Philosophy Now Forum

iambiguous wrote:From Six Existentialists Thinkers by H.J. Blackham:

The existentialists...use Husserl's method of discerning and describing basic structures, but with their attention turned back to the world, including the self in the world. And when we return to the factual world, we find that we can constitute, and therefore explain meanings, but we cannot constitute, and therefore cannot explain, the real; we are up against the irreducible existence which we must accept and can describe but cannot constitute...Existence is an inexhaustible reservoir of meanings, since our approach to things is always and necessarily from a point of view and is therefore drastically selective. But Heidegger wishes to raise the question of the meaning of Being in its unity and totality.


And, of course, Heidegger failed. Just as had every previous philosopher. Always trying to find the intellectual Rosetta Stone that will take us [take "I"] to Being. And always settling for one that was comprised of Definitions and Concepts and Theories instead. To wit: if this deduction about phenomenological interaction is true than, a priori, that one is, as well. And it all sticks together reasonably well as long as the exchange doesn't actually go anywhere near phenomenological interactions themselves. And so, like Kant, the metaphysicians sully the part that is lived down on the ground and embrace the part that is merely "thought out" scholastically instead.

Husserl was a mathematician and a logician. His aim was to disclose as Blackham puts it, "the world of experience rather than the experienced world". And what exactly is that? Well, perhaps, whatever one defines or analyzes it to be?

Again, as though the manner in which medical science encompasses the objective reality of an abortion as a medical procedure could be translated, in turn, into being with respect to the moral parameters as well.

iambiguous wrote:From William Hubben's Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka:

Much of Nietzsche's thinking is a monologue, a persistent contradiction within himself, which ends at last in the exclusive self-reflections of Ecce Homo, written shortly before his outbreak of insanity. 'I have become more a battlefield than a man,' he said. His thinking is one great protest against the logical construction of a philosophical system, an explosive trend that had begun with Kierkegaard's rebellion against a 'system about being which cannot possibly exists.' He has his own tragic share of tensions between reason and instinct, emotion and logic, tradition and irreverence so characteristic of his time, that were to foreshadow the breakdown of Europe's civilization...Any noble thought arising in him is immediately attacked by rebellious, brilliant or cynical counter arguments and suspicion. He knows he can never find his true self; it must remain elusive, tragically hidden.


If more of us would recognize our excursions into philosophy reveal more the "battlefield than the man" there might, in my view, be a lot less actual battlefields with a lot less actual bleeding corpses strewn up and down them. But many, of course, continue to take their existential leap to philosophy in order to discover and embrace that which they become convinced is analogous to Wisdom.

Wisdom grasped by the Self in search of Reality.

How else to explain the [at times] heated arguments various "schools of philosophy" repeatedly engage in. Not only to "prove" one or another rendition of, say, What Nietzsche [Kant, Descartes, Plato, Camus etc.] Really Meant but also to nail down once and for all how close or how far this was from the most rational manner in which the Wise Man can, in fact, deduce it.

Yet some argue that Nietzsche [contradictions and all] encouraged this by not more fully acknowledging the extent to which his own philosophy was subject to its own "rebellious, brilliant and cynical counter arguments"? They claim he wanted it, by and large, both ways. He wanted to deconstruct all of the old logo-centric, binary, metaphysical intellectual contraptions but, in turn, he wanted to then introduce his own. In other words that, paradoxically, the manner in which he crafted and expressed his chief arguments [God is dead, the Uberman, the Will to Power, the herd, the creatively constructed and reconstructed existential "self" etc.] does not seem all that far removed from the manner in which those he criticized orchestrated and conveyed their own rendition of the crucial distinction made between the authentic and the inauthentic lifestyle.

But what if---philosophically---there is no distinction? What if "I" must ever remain fractured and fragmented with respect to that which is most crucial in our lives: how ought I to live it?

iambiguous wrote:From "Peterman and the Ideological Mind", by Norah Martin [in the anthology Seinfeld and Philosophy]:


The self that we know...the 'me', could be seen as a masquerade, a self 'put on'. Usually when we think of the self as a mask or masquerade we imagine that there is a true or real self behind the various masks [even if it is only the pathetic little man behind the curtain]....But this is an ideological illusion, an inversion if you will. Ultimately, there is nothing behind the masks...and so without them we are left with a pure void...

