Dasein/dasein

[iambiguous]

iam,

We both know you won't address the bulk of my post above.

This from Mr. Wiggle himself!!!

So, how about just answerin' the question...

How did you existentially come to believe you should own a gun while denying others a gun? Where is your reasonable undergirding for such a position?

Huh?

I'm not denying others the right to own a gun. I'm not even denying the right of others to own bazookas or other weapons of mass destruction.

At least not in the sense that I can provide them with a philosophical/deontological argument demonstrating that owning guns and weapons of mass destruction is inherently or necessarily irrational or immoral.

Instead, I argue only that given my own life -- my own particular existential accumulation of personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge -- I have come "here and now" to believe what I do about these things. And that given new experiences, etc., I might come to change my mind. As I have so many times in the past about truly important things.

It's just that, re one or another God or one or another political ideology or one or another school of philosophy or one or another rendition of Nature -- objectivists of your ilk insist that only your own understanding of life, liberty and property count.

It's the "psychology of objectivism" that you cling to above all else. "My way or the highway", "one of us vs. one of them".

What you believe about abortion and guns and human sexuality pales next to the need on your part to believe that what you believe does indeed reflect what all rational men and women are obligated to believe in turn.

Or they become...

...IDIOTS.

[henry quirk]

iam: "Instead, I argue only that given my own life -- my own particular existential accumulation of personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge -- I have come "here and now" to believe what I do about these things. And that given new experiences, etc., I might come to change my mind. As I have so many times in the past about truly important things."

Retreated to your safe spot...again. Funny how you have firm opinions about everything from abortion to democracy to guns to sexual identity to 'whatever' but, when called on any, you play the 'don't hold me to what I've said...I might change my mind!' card.

A very clever strategy: you get to expound, at length, condemn, with vehemence, and never have back a lick of it up.

[iambiguous]

iam: "Instead, I argue only that given my own life -- my own particular existential accumulation of personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge -- I have come "here and now" to believe what I do about these things. And that given new experiences, etc., I might come to change my mind. As I have so many times in the past about truly important things."

Retreated to your safe spot...again. Funny how you have firm opinions about everything from abortion to democracy to guns to sexual identity to 'whatever' but, when called on any, you play the 'don't hold me to what I've said...I might change my mind!' card.

Firm opinions?!!!

How on earth is being as drawn and quartered...fractured and fragmented...as I am in regard to abortion, guns and sexual politics strike you as an example of someone having firm convictions?

I agree that abortion is the killing of an unborn human being and I agree that abortion ought to be legal for all women if the alternative is forcing them to give birth.

I support the right of citizens to bear arms and I support the right of communities to pass legislation outlawing the buying and the selling of weapons of mass destruction. I support transgender rights but I believe those who make arguments pertaining to issues like bathrooms and sports competition have good points.

But I recognize as well that in the past I once believed other important things that I changed my mind regarding. And that new experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge down the road [maybe even here at PN] might cause me to change my mind again.

You're the one with the God-given intuitive capacity to grasp these issues Rationally such that all those who don't accept your own take on life, liberty and property are IDIOTS.

And, most of all, what you [and all objectivists of your ilk] refuse to explore is the extent to which your own value judgments are rooted existentially in the social, political and economic parameters of the lives that you've live...and still live.

My aim in examining dasein on this thread.

In my view, all the way to the grave no doubt "my way or the highway" minds like yours cling to the "psychology of objectivism" in order to convince themselves that they are in sync with the Real Me in sync further with The Right Thing To Do. That's the part that ever and always comforts and consoles them.

Again, the only difference between you and someone like Satyr is that Satyr doesn't need to cling to a God, the God to sustain his own "arrogant, autocratic, authoritarian" dogmas.

So, is that why you left KT? Did Satyr mock you as a weakling for needing God to fall back on?

[iambiguous]

This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me...philosophically and otherwise.

I was just reading Maureen Dowd's column in New York Times. It pertained to the possible demise of the TCM channel. But what grabbed my attention was this...

"...my father had a ticket for the Titanic when he was a teenager. His mother cried so much, he sold it to a young woman. She survived, but her hair turned prematurely white. My Irish dad immigrated to America the following year."

