“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.
Of course, like all the rest of us, however many factors he took into account, how realistic is it to suppose that he took into account all of the factors there are that can be [or must be] taken into account? Did he take into account the factors that I take into account? How about the factors that you take into account? Or the factors that others focus in on that you and I and he did not think of at all?
In whatever manner we account for our own behaviors, there are surely variables we will have left out. Or include but do not understand as others do. Or do not understand in the optimal manner.
I always come back then to the seeming futility of making claims about the behaviors we choose as anything other than existential leaps. Let alone in making claims about the behaviors of others.
There seems to be no exit from the problematic “I” here. We go back and forth about it, but with no real capacity to come up with a frame of mind that allows us to draw any definitive conclusions.
And even the extent to which this disturbs some more than others is just another manifestation of the conflicting narratives we are able to come up with in explaining “I” to others.
It’s no wonder then that most become objectivists.
In other words, the parts that intertwine in the either/or world. And these include facts able to be established about us and facts able to be established about the world that we interact in.
But even here [in a No God world] we are either able to establish certain facts or we are not. So, just because something is true does not mean we able to convince others of it. And that then precipitates yet more problematic interactions. We act on what we think is true. But: The consequences are in fact what they are however they are in sync with what is actually true.
Okay, but the undeniable facts about our own psychology are still embedded in a profoundly problematic and convoluted “soup” of human interactions. There are facts that psychologists can tell us. Facts that sociologists can tell us. Facts that political scientists can tell us. Facts that anthropologists can tell us. Facts that historians can tell us.
But, given behaviors that we can describe, chosen at a particular time and place, who can really tell us what “our acts manifest the unified purposes of the psyche” means?
Other than the objectivists.