.

The question then becomes this: will I someday? Can I at all?

The objectivists on the other hand don’t really wrestle much with that. Or, rather, they don’t “here and now”.

And that is precisely why they are are still able to suckle on the comfort and the consolation embedded psychologically in an objectivist moral and political narrative/agenda.

On the other hand, perhaps there is a way. My frame of mind includes the possiblity that an objective accounting of all this is out there. Waiting to be discovered/invented by the ethicist equivalent of the physicist Einstein’s assessment of spacetime.

The crucial factor here is the existence of God. That fundamental “transcending” font that mere mortals can turn to when goods do come into conflict.

Out in any particular human community, there are going to be moral and political conflicts. And, in the end, one faction will have the power to enforce a particular set of behaviors in terms of rewards and punishments.

The might makes right crowd are simply those who resolve these things based on the fact that they have the brute force able to protect their own interests. Inherently, however, this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing.

At least until someone is able to demonstrate otherwise.

That’s your capital G, not mine. But “goods” are recognized by me [here and now] to be existential contraptions, political prejudices.

Hypocrisy would only come into play if, as Moreno often pointed out to me, I embraced moral nihilism in the philosophy forum but then in the SGE forum I came down thumping on those who refused to share my own liberal/progressive moral and political values.

And he was right. Back then I probably was pretty much the hypocrite. I often didn’t walk my talk in that forum.

The irony here being that he managed to remind me all the more of just how debilitating it can be down in that hole.

Over and again I acknowledge that I am unable to wholly refute this speculation on your part. It’s an extremely complex frame of mind. Here and now I think that my arguments are reasonable. But I don’t have access to an argument that would allow me to demonstrate this to others.

Or, just as importantly, even to myself.

“I” here for me is all that more convoluted.

All I can really do here is to recall the comfort and the consolation that I was able to embody when I thought of my “self” as the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

And how all of that is gone now.

And I still have oblivion to look forward to, don’t I?

You miss my point here. Even to the extent that moderation, negotiation and compromise become the components in any particular democracy, those who embrace them may well still be convinced that they are right and their opponents are wrong. I’m not able to think and to feel like this. The compromises are still no less embedded in the hole.

If, on the other hand, you wish to construe my own existential narrative here as but one more objectivist project, so be it.

I’ll summarize the post above:

Iambiguous believes that it is neither objective that subjects exist, nor is it subjective that subjects exist.

This is the root contradiction used in the population to attract women, a person speaking, who says “I don’t exist”, it’s 1984 big time.

He attempts to seem innocuous and kind and sympathetic enough, but this is a blatant brainwashing power move.

No, that was me noting that you attributed motivations using one kind of not qualified type of language and that when you defend this behavior you describe in a new way. You call it suggesting, when it was stating. You say you suggested it might be, when you said it was. You rewrite history. To defend your ‘I’. To fool me. To fool ‘yourself’. I don’t know.

You are a functioning objectivist and I was pointing this out.

Perhaps the people you label objectivists ‘really’ or really deep down are not. Who knows? What we have to work with is words and actions. You decided to misrepresent what you said/did. I can’t be sure of the motive, but it was slippery.

The racist analogy still holds.

And then given your own dasein based philosophy, how would ‘you’ know what ‘you’ really meant when you acted like an objectivist?

I’ll either grasp this crucial point I think that you think you are making here or I won’t.

The reason people think that flying is the fastest is that, in fact, it is the fastest. Regardless of the reason for the trip. If you want to get there the fastest you fly. At least until they invent, say, a “beam me up Scotty” technology in which you are disassembled in New york and then almost immediately reassembled in LA.

Whereras, while people might agree on a particular moral criteria if the purpose of the trip was to kill someone, what happens when others refuse to accept that criteria and propose a conflicting one instead? Either sanctioning the killing or not.

Why one and not the other, if only because some might agree you were justified in killing him and others might insist that you were not. Which “form of morality” can in fact be demonstrated to be “objectively best”?

[b]Note to others:

Seriously, what important point is he making here that I keep missing? Objectively, flying is the fastest way to make the trip. And that’s true for everyone. That’s a fact. In this day and age anyway.

But if the purpose of the trip is to kill someone, how do we arrive at this same objective assessment when different people come to very different conclusions regarding whether this killing is morally justified?[/b]

Sure, as a “general description” of the predicament that we are all in here, that is certainly one way to look at it.

Of course for some it will be considerably more effective than for others. Why? Because each of us as individuals is either more or less in the vicinity of the abyss, oblivion.

Existential death as it were.

On the other hand, there are those able to convince themselves that if they do behave in a particular manner on this side of the grave, they are rewarded with immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

And, in so believing, they are comforted and consoled.

And sure, while millions upon millions of them have simply been indoctrinated as children to embrace this soothing frame of mind, others have taken the time to explore God and religion in a considerably more sophisticated manner.

Introspectively, they come up with arguments able to sustain at least some measure of religious faith. Folks like you and Ierrellus.

All I can do then is to examine their narratives in places like this.

Exactly.

But just as crucially the manner in which one construes the meaning of that context as a particular individual out in a particular world.

I merely probe the extent to which the assessment is rooted in dasein more or less than in a probing philosophical examination.

In what sense then? As you think that I think the word “optimal” pertains to moral narratives out in a world bursting at the seams with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of conflicting goods?

Okay, but my point revolved more around the distinction between achieving the best/optimal SAT score [however you were able to figure it out] and coming up with the best/optimal argument pertaining to the use of affirmative action by colleges with regard to SAT scores.

:scared-eek:

Really, what on earth does this mean?

All I can do with folks like you is to note how obtuse, how abstract it is.

Then back to this:

Choose a set of conflicted behaviors out in a particular context that we are all likely to be familiar with. Which particular points will be made regarding which particular behaviors? What [in those points] can or cannot be demonstrated to be “good”?

Then we can discuss more descriptively, more substantively what it means to be a “functioning objectivist” in regards to our actual interactions with others. In particular, when they precipitate conflicts as a result of value judgments out of sync.

That’s basically my point. I describe the manner in which I construe the meaning of “objectivist” out in the world of conflicting human behaviors. But: How can this description be any less an existential contraption?

All others can do is to note the manner in which I stray from the official, technical understanding of the word by “serious philosophers”.

Or, if they are willing to accept my understanding of it, note why they are not themselves an objectivist out in the is/ought world.

Please, let’s bring this down out of the scholastic clouds and explore the words that we use in relationship to the world that we actually live in with others.

What words pertaining to what actions?

Instead, it’s straight back up into the stratosphere of analyzing language itself:

In a word: Huh?