Abortion, other forms of life, and taking life
So I was reading some Lacan and Freud recently, trying to understand when a human person can be said to be a fully formed human. It seems like any judgment I would come up with would be very subjective and may only apply to myself. I will take it as axiomatic that we are fully humans once we are born, and from then until we die. However, we have the life of fetuses; we had Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, and others in the past. We have primates now, and may have intelligent alien life to meet in the future. As genes keep changing and we discover new genetic combinations, the question arises when we can take the life of a living thing. Abortion is one among many of these topics, but is perhaps the most important. I put humans to one side as those who are born and have.. well, human DNA? But humanity is not clearly defined. Many humans have Neanderthal DNA in them. It seems the most logical position for me to take is that we shouldn't kill any mammals. On the other hand, I find frogs to be very innocent and would consider it a sin to kill one. So I find myself becoming more of a Buddhist the more I think about this issue. We can't assign a specific genetic make-up as THE arrangement for "humanity". Also, there may be an X factor that is the true criteria for what humanity is, and it it really isn't based solely at genes after all
Do you think it's right to kill deer? Neanderthals? Silver-back gorillas? Aliens? Looking forward to your feedback
Do you think it's right to kill deer? Neanderthals? Silver-back gorillas? Aliens? Looking forward to your feedback
Comments (138)
Quoting Gregory
There are probably too many abortion threads but I'll give it a go.
I think a better question is when human life becomes a person. Unless I'm mistaken human life begins at the moment of conception. However, there are objective criteria for when something qualifies for personhood, such as sentience and consciousness. For much of a pregnancy a fetus possesses none of the criteria for personhood, despite being human life, and, thus, many believe it is okay to kill a fetus. This raises some questions, however: if it is okay to kill a fetus because it is not a person, then shouldn't it be okay to kill a person in a coma? And what about the potential for a valuable future for the fetus? Do they not own that? And what about the fact that if the status of the humanity of the embryo/fetus/child reaches all the way back to conception, and there is at no point a defining moment at which the status of the humanity of the embryo/fetus/child changes, then isn't the embryo/fetus/child as human as it is as a child as when it is an embryo/fetus?
I agree abortion seems wrong, but so does killing a primate. Unless we define exactly what is human life and then what exactly is personhood, the safe position seems to be vegetarianism to me
:up: Good one!
Sarcasm?
No! Genuine appreciation of a point well made.
In my humble opinion, our passions are well-known causes of much misery - the emotional stress of aborting a baby being just one. They need a chaperone to keep us out of trouble and reason, allegedly, is the right person for the job.
To follow the argument to it's logical conclusion that all living things have the same attributes, thus are identical to each other in substance, we must also agree that all that is biotic, or alive, are identical in nature. And we so we continue this to ad infinitum that there are no important differences between skin cells and infant humans while making performative contradictions that demonstrate as evidence to the contrary.
To this point, we can make an interesting discernment between capacity and potential. There is a notable difference between the capacity for X and the potential for X. Because the latter has all necessary attributes to make a coherent argument for the formulation of a particular substance. A capacity for X is about as akin to nothingness being contained within a box; while it is something it does not contain necessary attributes to be some thing. This is why we have cut-off points in abortion. The biggest error I see with anti-abortion arguments seem to be on the basis of capacity fixation, such as a capsule that holds content, while ignoring the contents within the capsule are inconsistent with what is necessary to trigger the potential of a thing; and it's absence of necessary attributes to create potential for the formulation of particular substance.
The capacity to be alive is not merely enough to argue a potential for something to live, and so comparing simply something that is alive to something that has necessary attributes containing potential to be of a particular substance is irrational. Not only in the argument inherently reductionist to more complex forms of organisms, but actively blinding to their complex problems and dilemmas.
Quoting Gregory
I don't think this is framed correctly. It's not really a matter of whether or not it's right/wrong to kill a deer, but instead under what conditions that it occurs.
I think it is our duty to not cause or increase the suffering of an animal, and this includes that of humans. The most ethical solution is reducing the deer population, causing as little harm as possible if they become problematic.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Stop thinking rationally for a day and let your passions rule; it won't be long before you find yourself in deep water. Am I wrong?