The Benjamin Button Syndrome at its most dramatic? Had Mom not cried so much he would have been on that fateful voyage. And had he been, it was likely that he would have died. And had he died, Ms. Dowd would never have been born.

I wouldn't be reading her column and you wouldn't be reading these words.

That's the way human interactions unfold. Some things we are aware of, some things we control. But other things we aren't and don't. The smallest of things can precipitate the largest of consequences.

[iambiguous]

HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco

In traditional approaches to ethics, there is something peculiar about the way in which we have to check to see if we have found a good ethical theory or not. In the sciences we observe the relevant phenomena so that when we hypothesize in order to explain why certain things happen while others do not. We can check this hypothesis in other instances to find out whether it is good enough to become accepted theory. In ethics, though, whether or not an action is right or wrong, whether or not it does or does not conform to the good is not something to be empirically observed as a property in the same way of empirical observation.

Sound familiar? The part where science revolves largely around the either/or world. Something broached theoretically either is or is not wholly in sync objectively with the laws of matter. After all, it's not often that physicists and chemists and biologists and geologists or even meteorologists are tasked with resolving moral quandaries.

Though, sure, to the extent that ethics is discussed and debated up in the theoretical clouds things might be "resolved" in the sense that agreements might be reached regarding definitions and deductions. Same with Dasein as an intellectual contraption in Being and Time. Dasein theoretically meets morality theoretically?

But take them both out into the world of conflicting goods...into conflagrations that rage day in and day out "in the news"?

This is nothing ground-breaking. What is interesting for justifying the need to investigate Dasein as ethical is that we are left to appeal to our pre-theoretical intuition.

Our "pre-theoretical intuition"?

Okay, given a moral conflict of note, how would you encompass your own pre-theoretical intuition?

Our intuition is exactly that element of our understanding that does not give us precise reasons, but that we nevertheless still take as giving us some reason.

Here, again, I would still need someone to explain to me how human intuition itself is not in turn rooted existentially in dasein.

Intuition:

"a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning."

"the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning."

"Intuition, in philosophy, the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience."

Okay, but just as those all up and down the moral and political spectrums, think and feel what they do regarding their moral convictions, don't they intuit what "deep down" they "just know" is right or wrong all up and down them as well?

How are our intuitions not shaped and molded as well by our indoctrination as children and by the social, political and economic parameters of the particular world we are a part of historically and culturally?

As for this...

If attempts in ethical theory are even going to use the intuition about right and wrong as an important factor for whether or not an ethical theory is plausible, then this will for us constitute an acknowledgment that there is something more fundamental to what Heidegger presents as being-in-the-world. So, while this does not constitute anything like a proof that Dasein is ethical, it at least gives us the prompt we need to begin an investigation to find out if Dasein can be understood as ethical.

...what on Earth does it mean to you in regard to your own value judgments? How do you relate Dasein as construed in Being and Time to your own understanding of what it means to be ethical? The part where you make distinctions between thinking and feeling and intuiting when choosing behaviors.

[iambiguous]

HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco

In order to find out if there might be a connection between Dasein and ethics we must investigate those elements which are central to understanding the kind of being that Dasein is. This will be our method of investigation for the second chapter. We will consider Dasein’s “mineness,” “being-in-the-world,” “readiness-to-hand,” “presence-at-hand,” “being-with,” “das Man,” “anxiety,” and “authenticity.”

Take any of these things. Now, given how you think you understand Heidegger's own understanding of them in Being and Time, take that assessment out into the world of human interactions in which conflicts pop up regarding moral value judgments.

Clearly, it is not a question of if there is a connection between Dasein and ethics, but how could there not be one? In other words, pertaining to any of us as individuals who choose to interact with others socially, politically and economically. "Mineness" and "being with" and "anxiety" and "authenticity" are likely to be most prevalent precisely when ethics becomes a factor in human interactions.

This understanding of the kind of being that Dasein is will serve as the point of departure. Insofar as we will show how Dasein differs from the traditional ethical subject, we will subsequently be able to consider traditional ethical approaches and similarities that they might have with Dasein.

And then for those interested, we can explore the manner in which my own understanding of dasein overlaps and differs from Heidegger's assessment of Dasein.

