phyllo wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2023 2:02 pmMaybe this forum is not conducive to having the sort of discussion that you want.
Maybe you need to find a forum which aligns better with your expectations.
Maybe you need to find a forum which does not reject some of your core ideas from the start. Not necessarily an echo chamber but something more receptive.
This may be be difficult but perhaps not impossible.
It seems to be a question of *interests*. I cannot blame the forum or its denizens for not sharing my interests. The thing is -- I think this is true for everyone but some are less conscious of it -- is that we seek opposition, we even seek impassable conflict, and seem to relish it when it is found. I've wondered why this is. Sometimes I've thought that *conflict keeps us alive*. If people, if we, did not have something to adamantly oppose we'd not be able to define ourselves, and what is more like death than not having a self-definition?
Personally, my ideal is not so much 'discussion' because, let's be honest, no one can agree with any other one. Isn't that peculiar? Rather my ideal would be a forum where people write independent essays which express their views in a relational way. For example some of us *oppose* Immanuel Can and yet
the strict atheist's set of oppositional declarations is simply not adequate and does not sufficiently 'answer' what many see as IC's impossible god-definition (supported more by will than by anything tangible). But here's the curious thing: Immanuel needs to oppose us (the majority of those who oppose him) in a proportional degree as we need him to mount our oppositions! There is a curious symbiosis.
But then What sort of god can be said to 'exist' since the Christian god is absurd through and through?
But nevertheless none of this actually gets to the heart of the issue: How can existence exist? In the conversation [sic] between Tillingborn and IC -- in my own view of course -- both totally miss the mark. Nothing even remotely *productive* (intellectually) came from it nor was any productivity ever intended! The conversation was doomed even before it began. Now isn't that a wee bit curious?
[The fact is that there is no way to explain the origin of life nor anything at all about how extremely complex biological mechanisms came to exist. No one has the slightest idea! All 'structures of idea' (interpretations) fail. So, isn't that where the conversation must begin?]
Maybe you need to find a forum which does not reject some of your core ideas from the start. Not necessarily an echo chamber but something more receptive.
You could be right. But it is opposition to some of the precepts I work with, and present 'theoretically', that provide a sort of fuel I seem to need to keep moving forward. But I am really interested in defining what are the 'core ideas' that I am working with? Here is the basic fact: these core ideas are essentially illegal.
Morally illegal. Once one moves over 'established frontiers' (idea limits) one heads into territory that has been established as 'extremely fraught' and which immediately places you in trouble. And what I have found is that in those places and zones where such discussion and conversations do go on, that they also become 'pathological'. So it seems to me that it is
pathology that must become the topic.
If I were to make a general statement that seems true I would say that we live under a developing 'managerial régime' in which the State has become therapeutic and enforces
therapy. This is 'applied anthropology' really. The Individual is the subject of the State's intervention and what is applied to the individual is a schema and ideology which has been determined to be the 'best' one for a larger economic system. The State assumes a near-theological function and replaces 'god' (the god that is invisible and absent).
Curiously, and in a related sense (and here I refer to these pages, these conversations [sic], each
opinionator is presenting his or her own version of
therapy. Take Lacewing. If only man's ego was not so present we could all realize our 'cosmic' potential, and woe to anyone whose 'ego' is manifest. Underneath it there is a definite therapeutic recommendation. It is the 'moral force' of her condemnations that invoke my interest. These attitudes are very common today, in one form or another.
Iambiguous shows himself to be in a *pickle*. On one hand he is fundamentally aligned with every progressive-left tenet, indeed every Marxian assertion, but then weirdly he undermines his own core position with bizarre statements about his own complicity in 'dasein'. And what about those black brown and red victims, eh?
Words to worlds et cetera et cetera . . .
These two especially seem *subsumed* into attitudes that are redolent of the State's therapeutic, applied anthropology function. So in this sense 'certain ideas' show up when people indicate what has them in their grip.
My view at this point is that one can only step back and watch as the ship wrecks; as the train-wreck unfolds -- because we can actually watch it in slow-motion as it all takes place. I mean on the larger economic-political stage but then on the microcosmic stage of personal melt-down. To 'get involved' draws one into the realm of social pathology and then 'objectivity' is quickly lost. . .