That cyst on your foot was alive; yet you had it removed.
How is a cyst in a womb different?
I think it's more likely a zygote is a person than a cyst. The cyst has my DNA. But point taken. I don't know when you can take life. I will continue to kill pimples, but I only kill bugs when it comes to fill creatures. Deer hunting sounds cruel to me.
I feel like your post was unnecessarily complex. If wombs were transparent, would you still feel the same way?
I had a blastocyst in mind; which is a cyst. So at best you would have to insist that a cyst is also a person. That's an awfully long stretch.
Now the women involved - remember her? Odd, how she gets left out of anti-abortion rhetoric - she is most certainly a person.
The woman who has the Blastocyst is the one who should decide what to do with it. There is no question that she is alive and able to make the decision.
All else is self-serving crap.
Being a person involves sentience, emotion, affection, physical health, and appetite and rationality. A woman is capable of all of these. A cyst, of none.
Further, a blastocyst can only achieve personhood by inflicting its demands on a woman.
So for example, opposing the morning after pill is immoral because it denies the dignity of the woman involved. The cyst has no moral standing. Human dignity inheres in sentience, emotion, affection, physical health, appetite and rationality. It is in recognition of this dignity that a person had moral standing. A cluster of cells, not having any of the characteristics of human dignity, has no moral standing.
As that cluster of cells develops, it grows in its ability to express sentience, emotion, affection, physical health, appetite and rationality. It grows in its entitlement to be treated with dignity. The woman involved in a pregnancy is fully entitled to be treated with dignity.
Pregnancies that threaten the dignity of the pregnant woman may be terminated up until such time as the dignity of the developing human becomes significant. That is, when the developing human shows significant sentience, emotion, affection, physical health, appetite and rationality.
Thereafter pregnancies may be terminated if on balance the continuation of the pregnancy will result in a reduction human dignity. Generally, this will be around the end of the second trimester of the pregnancy.
When does a person become a person?
Quoting Gregory
A woman is a person. A blastocyst is mere tissue. Somewhere between these two...
Do you think there has to be a particular point at which personhood occurs? The point at which the soul enters the body, perhaps? Superstition. What ever point you introduce will be somewhat arbitrary. Again, being a person involves sentience, emotion, affection, physical health, and appetite and rationality. A woman is capable of all of these. A cyst, of none.
Quoting Gregory
My bolding; a blastocyst is not a someone.
Quoting Gregory Indeed, and sometimes this will involve deciding to have the cyst removed. (There's something misogynistic in and ...) What would be immoral would be to enforce carrying to term, to the detriment of mother and eventual child.
See Martha Nussbaum on Capabilities and Human Rights: The Basic Capabilities for a view I think well worth considering.
Seriously? I'm misogynistic? I literally said that I believe abortion should be permissible.
I woke up this morning and apparently it's the dark ages again. What happened?
How about actually letting women be responsible for their acts, rather than dictating to them what to do with their bodies.
That's just lame! How many single fathers are there? I think you'll find the numbers are a bit lop-sided on that one! And no one is required to raise a child, just to support one if married but separated or divorced. I think a paternity suit is possible, but a woman without a lot of money is out of luck, unless suing a rich father with the help of a pro-bono lawyer or a greedy one on spec. The state will step in without fault if the parents don't want the child or can't manage it. In any case, before the third trimester the foetus is not viable. If you insist a mother carry it for the first six months, until viability, just to clock into the era in which you claim obligation ticks in, doesn't your remark above seem disingenuous? As for the DNA argument, we drip the stuff all over the place, it's just not that precious. And if you just gave some thought to how life really develops you would see what a lame argument it is. Life develops most crucially by cell differentiation, and DNA can only regulate replication. And quite frankly I don't care. It's about liberty. not life. Child support is a civil matter, not state coercion. Child care is never mandated, and most single fathers are by accident or choice. And most single mothers are forced into it by the neglect of the state and the influences of bogus ideologues.
You don't care because your not being paternal.