And:

The 'I' is experienced by us as emptiness and as desire. In other words as dissatisfaction. It is this constant dissatisfaction that creates what Marx identified as 'the proliferation of needs'. Rather than recognizing that we lack, we constantly strive to 'make our lives as we wish they were'...The narratives give us the sense of being the main character in a story far more interesting than the one we live. Now all I need to do to be that character is to buy the costume. I recognize the absurdity of it, but, ironically, I am still committed to the fiction. In fact, recognizing the absurdity only makes me more comfortable buying, as I at one and the same time recognize and refuse to recognize that there is nothing to me but the narratives.



Going back to the basic, fundamental reality of human identity means going back to the basic reality of biological existence itself. We pop out of the womb and we need things. We need food, milk, clothing, shelter etc...Our whole world revolves around satisfying those needs and, of course, we are utterly dependent on others to provide them. We learn very quickly in other words what to do in order to subsist even if we don't think of it on those terms. And, of course, when we do start to think about it we think about it on the terms of those who nurture and love and protect us.

But as we get older things get a lot more complicated. We are programed genetically to express and respond to many different emotional and psychological cues. And we turn on sexually at puberty. Yet all the while [in ethnological and historical contexts that vary dramatically over space and time] we learn a script, a narrative for understanding Who I Am in a particular way. And this is all happening, of course, largely below the surface. It is called our "upbringing".

But the bottom line always remains the same: subsistence.

And that means absorbing the insights of folks like Marx and Engels.

iambiguous wrote:Maurice Brinton in The Irrational in Politics:

Wilhelm Reich set out to elaborate a social psychology based on both Marxism and psychoanalysis. His aim was to explain how ideas arose in men's minds, in reaction to the real conditions of their lives, and how in turn such ideas influenced human behavior. There was clearly a discrepancy between the material conditions of the masses and their conservative outlook. No appeal to psychology was needed to understand why a hungry man stole bread or why workers, fed up with being pushed around, decided to down their tools. What social psychology had to explain however is not why the starving individual steals or why the exploited individual strikes, but why the majority of starving individuals do not steal or why the exploited individuals do not strike.

Again, we live on a planet where 15% of the richest folks gobble up over 80% of the world's resources...a planet where 3,500,000,000 men, women and children barely subsist on less than $2 a day...a planet where every 24 hours tens of thousands of human beings literally starve to death.

But the wretched of the earth are not exactly rising up to change all this. Why not? Reich's speculation revolved around the use of sexual repression as a tool to engender authoritarian personalities. From a very early age children are taught to repress [or fear or be ashamed of] their natural sexual instincts. And Reich suggests that this is a potent tool for repressing other potentially rebellious behavior as well. After all, if a culture can suppress something as powerful as the sexual libido how hard can it be to mass produce personalities that are [on average] politically docile and conservative in turn?

Whether or not this has any relevance respecting the validity of any particular political agenda is not nearly as intriguing to me as the manner in which Reich was in or around the bullseye regarding the indoctrination that goes on in children...brainwashing that does, for all intents and purposes, create social automatons.

But there is, of course, an important difference between Reich's time and our own. Today the caretakers of our political economy not only seek to repress sexuality in kids but also try to transfigure it into a commodity...or into a potent device to sell other commodities. That creates particularly schizophrenic psychological riptides and all manner of neurotic repercussions. Sex is everywhere. But seldom has there been a generation that understands it less.

It all unfolds largely below the surface of consciousness. Nothing is actually exposed so as to generate any real discussion about how it all works. And slowly but surely the whole planet is being infected.

More Brinton:

What was it...Reich asked, which in the real life of the oppressed limited their will to revolution? His answer was that the working class was readily influenced by reactionary and irrational ideas because such ideas fell on fertile soil. For the average Marxist, workers were adults who hired their labor power to capitalists and were exploited by them. This was correct as far as it went. But one had to take into account all aspects of working class life if one wanted to understand the political attitude of the working class. This meant that one had to recognize some obvious facts, namely that the worker had a childhood, that he was brought up by parents themselves conditioned by the society in which they lived, that he had a wife and children, sexual needs, frustrations and family conflicts....Reich sought to develop a total analysis which would incorporate such facts and attach the appropriate importance to them.

In other words, Brinton's and Reich's points revolved precisely around the manner in which we view ourselves and the world around us is profoundly situated in dasein. And dasein has a childhood. And this childhood consists of years and years of deep-seated indoctrination. It is not only what you learn about how to live in any particular political economy...but how you acquire a psychological framework, a engrained conditioning hard-wired into your brain such that it becomes extremely difficult to unlearn all the layers of psychological compulsions, intentions, motivations etc. that propel you into the future.

