Iambiguous: non-objectivists should feel bad

I realize now that I may have contributed to the problem by using the term pragmatism or pragmatist. I am not a follower of James or Dewey. I was using the term in its everyday sense of being practical, trying to get what I want. I mean this precisely in the sense that any mammal, for example, uses its skills to get what it wants and avoid what it doesn’t want. It is not a believe about the nature of reality. It is not prescriptive. I simply not that that, like everyone, including you, I takes steps to get what I want. I have not decided that it is ok to try to get what I want, I simply note that I, like other animals, do this. Toward the end of this post I cite a number of you comments about me, assigning me types of evaluations and thinking I do not do, nor have I done. Perhaps this comes out of my using the term pragmatic and its other forms. I did not become a practical person because I read the little about Dewey I have, nor do wolves. My preferences are based I assume ONLY on my nature and nurture. That is genetics and experiences. Which fits with current scientific ideas about what gives us our tendencies and preferences. I have no contraptions to make me feel less fragmented. I do not know why you react to the degree you do to being a non-objectivist. Could be your experiences that are different from mine.

  1. No. Perhaps you do. The general You, as in one, does not. This is your reaction to non-objectivity. You are universalizing. Please demonstrate that one must do this.
  2. Pragmatism means only that I take practical measures to achieve my goals. LIke any mammal does, for example.
  3. Tell me what you have seen (re: eye of beholder) that indicates that my pragmatism, which you share by the way, minimizes my fragmentation. What have you seen to indicate this? Be specific about what facets of my pragmatism lead to minimizing the default fragmentation.
  4. How does trying to figure out how to accomplish one’s goals lead to minimizing fragmentation? And since you do this also, why does it not minimize your fragmentation?
  5. Why did you react with amazement when I said you considered it inevitable that one must have a contraption if one is a non-objectivist who is not in a hole? You clearly believe it is inevitable.
  6. Why is it not possible that the degree of your fragmentation has to do with your history, which is not mine, your parenting, perhaps, and what you were born with genetically? Why is your level of fragmentation the default that must be the case unless there is a contraption?

Here are a couple of things your eye of the beholder ‘saw’…

This is just making up stuff. I have never said that my preferences are derived from objectivists and philosophers.

Nope. This is making stuff up. I make no judgments on the weight of that based on pragmatism or ANYTHING ELSE. It sure seems like you put a lot of weight on that and you suffer it. I do not suffer it. I do not believe in pragmatism and therefore experience less of a hole. I just notice that sans objectivism, I head out not trying to satisfy objective morals, but just trying to achieve things based on my preferences. I note that. I call that pragmatism, because that is what is left without objectivism. Just as you takes steps to achieve your goals. Just as any mammal does, for example. Wolves do not have a contraption that keeps them from the hole. They apply the skills they have to achieve what they want, and to avoid what they do not want to experience. That is all I mean by pragmatism. You are adding in some stuff that is not in there. Perhaps I contributed to your confusion by using the term pragmatism. All I meant was that given a lack of objective morals, I am left with trying to make things more like I prefer them and less like I do not. It is not a philosophical position. It is a given for any animal. Even you. Even you takes steps to find an answer to something you want. You try to solve the problem. Even you order food or shop. Even you go to the doctor when you need to. We are all pragmatists, all of us mammals. Even the objectivists, though they are also other things, and those things fall under the category of objectivism.

And, you are treating your reaction to non-objectivism as the default.

NO, I never said anything like that nor done that kind of evaluation. You make things up.

I may have contributed in some way in not being clear. But I do not react to the absence of objective morals nor to my own potential and past changes in my preferences like you do. It does not create a crisis in me.

You are assuming that all people are alike at base, so If I am not in crisis because of this I have a contraption.

You cannot entertain the possibility that your crisis may be caused by a contraption.

You cannot entertain the possiblity that other people might react differently when faced with a lack of objective morals.

So you behold contraptions where there are none, and you tell me what is going on inside me with no basis.

Can you stop this?

Okay, but here’s the problem with this from my frame of mind.

Any number of folks can claim to be pragmatists. They generally eschew “might makes right”/“survival of the fittest” political contraptions. They generally eschew “right makes might”/“kingdom of ends” political [and religious] contraptions.

Instead, most tend toward “moderation, negotiation and compromise”/“democracy and the rule of law” contraptions.

Like me. But, unlike most pragmatists, I am not able to think myself into believing that my own value judgments are not hopelessly entangled in dasein and conflicting goods. “I” am instead bascially drawn and quartered in confronting my “self” in confronting issues like abortion or Communism.

But no other mammal comes even close to grappling with their day to day interactions as does the human species. Instead, for them, it is almost always bahavior rooted far more in biological imperatives.

