a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

The healthiest is Nietzsche’s: neither transcendentalism nor atheism: overcoming and self-overcoming. And transcendentalism a little bit.

leftism proper is only a pathological and eidetic expression of the paternal/maternal instinct in human beings. wanting to ‘take care’ of someone. remember heidegger’s whole thing about dasein’s possession of the world as grounded in ‘care’? that was one of his better moments. so, naturally, when you see a nigga being what you consider ‘mistreated’, you wanna jump in there and straighten shit out. pretty simple really. that’s all leftism is. the marxist is the linderman (vanguard) protecting and teaching the clifford (working class) how to beat the mikes and moodys (capitalists) of the world. this is, ad hominus simpliciter, an expression of fatherly/motherly love.

Yes, we all know that’s how leftists like to think of themselves.

indeed, and some of them are even liars. oh shit wait. i just had a eureka moment. what’s the difference between an opportunistic leftist liar who seeks office only to fatten his own pockets and doesn’t give a shit about the workin man, and a capitalist who seeks to maintain conservatism to fatten his own pockets and doesn’t give a shit about the workin man? (while also being entirely dependent on him. interesting, that. almost like biting the hand that feeds you, but that would be like comparing a capitalist to a dog… which is a very generous analogy)

yeah so did you see that? it’s like ‘hey capitalist, what are you bitchin about? these fucksticks are doing the same thing you are, right?’ ohhhh i see. suddenly it’s ‘unethical’ to get rich… especially if you’re lying while trying to do it. in that case, an honest leftist who admitted he didn’t give a shit about the workin man would garner the respect of the capitalist.

and this would work, actually, because we can’t indict the capitalist on lying here. he’d have to know what he thinks is ethical is actually not (for several epistemological reasons… and even more pragmatic reasons) in order to be ‘lying’. so far, the capitalist is only an imbecile, not a bad guy.

now we’ve reached a beautiful dilemma. the capitalist isn’t a liar (because he’s too dumb) but he does not empower the workin man… while the fake-ass leftist is a liar, but empowers the working man.

fuck. now what do we do?

Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality

And, if this be the case, then everything — everything that encompasses the body, everything that encompasses the mind, and everything the encompasses the world around it/“I”, can only be entirely explained when we have an understanding – ontological? teleological? – of existence itself.

This thread however takes that gap for granted. Just as it makes the presumption that we all have some measure of free-will to actually opt for particular points of view.

Dasein then revolves around “I” in our day to day interactions and the extent to which what we believe to be true about them is able to be demonstrated as in fact true. Call it true objectively. Call it true universally. Call it true empirically. Call it true phenomenologically. Call it true historically, anthropologically, ethnically, culturally, sociologically, politically, economically, psychologically.

It is either a thing or a relationship in sync with what science calls the “laws of nature” out in the either/or world able or not able to be verified or falsified by way of the “scientific method”.

Of course science is considerably less concerned with “I” in the is/ought world. With human behaviors said to be virtuous or moral. Here instead any number of philosophers down through the ages have grappled with what in the discipline is called “ethics”.

And that’s the part I zoom in on in regard to my own understanding of dasein in this thread. That’s the part where I focus the beam at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political power.

Out in any particular world, in any particular context, understood from any particular point of view. And here I speculate not so much on what philosophers can tell us, but on what [perhaps] they cannot.

But it is only when we take these “intellectual contraptions” down off the scholastic scaffolding and situate the words out in a particular context, out a particular world, can the human condition be explored more substantively.

Or, rather, so it seems to me.

Liars to who?

You have yet to realize the realization of lying to one’s self.

Go, meditate on this. “Nihilism” won’t do.

What’s So Simple About Personal Identity?
Joshua Farris asks what you find when you find yourself.

In other words, as I interpret it, “I” is not reducible down to the body or to the brain, or to a particular set of memories, or to a personality, or to a character. Instead it is embodied in the manner in which they all somehow come together from day to day to produce a “perspective”. I think this, I feel that, I choose this, I do that.

