It seems that the ethos of conscious life would be the only ethos that can maintain itself in the nihilistic currents of modernity because it is basically not an ethos. It does not even fulfill the function of a substitute morality (of the kind in Utopias that posit the good in the future and help to relativize the evil on the way there). Those who really think from beyond good and evil find only one single opposition that is relevant to life; it is at the same time the only one over which we have Power stemming from our own existence without idealistic overexertions, namely, that between conscious and unconscious deed. If Sigmund Freud in a famous challenge put forward the sentence: Where it (Es) was, ego (Ich) should become, Heidegger would say: Where Anyone was, authenticity should become. Authenticity —freely interpreted—would be the state we achieve when we produce a continuum of being conscious in our existence. Only that breaks the spell of being-unconscious under which human life, especially as socialized human life, lives. The distracted consciousness of Anyone is condemned to remaining discontinuous, impulsively reactive, automatic, and unfree. Anyone is the must. As opposed to this, conscious authenticity —we provisionally accept this expression —works out a higher quality of awareness. Authenticity puts into its deeds the entire force of its decisiveness and energy. Buddhism speaks about the same thing in comparable phrases. While the Anyone ego sleeps, the existence of the authentic self awakes to itself. Those who examine themselves in a state of continual awakeness discover what is to be done for them in their situation, beyond morals. — Sloterdijk
In a sublime line of thought, Heidegger discovers that this "conscienceless conscience" contains a call to us —a "call to be guilty." Guilty of what? No answer. Is "authentic" living in some way a priori guilty? Is the Christian doctrine of original sin secretly returning here? In that case we would have only apparently taken leave of moralism. If, however, authentic self-being is described as being unto death, then the thought suggests itself that this "call to be guilty" produces an existential connection between one's own still-being-alive and the death of others. Life as causing-to-die. Authentically living persons are those who understand themselves as survivors, as those whom death has just passed over and who conceive
of the time it will take for a renewed, definitive encounter with death as a postponement. Heidegger's analysis, in essence, penetrates into this most extreme boundary zone of amoral reflection. That he is conscious of standing on explosive ground is revealed by his question: "Calling on others to be guilty, is that not an incitement to do evil?" Could there be an "authenticity" in which we show ourselves as the decisive doers of evil? Just as the Fascists cited Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in order to do evil emphatically in this world? — Sloterdijk
For me the interest lies in the "construction" / "discovery" of the meta narrative; it might be these are constructs created by the human mind to provide some sort of interpretational framework but for some there might be pre existant eternal narratives, especially in the area of religion which exist independently of us, perhaps like Kantian idealism? — Edmund
Let me joke with you a little bit and say: you tell me, because aren't you one of them? Or was your comment the emission of Virtue 2000, true to type? In other words, ain't we both foolosophers who want to say something new now and then? Even if we mostly construct ourselves from what we found in the junkyard? — syntax
he best recent book on it, is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer
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