Subjectivism and Modern Life

[smmudge]

I think people finding their own meaning and realising it is subjective carries on to the line of thought that, if you are free to make your own choices, you have to take complete responsibility for them as well. This means you have to not only think about your own subjective "why am I doing this?" but also "what affect does this have on other people?" which inevitably occurs in a society where other people's actions also have an affect on you. I don't think either of these questions could be contemplated without the other. In other words, you can't just understand your meaning, you have to justify it.

I don't think it's possible for one to find meaning in a world where they are the only person/consciousness that exists, therefore, other people must be necessary for finding your own meaning. I personally blame Nietzsche's view that sympathy is a weakness. Perhaps not sympathy, but empathy at least is an integral part of finding your own meaning, and it lets you understand other people's meaning. And, likewise, it's good to question the morality that your culture gives you - which is the same as justifying (or recognising the injustice) of other people's actions - whether they have truly considered their responsibility.

 

[gorski]

I forgot where I got this from...

http://rapidshare.com/files/80294886/Art_of_Loving_-_Erich_Fromm.zip.html

A gorgeous little book by Erich Fromm, read out loud for you... So, it's in .mp3 format and a simple Windows Media Player will be able to play it for you. It's in 2 parts, each lasting a bit longer than 1 hour and 20 minutes.

A very healthy and a happy New Year to you!!!

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

More than ever, we are free to choose what we do and how we live our lives. .

...other than on the metaphysical level, where everything is determined.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

if moral values are a matter of individual preference

But they aren't, really. You might think its ok to murder, but society won't agree with you.

 

[gorski]

Which society would that be? Tea party society?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Which society would that be? Tea party society?

The one that has the police and jails.

 

[gorski]

Sometimes one is rewarded - by that very same bunch - when one kills...

 

[CJohn]

Really interesting posts, nosos. I don't personally have a background in philosophy, but I still have a take on some of what you say - though I'm likely just echoing what you've said...

Oh I'm not disputing this at all. I'm simply saying that what we commonly understand as "finding ourselves" (finding answers within ourselves) is in actuality just another way of dealing with the world. The problem is more our understanding the process as something removed from the world (we can't find answers in the cold neutral world 'out there' so we must explore our inner depths) than it is the process in itself.

I agree with the idea that there is increasing pressure on people to look into themselves to find meaning and value, to discover their "true self". The problem being that it shifts us away from the social aspect of our being, and the inter-subjective aspect of meaning. For me meaning is something that emergences through engagement with the world. I find myself then not through abstracted introspection that uncovers some internal truths, but through relationship with other people, and the choices and responsibility that this entails. Authenticity is then a project one pursues in the social environment, my true self – if anything – is my commitment to ideals, morals, or values in the social sphere.

Returning to choice, can it be said that I am free to choose, but that I do not choose freely? Thus there is of course a subjective voluntary aspect to any choice I make, a commintment that must be made, yet at the same time the choices I actually make can be – at least partially – casually related to objective involuntary aspects such as my position within socio-cultural space, my psychology (and unconscious) and my biology.

 

[goldenecitrone]

People like you say are atomised. I fear people cannot relate to each other like perhaps they did only 40 years or so ago.

Well, they certainly couldn't chat with a bunch of random people from around the world about the subjectivity of life in the 1960s, that's for sure.

 

[Barking_Mad]

To a degree, altohugh im not sure what it would be. However, the internet by its very nature is atomised, at least in as much as I think it doesn't foster (for the most part) genuine human relationships.

 

[goldenecitrone]

To a degree, altohugh im not sure what it would be. However, the internet by its very nature is atomised, at least in as much as I think it doesn't foster (for the most part) genuine human relationships.

I agree, but it certainly gives you insight into the lives of others that wouldn't have been previously possible. Maybe that gives us more empathy with others.

 

[nosos]

I agree, but it certainly gives you insight into the lives of others that wouldn't have been previously possible. Maybe that gives us more empathy with others.

