Good point. Nearly always his version of objectivists is a straw man generalization. As if objectivists cannot have doubts. As if objectivists don’t understand epistemological problems. And more sorts of very all or nothing, one type objectivist is the only that exists. Which is utterly unbelievable for someone who believes in dasein - which means that uniques experiences will create unique individuals, amongst other things - and who believes there is no self or may not be a self. Still he sees these monad monolith opponents.
Yes, a moral nihilist who is adamently convinced that moral nihilism reflects the most rational understanding of the “human condition”. But that’s not me. Moral nihilism as “I” understand it is no less an existential contraption. Despite that fact that some insist that “in reality” I am no less the objectivist than those I accuse of it.
So after describing yourself as a “moral nihilist” hundreds of times, you’re not actually a “moral nihilist”??
I would say that he alternately identifies with the I that doubts everything and the I that is a leftist moral nihilist.
Isn’t that what all us [objectivists or not] do? More or less. But what does that have to do with actually critiquing the components of my own arguments here? After tending their garden and after examining their lives why are they not down in the hole with me?
Looking to me to give you an answer for your life is not tending your garden.
Yeah, but then some of them are in positions of power such that they are able to enforce their own agenda [socially, politically, economically, legally] on others.
Yeah, life is unfair and there are things out of your control.
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The irony in your correctly interpreting him as saying this is unfair (read: bad, evil, immoral] will be lost on him. He will simply saying that his calling this ap roblem is just another existential contraption. Of course if he actually believed that he would stop bemoaning the unfairness.
And you still haven’t really addressed the manner in which I speculate that why they think what they do is embodied largely in dasein.
People are the product of their genetics and their environment. I never said that they were not. But I think that genetics is the larger chunk in ethics and morality.
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He does not really want to include nature. He is implicitly a tabula rasa philosopher. It is nurture, period. Hence all his gibberish about ‘I’. When I call it gibberish, I am not dismissing the complexity of knowing oneself, let alone having anything like unity. But he sees himself as a sort of holding tank for memes. And there is no possible way for him to determine, for example, what he really feels or thinks, because he is just a holding tank for the memes he has been exposed to. He cannot even determine his wants and desires. I have tried to point out that he has not tried to find out what is nature in him, but rather focuses on a third person view of himself and what ONE should do.
Pardon my messing up the quotes.
I feel sympathy for his existential crises. These are not easy issues. But since he does not meet his discussion partners as equals, but rather as tools or avoiders of his goals, cannot admit that he contradicts himself often rather terrible, uses his cake and eat too existential contraption excuse whenever cornered, and does not live up to his own values of moderation, negotiation and compromise - which he hates the objectivists for not using even though may do, and do much more that he does (again, some of them) - I get impatient.
He is hurting himself, it seems to me, with the same kind of indifference he makes it frustrating trying to have an honest discussion with him.