The creatives you're talking about aren't going to be able to live normal lives are they? In fact it seems they'd be as likely to end up striking out as hitting a home run.

I'm just saying I have confidence that, if I express what's in my heart, others will understand me. — T Clark

And you believe that's what the Emerson essay is about?

Just bumped into this, and I think it describes (more or less) why I give a damn about self-consciousness and the idea of seeing one's self from the outside that then becomes more inside.

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

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?

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

Just wanted to share and see if anyone also saw themselves in it...

From a historical perspective metanarratives have been a fertile source of debate and discussion and one of the tenets of postmodernism as applied to historical study is to challenge meta narratives. The kind of sweeping all encompassing big picture theories of the past have been criticized and led to a lot of historical focus being very narrow. Allied to this post modernist skepticism about the possibilities of objectivity and the questionable nature of any knowledge claims about the past have led to a kind of relativist wilderness. EH Carr's What is history began a road to the likes of Keith Jenkins Rethinking History and the repost from Evan In Defence of History. All kinds of meta narratives have been challenged, Marxist interpretations, Evolution, the rise of western liberal democracy and so on. 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?

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

I also find that kind of thing fascinating.

If you haven't already looked into Carl Jung, you might like some his ideas (on the sources of religious myths/narratives.)

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

Putting value to saying something new. I'm not being dogmatic, I'm asking: is that part of our worldview? I think I could make the case that it something that transcends all worldviews, although it's a helium balloon that pulls an anchor through all views, stirring things up.

In some Platonic dialog Socrates says that what all philosophers most want is to die so they can see this world from the outside. Are all attempts to say something new related to this desire?

he best recent book on it, is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

On the list. Thanks!