Given particular contexts of course

[iambiguous]

HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco

As a gauge for determining whether or not Heidegger’s depiction of Dasein leaves a space for it to be ethical we will compare it against three major traditional approaches to ethical theory.

To the extent that any particular one of us chooses to interact with others on a day-to-day basis is the extent to which "rules of behavior" come into play. Call this ethics, call this something else. And into this space we come up with our own existential assessment of what is rational and moral to do and what is not rational and moral to do. Heidegger himself was no exception, right? And, in fact, the space he occupied back then is bursting at the seams with controversy.

First we will consider Immanuel Kant, for whom our major point of comparison will be the formula of humanity in relation to Heidegger’s presentation of concerns and solicitude. We will show that the two ways in which Kant outlines the possibility of interacting with humanity are strongly connected to, if not the same as, the two modes of care that Heidegger outlines for Dasein.

Okay, but Kant connected the philosophical dots to God. He had to in order that ethics could be construed as categorical and imperative. One embodied care and solicitude towards others because ultimately one was judged by God and not by the Führer.

Second, we will consider Aristotle, whose strongest point of connection to Heidegger is to be found in the element of readiness-to-hand. We will show that due to the nature of his virtue ethics as a cultivation of virtues that are put into action in a ready-to-hand manner, there is plenty of common ground for Aristotle and Heidegger.

This Aristotle:

"Aristotle strongly believed and justified the institution of slavery. He opined slaves as the possession of the family or, in other words, was considered the property of the master or the family. He stated that slavery is natural and beneficial to both the masters as well as the slaves."

Readiness-to-hand, indeed. Heidegger had his own existential rendition of that. Only some argue that it revolved more around extermination than enslavement.

Finally, we will show how thought of John Stuart Mill is related to Heidegger’s depiction of Dasein by looking at the way Mill’s utilitarianism isolates happiness as the key mood for ethics. This will lead us to an investigation of what Heidegger calls Mitbefindlichkeit, which we can understand as the manifestation of how Dasein is essentially being with.

Again, any discussion of ethical "outcomes", of ethical "consequences" can only be grappled with realistically given particular historical contexts. The actual outcomes and consequences for who? And the part where one person's happiness is sustained only at the expense of others.

[iambiguous]

HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco

Before beginning, though, it is necessary that we make clear the nature of this project in ethics. Insofar as this is a work in Heideggerian phenomenology, we will not be arriving at any ethical laws or prescriptions that can be considered as what Dasein “should” do. Because this is a phenomenological investigation it will be purely descriptive, merely using the analyses provided by Heidegger to find a way in which they may pertain to the ethical.

One possible translation: In broaching the phenoneological relationship between Dasein and ethics, don't expect anything in the way of actual behavioral presriptions and proscription. This is more in the way of laying a philosophical foundation for the discussion of Dasein and ethics.

In other words, after reading the entirely of Being and Time, don't imagine that you will be able to assess whether or not, say, the Nazis' "final solution" was something that perhaps should not have been pursued. Instead, the task here is to take the "self" down out of the Platonic or theological or objectivist or a priori clouds and anchor it more substantively to the actual phenomenological reality of human interactions.

Then way, way, way up into the philosophical clouds...

"Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a 'standpoint' or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself...The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call 'technical devices', though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines. (SZ 27, BT 50)

Again, all I can do is to request of those who think they do understand the point being made here, to bring that point down out of the theoretical clouds and note how it is applicable to them phenomenologically in regard to particular contexts they have been embedded in existentially such that ethical conflicts prompted them to champion one set of behaviors rather than others.

[iambiguous]

Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
Luke Dunne at the collector

Personal identity is a philosophical issue which spans a whole range of disciplines within philosophy, from the philosophy of mind, to metaphysics and epistemology, to ethics and political theory. There is no one problem of personal identity – they are rather a kind of philosophical problem that starts to emerge whenever we ask questions about what one ‘is’ most fundamentally.

But then, given all of the various "schools of thought" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy -- that one can subscribe to in assessing human identity philosophically, don't expect there to be anything approaching a general consensus. I merely focus more on the greater gaps here pertaining to moral and political convictions. Concluding that the most reasonable manner in which construe identity here is from a "fractured and fragmented" perspective.

