From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 07 2002 - 13:15:36 MST
gts wrote:
.
>
> I understand the apparent paradox that Lee would have us accept as
> true as being due to a false understanding of identity as something
> fixed. The paradoxes go away when we adopt the humanist view of
> personality as something dynamic, always changing. We are literally
> different people with each passing moment, always in a process of
> becoming. Our experience of continuity of identity through time is an
> artifact of intelligence. The human mind sees continuity in a
> succession of similar but disparate objects, including when those
> objects are ourselves. The illusion that identity is fixed rather
> than dynamic is amplified further by our use of nominal identities
> for identification purposes (name, social security number, etc). We
> tend to believe we are our static labels, forgetting that our labels
> are merely pointers to our dynamic ever-changing selves.
>
### I can see you are playing little rhetorical tricks - to the superficial
or poorly informed reader you are conveying the idea that Lee's thinking is
false, static, illusory, paradoxical, basically, a bag of bullshit. At the
same time, you portray your own views as humanist, dynamic, "always in the
process of becoming", shortly, warm and fuzzy. All this without touching on
the substance of the disagreement.
Your opinion about your own identity is your own problem. It's possible and
pleasant to exchange notes about the differences between our views. This
pleasure disappears quite quickly when you start to use eristics, merely to
denigrate the tastes which you do not share.
Rafal
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