Yeah, but you have managed to think yourself into believing that “I” here, in taking steps to accumulate “preferences”, need not be concerned with the parts about dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. At least not to the extent that my “I” recognizes them as crucial in coming to grips with understanding why “I” want ths instead of that.

They are simply less construed as “fabrications” and “contraptions” to you.

And how is this not an assumption that deep down inside lurks this “real me” such that even had your life been “very, very different” you would still be pursuing the same “preferences”.

But the only way to test this at all is to find your life being upended by an avalance of new experiences that takes “I” into new contexts like never before. Does “I” stay the same?

So, has that been the case with you?

For me there are two contexts in particular that are applicable:

1] being drafted into the Army as a staunch conservative Christian and coming out of the Army as a radical Marxist atheist
2] the Mary/John/William Barrett experience which precipitated the deconstruction of my own objectivist frame on mind

My point though is this: only to the extent that you illustrate the text by situating your preferences “out in a particular context” am I likely to understand how “for all practical purposes” your “I” here remains less fragmented than mine. And that entails noting specifically how in a particular conflict with someone [or regarding a value judgment pertaining to an issue “in the news”] you manage to keep “I” more rather than less intact.

Because, sooner or later, despite recognizing that had your life actually been very, very different, you might be championing a conflicting value judgments, you settle for one moral and political narrative rather than another. Precisely because you have not allowed the parts about dasein and conflicting goods to rend your own “I” as mine has been.

That [again] is your rendition of my reaction. I steer clear of words like “must” or “inevitable” when confronting these problematic relationships. All I can do here is to note my own understanding of what I construe to be the profoundly existential juncture that is identity, value judgments and political power.

But this is precisely my point in connecting the dots here between “I” as the embodiment of dasein and particular preferences out in the is/ought world. Whether one refers to things like “religion” or “ideology” or “deolotology” or “pragmatism” or “nature” etc., as “contraptions” or not doesn’t make them any more or less effective in providing “I” with a font able make one’s psychological predisposition more or less comforting and consoling.

Whatever works I always say.

My point here is that I recognize my own value judgments as more in pieces because I recognize that “I” itself here as more an existential contraption than your “I” does.

Thus…

First of all, I acknowledge right from the start that my reaction to you here is no less an existential contraption enbedded in “in my view”.

As for, “I make no judgments on the weight of that based on pragmatism or ANYTHING ELSE”, what on earth does this mean?

Take us out into your world, note a particular context, and actually illustrate your point here. Judgments about what particular behaviors that have come into conflict?

Wolves?!!!

How close is that to the argumnts that Satyr and his clique/claque over at KT would make when in describing the nature of human interactions they come back time and and again to lions and zebras.

For wolves, the “contraption” is almost entirely instinctual. Genes with only the slimmest connection to memes. Given the extent to which they can learn new ways in which to susrvive. But none of them to my knowledge would describe their behaviors as either more or less deonotological, or more or less practical. The “stuff” that I am adding here revolves around a species of mammal able to actually ponder why one individual has one set of preferences while another has an entirely different set?

What, epistemologically, can we know about this? How is the manner in which I construe these conflicted interactions at the intersection of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy more or less reasonable than the manner in which you construe them given the manner in which you describe yourself as a pragmatist?

I am not able to think that my own value judgments are not inevitably entangled in dasein. Again you tell me that I think myself out of something. But I have not done that. I am not unlike you there. You just, again, said I am something but it is not true. I think it is inevitable that those things are entangled. I took out the word ‘hopelessly’ since this implies an emotional reaction I do not have, but which you do. We are unlike in our emotional reaction to this. We are unlike in that you spend a very large part of you communication and time on this issue. We are unlike in that you are seeking to solve this, but giving every chance for some objectivist to demonstrate their values are correct. But I have no contraption that MAKES me different from you there. Perhaps you have a contraption makes you put so much weight on the issue. Perhaps you do not. Perhaps dasein has made it that you put much more weight on it than I do, or mine such that I do not. Perhaps it is your temperment, coming from dasein and genetics. I don’t know.

Yes, we are more complicated. But I have no contraption. I try, like mammals, to solve problems related to my preferences. I have more preferences than a garden mole. I have more ways to solve problems or fail to. There are more factors, but there is no value contraption associated with it. I don’t find myself obsessing about the lack of objective morals. Consider that your reaction my be your particular, individual reaction based on dasein, etc, to the absence of objective morals. I mention mammals because it seems to me it offers the opportunity to consider what the default is. And to consider if the weight you put on the issue might itself be based on a contraption and/or based on dasein.

One huge thing that separates us from mammals, who are not in your hole, are contraptions. It takes a number of contraptions to give all that weight to the issues around your hole.