Problems of personal identity were first posed in something like the form they take today, but underlying issues of personal identity have been a feature of the Western philosophical tradition since its inception. Plato, writing near the dawn of philosophical enquiry, and Descartes writing at the dawn of modern philosophy, both had a theory of what we were most fundamentally – namely, that we are souls.

Souls? Well, that certainly puts one's identity beyond the reach of...actual evidence? After all, since no one to my knowledge has ever actually located this soul using, say, the scientific method -- experiential research, experimental methods that might be replicated -- the soul can become pretty much anything you want it to be. Or need it to be. You merely "think up" the parameters of your own soul that best suits you. Make it an adjunct of God or of a Goddess. A deep down inside you manifestation of nature. Or a genetic component of your DNA that, given enough time, will actually be discovered.

And then passed on to clones of ourselves? Or to AI entities? Or perhaps reaching the point where we can create certain traits in the souls of the unborn?

[iambiguous]

From my ILP thread...

Brigitte Lozerech prefaces her novel The Temp with a quote from Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

When one has suffered much, and for a long time, one forgets everything but oneself; personal misfortune is a cold but demanding companion; it obsesses you and leaves no room for any other feelings, never lets go, takes possession of your legs and your bed.

She then begins the novel itself:

It's not love that frightens me, it's men. I'm not afraid of work but of offices, careers, business, organization, society. People say I've no ambition. I'm also terrified of crowds.

I'm frightened. I huddle inside myself, hide as best I can, using any devise. I know very well that I'm not where I belong, but I don't know where I do belong. What I fear most is to be one of the crowd, an ideology, a fashion, a herd pouring out of the same subway station, entering identical doors in a row of houses in one street, climbing stairs and walking through a door, saying good morning to colleagues and sitting down at a desk for eight hours. This seems to me so profoundly sad that I refuse to be a part of it. When I do find myself in this situation it's only by chance, and I can say, 'I'm only a stand-in. I'm a temp.'

I'd also hate it if I were caught flirting in the very height of fashion, or following the latest theories, which are as transitory as most fashions.

I protect myself. I hide and leave false trails, so that no one can find me. I'm nonetheless very hurt when I'm misjudged, but I reassure myself by telling myself, 'they don't know the real me and are judging by appearances.' Then I feel a tiny surge of pride and triumph. I feel above them, maybe alongside them, but certainly not one of them. Suddenly when I least expect it, anxiety seizes me, panic constricts my throat. Then I feel like marching in a demonstration, arm in arm with others, laughing and chanting slogans. Then I would like to go home to a husband and children like my cousins of the same age, the girls with whom I work, the friends I used to have.

I burst into tears and realize that I don't exist, that in this society of well-oiled cogs I am nobody, rejected as I was so often in the schoolyard when I wasn't chosen for a team. It's hard to live as an outsider, but I'd hate to merge with those inside. How is one supposed to live?

After reading it I wonder: how does philosophy respond to something expressed in this manner? What is the author saying here that might be construed as philosophically relevant or irrelevant? Or, instead, is it merely a psychological outburst that has no lasting or significant relevance at all when stacked up next to, say, an academic pursuit of rational human discourse?

Or, perhaps, is the search for a logical, coherent understanding of "the human condition" itself missing the point regarding just how relevant this particular reaction to contemporary human relationships might be for those inclined to either fervently embrace or dismiss a similar point of view? Or be completely indifferent to it.

It is all inexplicably contextual. Responding to the passage will largely reflect your own circumstantial trajectory. You will generally share or reject the protagonist's reflection -- her recoil -- based on the life you live. On the manner in which you have come to understand what it means. In other words, she is not responding to the world or comporting herself in the "right" way...or the "wrong" way. She just happens to see the world around her [and reacts to it] in this way...now, today.

Just as you and I have come to make sense of it as we have.

Many, however, will rationalize that, when it doesn't make sense to see it this way tomorrow, they are at least closer to understanding the way it should make sense. And this makes no sense to me at all. Although I can certainly understand why it might to them---given the way in which we seem to be hard-wired to rally around various psychological defense mechanisms.

The way I look at it, it is a miracle we are even able to communicate as well as we do. Sideways, as it were. And it almost always comes down in the end to personal fortune and misfortune. It is existential to the bone.

Everything seems to be dangling by the slenderest of threads as we weave in and out of each other's lives. At least it seems that way to me.