And again it is not really all that important whether they are entirely correct in their analysis; only that they are certainly not entirely incorrect. Many try to "analyze" reality into existence by simply noting how the pieces seem to fit into the larger puzzle. And then by interpreting what that puzzle "means".

Reich however goes a bit further according to Brinton:

In learning to obey their parents children learn obedience in general. The deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself whenever the child faces a 'superior' in later life. Sexual repression----by the already sexually repressed parents---is an integral part of the conditioning process.

According to Reich, the 'suppression of natural sexuality in the child....makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, 'good', and 'adjusted' in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief the goal of sexual repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation....the result is fear of freedom, and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order'.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical effects of sexual repression. Reich however constantly reiterated its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom into people's 'character armour'. The net result was the reproduction, generation after generation, of the basic [psychological] conditions essential for manipulation and enslavement of the masses.

Here again, in my view, it really doesn't come down to whether or not they have hit the bullseye; only that the dart landed somewhere on the board. And my contention is that the analysis of others, in not taking into account factors such as these, aim their dart at the bullseye and don't even manage to hit the wall the dartboard is anchored to historically and ethnologically.

Also, this childhood acculturation is particularly insidious because it is not unfolding in many respects on a conscious level. The ruling class doesn't sit in a conference room somewhere and, from day to day to day, plot this all out. And parents don't huddle in the living room and decide how best to brainwash their kids. Instead, all of this evolves more or less organically as a historical manifestation of political economy. Production revolves around the means of production and in the capitalist political economy that revolves around rationalizing it down to its most basic [and alienating] components.

You need a certain kind of mind to work under these robotic conditions and the "system" sets out to produce them. But all of this is internalized in the minds of most folks as part of the "natural order of things". Few are actually conscious of how this works "in reality"...and thus few self-consciously seek to sustain "the system" on that level. Most simply believe that what they think about the world they live in is the only rational way for the world to be.

What makes things more complex in today's world, however, is, again, that sex has also become an enormously profitable commodity. In fact, Frontline had a rebroadcast of their program on the pornography industry in America. Here you see the classic contradiction coming to a head. During the Reagan era the conservatives wanted to shut the industry down. And almost did. Then the more liberal Clinton administration assumes power and Reno all but shuts down the investigations and prosecutions. Then Bush and Ashcroft assume power and they are all set to revise the draconian clampdown. Only 9/11 intervenes and suddenly the justice Department is forced to shift gears to the Patriot Acts. Another kind of repression. But the crucial fact remains that even though you have the Father Knows Best crowd co-existing [for now] with Hollywood, Eminem and rapworld, the "libertines" barely scratch the surface in their understanding of "sexual freedom". And it is often manifested in misogynist and homophobic ways. In any event, it's all just co-opted into the "entertainment industry" and everything stays right on the surface. And it is right on the surface of pop culture, mass consumption and celebrity that the new gods rule.

Sadly, however, perusing much that comes out of philosophy departments [and venues like this] these days you wouldn't even suspect the above analysis bore any relevance whatsoever to the human condition.

iambiguous wrote:From Richard Shusterman's essay, "Ehics and Aesthetics are One"

Taken from the anthology, After the Future

There are at least two good reasons why not even...localized human essences can be found. First, not only in a mammoth country like America but in any advanced civilization, there is a very high order of division of labor, a division of occupational roles. The notion of a general functional human essence that Aristotle and other ethical theorists assumed and built upon seems no longer viable when men and women have so many different functional occupations that are so difficult to reconcile. How do we reconcile the functional essence of the farmer and the stockbroker, the creative artist and and factory hand, the priest and the cosmetician, the scientist and the casino operator? Much more disturbing is the fact that we not only collectively experience a conflict of divergent [occupational] functional essences but we feel it just as powerfully on the individual personal level. The conflict between a woman's functional essence as defined by her profession, and that defined by her role as mother is perhaps the most familiar and acute of such contemporary problems of identity. But there are countless other examples of how our professional role or self-definitions sharply conflict or simply do not coherently mesh with our self-definition as friends, family or political agents, thus making it seem impossible to find humankind a functional essence in some coherent amalgam of its social roles.


