This is off-topic. If you don’t want to answer my question, fine. But this is not yet another place for people to satisfy your criteria and answer your questions.
I am asking you to bring…
down to earth.
I have seen you refer to abstract scenarios relating to a number of conflicing good situations. What I am asking for here is to find out how this fracturedness and fragmentation arises in a specfic day. Preferably today or yesterday.
After you wake up, how do you notice this F & F state of mind/self? What triggers it? What do you do about it? What concrete situation does it relate to? You hear something on the news? You get a letter from a friend? What exactly happens?
Actually I asked Iambiguous to answer a question using the criteria he asks of us. I really don’t know how you could possibly have missed that after years of each of you participating in the same forum AND you are coming to his defense. He often chastizes people for being abstract, for not being concrete, for not ‘bringing things down to earth’. I am now asking for him to explain this fragmentedness and fracturedness he experiences in the concrete. How does this arise in his day.
Apart from the fairness of this - since he is hypercritical of precisely the kind of language he is using here - it is also a genuine question on my part. What is he talking about?
Nothing you wrote here has anything to do with the request I made in the OP, nor does it show any understanding of Iambiguous’s OWN criteria for clear communication.
Notice that he continues to assume the idea of fracturedness and fragmentedness is coherent and clear and asks others including me to explain why we are not as fragmented and fractured as he is.
In order to give us a chance to do something like that - in another thread where it would be on topic -
doesn’t it make sense that he try to clarify what that means in experiential terms?
Or are we just supposed to make up stuff guessing at what his extremely abstract formulation refers to?
What the heck are you defending?
You’re actually getting in the way of his project.
K: as you have made several post, I shall answer in one… in the post you referenced,
I did in fact answer your question and, and spoke clearly about the answer
IAM wrote…
To IAM, the language he uses is his language and his understanding of his
experiences…he has explained it as best he can with that language
and his understanding…he has answered your question, but with
a language and understanding that you don’t understand…
an example of this can be taken from my life in two parts…
I am hearing impaired… I was born with a severe hearing loss…
so, I say to you, I am hearing impaired… now you might think
that you know what it means, but trust me, you don’t…
for me, it is clear and understandable because I have lived it
all my life… I cannot reduce it down anymore for it to make sense
to you…to a hearing person, life has certain basic fundamental
experiences, but to a hearing impaired person, I don’t have those
basic fundamental experiences and thus, I cannot know what you mean,
no matter how you describe it…and no matter what language you use…
I simply don’t have the knowledge or experience to know what you are talking
about and you cannot know what I am talking about in regards to my hearing loss…
that experience of a hearing loss cannot, cannot be reduced to some basic
level of understanding that can be communicated to others… it must
be experienced to be understood…
IAM has a certain understanding of the world based upon his
knowledge, experiences, both practical and theoretical…
he has explained it as best he can with the language and experiences
he has…if you don’t understand, that isn’t his fault… you don’t
have his language or experiences to understand his issues…
just as you don’t have the language or experiences to understand
what it means to be hearing impaired…you cannot possible know…
we human have certain experiences that allow us to be able
understand each other… we, each of us, have needs that everyone
has and we can understand each other based on everyone having those
needs…but what if we don’t have certain common experiences…
how does one explain to another that doesn’t have the same experiences?
for example, a soldier can try to explain to me, a firefight he
had in Iraq with the Taliban soldiers… I have no experiences
with guns or being in a gun battle… no matter what words he
uses, no matter how basic he gets, how down to earth he gets,
I will never grasp what he is talking about because I cannot
ever experience that…
experiences and knowledge are, personal… they are unique to each of
us… sometimes we can explain those experiences and knowledge
because they are experiences and knowledge available to everyone…
being hungry, wanting love, having dreams, needing safety/security…
everyone on planet earth has these needs and these experiences…
I can explain that to anyone and they will get it…
but how do I explain my hearing loss and have them understand it?
To IAM, what he is saying is quite clear and obvious, to us, it isn’t
because we don’t have his experiences or knowledge or his language…
he has brought it down to earth as best he can given his
experiences and knowledge…… sometimes, sometimes
we just don’t have the language, experience or knowledge
to know what others are talking about…
I understand it, to the extent I understand it at the extremely abstract level it is presented. IOW where all sorts of misunderstandings may lie. I know his philosophical position probably better than most people here and I understand how he uses the terms he uses. What I specifically was asking for was how his experience, the one abstractly described, arises in a specific day, and also what he actually experiences.
Of course you could explain this more clearly to me, in precisely the ways Iamb could.
Of course I will not know what it is to be hearing impaired as someone who is impaired will be.
