FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 9:16 pm
iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Nov 06, 2023 9:56 pm
...there have been any number of situations in my past where my thinking and my emotions were shifting dramatically and thus up to a point out of sync. When I first became a devout Christian. When I became a Marxist and an atheist. When I flirted with the Unitarian Church and with Objectivism. When I shifted from Lenin to Trotsky. When I abandoned Marxism and became a Democratic Socialist and then a Social Democrat. When I discovered existentialism and deconstruction and semiotics and abandoned objectivism altogether. When I became moral nihilist. When I began to crumble into an increasingly more fragmented "I" in the is/ought world.
Who were you quoting there? Whoever that guy is, he's a complete fucking mess. Nobody can really be such a rudderless ship blown around by every gust of wind and pushed by every current as that.
Iambiguous is quoting
himself. What he presents is his own situation. It is not without a certain integrity however. And as confused and rudderless as it is, that is actually his point: there
is no rudder.
It seems that the situation Iambiguous describes -- as an impasse he is stuck in but one he has universalized into a version of absolute truth -- derives from our own liberal democratic political and social situation. What he describes is our own situation at a macro level. I refer naturally, and given my own background, to the political and social situation in America to illustrate this point. No one agrees. All positions are merely *opinions* of those within a given interest-set. There are now such a variety of sectors and factions with some opinion or other and each feels they are 'metaphysically grounded' and are truthful and correct. They establish themselves in *battle positions* agains the other (who is obviously
getting it wrong).
Since Iambiguous (and by extension many people) no longer recognizes a *god* that has provided a moral grounding, and a moral grounding located in metaphysics, then all we have as a model is the natural world where power and striving determine everything. Returning to *reality* from a long voyage in
romantic idealism we confront the real world of Nature and against that we go *splat*.
Because Iambiguous finds himself
there and no longer in an idealized metaphysic that he *believes in*, the only alternative available to him is just as he says: moral nihilism.
And when he then goes on to confess that in that situation even his *I* begins to fragment -- after all what could hold it together since the *I* is a metaphysical entity? -- he actually does a service by revealing what our own cultural, social and political situation really is. This is what we have come to.
Nobody can really be such a rudderless ship blown around by every gust of wind and pushed by every current as that.
Yet this is, in fact, the situation we (i.e. *the world*) is in. True though that you
can present an example of someone who says that they are grounded in something-or-other (these Iambiguous describes as 'objectivists' and he describes an objectivist
contrived strategy which he dismisses and ridicules to a degree) but there is no position that is held today that has any ground except that of *opinion*. In Iambiguous' would there are no metaphysical solidities and his use of the term Dasein is a way of referring to the position that any person has which, according to him, is produced from their existential situation.
Dasein is really a fancy term for *location*.
But these are mutable. He often asks "What would I have believed had I been born in another place?" He sees that he is a malleable entity and such an entity only has *opinion* and no *truth*.
Iambiguous wrote: As for my own expectations in regard to those of your ilk here, those of my ilk anticipate more of the same didactic "up in the intellectual clouds" exchanges. Theoretical ethics.
I have often been stymied when Iambiguous bust out with this odd accusation but now I believe I have a better sense of where he is coming from. Since he rejects all metaphysics, and since 'intellectual clouds' is another word for metaphysics, and since he can only descend from the cloud-realm down to the very physical and therefore material plane, he seeks to ground what he does in what might correspond to a Marxian view: strict power relations and economic relations and one's class-position.
Any attempt to get the *metaphysical contraption* up in the air again and flying is met with the accusation that it is a
false-attempt. There is no getting off the ground. And this is where his wonderful metaphor of an intellectual person moving from one level to another on *skyhooks* has always seemed a concise image.