Basically, the manner in which most of us think about “I” in the world around us for all practical purposes. Given some measure of autonomy.

And we can think of it this way until someday, someone actually is able to demonstrate why the whole package is reducible down to a specific factor above.

And, in the interim, it still comes down to that which we are in fact able to demonstrate to others is [existentially] the most rational way in which to think, feel, say or do…anything.

There’s no getting around circularity here because however you explain human identity, you come back to certain assumptions you make which are not able to be either verified or falsified definitively. And this must be the case or there would already be an explanation out there that accomplishes precisely that.

Though, sure, if you think there is one, link it to us.

Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.

The technological self?

Assuming of course that, using the technology currently available to them, neuroscientists are not able to rule out entirely at least some capacity on our part to freely choose among the options made available.

Given some measure of autonomy here, “I” is about to enter that brave new world in which the human biological self itself is reconfigured into a kind of memetic self predicated on those qualities that any particular historical or cultural community value the most.

Of course this part…

…we may soon be stronger, healthier, longer-lived, happier, with more acute senses, and capabilities undreamed of by our ancestors…

…is one thing. But it might well become another thing altogether if science is able to reconfigure the mind’s “I” so as to instill characteristics and behaviors more in sync with one political narrative rather than another.

What sort of behaviors should be encouraged if all it takes is tweaking the brain at or around birth?

Then this part:

What might science be able to pin down here more definitively? Whole new ways to grasp the phenomenological “I”? Will a “self within” be discovered? Will there be ways to determine what the optimal self might be? And ways to bring that about in the really and truly brave new world of childhood indoctrination? The “mass me”?

Or, instead, will it be discovered that the mass me is just the wholly determined me spread out among all of Earth’s inhabitants?

Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.

Why? Because grappling with “I” in one context can be quite different from another context.

Consider:

  • There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the either/or world. Hundreds of things that we do [alone or with others] that are entirely in sync with that which is as close as we have been able to come to “objective reality”. In fact, the main obstacles to pinning this self down revolve around sheer speculation — sim worlds, solipsism, dream worlds, matrix perspectives.

  • There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the is/ought world. Still hundreds of things that we can agree are “true objectively” for all of us. But these things trigger relationships that trigger behaviors that are judged far, far more subjectively. The “I” that I root in dasein.

*There’s the “I” all the way out at the end of the metaphysical limb — going back to the understanding of existence itself. Or in resolving the debate about “free will”.

  • There’s the “I” that, for some, is in a relationship with one or another God. I and Thou.

But that, it turns out, just gets us started…

The biological “I”, The neourological and chemical “I”, the historical “I”, the cultural “I”, the sociological “I”, the psychological and emotional “I”. And on and on.

On the other hand, don’t get them started, right?

And what does this ultimately revolve around? The fact that we relate to our “self” differently in different sets of circumstances. Somehow the “I” in my head is intertwined with all that exist out in any particular world. But there are so many different [and at times entirely unique] possible permutations “out there” given interactions awash in contingency, chance and change, that trying to pin down an understanding of all the variables that combine to create an “I” at any particular time, in any particular place can only be at best a more or less sophisticated guess. While, for many of us, it is more like a WAG.

And yet how could one speak of an “essential self” or the “real me” without the capacity to reduce all of these factors down to the one true reality?

Iambiguous,

I’ve told you a “million times” already that objective proofs are like open mathematical questions… sometimes they take hundreds of years to solve: either the conjecture is true or false.

People have NO PROBLEM, given these “multiple selves” of abstracting a continuity of consciousness. Obviously, given this, there is something wrong with stating that we all should agree that we don’t have a continuity of consciousness.

Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.

Language can get particularly misleading when “I” is intent on pondering all the stuff that goes on in the mind that generates the “I” in the first place. Dogs and computers are things that are out in the world. You either have one or you don’t. And, if you do, you are easily able to demonstrate this to others. The communication back and forth is rather clear and objective.

