> Some say that everyone has a unique life-purpose; some say everyone has the same purpose, or that there is no purpose. Some say they are sure that All Is One, really, and distinctions are illusory. Some say objective ethical principles definitely exist; some say ethics can only be subjective. Some say that The Self is divided into certain definite parts, which interact in specific, known ways; some say it is unitary and indivisible; some say it does not exist. Some say you can only find Ultimate Truth by Looking Deeply Within, and others say you can only find Ultimate Truth by applying The Scientific Method.

I conceptualise these all as *linguistic gestalts* serving an affective *epistemic telos*. In other words, there is a relatively stable kernel of the Real around which these concepts orient—there *is* purpose, and purpose *does* provide emotional association—and then there is a fluid, mutable periphery which is subject to rhetorical argumentation and heavily driven by an underlying motivation, typically the mitigation of short-term uncertainty.

The self, for instance, *clearly* exists: there is an unassailably bounded consciousness that retains continuity. When people say a self does not exist, one must apply a *linguistic* and *psychoanalytic* evaluation: they really mean that a *concrete* separation cannot be *reliably* defined, and the emotional motivation is some transcendent sense of communion. The *subtle implication*, which is the assumed conclusion based on the epistemic telos, is that we should therefore all be more compassionate. (Of course, there are less convoluted ways to reach this conclusion that don't involve linguistic-metaphysical sophistry.) I elaborate on this here: jakehpark.substack.com/…

I apply this same meta-pattern to ethics in the Lacanian tradition and show that one *can* pragmatically morality/ethics as a shared kernel of the Real around which a fluid periphery is subject to rhetorical flux: jakehpark.substack.com/…

I would love to talk more about this if you're interested.