I'm not for forcing anything belief in anybody. But there has to be some limit when it comes to taking life. Would you say "abortion" two weeks after birth is something relative to the norms of society?
Do I detect a Hobbesean view? That we are savages? That myth was created to rationalize the most atrocious oppression and dispossession. It is a colonization of the mind. The concept of obedience is tyrannical. I hope you realize Freud was a charlatan. The fact is, if given a wholesome context dissent is self-limiting. If not permitted to limit itself it is forced into subterranean rumblings that eventually cannot be limited. It is a bit of rebellion that has a real impact where it is given a chance to stand up to scrutiny of it that actually makes for real tranquillity. Autocrats, and to some extent all religious leaders are autocrats, want to count us, but don't want us to count. And a reasoned desire to count, and an avenue to be effective, makes for a just society. Commandments make us savages.
Murder makes us savages more than anything. I brought up Freud as a possible explanation for sexual freedom. If there is one thing humans are free about, it's the ones sexual choices because this is to the species continued. If people don't want to live with the consequences of sexual freedom, why are they here? Why do they want to live and continue the species? Pro choice philosophy is a strange kind of nihilism
Special pleading; ad hoc fallacy.
Then name something in philosophy that is certain
So who does the deciding? You? Your invisible friends?
Take care lest someone point out that you are reneging on your moral responsibility.
Why do you choose the blastocyst for your "paternal care", over the mother?
A little history,,, with apologies if these facts have come up already.
A guy by the name of George Whitefield came over from England to preach Luther/Calvin fire-and-brimstone to the colonies before the Revolution. At the time each colony had its own established church, and they did not cotton to mendicant preachers. So, he traveled the frontier just outside their reach, and in the process founded the Lutheran church, and promoted the idea of protecting the right of such preacher to challenge established churches. Jefferson became governor of Virginia in part with their support, newly called Lutheran or Baptist. And so he demanded the religion clause in the First Amendment, despite its glaring contradiction between individual faith and institutional authority. Which makes it very odd that it is the Baptists, or one branch of them, that is now demanding Christianity be established as the national faith.
Abortion was legal at the time of the nation's founding, but was outlawed later only because procedures were so primitive. Now, of course, it is one of the safest procedures in medicine.
In the early seventies a gathering of "evangelicals" (which I take to mean church leaders dedicated to the indoctrination of as many as possible--Catholics call it "spreading the faith") including, as I recall, the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, to plan a strategy to support Nixon's "southern strategy". They had planned to make the issue divorce, but realized that that that horse had flown. So they latched onto abortion, which had never been an issue to then.
More hypocrisy.
Severing the connection between the unborn and its host is not murder. No more than disconnecting life-support from an otherwise non-viable adult. When the unborn becomes viable (something to be determined by science, not religious doctrine) the state can step in, if it chooses, but only once its equally fundamental obligation to the liberty of the mother is addressed.
I find this connection weird. It has the acrid smell of puritanism to me. An abortion is a medical procedure that aborts a pregnancy. It's not some kind of reneging on sex. This attempt to lump sex, pregnancy and child support all together as some big whole seems to be designed to somehow give men equal access to something that happens to a woman's body.
A lot of people apparently feel it's very unfair that women have the sole "control" over a pregnancy, and I can see where this feeling is coming from. But without fault, the suggestions to address this perceived issue seem worse than the problem itself.
It's very tempting to try to bring the reality of abortion in line with some clear principle, like the sanctity of life or the right to bodily autonomy. But at the end of the day it's an issue that's so intensely personal and has such significant personal consequences that any such attempt will just lead you to ignore reality in favor of theoretical purity. It seems much better to just draw a line somewhere and then spend our energy trying to help mothers, fathers and children instead of judging them.
A belief is much more than a personal opinion if there is convention backing it up. Convention can never prevail so broadly it is beyond question. And a factional convention cannot plea personal preference when those otherwise partisan to it are quite prepared to bully any who question it. That is, factional bullying scores no points singling out an opponent as just one opinion.