In some respects, Nietzsche's God-is-dead nihilism fits right into the conjectures above. After all, if God could be posited and then produced, he would then function as both the ontological rim and the teleological hub we "mere mortal" spokes would cohere to "metaphysically" on the wheel of life. Sans God, however, we need to construe a secular facsimile. But given all of the multitudinous and multifarious "roles" and "options" open to us in our much more profoundly fragmented contemporary world, how would we go about that? Think, for example, of how we go about "acquiring" a sense of "self" and how someone born into, say, a small aboriginal community in the Amazon Basin might come to understand her role re the world around her.

Yet Nietzsche was himself deluded, in my view, respecting the manner in which the far more open-ended approach to identity in the "modern world" is applicable to the "will to power" and the "Ubermensch". Nietzsche still valued the manner in which some folks [like him] see through the meek inheriting the earth; and as "blond beasts", the Supermen are willing to embrace the consequences of the dead God in order to live their lives fully and passionately on a more "authentic" level.

In other words, just as Sartre tended to ascribe the manner in which others are "hell" in objectifying us, Nietzsche projected the same sort of agenda into "the herd". Yet, like Sartre, Nietzsche failed to focus the beam intensely enough in another equally crucial direction: the manner in which we tend to objectify our own self.

What we do in the modern world, of course, is to differentiate the Real Me from all the personas we adopt around others in order to "play the game". But what if our own sense of "self" [our alleged "True Self"] is just a game we play in turn? What if we are merely deluding ourselves into imagining the distinction is "authentic"?

I think, by and large, that is exactly what we do.

iambiguous wrote:Bret Easton Ellis

The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.

Folks living in a world that might be described as, say, less than zero. And only some of them have access to Rip.

A child should never even think about being a "good son." A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the "perfect dad"? I shudder at thinking what that may be.

Besides, a lot of them just make it up as they go along.

The newspapers kept stoking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had ‘unwittingly’ been done. There were ‘feared lapses’. There were ‘misconceptions’ about potential. Situations had ‘deteriorated’. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn’t care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people’s days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn’t help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it.

Still, don't forget to vote!

I've been accused of being vain about my apathy.

Must be like those who accuse me of being vain about my cynicism. But how close to or far apart from each other can they be though?

Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.

Trust me: it's not even close to being one of the worst.

...if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you.

Wanna bet?

iambiguous wrote:Came upon this quote from Salman Rushdie:

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

Yes, this also captures the manner in which I try to convey the meaning of dasein. All the variables -- some of which we are barely cognizant of -- coming together over the years to predispose us to one rather than another meaning. A very personal meaning to say the least.

What then are philosophers to make of this? How are they able to pin down the one true objective meaning when that meaning revolves around conflicting values -- around the question "how ought one to live?"

iambiguous wrote:"Heidegger and ethics: from Dasein as being-in-the-world to Dasein as ethical"
Eric Robert Panicco
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/view ... ool_theses

Note: I choose this merely because in Googling "Dasein and ethics" this was the first scholastic account I came upon.

The aim of this thesis is to show that we can understand Dasein as ethical. In order to do this we first need a reason to think Dasein might be ethical. Heidegger certainly never gives anything resembling a positive account of ethics. It is extremely rare for him to even bring up ethics. So then, why should we think that his characterization of Dasein should be ethical? As an initial answer, our interest stems from Dasein as fundamentally engaged in the world.

Yes, it's been a long time since I have construed myself as a "serious philosopher". Instead, of late, my focus has always been on connecting the dots between those who do think of themselves as taking philosophy seriously and the extent to which someone of this sort implicates philosophy in human interactions out in a particular world that come to clash over conflicting goods.

Sure, there are any number of aspects embedded in human interactions in which that is not the focus at all. Instead "I" here goes about the business of connecting dots between those facets of human interaction that appear to be true for all of us. The stuff that revolves around going through the day knowing that if you do this, that will be the result. It will be that result for anyone who does it. That's the nature of the either/or world. And to the extent that folks like Heidegger can offer us new insights into this re "the human condition", fine.

I've no doubt that there are any number of "technical issues" here to consider. Techincal issues revolving around perception and conception; revolving in turn around that which is deemed to be rational in sync with that which we either can or cannot know.

But for Heidegger to explore the nature of Dasein and "rarely even bring up ethics"....?