However, let’s draw an exact parallel. The exact parallel with my request to iamb would be to ask you to give a specific example of how this came up in a specific interaction with another person. Did it come up today? In what context? Do you happen to know what you missed due to the impairment? How does it feel emotionally when you encounter a problem due to this? What steps do you take to minimize the negative effects - not in general, but in a specific recent situation?
Those are all things you could do. Does this mean I will have the same understanding of each of your experiences you have? Obviously not. Can my understanding be increased regarding the effects, the feelings around the issue, what (in his case) triggers this feeling of being fractured and fragmented? Around what steps you take in reaction to situations where the impairment might have more important problematic effects?
Yes.
Could you tell me for example what aspects of other people’s speech or other sounds are affected? What problems arise from this? Could you tell me, for example, that background noise is a key factor in you missing things? or that it is nto, that some other facets of the situation lead to increasing the problems of the impairment?
Yes, you could. Perhaps those questions are not the best ones, but there is absolutely no possibility that I cannot come to a greater understanding of the specifics of your impairment via dialogue. All I know now is that you have an impairment. Could I learn more? Obviously.
Would I know what it is like on the inside? No.
But that’s a binary response on your part. Since I cannot come to know what it would be like on the inside, I cannot learn anything more and/or you are incapable of communicating more, just as Iamb is.
Bullshit.
And what he wrote was not an answer to my question, it was a repetition of his philosophy, a short version. I didn’t ask him for that. Who would need to? I could find that summary literally in hundreds of posts. No part of it tries to answer my questions. He’s perfectly capable of trying. He is under no obligation to do that of course. Though it’s hypocritical since he demands it of others.
.
You have no way of knowing this. You are assuming he has tried. You are assuming as a third party that you know what can and cannot be communicated by Iamb. For precisely the same reasons you are raising, you cannot possibly draw this conclusion.
I know people both with hearing impairments and others with depression, anxiety, depersonalized states and much more. And all of them are capable of going into concrete details that will give more information.
You like the person you are defending are making something binary. Of course he could give more information about the specific details in concrete instances…
And guess what Peter, that’s what he demands of his readers. I am only asking him to do what he 1) asks everyone else to do and 2) chastizes them, in various insulting ways, if they do not do it.
Precisely the type of distanced academic language he is using is the kind of thing he tells others they are using to, for example, soothe themselves with existential contraptions.
You cannot know what would happen if he actually tried to answer the question. What he did was post something using the same descriptions he has for years. And it was not an answer to my question. It was not an attempt to answer them. It did not in any way try to describe a concrete specific instance.
I’ve read your opinion. I notice what you keep not responding to. I notice you cannot admit for a second that some of the context of the questioning is such that you are in a poor position to judge. I notice that you claim to know what can and cannot be communicated, despite your own position implying you can’t be sure at all what might be accomplished if he answered the questions I posed.
instead of a point by point rebuttal, I shall answer as best
I can from the bottom to the top…
I notice you ended your post with an insult,
“your out of your depth” but in fact, you are making
an assumption…based on your knowledge and
experiences…
I too have read IAM and I actually, as much as I can,
do understand where he is coming from and I believe
he has already answered your question…when he write
about Mary and John and abortions, he is quite plainly
giving concrete examples of where he was and where he is now…
he writes about “Dasein” which in German means “being there”
or “presence” and is translated into English as “existence”
in his “existence” or being, he has certain experiences which
allow him or give him or show him, his relationship with
“Being” or “existence”……he says he is “fragmented”
in regards to “Dasein” or existence…how does one make
this any more plain?
my “reality” or my “being” or my “existence” doesn’t have this
“fragmentation” and thus I do not experience it the way he does…
have I been “fragmented” in my past? yes, I suffer through
some bad years of being “fragmented”… but I worked through them
and I have reclaimed who I am…is my idea of “fragmentation” the
same as IAM? I can’t say as we experience it, understand it differently…
and I don’t have the language to make it clear what I went through
when I was dealing with my “fragmentation”…
to give an example of this, let us say, I explain what it means to
you about being hearing impaired… you might be able to understand
it on an intellectual basis, but that doesn’t mean you actually know
or understand what it means to be hearing impaired…
language cannot give us any type of clear explanation of experiences…
I say to you, I have been married for over 24 years,… you might understand
it, sorta of, because you may have been married for 5 years, but you don’t
really understand what it means to be married for 24 years until you have been
married for 24 years… language itself will not be able to make you understand
what it means to be married for so long…
you have far more faith in language then I do… I don’t believe that the use
of language will be able to explain what it means to be hearing impaired or
to be married for 24 years or to be “Fragmented” in the face of existence…
we believe that by the use of language, we can “understand” what others
are thinking and feeling, but language is a very poor substitute for
understanding because language is not really able to reveal experience…
so, I say, I am in love… you can guess what that means, but you can’t
really know what my experience or understanding of love is because love
isn’t outside of us, it is inside of us… love is an experience and
words, mere words cannot adequately explain the emotion of love…
I can give you examples until the cows come home, but you still won’t
be able to understand what love means to me because you have your
own understanding, your own experiences of love and the two cannot ever
be shared…
words, I would submit aren’t actually a very good way to share what it
means to be human because the same word to both of us may mean
quite different things… you want clarification on what it means to
IAM to be “fragmented” and yet, by mere language, he cannot ever
really describe what it means to him to be “fragmented”… because
words aren’t really able to give a true “representation” of what it
to be “fragmented” in the face of existence…
just as I can give examples of what it means to be hearing impaired
and yet, it won’t actually allow you to know what it means
to be hearing impaired by words… the only knowledge of
being hearing impaired that will allow you to understand is to
be hearing impaired…words themselves won’t give you any
understanding or knowledge of what it means to be hearing
impaired…
the difficulty in existence is all we have are words to describe
existence and words mean different things to different people…
K: and why should he explain a clearly painful event with you?