You know how many beans make five, do you? Maybe, like with Baldric, it's a very small casserole? Why is it we expend so much effort to convince each other that our opinions are personal but our terms are universal? And why is arithmetic the standard of this? Are we each just one arguing what all should believe? Does that resolve this strange division between one and all? What do you do when convention is made itself your enemy? By claiming this partition between opinion and terms? You see, it has always been the preferred recourse of ideologues to stand in front of a presumed universal to isolate a targeted victim, pretending it's just one on one. How many Christian ideologues have declared to proselytes there is no satisfying attachment between individuals, you are alone before god! Even Christ himself says as much, demanding his followers abandon their kin and think only of their fellow believers as family. I seem to remember a preacher at a fundamentalist 'service' dragging a young woman onto his stage and browbeating her, in front of the congregation, until she 'accepted Christ', and then, of course, suddenly and with great fanfare, embraced into the fold. Point is, you don't have to have that congregation there behind you to put them to use in isolating your victim from the terms of victimization.
The context of what you regard as certain fact, however justifiably, is a lexicon of terms, including formal terms, that are not factually understood. They are a cultural consensus, and subject to personal apprehension that must be habituated to the freedoms interpersonal subjectivity always require, otherwise consensus and convention is just slavery. Unless that freedom reigns amongst us there is no fact we share. Subjectivity is the context of fact, not the other way 'round. The dynamic of that freedom, and its superseding fact, is an issue far too extensive for this venue. I can begin the arduous work of explaining it, but not in the context of a simple debate on reproductive rights.
Here's a good summary of reasons why even a "Right to lifer" should support reproductive rights:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9548/abortion-other-forms-of-life-and-taking-life
Guess you're not up for a read.
My god.
Hi Tim, yes I see where you are coming from in that both Mother and Feteus have their own Human Rights, kind regards, Corinne
Also, in New York now for partial birth abortions they have a doctor there ready to kill the organism before it fully births and one to keep it alive in case it fully comes out. What if a new movement starts in philosophy that says you become of person when you reach the Mirror Phase and if a baby can't recognize itself yet you can put it to death. It's a scary escalation when you stop and think that they are killing these beings while they are being born
In my life I can't worry about how my taxes are used or how my food choices effect others. People have vital space they need to live in. What I do is totally different from a women going to get an abortion and the doctor doing it. Those two people in that situation I do blame. Me giving my taxes instead of worrying that one fetus might be killed because it is not like doing the act of abortion. This seems clear to me. You've probably paid for an abortion yourself
It's not an issue, politically.
Sex work is legal. I've had something to do with arguing that the Disability Insurance Scheme here, which funds support for those with a disability, should cover the hire of a sex worker. My tax dollars at work.
What i was saying is that I don't think I have to stop eating animals even though i am against killing them (a fetus to me is a very noble animal)
"If I kill this cow will you eat it" asks the cow-killer
"Yes but you shouldn't kill it" I respond
"Would you buy the meat" he asks
"Yes but I tell people I think it's wrong to kill the cow and I tell you that. I don't wish to put a temptation on you but if that happens so be it. It's your responsibility not to kill the cow, but if you do we can eat and talk more about how you shouldn't kill another one. I will continue to try to convince you."
I never said killing a cow is murder. I think it's wrong, but killing a fetus might be murder. They might be a full member of our species
There's something odd with your logic. Perhaps you should read more widely.
All I am doing is giving a little money here and there which people make up their minds to use for bad purposes. My reasoning does satisfy me in this case. Being classified as scrupulous as a child by priests, I still see situations all over the place where things I do might lead others to do bad. I can't worry about all that. Giving money to McDonald's is different from going to get an abortion though
If you meant me as the OP, thank you. I am trying to learn through all this
..? Dumbass reply like most of the OP's/pro-lifers MRM shit.
Apparently you are able to perceive the perceptions of others. Talk about a nice trick! Thing is, it is hard to reconcile that ability with your "individuality". If what we do creates impediments to the free access other's to their rights, then the public has a right to mitigate that activity, if not to thwart it altogether. And that's a fact. I think it was Locke who said "the freedom to swing your arm about stops at my nose.", or some such. As in so many other matters, he was wrong. It stops wherever it becomes an intimidating gesture. It's interesting how so many "individualists" rely so heavily upon the community respect of those they derive their livelihoods from!