I'm sorry but for folks like me, that seems nothing short of preposterous. Unless, of course, he always intended to bring the "technical" facets of his philosophy out into the world that he lived in. In order to examine them in the context of the particular conflicting goods that were swirling about him in Nazi Germany.

What of Dasein and "the final solution"?

After all, when most Daseins become "fundamentally engaged in the world" around them, they quickly become immersed in "rules of behavior" that garner either rewards or punishments. Indeed, any newspaper or newscast reveals just how being fundamentally engaged with others precipitates all manner of turbulent headlines and editorials.

And this is where my own rendition of Dasein comes in. The existential dasein. The existential "I".

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

In this article we will see what Sartre does and doesn’t mean by this awkward inversion of everyday language. In his reflections on action Sartre goes to the very heart of what it is to be human. He argues that our free actions are not the consequence of our identity, they are its foundation – and it is our nature as human beings always to go beyond who we are towards a freely chosen self.

Here though Sartre would have had to note for me an action that he chose, and then clearly described for me this juncture at which his sense of identity is the starting point for the action or the action itself is the starting point for his identity. How in the world can they not be all tangled together in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein and conflicting goods?

Unless of course I am simply missing the point here.

The act that he embodied in choosing an existential leap to Maoism flowed in large part from all of the existential variables in his life that predisposed him to go in that direction.

Sort of his own personal rendition of the points I raise here: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopi ... 1&t=194382

And then having acted from that trajectory he creates many new existential variables that will propel "I" further. He has new experiences, new relationships, access to new ideas [in a world of contingency, chance and change] and thus "I" evolves accordingly.

It's not like he woke up one morning, turned to Simone, and just blurted out "I'm a Maoist!". Of course the manner in which his own particular "I" was predisposed to go in that direction played an enormous part in the action to choose itself. And that he acted as he did in itself precipitated new factors that would impact profoundly on the life that he lived.

Our commitments allow us to become people we might not have become and illuminate a set of priorities that might have remained obscure. Yet we are not slaves to but creators of our existence, and our freedom allows us constantly to redesign and rebuild our identity.

But only [in my view] to the extent that one comes to recognize "I" as an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

In a section of Being and Nothingness concerning angoisse (‘anguish’), Sartre gives two examples of individuals who discover that their identity is insecure. First, the cliff walker. Someone is walking along the side of a dangerous cliff, on a narrow path, without a guard-rail. He is anxious. It is not a straightforward fear that the path will give way (it looks firm enough) or that a gust of wind knock him over (the air is calm): it is a fear that he might willingly throw himself off and jump to his death. He doesn’t trust himself.

You either get this or you don't.

But: How to explain it if you do.

For me it's an overpass at Herring Run Park. On some days it became a real ordeal making it from one end to another. The knowing that I was never quite sure if I wanted to tumble over into oblivion. And grappling with the tug of war being waged inside my head by psychological forces I would never be able to actually explain. Not even to myself.

It was an entirely different kind of anguish because it came from deep down inside myself. It was like grappling with the reality of existing itself but not knowing what the hell that actually meant.

And [of course] right around the corner from Sartre's nausea. Which was in turn largely ineffable. "I" free to topple over into the abyss. But never quite believing that I ever would. But never absolutely certain of it.

Many people have had an experience of vertigo akin to this. On the one hand, looking into the abyss, we want to live; on the other hand, we become aware of our total freedom. We notice that the ‘will to live’ is not an unchangeable part of our psychological make-up. The more we reflect on it, the more we realize that we are not bound by it, and we become dizzy with the possibilities that open up before us. We could be reckless and jump, for no reason at all – and this is what really terrifies us.

And this frame of mind can be directed outward towards others as well. All of the terrible things that you can inflict on them if only "I" comes around to a set of circumstances that makes it all the more possible.

What could you do? What are you convinced that you could not do? I still recall an incident at college when, in Vaneeta Burkhardt's abnormal psychology class, the discussion got around to murder. "Could you murder someone?", she asked. And of course, the students [all fresh out of high school] were absolutely certain that they could not. But I had enrolled in college on the GI Bill. I had just been discharged from the Army, having spent a year in Vietnam. An experience in which the man I was before the war had been completely reconfigured into basically a whole other person. At least in some important respects.

I knew [intellectually, viscerally] how a set of circumstances could prompt you to do things that, before the experience, you never even imagined that you could or would do.