[iambiguous]

I just watched the film Damage [from the Josephine Hart novel of the same name]. I have seen it many times and it never fails to enthrall me regarding the manner in which any particular human identity is dangling by the slenderest of threads; a precarious and fragile contraption; and always but one circumstantial jolt away from unravelling.

It is the story of Stephen Flemming, a successful member of the British Parliament who has spent his whole life convinced that only by ordering and controlling events he encounters from day to day can his life be understood as meaningful and purposeful and settled. It is the quintessential calculated life rife with the redundancy of ritual.

He has his perfect career and his perfect family living in his perfect home with his perfect future planned out amidst all the creature comforts of a lucrative, civilized world. He may one day even become the next Prime Minister.

But there are cracks in the mirror of course. And then one day he meets his son's "new girlfriend", Anna. He begins a tempestuous affair with her and as a result of it his whole world comes crashing down. His son discovers the affair quite by accident and as a result of that discovery he backs out of the love nest out into a hallway, stumbling over a banister and crashing to the floor below. He dies.

So, the man loses his son, his lover, his wife, his daughter, his job, his home, his future. He loses all that he has known as "my life"; and a whole sense of identity that revolved around it.

In the blink of an eye.

In the final scene of the film he is far, far away in another world. He tries to encompass it all by speaking to the audience:

It takes a remarkably short time to withdraw from the world. I traveled until I arrived at a life of my own. What really makes us is beyond grasping...way beyond knowing. We give in to love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters in the end.

But in the end the film makes it quite clear how this point of view is just another illusion...another attempt at ordering and controlling what can never be either ordered or controlled. His tumultuous, all-consuming obsession with Anna was really just a reaction to what he could no longer bear---being his well-ordered and controlled self in his well-ordered and controlled world.

He is even able to admit this to himself:

I saw Anna once more only. I saw her by accident...changing planes. She didn't see me. She was with Peter. She was holding a child. She was no different from anyone else...

Somewhere between these observations being completely true and completely false lies the reality of our own lives...our own reactions to them.

But what is certainly true [as Anna tries to convey to Stephen] is that "damaged people are dangerous...they know they can survive." And once you know this you are all the less likely to fall back on who you think you are because you come to understand that who you think you are is often all you really are instead. And you come to accept how easily a circumstantial landslide can reconfigure you into, for all intents and purposes, an entirely different person. And when you have begun to accumulate such experiences...enough to know just how fragile "I" really is...you are less likely to be impaled on the horrors you might bump into adventitiously around the next corner. You can survive because there are so many other ways in which to reconstruct the fragments of self. Then you might become all the more cynical regarding the ways in which you are able to manipulate others in order to shape the world to your own liking.

Or maybe not. Maybe you will go in the other direction instead.

In any event, you no longer come to think of yourself as wearing masks around others; instead, you come to think of yourself as being one. And, in my view, the wisest among us come eventually to grasp that we are one even to ourselves.

[iambiguous]

As many of you know, few things fascinate me more---philosophically---than the manner in which we come to acquire, apprehend, articulate and then act on a "sense of self". Why do we understand ourselves [and the world we live in] one way rather than another? How do we account for the many ways in which that can change [or has already changed] profoundly over the years? Why do people have such a difficult time communicating this to others?

So, when I bump into [or reread] a passage that probes this very thing I like to pass it along to others.

This is from Bryan Magee's book Popper:

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time [since before birth] by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do [and are members of it at a particular time and place in history]; and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. [Karl] Popper does not say, though he might have, that our very existence itself is the direct result of a social act performed by two other people whom we are powerless to choose or prevent, and whose genetic legacy is built into our body and personality. We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything from scratch, free from the past could not conceivably be more wrong....In everything we are, and everything we do, we inherit the whole past, and however much we might want to make ourselves independent of it there is no way in which we possibly can.

Consequently, when we reach conclusions that revolve around the evaluation and judgment of things we [and others] say and do, those convictions are themselves embedded in a long and complicated history...one that revolves in turn around how those before us [our parents and teachers and community leaders etc.] have chosen to evaluate and judge what still others have said and done before them. It's just passed down from generation to generation.

