What is Your Story?

[Dark Matter]

Georgeanna, are you moved by such a dreary and and uninspiring story as F4’s?

[Georgeanna]

Georgeanna, are you moved by such a dreary and and uninspiring story as F4’s?

I was moved enough by it to respond. Which aspect of his account did you find 'dreary and uninspiring' ?
Is that all you have to ask of me in relation to my reply ?

[Dark Matter]

Georgeanna, are you moved by such a dreary and and uninspiring story as F4’s?

I was moved enough by it to respond. Which aspect of his account did you find 'dreary and uninspiring' ?

Everything. It’s a story any unimaginative third-grader could write.

Is that all you have to ask of me in relation to my reply ?

What else do you want me to say? That your story isn’t really a story in a mythological sense?

[Sy Borg]

But what if, like Rey in the Last Jedi, some people know, somewhere in the back of their minds, there's more than what is presented to their physical senses? Would it not be natural to dismiss Greta's story as inadequate for their stage of development? Would they not pursue more satisfying answers, and would not those answers also evolve?

How would they "know"? By what mechanism. History is replete with politicians and people who were absolutely utterly and utterly certain that they knew things - but actually they did not.

And you can stop babbling about bigotry. There are equivalent things you could be called but no one else has stooped to that level, rather preferring to focus on content rather than playing rhetorical games.

Perhaps when theists stop attacking women, gays, abortion clinics and interfering with end of life processes, forcing millions into prolonged pointless agony, then we can talk about bigotry. At this stage any secular attacks on theism are still just self defence given that our polities dominated by theists enforcing unrepresentative policy on everyone.

I'd put money on it they those people "know" too - many "know" science better than scientists, economics better than economists, nature better than naturalists, chemistry better than chemists etc.

[Sy Borg]

I was moved enough by it to respond. Which aspect of his account did you find 'dreary and uninspiring' ?

Note that DM loathes Fooloso and is taking the chance at a quick shot, without content but replete with spite.

Integrity?

[Fooloso4]

I started working on this before Georianna posted and DM responded. A few quick comments on that exchange:

Georgeanna:

I agree that we can learn more about someone, or our selves, by observing outward behaviour.

Dark Matter:

Georgeanna, are you moved by such a dreary and and uninspiring story as F4’s?

DM, you may believe that any story that is not an otherworldly fantasy is dreary and uninspiring, but some of us find human relationships and our obligation to care for ourselves and others here and now more inspiring than what we find in the escape of fantasy. No matter how one furnishes the world of their inner life, how we behave, what we do rather than what we imagine is the touchstone of self-knowledge.

Some thoughts on the self inspired by Nietzsche’s misquoting Pindar:

Become who/what you are.

He omits the second part:

Having learned what that is.

As with the imperative

Know thyself

it can be turned in many directions. Nietzsche’s omission is not only deliberate but telling. Who we are is what we become. As long as we live who we are is always a matter of what we will be, of what we become. But we do not become who we are from being something other than we are. There is no escaping this self-referential circle. All talk of God and transcendence is an unaware self-referential attempt to escape the circle. Such attempts are at bottom a denial of self.

As I see it, the self is a self-constructing construct. Who we are emerges from our own narratives of ourselves. Both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we accept about ourselves are already determined by who we are. The self emerges from what you already are and is never separate from who you are. In one sense we are always ourselves even when we are for one reason or another “not ourselves”. But the self is not a fixed, unchanging entity. This is why Nietzsche omits the second half of Pindar’s admonition. Who or what we become is open ended and, at least for some, self-directed. We should not separate the problem of becoming who we are from our self-knowledge of what we want to be.

The extent to which the self is a coherent whole is itself dependent on yourself. The self, even the most consistent and unified or whole self is a multitude, with multiple stories, that wax and wane. Which voices are the loudest and which voices we are attentive to, what is of concern to us, what makes a difference to us, says something about ourselves in a double sense. On the one hand, it is a reflection of ourselves, but on the other, formative for who or what we wish to be or not be, that is, for what we become.