How do you reconcile individual religious faith with institutional religious authority? Can the First Amendment protect both if they conflict?
Every word you have posted is a demonstration you are not an individualist. And every thought or perception you have is an engagement in the expression that you know you are part of a community, and that you impact it in ways that, however minuscule, are less limited of that impact than any system of preserving the general appreciation of terms. That is why dictionaries have to be revised pretty often, though there are so many words and the changes so subtle that you personally may never notice this. Besides this, we are more deeply steeped in that altering of terms than the process of preserving terms from that dynamic of them can suppress. This is how we know each other and share meaning far more fully than the lexicographers can regulate. An inside joke differs with every telling. The scribes can list and even explain the joke, but cannot stymie that difference. Because that difference, intimacy, is the engine of language and shared apperception.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/22/1986768/-10-Tragic-Consequences-of-Restrictive-Abortion-Laws
Is the "free exercise" of religion an individual right or an institutional right? F'r'instance, isn't enlisting government support for a prohibition against birth control establishing that religion, at least amongst that congregation and its non-member employees?
Your being deliberately obtuse. Or do you just not get the joke? That is, that you are just as human as are we all. And language, even the terms of symbolic logic and computer code, is a human artifact developed and sustained as a human dynamic. Did I use any words you can't find in your Webster's? Actually, with the exception of 'apperception' all the words in that paragraph can be found in a pretty skinny dictionary, and this one can be found in any philosophy dictionary.
Present the argument that fetuses are for sure not humans. Since you cant, it's obvious that they might be human. Isn't it obvious that you don't kill something that might be human? Its called basic respect for (here comes that that word) life. forget about the killing animals thing. I brought that up as an example. You're ok with killing something that for all you know is a full human baby. That is disgusting
Learn the facts. Fetuses might be babies and abortion might be murder
I think it should be legal to kill humans, never mind "might be humans", under certain circumstances. Do you disagree?
If they are in terminal pain, yes. But not for lesser reasons like abortions are usually for
Ah, so it isn't about baby killing after all. It's about the reasons we have.
The abortion debate suffers from a lack of people who are willing to admit their solutions also suck. There is no solution that'll magically make the world a better place. Just ways to avoid the worst outcomes.
No, I think we can put to death a 30 year old if he wants to die and is in terminal pain. He is clearly human. You guys have no evidence that shows the fetus is not a human baby and are willing to take a chance in killing it. That's not right. It has it's own DNA at conception and has brain waves and a heart beat soon in the pregnancy. The fact is you guys just don' care if it might be a baby. You'd rather be sleazy in your thinking and try to get away with killing what could possibly have all the dignity you have
You're a complete sophist dude, to put it kindly. Parental rights might be interpreted however the Supreme Court wants considering they consider the Constitution to evolve. You don't have a shred of evidence a fetus is not a full human because it's fucking obvious it could be. Your saying there is no possibility whatsoever that a fetus with brain waves and a heart could be a full human? Once you admit that this is possible, you can see that abortion is evil, unless you're a complete idiot
And you have no evidence you're not a robot.
Quoting Gregory
What interest do you think we have in killing someone?
Quoting Gregory
You're the one demeaning pregnancy and motherhood by acting as if it were all sunshine and rainbows and noone ever needed to make difficult decisions.
You are the one claiming that motherhood starts at birth. I have a much more respectful and wholesome view of pregnancy. A pregnant women is a mother, and females know this too. I know life can be hard, but you just don't care if something that might be a full human is killed. You are willing to publically defend it. I know I'm not a robot because only I make my decisions. If we are going down that sceptical rabbit hole, i ask you to prove Jews and blacks are equal to whites and shouldn't be enslaved. What's your evidence and PROOF that slavery isn't good for them. I respect life and other people. You are willing to use doubt to take life (even up to birth?)
Not really.