Here again however a distinction can be made between being or not being yourself with regard to things which are able to be demonstrated. If one day you find out from the doctor that you have an inoperable brain tumor, or have contracted AIDS, “I” can well come to embody a very different perspective on life. Or if your beloved spouse or child was murdered, “I” too can then come to reflect on life emotionally and psychologically such that you are never quite the same again.

But what is the true or the false way for one to embody a self with respect to conflicting goods? Interactions that garner particular reactions [good or bad] from others depending on the moral and political values that you embrace.

Yes, any particular “I” may not know what to think, but, depending on the context, there either is or is not a rational way in which to think about someone or something. You can’t make up your mind but there are ways in which to show you what a rational mind is obligated to believe or know.

There are epistemological boundaries separating that which we can know for certain and that which we cannot.

And it is always the latter that is of most interest to me. Things that “I” can draw more or less informed and educated conclusions regarding…and things that appear to more in the nature of personal opinions.

And, in regard to our day to day interactions, what could possibly be a more crucial task for philosophers to take on?

A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.

Think about it: Suppose we lived in a world where there was no contingency, chance and change. None at all. Nothing to tackle then in regard to your identity, right?

But we live in a word that is exactly the opposite don’t we? Of course the question “who am I?” is a difficult question to answer. In fact, it’s far more likely an impossible question to answer. After all, does anyone here actually imagine they have a handle on all of the thousands upon thousands of variables that, over the years, come at you from all directions? The mind-boggling social and psychological permutations that go into creating and then sustaining your own particular “I” . Try to even imagine all the factors that you had no control or understanding of at all. If only as a child.

Yet many of us still approach our identity in the same manner as we might approach, say, a cinder block. It’s there, weighted down by it’s “thingness”.

So, the most important question of all [by far in my view] is how, given the fluid complexity necessarily embedded in “I” evolving over the years, what parts [and changes] can we come closest to nailing down objectively?

You know where I go here.

A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.

You may as well attempt to pin down if “I” is more the function of genes or memes. We know of course that without the biological self there would be no psychological continuity. But where does one stop and the other begin?

Think about it like this…

You get out of bed this morning. And, you tell yourself, you’re the same person you were when you got out of bed the day before.

Or maybe not. Maybe there is something happening in your body – a cancer cell, the onset of a disease – that, sooner or later, will dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.

Or maybe yesterday you made a new friend. You are meeting her today. You will embark on a relationship that has the potential to introduce any number of new factors into your life. Factors that, as well, can dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.

That’s simply how it works. There is “I” in your set of circumstances here and now. And then biological and environmental changes – in increments or in a tidal wave – result in a reconstructed “I” from day to day.

Some of these factors you will be able to grasp and/or control better than others.

Or, as Lena points out to Ray in Dream Lover

“They say you replace every molecule in your body every seven years. I changed my name eight years ago. No more Thelma Sneeder. Aren’t you going to give me credit for it? Doesn’t it seem brave that I became this completely different person.”

And we know how Ray’s “I” was reconfigured after marrying Lena.

But: In what sense do we become a “different person” when all the molecules are replaced? Or, circumstantially, when we have an experience so traumatic, the way we look at the world around us seems to turn upside down?

A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.

So, these are facts that can be ascertained regarding the various parts of us that regenerate over the years. But it’s not like the fact of this has much of an impact on how we see ourselves. The fact that our bones and blood and organs etc., are reconstructed autonomically over time has little or no impact on how we react to, among other things, the behaviors of others given our moral and political prejudices.

No, instead, that part is reflected in the physiology of the brain. And here…

Except that we know full well how injuries and diseases and the effects of ageing can have a truly profound impact on how we see both ourselves and the world around us. All of those chemical and neurological interactions that we have little or no control over at all.

Of course sooner or later genes give way to memes here. To our ever evolving and changing “sense of reality” given new experiences and access to new information and ideas. And here the social, political and economic permutations that any one particular individual might come to embody are truly vast and varied. Is it any wonder then that the objectivists are driven to invent Gods and philosophical contraptions and political dogmas and assessments of nature able to wade though all of this profoundly problematic variability and pin down the one true set of rational and virtuous behaviors.

