what man is?

The difficulty, of course, with ascribing "what man is" is the staggering complexity of all the macrocosmic variables that come together in the mind of any particular man enabling him to encompass a particular sense of reality. Among them: biological, psychological, personality factors, congental health factors, innate intelligence, culture, history, childhood acculturation, family, community, traumas, interpersonal relationships, gender, ethnicity, race etc. etc.

These are entertwined, in turn, microcosmically, in the particular books we read [and did not read] the particular people we met [and did not meet], the particular places we had been [and had not been] the unique experiences we had [and did not have]. The permutations are, for all intents and purposes, infinite. So, for a man to say that he has derived the most rational manner in which to encompass human interactions, is, in my view, to say he is able to configure [and ceaselessly reconfigure over and again as new variables are encountered and interpreted from day to day to day] all of those existential variables so as to encompass the most rational of all permutations: I

"My reality" thus is essentially a prefabricated [and refabricated] contraption because the "self' is, in turn, merely an existential construction. It is the manner in which a particular mind, shaped and formed in large part by all those macro/microscopic existential variables, comes to put the pieces together day after day after day. It is, however, only because from day to day [incremental passages of time], our sense of self, in appearing existentially persuasive, allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that "I" is not merely the manner in which we do piece all the fragments together. Yet if they go back 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years most folks can see clearly how their sense of reality has, in fact, changed. Perhaps dramatically. Yet, even in this respect, we delude ourselves, by and large, by thinking, "well, it's true that how I view reality now is very, very different from how I viewed it back then, but that is only because, over time, I have come to grasp the True Reality.

And, when it is pointed out to them that their own True Reality clashes with hundreds and hundreds of additional conflicting and contradictory True Realities espoused, in turn, by hundreds and hundreds of additional conflicting and contradictory idealists, rationalists, essentialists, transcendentalist and the like, they simply insist that their own True Reality is THE True Reality.

That is why, in my opinion, so much that allegedly passes for exchanges of philosophy are really just exchanges of human psychology instead.

Randall Patrick