Quoting Gregory
Nothing says wholesome like referring to women as "females". Your respect for mothers apparently does not extend to their ability to judge what's best for them and their children.
Quoting Gregory
Like millions of other people are. So the question is, why do you think all these people want to kill babies?
Quoting Gregory
The proof is that I have met and talked to them, and they seem to be like me. Unlike fetuses, by the way, but I don't really care to discuss at what point in pregnancy one draws the line.
Quoting Gregory
What do you mean by "using doubt"? I personally haven't killed anyone or was in any way responsible for a specific abortion. So I don't "use doubt" to kill people.
I don't think I can prevent abortions in any reasonable way that doesn't cause more harm than good. So I don't try. Your position is obviously that abortion is a terrible evil to be rooted out at all costs, but I wonder why you think this will result in a better world for anyone.
Others seem to be holding up our end pretty well otherwise.
First, the word female is a beautiful word. I don't see the problem there. Second, I actually supported Biden because the good of the whole community is more important than the loss of fewer lives. No one knows what trouble Trump could have gotten us into. It was said earlier that "maybe" I'm a robot and I responded that if we are just going to make crazy shit up than why not say slavery is ok. With regard to abortion, we clearly don't have to keep a thumb alive if it's cut off in an accident. However you have to use common sense when it comes to morality. Otherwise all kinds of evils become permissible. A fetus is not a cyst because a cyst never comes a full grown baby. Fetuses in the womb have been known to suck their thumbs, just like new borns. The women has no abortion rights and we don't balance the mother's "rights" with those of the fetus because the mother should just be a mother. They have no right to kill their offspring. Embryology has shown that fetuses have many characteristics of a human, and you cannot prove it's not a full human person. The Confederates argued that they needed to balance the needs of the blacks with the "needs" of the whites in the latters' desire for a segregated "traditional" culture. Abortion is the new slavery. It is the moral issue of the times, as slavery was then. Abortion, just like slavery, does not respect everyone and gives one group of people rights over others. If women don't want to get pregnant, then grow up and go become a nun or use birth control or whatever. Take responsibility for your actions. Of course I know that blacks are full human, but fetuses might be too. It's unbelievable that someone would be okay killing something that very well could be a baby. In one's mother's womb should be the safest place in the world. Many pro-choice people are for animal rights, but they show more respect for a gibbon than for a human fetus. In fact they treat fetuses with squeamishness and fear. It's totally lame and indefensible.
Because in all reasonableness a fetus might be a human being, the mother has no abortion rights. This is as good an argument as you will find in philosophy. You don't bury someone who might still be alive and although this Old West example certainly is a different situation from abortion, the core principle applies to abortion. You don't kill a being that in all reasonableness might be a human being.
You're now just trying not to see the truth. What rights does a fetus have? The right not to be killed for starters. It's based on their biology. It's probably pointless trying to reason with you. You desire to damn yourself, whatever that means
Possibly a baby. If your not comfortable caring out an abortion yourself, you probably shouldn't be defending it on the internet
Most people abide within a self created grey area between the two and hence have difficulty in determining a course of action when what they want to do conflicts with societal values.
“I consider criminal abortion [all abortion was criminal back then] in any circumstances whatsoever as one of the foulest kinds of murder. Apart from anything else, it nearly always ruins the
health of the woman, when it fails to kill her. The vigour of my views on this point strengthens
my general attitude on the question of sexual freedom. I believe that very few women, left to
themselves, would be so vile as to commit this sin against the Holy Ghost; to thwart the deepest instincts of nature in the risk of health and Life, to say nothing of imprisonment. Yet criminal abortion is one of the commonest of crimes and one most generally condoned by what I must paradoxically call secret public opinion .And the reason is that our social system makes it shameful and punishable by poverty for a woman to do what evolution has spent ages in constructing her to do, save under conditions with which the vast majority of women cannot possibly comply. The remedy lies entirely with public opinion. Let motherhood be recognized as honourable in itself, and even the pressure of poverty would not prevent
any but a few degenerate women, with perverse appetites for pleasure, from fulfilling their function.
In the case of such it would indeed be better that they and their children perish."