Nietzsche says he tests or sounds various claims about who he is in order to see whether they ring true to him. It is a mode of self-examination. He is in this sense being true to himself, his own authority as to who he his, something for which no one can stand as as a higher authority. But what is true in his case is not true in all cases. Some simply prefer to be told who or what they are, and, of course, that is part of the story of who they are.

[Georgeanna]

I was moved enough by it to respond. Which aspect of his account did you find 'dreary and uninspiring' ?

Note that DM loathes Fooloso and is taking the chance at a quick shot, without content but replete with spite.

Integrity?

Understood.
Shame if that spitefulness continues. Then again, has all the ingredients of a non-dreary and inspiring soap opera...

[Sy Borg]

Note that DM loathes Fooloso and is taking the chance at a quick shot, without content but replete with spite.

Integrity?

Understood.
Shame if that spitefulness continues. Then again, has all the ingredients of a non-dreary and inspiring soap opera...

That will be dreary too, trust me. DM and F have been at it a few times and it's a matter of "never the twain shall meet".

DM is a romantic and provocateur who longs for the eternal and speaks in terms of the metaphorical, making short, pointed, broad assumptive statements while F is an ethical humanist, keen to avoid conjecture, who is polite, detailed and precise. So they tend to run at cross purposes. Maybe spelling it all out this way will help? Realistically, probably not

Meanwhile, most of the rest of us probably lie somewhere between the poles that these two differing personalities somewhat represent. Whatever, I like the premise of the thread - it's interesting and has provoked some interesting thoughts so far.

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Meanwhile, most of the rest of us probably lie somewhere between the poles that these two differing personalities somewhat represent.

Kh-khm. Excuse meeee.... but I should like to think of myself as my own pole unto my very own self.

No pole is more pole-ish than I. (That Includes myself, naturally.)

"most of the rest of us..." I shalt not rest my pole mostly until I prove my own pole to all of us.

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[-1-]

"some of us find human relationships and our obligation to care for ourselves and others here and now more inspiring than what we find in the escape of fantasy." -- That was nicely put. Very, very, very nicely.

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I was moved enough by it to respond. Which aspect of his account did you find 'dreary and uninspiring' ?

Note that DM loathes Fooloso and is taking the chance at a quick shot, without content but replete with spite.

Integrity?

DM loathes everything that is crossing his ideas of spiritual domination.

DM has no special place in his heart for Foolo, not even in the negative, hateful sense. DM, instead, hates every atheist, freethinker, and logic-monger.

DM did this with me until I put him on Foe. He was the one that inspired me to plea to the organizer of this site to establish some sort of rule on the supremacy of logic and reason when discussing topics.

[-1-]

I had a story... oo, yes. I had had a story. Quite a story.

But the dog ate it on my way to the forums.

[Sy Borg]

Meanwhile, most of the rest of us probably lie somewhere between the poles that these two differing personalities somewhat represent.

Kh-khm. Excuse meeee.... but I should like to think of myself as my own pole unto my very own self.

No pole is more pole-ish than I. (That Includes myself, naturally.)

"most of the rest of us..." I shalt not rest my pole mostly until I prove my own pole to all of us.

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[Belindi]

Fortunate for Rey! If Rey feels that all is balanced does she then not trouble herself to try to make things better?

[Dark Matter]

But what if, like Rey in the Last Jedi, some people know, somewhere in the back of their minds, there's more than what is presented to their physical senses? Would it not be natural to dismiss Greta's story as inadequate for their stage of development? Would they not pursue more satisfying answers, and would not those answers also evolve?

How would they "know"? By what mechanism. History is replete with politicians and people who were absolutely utterly and utterly certain that they knew things - but actually they did not.

You wouldn't ask if you were truly as open-minded and as observant as you claim. How do birds know how to make nests without being taught? By what mechanism? Did nest-building suddenly appear or did it evolve overtime?

Myths are powerful because they speak to what is already there in the recipient, no matter how deeply it is hidden by the mind's meandering.