Meta-ethical Investigation

[Reconstructo]

Humans want something like religion, if not religion itself. It's as if we are born to wave flags. And I am not one whose religion is anti-religion. I do believe I can find a cast-off skin somewhere like that. "Sophia" seems to have been a religious myth/concept.

I see the God-haters on this forum and they remind me of younger days. It's heroic to face the ugly truth. But when one realizes how much pleasure there is in such apparent heroism, one becomes a bit more ironic in relation to oneself.

I've got this theory. Joe Campbell's phrase "hero with a thousand masks" fits into it. But I use it perhaps in my own sense. Also Kojeve on Hegel, who says that Man is negativity, that man is time that chews on space/matter/that which is. Man is itch. Man is change. Man is fire, energy, transformation. Another way to phrase this is Man is Heroism. For "heroism" we could substitute "spirit."

I've always been confident about my ideas. All throughout my life. And yet these ideas have changed sometimes into their opposite. But the energy behind always remained. The faith in the them. It's as if the ideas themselves were just masks. The face behind is never seen, for the dancer is never separate from the dance. This face must be inferred from experience. Jung would call it an archetype. Plato would call it an Idea. Fichte might call it God. The name doesn't matter.

As soon as a person is convinced that they are programmed, if you will, to play the hero...well this shatters the possibility of certain hero roles. It does leave open the ironic amateur psychologist role. To see the heroism of the world as the scratching of an itch is almost impossible for anyone who doesn't pride themselves on some sort of psychological/religious heroism. It's the one role where this otherwise troubling deflation is experienced as progress, as a secret. I think Schopenhauer says somewhere that Nature is naked. We just don't want to see. Well, maybe that man is heroism is something we just don't want to see. For most of us would prefer a monopoly on this heroism, identified as we are with the one right path. This is not to mock the possibility of one right path, for that is to imply that this mocking itself is the one right path.

I can tell you this. A real feedback loop occurs with certain psychological theories. Dostoevsky grins increase the frequency of their appearance.

If we are going to play the hero, let's aim for the stars. It won't cure man to kill God. Half of those who wage war on superstition do so in the name of a slightly more modern superstition, or so it seems to me. But am I waging war right now? Hard to tell. Doesn't feel like.

[mickalos]

If we are going to play the hero, let's aim for the stars. It won't cure man to kill God. Half of those who wage war on superstition do so in the name of a slightly more modern superstition, or so it seems to me.

Perhaps. Anscombe's objection to Kantian and Utilitarian ethics (or any moral theory that relies on the notion of obligation) was that they necessarily rest on the Judeo-Christian idea of a lawgiving deity, and the concept of obligation, which rests on a system of laws (moral laws), makes no sense without such a deity. Laws without a lawgiver. A perfectly reasonable answer seems to be non-cognitivism, or virtue ethics in Ansecombe's case.

[Reconstructo]

I think what I'm saying is an aspect of virtue theory. Basically I'm looking at narcissism and its relation to ethics. Individuals focus on different virtues to associate themselves with. What we seem to have in common is not any particular virtue but the need to associate with virtue in the abstract. The determinate form of the virtue is influence by our environment. We also look at what we are good at. Was the child told he was smart? Was the child told she was beautiful or sweet? And then within the intellectual sphere there are so many sides that can be taken. We can play the empiricist pieces of the rationalist pieces (as if it were a game of chess). We can be realists or idealists. We can be poets of logicians. We can be Satanic Romantics or the priests of Universal Reason. In short, we tend to make a religion out of something, with our without extensive reasoning behind it. This seems to be essential to us. I don't know if I've ever met anyone who didn't pride themselves on something, connect themselves with power/virtue/glory of some kind. Many are happy to be the cells in the power beyond them. Organized religion. Others want to found churches or schools. But the motive is the same I think. I think this broader concept of "religion" explains more behavior. I myself seem to be playing the psychology as religion role. I doubt there's an escape from the game of one-up, the game of transcendence.

Know Thyself and Define Your Terms.....Are we ever finished with either of these missions?

[Reconstructo]

Are we ever what we want to be? Sometimes.

[Reconstructo]

Give me an I. Give me an O. Give me XXX.