We need to eradicate poverty to help resolve this issue. Abortion is the worst kind of second degree murder because you are deliberately stopping a heart beat, killing brain waves, and destroying an organism that very well could be a full human being. No linguistic gymnastics can get you out of this. See you on another thread
What's your excuse for wanting to kill babies? Are you an abortion doctor? Do you want to be one? Would you be one? Or are you just going to let other people do the dirty work?
You have absolutely no philosophical abilities so I don't know why you are even on this forum. You are also very immature in how you avoid questions. It's been like arguing with the raging hormones of a teenager
I already went over the argument in detail. You don't understand it. That's a lack in your faculty, not mine
You say I don't know what language is. I say you don't know what an argument is. This conversation is over. Thanks for your imput
About all I can offer is a cultural value established upon honesty civility and reasonable responsiveness. The sequester of terms is a patent crime against philosophy.
Probably the most poignant moment in all of Plato is when Socrates' friend, Phaedo, despairs of the argument. Socrates warns of becoming 'logophobes'. The problem is that reason requires a synthetic term of which we become convinced as axiomatic to the ensuing analysis, but can only result in recognition of our differing. Is philosophy polemic or dissent? Persuading others of our convictions or testing our own? What if the most persuasive term is the one that frees us from our convictions rather than enforcing them on others? What could be more persuasive than being given reason to be emancipated from our convictions? And what could be more what truth is if we insist upon the highest possible state of rigor in this? And what could be more destructive of rigor, and so more conducive of ignorance, than supposing the end of reason is agreement? Consensus is the end of governing and establishing law amongst a people, but therapeutic dissent is the only justifying context of that consensus. The current state of this Republic is softball against canon fire. Civil war looms. Incendiary polemics can never produce genuine consensus, let alone recognition of the therapy of dissent that is the only genuine context of consensus. But those of us who do recognize that therapy are growing less intimidated by the canon fire surrounding us, and America's future is clearly with them. Those who oppose dissent in principle are losing, and becoming ever more frantic as a consequence. White supremacists and social conservatives really are being superseded, and they will end up subservient to the more flexible and open minded of us, but not because they are under attack. It is because they are attacking that they must lose. Because the future is adaptation to a changing reality, not preserving obsolete norms. While most of us adapt and gradually prosper, the dwindling remnant of logophobes languish in their incapacity to realize that we can only prosper by becoming more competent, more skilled, and more flexible. And this even while the rest of us are trying to help them develop those abilities and that prosperity. Charging us with undermining a way of life that clearly no longer serves their own interests is a lame excuse for resisting the future that so clearly lies ready to embrace us and offer the prosperity we all think we deserve. America has no future unless no one is left behind in that coming prosperity for all, and those who resist that future will themselves be last, and have no one to blame but themselves.
You're one of those who believe truth is what endures some sort of test? Worth is what does not endure, and worth is truer than truth. Time, of which the truest worth is its moment. What endures is what innures. Because we do not endure the moment of the worth of time. It is too real. And so we let ourselves fall into innured terms. But becoming estranged from those terms is more who we really are than received terms and what we feel we are given to be. But we can no more bring that moment of estrangement upon others than we can upon ourselves. The final term of "analysis", the reduction reason always is, is that estrangement from its originating term in some supposed synthetic term taken as axiomatic to it. In discourse, or dialectic, we urge each other to more intensive rigor. And if that rigor is indeed more intensive than we are capable without each other, and can only find its end in estrangement from its origin, then that estrangement cannot be untruth, and it cannot be entirely alone. And if the dialogue is honestly responsive, in which an act of engaging in it is responded to as effectively as that act, and that response is its own act also responded to, and so on in a recurring dialectic participation, always in some sense estranged us from our given terms, then we gradually replace those terms intimated between us in place of the world's terms given to us. Through estrangement form our world we become intimates. And yet the world is only persistence, whereas our participation in the intimation of the worth of time is only moment, but moment grown more real and completed than all the terms and time of the world.