In some respects therefore points of view are inherently part and parcel of a childhood indoctrination into ethnological parameters that many are barely cognizant of. They are, instead, so used to saying "I know this" or "I believe that" or "I think it's wrong", the "I" part is often just taken for granted. It has become a part of them like their fingers or toes.

The implication of this, however, is something to think about the next time you are confronted with a situation in which you struggle to come to grips with understanding what it means; or one in which you feel compelled to offer an assessment of its moral or political worth. The past is always deeply entangled in the present. In some contexts, however, this is more or less readily ascertained and revealed---rationally. For example, regarding a geological study of rock layers or ice cores. But human identity is not one of those contexts accessible to logic. Pick 20 people at random, plop them in a room and ask their opinion about a particular newspaper headline. You will get lots of conflicting and contradictory reactions. But the deeper you dig into their existential layers...the variables that led to one point of view rather than another...the more clearly you see it is the layers themselves that matter far more than the manner in which they are evaluated by each individual in order to proffer a particular opinion.

An opinion that can, of course, change dramatically at anytime. And one that can never be demonstrated to be the most reasonable of all.

[iambiguous]

From David Samuels's article a few years back in the The New Republic:

Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison explains Barack Obama

Where Obama's narrator provides the reader with a model consciousness, sensitive, responsible, and aware, who moves from triumph to triumph along the road to successfully embracing the fullness of his black identity, Ellison's story ends badly. The Ellisonian collision between the individualist consciousness and the realities of the color line in America produces a kind of fatal and indigestible dark matter that is aware of itself yet can never claim a full share of humanity. Ellison's protagonist is invisible because the symbolic radiance of his black skin queers the efforts of others to relate to him as an individual, and makes him prey to the manipulations of whites and blacks alike who utilize the brutal and absurd dynamics of the color line to satisfy private lusts for power and domination. The tragic thrust of Ellison's novel is often reduced to the banality that black people are invisible to white people. Ellison's deeper point is that the symbolic and actual baggage of race makes it difficult if not impossible for a black man to ever realize his full humanity in the eyes of anyone--white, black, communist, capitalist, or himself.

This is a prescient evocation of the self-conscious invisible man. The undulating underground man who is fully aware of all the tangled webs he weaves in constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the fractious ambiguity inherent in ever evolving relationships between I and We and all that is perceived as Other.

There is really no way in which Barack Obama can name and then embrace what it means to possess a "black identity". And to the extent Obama is self-consciously channeling the existential nature of Ralph Ellison's invisibility [the author points out that Obama claimed Ellison and Macolm X as mentors], is the extent to which he recognizes the futility of trying. All Obama would have to note, for example, is that, had he been a contemporary of Ellison, his background narrative and current accomplishments would have disqualified him even from being elected mayor of Chicago, let alone president of the United States.

It is in broaching the cacophonous and convoluted narrative of "identity" that I have always admired the stunning achievement that is Ralph Ellison's great novel. He recognized how identity [racial, ethnic, gender, cultural, historical etc.] is such that we are invisible even to ourselves in the end. We are a pastiche of ever reconfigured experiences, memories and interpretations.

We may decide to go our own way, to be "authentic", to be our own person, our own self; but what does that really mean when who you think you are now is so deeply and opaquely embedded in all that you once were---in all that you were once told you were by others as a child growing up.

Obama can never be black [or an "individual"] on his own terms. Even if he were to go underground and self-illuminate, in turn, it would remain no less opaque and ambiguous. And no less ephemeral in the sojourn to oblivion.

I often wonder the extent to which Obama grasps the perilous and problematic paradox that is identity. I would only know this, however, if he were to reveal someday that his belief in God was, in fact, merely a fragment of a political persona. In my view, it is only when we toss God out of the cave and reconcile our point of view with the ever-present shadowy fragments of identity, that we learn to communicate more realistically, more pragmatically, more humbly.

And just to show how bizarre identity can become when it is politicized Obama today is seen as a socialist by many on the right and a pawn of Wall Street by many on the left.

[iambiguous]

Immersed as most of us generally are in the task of actually living our lives from hour to hour, our sense of self is relatively solid. And even from day to day or week to week or month to month or [for some] year to year the incremental changes are so small our lives can engender the illusion of being "necessary" or "whole". Existentially persuasive, as I like to say. It is only when we look back 5 years or 10 years or 20 years that we begin to note just how much has changed. We note how different we have become.

