Quote:
Originally posted by randall patrick,
If you wish to call this Authentic so be it. I think it is just a particular self-delusion that you embrace now, today. So many conflicting and contradictory existential variables come together to create any particular persona at any particular existential junture "I" is always a work in progress that, given a particularly jolting circumstanital landslide, can utterly reconfigure the way you understand yourself and the world around you. If the man I was before going over to Vietnam met the man I was after coming back home they would not even recognize each other if they collided on the street. You can be "honest" and "sincere" about the role subjectivity plays in all this but it doesn't really change how precarious and problematic human identity always is. And the value of that "authentic" approach to life is no more or less relevant when the Grim Reaper comes around. Death and oblivion don't give a crap about things like that at all. |
I think the only thing we dissagree on is what we consider "Authentic." Like I said, authenticity doesn't matter much when you die. But it matters to me. And again, like I said, only I can decide what "authenticity" entails... there are no absolutes here, unless I want there to be.
This all reminds me of Sartre...
The problem with existentialism IMO is that, really, it solves little. It's like "hunting for a fugitive while banging on a drum." It creates more questions, and more questions, and more questions - without ever really answering much. It's really, (again IMO) simply very intelligent but go-nowhere fluff - if taken into a constant cycle of over-intellectualizing. Seems to me the more we know the less we understand - Truth is always one step ahead of us, and to chase the infinite with the finite (the limited human mind) is recklessness.
One more little story fragment comes to mind: a very intelligent philosopher and mathematician was taking a ferry across a large river, all the while expounding on his many theories and the theories of others to the ferryman, when the ferry sprung a leak. Both the ferryman and the philosopher panicked, and the ferryman, just before leaping into the river said, "I hope for all your studying you didn't forget to learn how to swim..."
Nature doesn't "think" about what it's trying to accomplish, it simply experiments and what works works, what doesn't dies out (evolution). Go with the flow (as in follow your own inner Way - don't stop and question yourself at every turn.)
Good thread, none the less!