Their own.

I was just reading this Philosophy Now article:

“Analytic Philosophy, Continental Literature?”
Marc Champagne argues that the supposedly ’professional’ style of the analytic tradition does not ensure professionalism, nor indeed, clear-mindedness.

In it, I came upon this passage:

And, sure, the manner in which I construe the meaning of the small-d “dasein” in my signature thread is probably construed by many “serious philosophers” as mediocre at best. While even a heavyweight thinker like Heidegger can be mocked in one or another “intellectual contraption” of this sort.

But: “being” here is just that. An “intellectual contraption” word that in no way, shape or form relates to the lives that we actually live.

Right?

Again, I am less concerned with whether as an intellectual contraption, this is funny or not. If you harbor a sufficient enough disdain for “continental philosophy”, it’s probably hilarious.

But what do the analytic philosophers have to tell us about any particular “I”, being “here” and not “there”? Being “now” but not “then”? As this relates to the historical, cultural and experiential interactions of flesh and blood human beings?

Instead, all this defender of the continental tradition can do is to take the “debate” back up into the clouds:

And it is certainly my contention that only to the extent that any school of philosophy is able to intertwine words and worlds, is there any possibility to explore in turn the extent to which in using the tools of philosophy we can grope to understand what may well be beyond the reach of “clear-mindedness”.

A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.

But what we don’t know is whether there is a scientific and/or philosophical and/or theological dividing line between that which DNA explains wholly and that which is still embedded in the mystery embodied in the evolution of matter into life forms evolving into brains evolving into minds like ours. Is it all DNA here?

That has to remain the profoundest of mystery of all. And yet we are left with no choice but to pursue questions like this largely ignorant of what that final solution is. Or by simply taking an intellectual leap of our own and basing our conclusions on our own set of assumptions.

Thus…

Most of us of course do not have either the education or the background to understand this in any really sophisticated manner. Instead, we have to accept that those who do know about these things [and are subject to peer review] know what they are talking about. And, if the above is in fact true, what does it tell you about your own identity?

And then there is still the part I focus on. The either/or “I” presumed to have some measure of autonomy grappling to understand why he or she chooses one set of value judgments over another. And how the species as a whole goes about determining which sets of behaviors reflect the most rational and/or virtuous manner in which to behave.

Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.

Think about it. At this particular moment in time and in this particular place across all of space, there is a “self” that you are able to talk about more or less with some degree of specificity and certainty.

But how in the world would you ever manage to catch the whole thing? In fact, I distinguish myself from others in regard to just how immese I perceive that gap to be.

Going all the way back to, well, you know where. :wink:

This is why I always start any exploration of human identity with psychology rather than philosophy. After all, could there be a more crucial “psychological defense mechanism” then the ability to think yourself into believing that one can catch the whole thing. And that, in fact, you know this is so because you already have.

Or, the description I most come back to:

“I recognize that I put structure into my world…There is no ‘real’ world out there, given, intact, full of significance. Consciousness is constituted by random, virtually infinite barrages of experience; these experiences are indistinguishably ‘inner’ and ‘outer’…Structure is put into experience by culture and self, and may also be pulled out again…The experience of nothingness is an experience beyond the limits of reason…it is terrifying. It makes all attempts at speaking of purpose, goals, aims, meaning, importance, conformity, harmony, unity----it makes all such attempts seem doubtful and spurious.”
The Experience of Nothingness—Michael Novak

Yet look at Novak today! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Novak

The Experience of Nothingness is not even mentioned!

See how identity works as an existential contraption? It’s just that for some they are compelled by their own psychological propensities to become objectivists – whether theologically, morally or politically.

Or, as with Novak, in all three domains.

Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.

And yet in regard to certain biological/genetic aspects of human identity, we are no less shaped and molded by the laws of matter than any oak tree. Our bodies and our brains are packed with “things”. Organs, blood, bacteria, chemical and neurological interactions which shape and mold our options in many profound ways. And there is only so far that even modern medicine can go in reacting to the parts that break down.

