Awareness and acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of Dasein is characterized as a state of "thrown-ness" in the present with all its attendant frustrations, sufferings, and demands that one does not choose, such as social conventions or ties of kinship and duty. The very fact of one's own existence is a manifestation of thrown-ness. The idea of the past as a matrix not chosen, but at the same time not utterly binding or deterministic, results in the notion of Geworfenheit—a kind of alienation that human beings struggle against,[2] and that leaves a paradoxical opening for freedom: — Thrownness
Oh schopenhauer1, you're such a knucklehead. You can't fool us. We know this is just Anti-natalism, Take 73. — T Clark
In other words, all these assumptions but it goes back to existential attitudes like the very ones I bring up. — schopenhauer1
My normative claim here is that we should not just accept this as "good" simply because it is the reality. — schopenhauer1
I think I know where you come from and you know the same for me. After a few tries, we've found that we're not going to convince each other of our positions. I'm comfortable with that.
I was teasing you. It was intended to be friendly teasing. — T Clark
It works for a little while before it gets worn to mush and all kinds of nails stuck in it and its usefulness deteriorates exponentially. — whollyrolling
But even the most mundane stuff can be seen as mildly annoying to deal with — schopenhauer1
We are not robots who just do stuff, but ask why, analyze, compare, look at underlying metaphysical and epistemological and ethical underpinnings. — schopenhauer1
Then no value should be assigned to it. Doing things and dealing with others are just a feature of life. — Alan
Being aware of the differences between the way we want things to be and the way they really are somehow drives both individual and social change towards minimizing the difference between that which is not as we want it to be and the ideal. — Alan
In the end dealing with things may not be good or bad but if you deal with them you may get closer to this ideal world you and I want. If we actually got to create this ideal world then life may not be possible because the ideal world and the actual one are mutually exclusive. The only thing left is to improve the world for us and for the rest of the people even if that is achieved asymptotically. — Alan
It can be, sure. There are a lot of ways to look at it, including the zen "wash the dishes to wash the dishes." — Terrapin Station
Interesting themes there. — schopenhauer1
Did you write it — Alan
We are in an initial state of dissatisfaction or deprivation that must be dealt with, repeatedly until unconsciousness/death. This whole system is deemed as "good" by many, but not reflective about its deprivational nature that is there to begin with. If life presents itself as challenges to "deal with" (get and keep a job to survive, let's say, or making more comfortable environs for yourself), then what is it about this that is "good"? — schopenhauer1
Schopenhauer1 So it seems you just want everyone to accept that dealing with stuff is actually bad. Then what ? Are you ok with thinking everything you do is shit because there could be a better world and you were not born in it? Would you still do it? If everyone thought the same way then we would either lose the will to live or stop thinking about it as bad and you would get back to the starting point. — Alan
But then: enter God. “Up speaks YHWH,” as Greenstein puts it, momentarily folksy—a voice “from the windstorm.” “Bind up your loins like a man,” God warns Job, before stamping on the effects pedal and delivering perhaps the most shattering speech ever recorded. Question after question, power chord after power chord: “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? … Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades, Or loosen the cords of Orion? … Do you give the horse its bravery?” No explanation; no answer for Job; no moral or theoretical content whatsoever. It’s the interrogation of consciousness by pure Being, by the Logos, by the unstopping, unmediated act of creation itself. Do not try this at home. “Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom, As it spreads its wings toward the south?” The human intellect shrinks before the onslaught. The language is incomparable. God, it turns out, is the greatest poet; no one can touch him.
And it’s at this point, with Job reduced to a pair of smoking sandals and the divine mega-monologue still ringing in the vaults of the firmament, that Greenstein and centuries of tradition diverge. He has produced his new translation of Job, he tells us in the introduction, to “set the record straight.” Every version of the Bible that you have read puts Job, in the wake of God’s speech, in an attitude of awestruck contrition or reconversion. “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes,” he says in the King James. “I’m sorry—forgive me,” he says in Eugene H. Peterson’s million-selling plain-language adaptation, The Message. “I’ll never do that again, I promise!” Greenstein’s Job, however, stays vinegary to the end. “I have heard you,” he tells God, “and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up.” The Hebrew phrase commonly rendered as some form of I repent, Greenstein translates as I take pity on. Dust and ashes, meanwhile, is for Greenstein a biblical epithet meaning humanity in general. So the line becomes “I take pity on ‘dust and ashes.’ ” Job’s last word: What a world you’ve made, God. I feel sorry for everyone.
What does it mean? This newly revealed Job, writes Greenstein, “is expressing defiance, not capitulation … If God is all about power and not morality and justice, Job will not condone it through acceptance.” Upon the scholarly merits of this approach, I am unable to pronounce; as an idea, I’ll consider it. We don’t read the Bible, it’s been said; the Bible reads us. It searches us. And here for us in 2019, right on time, with tyranny back in style and riding its behemoth through the streets, is a middle-finger Job, a Job unreconciled to the despotism of experience. He’s been shattered by life-shocks; then God, like a wall of terrible noise, fills and overfills his mind. His response: Thank you, but no.
Gloria Dei est vivens homo, wrote Saint Irenaeus: The glory of God is a living man. Might not the Author of Life look with favor upon this brilliantly resistant creature, this unappeasable critical thinker, this supremely lonely and dissenting figure, this Bartleby with boils—unswayed by the sublime, scratching his scabs in the land of Uz? That might be the rankest heresy: Let me know, bishops. But consider what Greenstein’s nonpenitent, polarity-reversed Job has done to the ending of the book. As before, with the experiment over, Job is blandly restored to a state of health and wealth; as before, God upbraids the sententious friends, the Bildads and the Eliphazes and the Zophars, and sends them off to make some burnt offerings, “for you did not speak about me in honesty as did my servant Job.” The quality or valence of this honesty, however, has turned upside down. It has become a kind of white-knuckle existential tenacity, a refusal to disown oneself even in the teeth of the windstorm. Maybe that’s what this God, faced with this Job, is telling us: Bring it all before him, the full grievance of your humanity. Bring him your condition, loudly. Let him have it. — The Atlantic
But the fact that there is even a reason to zen out on washing dishes is a dealing with. — schopenhauer1
Nothing negative though. — Terrapin Station
Why did the person wash the dish in the first place? — schopenhauer1
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