I think this is very interesting. The internet has allowed such an explosion of communication that, at least to some extent, the perspective of different cultures and different ways of life permeate our own experience. There's an inevitable sort of 'stepping back' from the choices we make, as we're unavoidably aware that even the things we hold most dear are just one choice amongst others. Of course the internet also faciliates a degree of group polarisation that was previously not possible: it's pretty concretely demonstrated (can't be arsed typing it out atm) that once you have self-selecting groups based around certain shared beliefs, they will, all things equal, tend to become more entrenched in those beliefs. I'd argue that while the internet atomises us, it does so in a way that also threatens the integrity of our identity: we understand ourselves as self-possessed self-determining beings with inner depths yet the communication we have with others so radically shapes our experience of ourself and the relationship we have to our beliefs and practices. Beyond the obvious physical sense in which you're sitting in front of a pc on your own (unless you're sitting around fucked in someone's living room on a sunday afternoon with everyone using a laptop and wireless internet - an oddly sociable unsociable activity) the internet doesn't seem to either simply atomise us or bring us together.

 

[gorski]

To a degree, altohugh im not sure what it would be. However, the internet by its very nature is atomised, at least in as much as I think it doesn't foster (for the most part) genuine human relationships.

So far. Overall. I would agree.

But we haven't seen the future. Ergo, goldenecitrone has a point! Nos picks up on it and develops it further... in an interesting direction!

 

[nosos]

I suspect the really interesting change that will occur is a growing understanding of the internet as a real geographical terrain, rather than the interesting aggregate function of computer technology it's relegated to being on a strict materialist ontology. There's a very real sense in which it's an entirely new (emergent) dimension of reality we've opened up.

 

[gorski]

The first internet "nation" asking the UN for a few square meters of "territory" to setup their server: http://www.juga.com/ - I'm one of the "ministers"...

 

[CJohn]

I suspect the really interesting change that will occur is a growing understanding of the internet as a real geographical terrain...

I also wonder if, given these changes, we will come to think of ourselves (perhaps non-reflectively) as less bounded to our bodies, in the sense that we can locate parts of our-self in this new 'geographical terrain'. Part of me will thus reside elsewhere, not spatio-temporally located in my body, but dissociated (to a degree) in another space.

 

[Jonti]

If my eyes an ears were in another room, I'd experience myself as being in that room.

"I" seems to be where my sense organs are.

 

[gorski]

It seems that new/experimental forms of psychology would disagree...

 

[kyser_soze]

at least in as much as I think it doesn't foster (for the most part) genuine human relationships.

Only because it's very new, and you're an old man digital media wise (frightening stuff). There is a tendency among a lot of people to forget that the internet as we use it is only about 15 years old, and while it exists in compressed time (insofar as lots happens quickly), it's still only a young medium in human terms...give it another 15 years and I suspect that the notion that it doesn't lead to genuine human relationships will be completely gone.

FWIW I disagree strongly with the statement anyway - I met one of my now best mates and my current partner online, and have forged firm friendships with a number of people on Urban and a couple of other boards, and while I know there's a network effect present in it, lots of my friends' friends were also internet started. As much as anything else tho I suspect that depends on how you view the net - as a tool for connecting people whom you then go on to meet, or as the sole medium of interaction.

I'll come back to the stuff on atomisation later, cos your OP looks a lot like my personal development from depression through shrinkage to where I am now...

 

[nosos]

I also wonder if, given these changes, we will come to think of ourselves (perhaps non-reflectively) as less bounded to our bodies, in the sense that we can locate parts of our-self in this new 'geographical terrain'. Part of me will thus reside elsewhere, not spatio-temporally located in my body, but dissociated (to a degree) in another space.

I'm fascinated by this sort of idea. It's just very difficult to theorise about because it's attempting to predict changes in our experience of self-hood which we're consitutively incapable of conceptualising. Just like if you tried to explain modern ideas of individualism to someone 1000 years ago.

 

[nosos]

I'll come back to the stuff on atomisation later, cos your OP looks a lot like my personal development from depression through shrinkage to where I am now...

Please do, I'd be very interested.

 

[gorski]

...our experience of self-hood which we're consitutively incapable of conceptualising.

Why would you say this, m8? Not sure I understand, so better ask...

