Well, after a series of rather substantive exchanges between us, that post had shrunk down to what I construed to be retorts. Zingers aimed at making me the point.
And that’s an honest expression of my evaluation. Or, rather, as honest as someone who thinks like “I” do can be.
Apparently, I’m not doing these exchanges in the way that they are supposed to be done. In the way that you and KT have been “helping” me to understand.
At this point, it seems fairly obvious that the help we thought you were asking for is not the help that you actually want. (If what you want can even be called ‘help’. )
The help I am asking for revolves basically around three things:
1] figuring out if, on this side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the nihilistic hole that “I” am in when confronting conflicting goods
2] figuring out if, on the other side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the abyss
And on this thread in particular
3] figuring out if my thoughts and feelings regarding the first two are in sync with at least some measure of autonomy pertaining to “I”
And here what else is there but to exachange points of view? I merely prefer them to be anchored [as much as possible] out in the world of actual human interactions.
I produce “confusion and frustration” in folks because I don’t come around to their way of thinking.
You seem to be asking for help with a big problem but then it turns out that your problem isn’t much of a problem for you after all. That’s the source of the “confusion and frustration”. “What the fuck is going on.”
First of all, you keep noting this as though it is something that you can in fact actually know. Again, just because I am able to distract myself from those things I am trying to figure out, doesn’t make them go away. And I recognize how ultimately futile it is likely to be for you to grasp this from my point of view. And vice versa. But I never lose sight of the possibility of bumping into someone who thinks about these things in a way that manages to reconfigure how I think about them. Dasein [for me] is everywhere here.
Then it comes down to to either grappling with or impugning each others motives. The trickiest part to say the least. Hell, I suspect I am not even close to fully grasping my own. If grasping anything at all is even within my capacity as someone in possession of a “free will”.
It’s not because you “don’t come around to their way of thinking”.
It’s true: I have no way of demonstrating that this is in fact applicable to you and to others here. All I can do is to extrapolate from past experiences with exchanges of this sort.
Whereas with respect to the “the big questions” and/or the “is/ought world” I don’t expect there ever not to be confusion and frustration.
Nothing to do with this expectation of yours.
Meaning what? If expectations here are construed by me to be profoundly problematic, it then comes down to finding someone able to convince me that they don’t have to be. But here I always come back to the gap between what any of us think we know about these things and all that there actually is to know.
You tell me: How can the expectations that any of us have be fitted snugly into that?
And even though I have accumulated “distractions” as my own “whatever works” method of achieving some measure of “comfort and consolation”, it doesn’t make the hole go away. It doesn’t make the parts embedded in an essentially meaningless world and oblivion go away.
That’s like saying that painkillers don’t make the cause of the pain go away. No shit. They make the pain go away.
Huh? You’re comparing taking aspirin for a headache to embodying distractions able to numb the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless world that tumbles over into oblivion?
As for dealing with the cause, I haven’t seen you try anything that has been suggested to you. It’s been 8 years. One would think that at least one worthwhile idea would have popped up in all that time.
What can I say. All those ideas later and it still seems more reasonable to me to distract myself from the hole that I am in on this side of the grave and the nothingness that awaits me on the other side.
I’ll leave it to you to explain to others why that is all my fault.
And yet I am still convinced that any number of folks like you and KT and Gib are repelled not by my “methodology”, but by the arguments that I make. In particular, the part where I reconfigures into “i”.
Believe me, it’s the way you post. Your “arguments” about “i” or “I” are not particularly frightening/repelling.
Okay, fine. Let’s leave it at that. Again, all I have to fall back on here are my own personal experiences with objectivists over the years. The part about “I” always seemed to be particularly aggravating to them.
This part:
The fractured and fragmented “I”, unable to pin down right and wrong behavior objectively. The mere mortal “I” that tumbles over into the abyss that is nothingness. The “I” that can’t even decide with a measure of self-assurance that “I” is all his own, autonomously.
Ooh scary. Just kidding.
If you say so.
Okay, over the past 10 years, what positions [regarding important matters] have others managed to change your own point of view about?
And you seem to insist that the problem here is always me not them. There have been arguments that would have worked but I refused to listen. Willfully refused apparently.
But they’re not asking for help. You seem to be asking for help.
What’s that really got to do with answering my qestion? What positions [of late] regarding important issues have the arguments of others managed to precipitate change [helped you] in your own life?
It comes down to “Do you want help? Do you want to change? Are you doing something in order to change?”
I really think that all you want is to talk.
What can I say? Yes, I really would like to come upon arguments that might “for all practical purposes” help me to “figure out” the three things I noted above. And I am more than willing to at least make the attempt to understand the experiences of others that helped them.
But: there are only so many [realistic] options open to me “here and now”.