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

The second example of anguish is the reformed gambler. This person has sincerely decided never to gamble again. He has taken a firm resolution to quit. He considers himself to be a reformed gambler, and he relies on this identity to get him through the temptations that come. Yet as he nears the gaming table, his resolution melts away:

“What he apprehends then in anguish is precisely the total inefficacy of the past resolution. It is there, doubtless, but fixed, ineffectual, surpassed by the very fact that I am conscious of it. The resolution is still me to the extent that I realize constantly my identity with myself across the temporal flux, but it is no longer me – due to the fact that it has become an object for my consciousness. I am not subject to it, it fails in the mission which I have given to it.”

This is basically surreal to me. As though "I" can decide never to gamble again in the same manner in which one's sexual behaviors can be changed through, say, surgical castration. "I" make a resolution in one set of circumstances not to gamble but this can be sustained only to the extent that those circumstances never change. Once the circumstances change all bets are off. In my view, only if "I" here was in fact a "thing" able to be commanded surgically [or through medication] such that biologically a new set of imperatives is set in place, would the resolution be sustained with any real degree of certainty.

Otherwise, new experiences and new relationships in a world of contingency, chance and change still prevails.

The identity the gambler has established for himself as reformed is fragile. He wishes it constrained him and guaranteed his new way of life, but this very wish betrays his knowledge that both gambling and not gambling are equally possible for him.

Exactly. Only if he puts himself in a situation where he literally cannot gamble is "I" here on a secure leash.

His present identity as resolved and reformed is illusory – it is really a memory of a previous identity (who he was at the time of his resolution): it is already surpassed, and the resolution will not be effective unless it is remade once more.

In other words, each new set of circumstances requires a new resolution. And, sure, if "I" here was not an existential contraption ever subject to dealing with these new contingencies, a more objectivist sense of self might be possible.

I merely note the extent to which all of this is true in regard to "I" acquiring moral and political values in turn; and then embracing one or another objectivist font in order to reconfigure "I" into I.

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

Matthieu [in The Age of Reason] wants to justify his actions and base them on good reasons, or at least on some overwhelming desire; but by interrogating his motives, by trying to establish whether they are compelling, he distances himself from them.

This exposes the extent to which how [for some of us] the more you attempt to think through a situation looking for reason and motive and meaning, the more you actually come to things like dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

The part about "overwhelming desire" seems more in sync with the libido, with instinct, with those deep down inside drives the human brain is notorious for. Just go where they take you, right? Why? Because as soon as you stop to think it all through rationally, to "analyze" it all "philosophically", the more likely you are to end up in the hole that "I" am in all busted up like Humpty Dumpty.

The process of examining his motives shows they have no binding power over his future: the search for obligations leads him to freedom because it uncovers the fact that alternative courses of action are also viable. However costly it seems, the price of being conscious of an identity is a corresponding liberation from that identity, with an ever-present responsibility for continuing or denying that identity. We experience this responsibility through anguish.

All I can say here is that this is more or less what happened to me the more I became immersed in existentialism, deconstruction and semiotics. I began to see how my own objectivist frame of mind was largely just a world of words brought together either by God or political ideology.

And, now, as a moral nihilist, that anguish pops up whenever I am confronted with conflicting goods embedded in this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

"I" am no longer able to think myself up out of it.

This is not just a point about the fact that our identities change, since anguish does not come about when a past identity is forgotten and a new one adopted. Rather, anguish is a sign that human beings are ‘separated from themselves’, from the identities that constitute who they are now. We can review the present and not just the past, and we have a continual responsibility to recreate our identities through our choices.

You either come to embody this frame of mind or you don't. For me, it's not so much bearing the responsibility of recreating my identity "authentically", but of recognizing how many variables here are either beyond my comprehension or beyond my control. And that no set of behaviors is necessarily either more or less authentic. The "nausea" is derived from the manner in which I construe "I" as the fractured and fragmented embodiment of dasein.

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

There are many ways of trying to avoid the responsibility for ourselves that comes with anguish. In Sartre’s scheme they all come under the heading of ‘bad faith’ (self-deception). One instructive type of bad faith is ‘sincerity’. This is a technical term in Sartre’s vocabulary: it is the attempt ‘to be who we are’; to make our life match our identity; to conform our actions with our supposed inner reality.

In other words [perhaps], another way of pointing to those who, in my view, are able to think themselves into believing in the existence of a "real me" in sync with the "right thing to do". That way, others can then be judged as more or less "sincere" about living "the good life" to the extent that they live it as you do.