Or, rather, those of us who live eventful lives do.

How then do we account for this? Well, most people rationalize it by saying, in effect, "yes, I have changed over the years...but that is only because I am now more fully aware of and in touch with who I really am" or "I am wiser now because I have had more years in which to contemplate it" or "the person I have now become reflects the most rational manner in which to be".

And yet don't we all embrace a sense of self that can at times conflict dramatically with others? And regarding all manner of important things? Someone may have been a liberal in his youth and later disavowed this and embraced conservativism instead. But then someone might have been a conservative in her youth and later embrace liberalism. And both might be intellectually astute. Think David Brock or David Mamet.

How then do we really disengage our philosophical reflections regarding the nature of "my identity" from existential trajectories that can challenge those conceptual or theoretical constructs?

I'm simply speculating that the existential boats we all row from the cradle to the grave will always have holes. Lots of them. That is the nature of human identity---to be a sieve in which new experiences and new relationships and new ideas are incessantly poking holes in the old ones. Especially in this postmodern age we live in. One in which, unlike our more distant ancestors, there is not always a clear-cut place for everyone and everyone does not always occupy his or her own clear-cut place.

Things can become considerably more problematic these days. Well, again, at least for some of us. Many now try on identities like they try on clothes. They are not even called identities much these days, are they? They are called "lifestyles" instead. Why do you suppose the world is being invaded by the evangelical hordes on both sides of the ocean? They want their Identities back.

But, again:

So much depends on the extent to which your life is eventful. If very little does change over the years it is much easier to construct a conceptual agenda and stick to it. Identity is always at the intersection of theory and practice. Consider, for example, this excerpt from The Outsider, by Colin Wilson

...for what is identity? These men traveling down in the City reading their newspaper or staring at advetisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for cornplasters, Eliot's, lines....

'We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together'

...and they would read it with the same mild interest with which they read the rhymed advertisements for razor blades, wondering what on earth the manufacturers will come up next.

They have aims, these men...but an aim is not an ideal...They changed their shirts everyday but never their conception of themselves.

These men are in prison; that is the Outsider's verdict----caged animals who have never known freedom. And the Outsider? He is in prison too---but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunneling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

Now, the wisest of men, in my view, recognize this: one man viewing the prison [of identity] from the inside looking out is essentially interchangeable with another man viewing it from the outside looking in. In other words, there is no more or less "authentic" manner in which to encompass the prison of identity. Other than...philosophically.

Out in the world, however, it is increasingly a matter of perspective. You can't really escape your identity without it becoming just another "cell".

[iambiguous]

How do we encompass a sense of reality -- out in the world with others -- other than in how we perceive it existentially with our own eyes and ears and minds? No two people live identical lives. Everyone has their own unique interactions: we read this book and not that book, we meet this person and not that one, we have this experience and not that one. And, because we always exist within the confluence of particular variables, our individual lives will flow problematically in a virtual infinite constellation of permutations.

As a consequence, meaning, as a manifestation of identity, revolves around how we come to understand this. And, concomitantly, the manner in which we grasp this can never truly be grasped in turn by another. Just as how they grasp these relationships can never truly be grasped by us.

It is ever an existential mosaic our mind's eye pieces together from day to day in order to orient ourselves in all that is contingency, chance and change.

Emil Cioran:

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

Susan Sontag:

[Emil] Cioran's broken arguments...bear witness to the most intimate impasse of the speculative mind, moving outward only to be checked and broken off by the complexity of its own stance. Not so much a principle of reality as a principle of knowing: namely, that it's the destiny of every profound idea to be checkmated by another idea which it implicitly generated.

This is the inherent nature of a fragmented personality trying to piece together all of the conflicting and contradictory existential variables it encounters whenever it tries to "think through" human relationships in a world that never stops evolving into something else. So, you have to wonder: why do we keep groping after something we cannot realistically comprehend as anything other than the particular mosaic we ceaselessly conflate existentially?

It is I believe the sheer futility of communicating the meaning of these relationships wholly, comprehensively [coupled with the intense desire to do so] that brings us to acknowledge the useless passion that "I" ultimately embodies.

Well, some of us.