I have moments, events and people that I haven’t even shared with my wife…
for whatever reason…and I don’t intend to ever tell her about these moments,
events, or people with her… they are my moments, events or people and
I don’t see the need for her to ever know…it could be from anger
or shame or the need for silence that keeps me from ever telling her about
these moments, events or people…….
he uses these moments, events and people to explain how he got here, but
he doesn’t have to explain what they mean to him or what happened…
I could say for example, that the election of Raygun in 1980 radicalized me,
but I don’t have to go into specifics as to why, that particular event
so radicalized me… it did, by the way…but the why is really not
important for the story… it is enough to say it did and move on…
not every moment, event or person needs to be discussed or gone over…
sometimes silence is the best way to understand or feel an moment, event or
person…
“Words are just words talking about words. When you say the word “tree”, those words are not an actual tree. When you talk about me, it has nothing to do with me”
For some bizarre reason, people like iambiguous, Peter and promethean think this is profound. I simply call it a desire for lack of accountability.
K: normally I don’t engage with you Ecmuandu, but today I shall…
take a word like love… what that word means to you and what that word
means to me are two, different and distinct things… that is my point…
it has nothing to do with being profound, see I don’t even know what
you mean by the use of that word… what does “profound” mean?
what does the word “tree” mean? my idea of “tree” may or may not
be what you refer to as a “tree”…it might take many questions and still
we might not agree as to what a “tree” is…
language is very imprecise because it can mean different things to different
people…that is why I object to any philosophy that makes as its center piece,
language…
take for example, the word… life… even scientist can’t agree as to
how to define what life is…how would you might define life isn’t
necessarily how I would define life…
now you might think it has to do with being accountable, but I don’t
even see accountability as being an issue in regards to language…
so, who is right?
neither one of us can say for certain, and that is the point…
What happened [to the best of my recollection] was this…
John [not his real name] became angry at me because I took that existential leap [as a Marxist/feminist] and supported Mary [not her real name] and her choice to abort her fetus. At the same time, my own politics was beginning to shift away from the radical left towards a more noncommittal frame of mind rooted not only in my reaction to William Barrett’s Irrational Man but in reaction to the points raised by George Novacks in his book Existentialism vs. Marxism. Even though [as I recall] he argued from the opposite point of view.
The friendship dissolved.
As for Mary, she had moved back to live with her family in Berlin, New Hampshire. But by then I had met the woman who would become my wife. She in turn was a fierce leftist/feminist. And sure enough my trajectory deeper into existentialism would become a thorn in the side of our relationship as well. I still recall a fierce argument we had over abortion in our Langley Road apartment. I was beginning to construe the unborn as babies…that killing them was justified only because of the conflicting good embedded in the politics of a woman’s right to choose. Also, the points raised by John in regard to men in these contexts. She didn’t take kindly to it. She was still a thoroughgoing objectivist. One was either “one of them” or they could fuck off.
In any event, the specifics of any context of this sort is subsumed in the points I raised on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
In other words, focusing in on the existential relationship between moral and political value judgments and the trajectory of the lives that we live. The part I ascribe to dasein.
How about you? Let’s examine your own intertwined trajectory here in regard to abortion.
After all, this relationship can only be fully explored to the extent that “I” is grappled with both philosophically and experientially.
My condition is that I’ve lived a supernatural life for about 12-13 years straight now. I can assure you, that other than all my wild tales, I’m extremely rational from anyone’s perspective when it comes to discussion.
Iambiguous, has it ever occurred to you what life would look like to you if everyone on this earth used YOUR lines against you, as they were mercilessly tormenting you?