What I call the "bad faith" of the objectivists.

On the other hand [of course], one can then conclude that unless others share this point of view, they are themselves seen by me to be acting in bad faith.

Good faith? Bad faith? Talk about "existential contraptions"!

But, lets face it, psychological defense mechanisms exist above all else to minimize anguish in our lives. Only, as I see it, it still comes down to the actual sets of behaviors that are chosen. What does it mean, when confronting conflicting goods, to claim that one is acting in bad faith? From my frame of mind, it means insisting there is only one obligatory -- rational and moral -- set of behaviors. But then others can insist that I am then claiming that to the extent others don't share this point of view themselves, they are acting in bad faith.

Which is not what I am saying at all. If I were, I'd be excluding myself from my own point of view.

But as soon as we spot whatever ‘essential’ aspect of our being it is that we want to display, we realise that we are neither identified with this ‘essence’ nor bound by it. To explain or excuse our behaviour with reference to ‘who we are’ is already to put some distance between our present actions and the past ‘identity’ which supposedly caused them, by our reflection upon this identity. We stake a claim to a ‘self’ and immediately betray our distance from it.

This is the part where many come not only to objectify others but to objectify themselves in turn:

“Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself. One frees oneself from oneself by the very act by which one makes oneself an object for oneself.” Sartre

Still, I always come back again and again to taking intellectual contraptions/general descriptions such as this out into the world of actual human interactions. What, for all practical purposes, do words such as these mean when describing actual behaviors in conflict?

My point is that to the extent we distant ourselves from objectification, the closer we come to being down in my "hole"...with "I" more or less "fractured and fragmented".

Then I go in search of the narratives of those who are convinced that they do not objectify "I" [in the is/ought world] but are not in turn fractured and fragmented as "I" am.

iambiguous wrote:"Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness"
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

It should be made clear that Sartre is very aware of the many factors that constitute an identity for each person. His aim is not to deny the reality of human identity but to question whether this is enough to account for one’s actions.

Of course, like all the rest of us, however many factors he took into account, how realistic is it to suppose that he took into account all of the factors there are that can be [or must be] taken into account? Did he take into account the factors that I take into account? How about the factors that you take into account? Or the factors that others focus in on that you and I and he did not think of at all?

In whatever manner we account for our own behaviors, there are surely variables we will have left out. Or include but do not understand as others do. Or do not understand in the optimal manner.

I always come back then to the seeming futility of making claims about the behaviors we choose as anything other than existential leaps. Let alone in making claims about the behaviors of others.

There seems to be no exit from the problematic "I" here. We go back and forth about it, but with no real capacity to come up with a frame of mind that allows us to draw any definitive conclusions.

And even the extent to which this disturbs some more than others is just another manifestation of the conflicting narratives we are able to come up with in explaining "I" to others.

It's no wonder then that most become objectivists.

It is worth considering some of the factors that make up our identity in Being and Nothingness. ‘Facticity’ is the word Sartre uses to stand for the innumerable facts about our life which we have not chosen. These make up the sense in which our life is given, discovered, inherited and dependent on circumstances outside our control. We are bodily creatures, in a specific time and place, with a personal history, living in specific conditions.

In other words, the parts that intertwine in the either/or world. And these include facts able to be established about us and facts able to be established about the world that we interact in.

But even here [in a No God world] we are either able to establish certain facts or we are not. So, just because something is true does not mean we able to convince others of it. And that then precipitates yet more problematic interactions. We act on what we think is true. But: The consequences are in fact what they are however they are in sync with what is actually true.

There are many undeniable facts about our individual psychologies. Sartre lists various characteristics, habits, states, etc., which make up the psychic unity of our egos. These include not only latent qualities which inform our behaviour, such as industriousness, jealousy, ambition; and actual states which embody a certain behaviour, such as loving or hating; but also a whole pattern of acts. Our acts manifest the unified purposes of the psyche.

Okay, but the undeniable facts about our own psychology are still embedded in a profoundly problematic and convoluted "soup" of human interactions. There are facts that psychologists can tell us. Facts that sociologists can tell us. Facts that political scientists can tell us. Facts that anthropologists can tell us. Facts that historians can tell us.

But, given behaviors that we can describe, chosen at a particular time and place, who can really tell us what "our acts manifest the unified purposes of the psyche" means?

Other than the objectivists.