Dramaturgical Ontology (The Necessity of Existentialism)

The human condition is our self-awareness. We must deal with our Zapffean programming. Science is a pursuit. The human condition is our very being. The human condition is primary to scientific artifices.

I don't think you can sweep science in its wider sense aside, because I have to figure out if it's true that we have Zapffean programming.

I can also take honesty (if only self-honesty in a world that punishes truthtellers) to be a fundamental virtue, something like my inflexible point of honor. I may bravely face the Zapffean Void as someone who at least tried not to lie so much to himself.

You won't find it under a microscope.

I had a thread on evolutionary psychology where it is debatable how much of human psychology is shaped by biological natural selection (rather than cultural learning):

The human condition is our self-awareness. We must deal with our Zapffean programming. Science is a pursuit. The human condition is our very being. The human condition is primary to scientific artifices.

I like this. I looked up Peter Zapffe. His ideas are interesting. I'll take a look.

Wiki:Zapffe's view is that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill (understanding, self-knowledge) which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot satisfy. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.

In "The Last Messiah", Zapffe described four principal defense mechanisms that humankind uses to avoid facing this paradox:

-Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling".[5]

-Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness".[5] The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal to consistently focus their attention on. Zapffe also applied the anchoring principle to society and stated that "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future"[5] are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments.

-Distraction is when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions".[5] Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself.

-Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation.

I followed that thread. My own view is that we aren't very free, and I think we 'prove' that we all know that in the way we treat others. No one expects all the homeless drug addicts to suddenly go clean tomorrow morning. Freedom is what a marketing major calls responsibility (being punished or praised for what your body does.) Freedom as autonomy is also an aspiration. I want to be like God, says Sartre, and I think he's right.

Wiki:Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation.

I think this is a bit besides the point

A 'spiritual' being is a cultural or sublimated being.

How you might connect this to Zapffe is to reflect on a 'scientism' personality whose existential strategy is the evasion of the embarrassing existential strategies as literature for sissies the tender-minded unworthy of contemplating steel-gray subject-independent Being in laboratories.

That does seem to be true. We give reasons for why we do something. What is that, but a story or narrative? We are the creature that has reasons not just causes.

Yes I gathered what you were saying and hence why I was saying that human condition comes first, then investigation and post-facto explanation

There could be that moment of "Why am I doing any of this?" when stuck in traffic on your way to the laboratory.

We know nothing of reality as it is apart from its being given to and through personality. Those who imagine otherwise are of course personalities using their imaginations, dreaming of serene landscapes without a trace of angsty primates.

Thoughts ?

Any ontology that doesn't bother to make sense of these fails by the sin of omission.

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.

There's a word for 'embodied subjects' that applies to all sentient organisms, and by which we ourselves are routinely described - that is, 'being'.

That's why I will often say (usually to much derision) that the nature of being is the proper study of ontology, and that it should be distinguished from the objective analysis of whatever exists.

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.
— Joshs

So are there subjects of experience?

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act.

Objectivity as unbiasedness (perhaps you'll agree) is not a problem.

I get that, and often refer to it, but I think to deny the reality of agency is a slippery slope towards nihilism. I mean, given that there may be no 'ultimately defineable' subjects or objects, there are still subjects and objects.

Can’t relative self-similarity over time do the job of providing a perspectival point of view, a way continuing to be the same differently?

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.

A crude ontology takes the frequent practically justified 'transparency' of the subject to an extreme that thinks it can keep familiar worldly objects without the subject that helps constitute them.

The meaningrich lifeworld in which the project of natural science makes sense depends on the embodied social-cultural 'timebinding' subject

Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation.
— Wiki

Becker and others make the same point. Life has a horrible aspect, and we meet it with narratives and symbols that mitigate that horror. The first heroic task as a child is ceasing to shit one's pants. A 'spiritual' being is a cultural or sublimated being

What does the game of philosophy always presuppose ?

The living breathing ontologist has a certain kind of personality. To what degree is philosophy a personal quest for honesty that leads toward a self-consciously critical and fallible conversation ?

Does the true scientist (I include, controversially, a person like Husserl) take science personally ? How else could it be taken?

I don't think it's an accident that we understand one another and ourselves as total characters, nor do I think literature is far from ontology.

I'm saying for my own self, not quoting scripture, that the ego is and must be flesh. No doubt a mystic can claim otherwise

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act. These are inseparable aspects of experience. For Heidegger there is the in-between, neither subject nor object.

I keep seeing the title as "dermatological ontology".

Getting some skin in the game?

Flesh (facticity).

Apel's strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification (1980).

Reality apart from human personality is a useful fiction.

I suppose to the degree one believes the path is not the destination.

This immanentist agrees.

a kind of horizon

IIRC, Husserl begins as a mathematician ... I imagine Spinoza, like Epicurus, would "take" thinking – reflective inquiry/practice – impersonally.

So there's an existential decision to live in a beautifully impersonal way, which I understand as maximally social.

I want to be us and not just me.

I want to strive heroically against my own petty finitude, toward the relative infinity of Feuerbach's species-essence.

... or minimally egoic (e.g. Laozi's wu wei, Epicurus' aponia, Pyrrho's epoch?, Spinoza's scientia intuitiva, Nietzsche's amor fati, Zapffe-Camus' absurd, Rosset's cruelty ...)

How about you – second person plural – such as Buber's Ich-Du (or even Dao)?

Maps are not "far from" models yet neither are equivalent to the territory as (sub)personal – existential – biases would have us believe (re: folk psychology).

I agree, but we don't want to smooth out the actual personal subject too much, because rationality seems to be normative on the personal level. I can disagree with you but not with myself

If we take a page from self-consistency theory in psychology, we can say that the self is a continual achievement of the construing of events, and among the most important event is one’s own self-reflections.

Thus the self is no more internally integral than the events the person is able to construe intelligibly. Examples of a disordered self include emotional distress. Emotions such as guilt, threat and anxiety can represents situations which put into question the coherence of our core sense of self.