I am content: Iamb cannot follow a simple request, but uses it to try to transform the thread off topic so it is one of his threads. The phenomenon of Iamb remains consistant even if a new angle is taken.
Some of the incredible strangeness in the thread so far:
Peter: there is no more information I could possibly get about Iamb’s being fractured and fragmented. I cannot know what it is like more than the sentence I quoted in the OP. It is like Peter’s being hearing impaired. That is also something I cannot learn anything more about.
I could not learn, for example,
if there is a tinnitus-type factor involved in his hearing impairment or not.
If this impairment remains consistent throughout the day or changes and how.
If it affects the higher or lower frequencies more
If it is degenerative and what portions of sound degenerate over time?
If background noise is a large or small factor and if this affects how he meets with and communicates with other people.
If he experiences simply a lack of ability to hear or if there are competitive noises – perhaps created neurologically.
If he has always had this impairment. If he has not always had it then he may be able to give descriptions of what changed when his hearing became impaired. If it was congenital, then perhaps he was told what differences there are between his hearing and non-impaired hearing. IOW the types of things a doctor might tell a parent about what their child with the impairment may have trouble with and what they might expect to experience.
But no, I already know all I could possibly know about his hearing impairment and any further discussion is utterly useless because I will never know what it is like for him, from the inside of the experience.
But that’s merely strangeness number 2.
Let’s look at it in context, however.
Iambigious is always asking why Phyllo or why we are not as fragmented and fractured as him? Well, Peter should long ago have told Imabiguous that he can never know this.
WHERE has Peter been all these years?
Why is Peter defending Iamb from precisely the kinds of questions and critique Iamb aims at other people? Why did he never leap to our defense when Iamb tells people, including us, but further including large numbers of participants here, their explanations are in the clouds or like ‘serious philosophers’ (a pejorative term for him), or mere contraptions? IOW how did he Rip Van Winkle his way in here and never managed to notice that I am only asking Iamb to do what he has asked and criticized his explanation using Iamb’s criteria.
And why hasn’t he told Iamb already in this thread that he can never know why our experiences are different? No, it is only we or perhaps just me who need this lecture, sort of along the lines of ‘what it is like to be a bat’
Iamb has been accusing people for a decade of not explaining their personal experiences to his liking AND
Adding to this then accusing them of comforting themselves with this ‘up in the clouds’ type description and other imind reading assertions.
Peter somehow missed all this.
And Prometheus just tags in because he is on Iamb’s team. He has the same beliefs or thinks he does.
Iamb himself responds to the request by saying that the best thing to do here is for OTHER people to present their moral beliefs on an issue.
IOW like a virus he tries to get the thread to reproduce his threads. Other people talking about their beliefs
Has nothing at all to do with my questions.
Iamb does not have the integrity to just say, no I don’t want to answer. And he doesn’t have the integrity to answer precisely the type of questions he asks others, often labeling their self-descriptions in insulting ways at the same time.
Of course this is briefly frustrating, but then…it really demonstrates that Iamb’s narcissism and solipsism is as functionally impervious as any I have ever encountered. I may have let some discussion partners down over the years, but I can head into the winter years of life content that I did not let him down. I approached with a wide range of attitudes and angles and if there was a chance for him to notice anything at all about himself, I may have missed it, but not for wont of trying.
The irony - a word he was more interested in before - is that it would actually help him to clarify in concrete terms what he means with that sentence…
Why?
Because he claims to want to know why other people are not so fragmented and fractured. Well, to answer that, the more clarity we have about his meaning of those terms, the better off we all would be.
If he is interested in what he claims to be interested in.
If he is.
If.
Perhaps it is a symptom of his being fractured and fragmented. Some of his fragmented are not interested in learning anything at all and they sabotage his conscious intent.
Come on, the only way someone cannot have one is if they have little or no understanding of what an abortion is; or if they have had little or no personal experience with it.
Most of us here will have an ample understanding of what it is. And even if they have not had any personal experience with it in their life, they have probably formed an opinion about it based on all of the many times they come into contact with others who have experienced it personally, or given how often it makes headlines in the media.
So, most here have probably formed an opinion about the morality of it.
My contention then is that this opinion is derived existentially from the political prejudices they have come to embody given the constellation of particular experiences they have lived through…intertwined in their attempts to think it through using, among other things, the tools of philosophy.
And until and unless philosophers [or others] come up with a frame of mind that all rational people are obligated to share, I take my own subjective leap to dasein as the most likely explanation for why someone believes this and not that.
But: in no way, shape or form do I argue that my own assessment here is any less subsumed in my own assessment here than yours is.
Unless of course I’m wrong.
So, from my frame of mind, you do have an “intertwined trajectory in regard to abortion”. You just choose not to share it.