I am not a pragmatist. I've no interest in finding methods for attenuating time, innuring our given terms to our dread of being real. My motive to to understand, and to be as real as I can. Time is the stranger it is through our rigorous estrangement from the world, not our mastery of or even navigating it. And each of us is the completing term in the intimation of its worth. Finding the means to endure our dread of being real is the last thing on my mind.
We seem to be leaving the topic, but you certainly deserve a response. It's weight hinges on some claim that truth is something we do or can aspire to have as a possession. But intimacy, as I understand it, is (willing) dispossession. Perhaps therapeutic. That word, which you asked about earlier, could have occurred to me from a number of sources, like Derrida, maybe. I have read a book "The therapy of desire", bur can't remember being that impressed. But Plato certainly presents the dialectic as therapeutic, and often assuages anger in an interlocutor by appealing to that notion. We heal each other of our reliance on an unjustified synthetic term taken as axiomatic to our convictions. But the intimation of that unjustified reliance is not a matter of synchronizing our terms and convictions, but of finding a complementary contrariety between us to them. We differ, and, if we are honest and competent in that differing, we find that complement we are with each other in that differing to received terms. In so doing we participate in freeing each other from the incompleteness of all synthetic terms, and yet distinguish each other in that participation. We always differ as much and complement to the differing we are to each other as to the original or received term. And if the rigor of that differing is the final term of our shared dialectic in differing our conviction in that received term, then we share in that differing more than we ever were in sync to that received term. And that sharing is more real, more rigorous, than anything we ever were endowed with by our world. We achieve this by realizing the therapy of being dispossessed of what otherwise would empower one of us over the other, or the world over us both. I am hinting at love, even, yes, Platonic love. But it is an intimacy in which we are willingly dispossessed of its terms. Neither/nor, not either/or, as classic logic would insist. We are willingly dispossessed of those terms that would possess us.
Plato's Lysis recounts a dialog in which one boy asks Socrates how to go about getting the most popular kid in class to befriend him. All sorts of ideas pass between them about how to entrap the friend. But this goes around in circles. In the end, the party breaks up, and Socrates shouts to the dispersing group "But we still don't know which one is the friend!" This is usually translated: "We still don't know what friendship is!", but I like my translation better. The whole point of the dialog is that neither is the friendship, and it is precisely the act of not being the friendship that makes the friendship real. But there is a world. And letting there be a world is part of the same intimation as deliberately excluding oneself as the friendship. That intimacy is more real than the world, but we come to know it as that differing we are to it as complementary in contrariety between us as to the world. And so our freedom from the imposition upon us of the terms of the world is our needing free of our own. We create the terms of the world precisely through our need of emancipating each other from our own. That dispossession is what truth is. And it is the worth of that dispossession that is its intimation. You're only right in you're criticism of me in the sense that that truth is ever only intimated and can never be explicit or explicated as in our possession.
Socrates says philosophy is practicing death. Maybe I'm not quite that dedicated.
If the final term of rational reduction is the ruin of its premise, and the most rigorous term in that ruin is the least term of contrariety as complementary between us as to the received term the world is, then by examining our differing we achieve the most coherent term. And merely receiving the given terms divides and isolates us from each other even as that delusion of unity, and that differing enjoins us in distinguishing each other as much from each other as from the world. And that distinction is the most rigor we can achieve. We need each other and can never be alone in it, whereas the world is the isolation of us from each other as it is inured us to our presuming it ours. Only in finding ourselves the stranger to the world are we overcome that isolation. Religion and science go hand-in-hand in that isolation. Religion, by securing terms which offer no alternative to that isolation within received terms, and science by protecting its original terms by securing all but its stated inquiry as its only "variable". That isolation, of course, also secures its victims in the absolution of any otherwise possible contrariety that might awaken us to the ruin of it in recognition of the distinct liberty right of women that the traditional role of childbearing tends to blind us to. If we do not recognize how much that liberty right is our need of breaking free of the isolation the received term is we never win the terms by which we recognize who we are ourselves, distinct from the world. Deniers of that right will, presumably, counter with a plea for recognition of the unborn. But in doing so can never be a real part of the life of either, nor free of enslavement to the world's terms.