You assume a non-objectivist not in the hole must have a contraption.
I am pointing out that it may very well take a contraption to put a lot of weight on the issue in the way you do.
Or it may be due to your particular temperment, at this time in your life, and your experiences.
And, in any case, when you try to lay out how my contraptions work and what they are, they have nothing to do with me.

Nope. I have never decided not to be concerned about it. This is you making up some kind of process in me, presumably based on yourself.

I think, but I am not sure, that you use yourself as the default. Since you react to non-objectivism the way you do, if someone else does not they must have a contraption. And repeatedly over and over, you tell me what I have done, like in the quote above, and it is not something I have done.

Apart from differences in our pasts, our current lives could also affect how much weight we put on things. Our social lives, intimate connections, work or lack of and how well that fits with our skills and preferences and in general do we get to do things that we care about with people we care about. All that would also affect the amount of weight, time and energy one would put into ANY existential hole.

I no doubt contributed to this confusion by using a philosophical term pragmatism when I meant in the way I have now described.

I realize I have only partially responded. But I keep thinking this dialogue needs to be very focused. I mess this up by trying a dozen angles and then regretting it. Consider me a ‘bulimic’ interlocutor.

In a world of conflicting goods the will to power prevails. That’s why the world is will to power. All non-power-gathering drives lost out.

Meaning it is a contraption to make a problem of conflicting goods. A more honest and direct approach simply recognises all entities as mining the same pool of “goods” and it isn’t the goods, but the entities that conflict.

Someone marked by “amor fati” ( a Latin “contraption”) even considers this conflict a “good”. So at that points goods only conflict on the lower tiers.

For example, the fight against leftists is excruciating because of their profoundly ugly souls bit deep down it gives me absolute satisfaction to be made so aware that I am not them, nothing like them, they will never value my values and thus I can completely dismiss them as less than worthless. This places me at the heart of nature, away from all contrived “peace” and in a genuine calm, a steady flame.

It surely occurred to you all here that any intellectual question is a contraption.
The uncontrived mind simply observes, weighs and decides.

Iambs core question is a contraption contrived to invite contraptions, presumably to avoid knowledge.

Knowledge is decisive in its influence. Iamb contrives to be free of this influence much like Sokrates, who also was in a deep hole he could only escape through “suicide by trial”.

In the last analysis there is only one question, Hamlet asks it.

From the answer to this question all the rest follows.

Sokrtes answered negatively, and all his “philosophy” (contraption) is to be derived from that answer.

Hamlet is a good character to bring up. He is in a kind of a hole and in his ‘to be or not to be’ he discusses the issue. Imagine he discussed the issue, using the same terms, the same lines, over and over hundreds of times. He is a member of ILP and he comes here, in the hopes of finding an objective answer to whether he should choose to continue living despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or whether it is logical, objectively smart to end his suffering and die.
This is not Iamb’s hole. He seems to have chosen to live. Suicide is not on the table.
He has a different existential crisis.
But if we imagine this ILP Hamlet coming back again and again to post on his hole and this choice, we might find it odd if he thought everyone else should have his particular focus give it the same weight. That the amount of weight Hamlet gives, the ILP Hamlet, to this hole, should be the weight every person gives to that hole.
If they don’t, he tells them they have a soothing contraption.
One should be able to conclude that Iamb must have a contraption regarding the suicide issue. He’s not a mammal driven by just biological needs.
One should be able to conclude that since Iamb does not bemoan external transience and contingency, he must have a contraption there also.
The people we know, the places we live often shift as we age. Many people find this outer transience depressing, that It makes their lives meaningless and random.
But Iamb is focused on the inner transience, that his morals have changed over time and may again. He does not focus much on that other hole. Fine.
But when he encounters a non-objectivist who is not in hole about the contingency and transience of morals, their lack of objectivity…and they are not troubled by this like he is, he then starts telling them they have a contraption that makes them not worry so much.
As if we must all be like him. Because he would need a contraption to not give it the incredible weight he gives it, I assume.
What contraption keeps him out of focusing on Hamlet’s hole? Or Siddhartha’s hole that he suffered before he invented Buddhism?
There’s the hole about the gap between men and women or between people in general: the one where one cannot find way to think the intimacy one yearns for is possible or how to get it or how to know it is real. He’s not in that hole. What contraption keeps him from that?
What contraptions might be involved in the amount of weight he gives his hole?
What secondary gain might be gotten from focusing only there?

if you’re a therapist its easy, you must say its laziness

he spends 99 percent of the energy needed to go out of the hole on making the hole slippery. It is only 1 percent easier but it works super. He doesn’t need to go beyond the hole and face the unexpected where he can’t be lazy. Thats what one of 12 therapists I was into when some bad shit had freaked me out, told me. But then I realized the therapy was the Hole. I just got out of it and got my life in order like snap, really cool it worked.