 

[nosos]

We're incapable of conceptualising future revolutions in our experience of self-hood because we can't step outside our current experience. Part of having an experience of self-hood is being phenomenologically bound into it iyswim.

 

[kyser_soze]

We're incapable of conceptualising future revolutions in our experience of self-hood because we can't step outside our current experience. Part of having an experience of self-hood is being phenomenologically bound into it iyswim.

So for example, I couldn't possibly conceptualise what I'd be like if I was suddenly born-again into religious faith?

 

[articul8]

we can't step outside our current experience. Part of having an experience of self-hood is being phenomenologically bound into it iyswim.

I'd be tempted to say the exact opposite - that our existence is always at least in part extrinsic to our capacity to conceptualise the experience of it. Which makes the kind of symptoms explored by psychoanalysis (eg. dreams) philsophically interesting because they are the closest we get to intuiting the historically contingent forms of our experience as individual 'subjects'.

What is closed off to the waking 'individual' subject might be partially accessible to us in the form of dreams, aesthetic images or other forms of thought beyond narrow 'rational' cognition

 

[kyser_soze]

Please do, I'd be very interested.

I think it leads to atomization: in the sense that we come to understand ourselves as individuals with “inner depths” (which we have an obligation to explore and so “find ourselves”) and thus we are, at a basic level, separate from the world and from others. It turns our moral focus inwards and consequently away from social externalities. It also leads to subjectivism: if moral values are a matter of individual preference then what weight could any values hold in determining individual conduct? It also breaks down processes of self-narrative. To maintain a coherent sense of self over time, we articulate (and rearticulate) the relationships between otherwise discrete events in our lives so as to form an ongoing narrative. A crucial part of the self-narrative process is orientating ourselves in terms of an over-arching context. If meaning and significance are reduced to wholly subjectivist terms then this serves to strip away a range of possible contexts available to us.

OK, when I split from my wife I was almost literally completely alone in London - I had one friend that I talked to irregularly. I was also completely adrift emotionally - having 'been there' for someone for 8 years, I was suddenly 'free' in a way I hadn't experienced before; I was an adult, successful in my career (at the time) and had just had any 3rd party behavioural boundaries removed from me. So I went through the process you talk about - I was answerable to no one, so I behaved as tho in my own social vacuum. None of the relationships I formed were solid, indeed I actively shied away from them. I existed in a mental state that's about as close to amorality as I think I've ever been.

It was only when this existance and behaviour hit a wall, and I fell apart psychologically, that I started to reconsider my stance of being atomised. I started reading a lot again at this time (about the time I started posting on Urban too), and began to realise that establishing values of my own was vital to my own mental health...which then began the long climb back to acting and behaving like a reasonably civilised human being...

What I think happens with a lot of people is that, for whatever reasons, they never reach a crisis point in that atomisation that requires them to re-assess ro re-build their own moral narrative, to give themselves any kind of framework...

 

[fela fan]

We're incapable of conceptualising future revolutions in our experience of self-hood because we can't step outside our current experience. Part of having an experience of self-hood is being phenomenologically bound into it iyswim.

How does one label this kind of bullshit? And what the fuck does it mean? And who is the royal 'we'?

And 'self-hood'??? Bloody hell!

You might not be able to step outside your own current experience, but don't go presuming for others. Coz you're making a big mistako laddo.

This post is the worst one i've seen in a long time here on urban.

 

[nosos]

So for example, I couldn't possibly conceptualise what I'd be like if I was suddenly born-again into religious faith?

No I think you could, in the same way that we conceptualise, for instance, (historic) pre-individualized experiences of self-hood. You have stuff to go on. You have interaction with the religious, you have knowledge of their world-view, you've seen their practices. A fusion of horizons is possible. If you're talking about experiences of self-hood that haven't occurred yet, no such fusion is possible because there's no such horizon.

 

[nosos]

This post is the worst one i've seen in a long time here on urban.

Yet you admit yourself that you didn't even understand it. Idiot.

 

[articul8]

care to respond to my challenge to your view (#55), Nosos?

eg. that although obviously we can't experience future forms of subjectivity directly, we can intuit them through the symptomatic traces which disclose the contingency of contemporary selfhood.