What separates us from from oak trees of course are minds. The most mysterious matter of all when it is actually able to become self-conscious of all the things it needs to know in order to conduct exchange like this one. At least in regard to our species on this planet.

And then where I take this line of reasoning: “I” in the is/ought world. At least waiters can be thought of as “things” in that there are behaviors that they perform that all of us recognize as being things that waiters do. Here “bad faith” might revolve more around a waiter approaching your table in a restaurant and dealing out poker hands. Here he or she could be said to have betrayed the manner in which we all agree waiters should behave or are expected lo behave.

Here things get all that more convoluted once we move into the is/ought world. In regard to value judgments, political prejudices and aesthetic tastes, what on earth does it mean to speak of “ontologically” at all? Still, we choose the behaviors that we do here without giving much thought to all of the things we are not. All of the experiences we did not have. All of the relationships we did not form. All of the information and knowledge we missed completely. Instead, we are “stuck” with reacting to our behaviors and the behaviors of others based only on that considerably more narrow thread of experiences, relationships and ideas.

But, come on, how many of us ever really stop to think that part through?

Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.

Come on, to the extent that postmodernists allow their own assessments to revolve largely around intellectual contraptions predicated on a particular accumulation of jargon, their own approach to the self bears almost no resemblance to the manner in which, from day to day, most of us recognize – in fact live – our own lives.

After all, what cares the biological, demographic and experiential I/“I” for “node[s] in a network of symbols and signs.” Love exists because, given the evolution of life on earth, our own species has come to embody the potential to feel love in all manner of complex and convoluted ways. Ways that clearly manifest themselves uniquely in different historical, cultural and interpersonal contexts.

Or are we to actually believe that the intellectual glop – gibberish? – that some of our more illustrious “postmodernists” spew out in almost unintelligible articles and books have any truly substantive relevance at all to those of us who, here and now, think of ourselves as being in love?

Sure, maybe. But only if and when they bring their words out into the world.

Realistically, however, how can the distinction here not revolve around I in the either/or world and “I” in the is/ought world? “I” may be a subject in any number of contexts, but the contexts themselves are bursting at the seams with the components of what we all agree is an objective reality. Again, unless we go all the way out on the reality limb and introduce things like solipsism, sim worlds, dream worlds etc.

Yes, “memetically”, “I” [in many important respects] is clearly a social and a political construct sustained in any particular community out in any particular world for any particular length of time. But to suggest that “the sense of being a substantive ‘subject’ or independent point of departure” is “merely a bourgeois illusion”?!

Who really believes that unless they reside in a pedantic la la land.

Okay, the other Dasein:

From wiki:

Sure, this makes sense to me. “Being there”. But being there in a particular, immediate world. A world that historically, culturally and experientially others share with you. But never in exactly the same way. And certainly ever further removed from the particular, immediate world of those who are “being there” across the vast span of human existence down through the centuries and across the globe. Or in regard to intelligent life forms on other planets.

We all share in common the “being there” part. And, in the either/or world, given that all beings exist and interact within the confines of “the laws of nature”, there are any number of things and relationships that are applicable to all of us. The part where the world does take priority.

But that’s not where I go given my own understanding of dasein. I go to the places in which “I” does in fact evolve over the years into different assessments of human interactions given particular social, political and economic contexts.

This part of course gets especially tricky. In a broad general sense one can argue that to the extent that one subsumes his or her own individual self in one or another set of community standards [re religion or race or ethnicity or ideology etc.] one is being “inauthentic”. But from my frame of mind this presupposes that if one does not do so, he or she can then come to embody a more “authentic” self.

But here [for me] “I”, while [existentially] becoming more problematic, is not any more or any less authentic in regard to that which he or she professes to embrace with respect to their own “individual” moral and political values.

Here the components of my own rendition of dasein come into play. The part where if how I view “I” here is reasonable there does not appeasr to be a way in which to avoid feeling “fractured and fragmented”.