Fuck the hole.

I-)

No its will to power. He does make the hole slippery and tries for others to fall into it, and it works, we are talking to him in his hole about his hole.

He is just having fun, posting music and keeping people obsessed with him. That is a good routine to have on a forum.

:smiley:
gotcha
Be the flame, not the moth that is his motto.

I don’t know either. But that is largely my point. In trying to understand how and why we come to react [as particular individuals] to conflicting goods at the intersection of “I” and political power, our intentions and motivations become entangled in the gap between what we think we know is true here and now and what is in fact true given a frame of that actually can know this.

Here of course most folks assign that task to God. But others, in rejecting religion, assign it instead to one or another political ideology or intellectual contraption [RM/AO, Value Ontology etc.] or assessment of nature.

As for the “hole”, my argument is certainly not that your argument is less reasonable than mine. It is only an attempt to describe it here at ILP; and then to note the assumptions and the components it is based on; and then to elicit reactions. Reactions from the objectivists, reactions from the non-objectivists.

And then [from time to time] to speculate on the extent to which some folks here become rather hostile to my point of view. Entire threads are created to expose me as a fool. Why? Well, perhaps because some sense the possibility that the components of my own argument here may well be applicable to their own “I” too.

What do you think?

Or, perhaps, we should invite the “serious philosophers” here to pin down once and for all the epistemological parameters of the word “contraption”.

They could react to the manner in which I construe your own rendition of pragmatism as just another existential/intellectual contraption; and then the manner in which you insist that it is not a contraption at all.

Let’s make the attempt to take this to the either/or world: Is it or not?

Then we could invite in other members of the mammal community to weigh in on it. :-k

And then, in my view, it’s straight back up into the stratosphere:

Indeed, the dialogue needs to focus in on a particular context. One involving conflicting goods that we are all familiar with. We can explore the actual existential, “for all practical purposes” implications of the words that we choose in our “general descriptions” above.

Note to others:

Is this not but another contribution in which words define and defend other words?

“Will to power”.

Okay, let’s consider that. Do these words reflect a reasonable assessment of human interactions when confronted with conflicted goods?

Or, instead, are they too just another “intellectual contraption” embedded historically, culturally and experientially in any number of vast and varied contexts.

Entangled in turn in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

Let Jacob bring the discussion here down to earth. Let him note a particular context.

Beat it Kid!

Seriously though, reconfigure this blustering sub-mental Kiddish accusation into an assessment of your own moral philosophy when confronting conflictng goods. How are you not down in the hole as I describe it above?

And from your perspective, as you have described it, saying you do not know, not as a mere disclaimer, but up front, makes sense. Since your philosophy allows for a wide variation of reactions, necessarily connected to experiences, assuming I have a contraption and this is why I react differently does not make sense.

Pragmatism in turn allows for “a wide variation of reactions, necessarily connected to experiences”.

My point then revolves around the extent to which these individual reactions are predicated more rather than less on the manner in which I encompass dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

In other words, given the assumptions embedded in this intellectual contraption, what makes “sense” to any one particular individual is, in my view, also going to be embodied in dasein.

Out in the world of actual conflicting behaviors.

Then it comes down to others here noting the extent to which these assumptions are not applicable to them with respect to issues like abortion or Communism or the Kavanaugh confirmation.

Sure, of course, as I have repeatedly said, experiences affect how I think and what I prefer.

Who is he arguing with?

Show of hands … does anybody think that preferences are not the result of genetics and experience? Anybody?

He doesn’t mention genetics much. When I started bringing it up, he seemed to agree, but reading most of his posts one could easily conclude he is a tabular rasa believer. That we are black slates and our preferences and morals ONLY come from our experiences.

So, we’ll see if he raises his hand.

And thus…

Had those experiences been considerably different you might well be embracing considerably different preferences.

So: Any particular sequence of new experiences, relationships and access to information/knowledge might result in preferences that are actually the opposite of what you embrace now.

All I then ask of others here [objectivists and non-objectivists alike] is to provide us with an argument [and a context] such that they are able to describe how their own reactions to conflicting goods embedded in their own chosen preferences results in them – in their “I” – not being fractured and fragmented.

Mine is. How are theirs not?

But: I don’t argue that if their “I” is not also in pieces here, it ought to be. I’m just unable to reconfigure my own “I” back into something analogous to “the real me” in sync with the “right thing to do”. Something that they [more or less] are still able to do.

So, let them encompass a value judgment near and dear to them in the manner in which I do in my abortion trajectory above. The part where experiences and ideas shape and mold each existentially into any one particular “I” here and now.

And, sure, call it a “contraption” or don’t.