Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our third installment in the ILP Sessions. In this installment, we will be Interviewing our good friend, UglyPeopleFucking. I expect this Interview to be very informative as we know even less about UglyPeopleFucking going in than we did about either Faust or Tab.
First of all, thank you UglyPeopleFucking for choosing to participate in this Interview:
1.) Let’s start where it starts, your handle. The aggressive copulation of the physically unattractive seems a strange thing to promote, so why did you choose that as your UserName?
2.) The only semi-personal information that you’ve shared (I’ve read the first 300 characters of every post you have ever made) is that you work staring at a computer for 8 hours a day and hate your job. What, specifically, do you do, and what would be your ideal job? I understand you hate work, in general, so by ideal I mean, “Least-Worst.”
3.) You have also mentioned that you have a Degree in Philosophy, and that said Degree is not necessarily the best way to acquire gainful employment. Assuming you were aware of that going in, why did you major in Philosophy as opposed to just independently studying it?
4.) It’s regret question time, if you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?
5.) You have said something closely resembling, “There is no such thing as always, there is a such thing as unlikely,” it is clear that you do not believe in absolutes. That is to say, that you do not believe there are currently absolutes, do you believe in the possibility of absolutes?
6.) Referring to laughing at the joke of life, you said:
The statement you were responding to was posted by Nano-Bug, so, do you actually believe life to be a joke, and if so, are you laughing?
7.) As it relates to conditioning you said:
Do you believe in social reflexes, or that you were born with social reflexes, as well, or do you believe some of those to be conditioned into you?
8.) You and I have determined that if there is an Ubermensch, then Ric Flair is it, are you or were you actually a wrestling fan?
9.) In another thread, you said that you rank your life between 3-5 depending on the day. You’ve mentioned that you hate your job, but I don’t necessarily think that (in and of itself) would result in a deduction of (at least) five, so what else about your life pulls the score down?
10.) I’m glad that you have enjoyed the Interviews that have taken place so far. I was originally going to save this question for your last Session, but I have precious little material on you to work with, so I figured I’d throw this out: Why did you decide that you would like to be Interviewed?
I like the idea of taking something most people would rather not choose to think about and putting it out there on the table - kind of throwing it in their faces even. You’re right, it’s aggressive and probably a little rude. It’s an interesting experiment for me to watch the different ways it colors peoples’ reactions to me and what i say. I’m sure it inspires some resentment, but hopefully also some wry smiles.
I grew up as kind of a teenage outcast - a punk rocker/skateboarder type among preppy soccer and football players. I enjoy the quasi-passive-aggressive act of broadcasting the unpleasant when it’s not necessarrily warranted, just as a reminder to everyone that it’s there. I think we all have a way of distilling our worldviews such that there are basic, UGLY, facts about life upon which we never dwell, and that even finds it’s way into our philosophies in subtle ways - manifesting itself in purified visions of what Humankind is or should be - we forget that we are animals, too. It’s kinda like Zizek talking about the sociology of feces - only he’s a genius and i’m not - but hey, i try to do my part.
Maybe it’s a little juevenile - but i think sometimes that’s a legitimate way to approach the world.
Wow, you really do your research - i pity you that - i’d never go back and even read the first line of every post i ever made, much less the first 300 characters - that’s a lot of bullshit to sift through Pav. Admirable.
Anyway, in real life, UPF’s alter-ego spent the last 4 years as a compliance and safety officer at a biotech company. If you were to strip down my job description to it’s roots, you’d end up with something like: protecting the Institute from liability. It’s something i kinda fell into (i started at this company in the mailroom), and, tho it pays well, it makes me miserable. I’ve already resigned and my last day is in two, i’m going to take the summer off and hope i don’t starve to death trying to find a job in the fall. It’s the riskiest thing i’ve done in a while, but this job has been totally soul-crushing. A morass of bureaucratic parasitism and regulatory minutia. I’m a big picture guy, not cut out for this.
My ideal job would probably be as a psychoanalyst, i’m fascinated by personalities and behavior - one of the reasons the message board is so addictive to me is that i love learning about all the characters that people invent for themselves. It’s great.
There really wasn’t shit-else that interested me. I mean, i’m fascinated by science, religion, psychology, anthropology, economics and mathematical theory - but i’m interested in their implications, and not necessarily in doing the actual work involved in studying them closely enough to earn a degree. I also had NO idea what i wanted to do with my life, and philosophy seemed a general enough topic that it wouldn’t predetermine me for any specific careers. I knew going in that it would make it tough to find a job, but (and tho i say this at the risk of sounding really cheesy, it’s true) part of me never expected to live much past 25, so philosophy seemed to suit me - also i found it came quite naturally to me (it doesn’t come as naturally anymore - i had a lot more intellectual energy in my early twenties - which i attribute at least partially to the dexadrine).
Nothing, i have regrets, but they are part of who i am and how i see the world. You know the song: my failures have given me a degree of wisdom and insight, and i don’t want to trade that for a change in material circumstances. I’ve learned a lot more from my regrets and failures than, for instance, from the hours i’ve spent on the internet trying to distract myself from them. Intellectually, i take what i can get where i can get it - there’s always something to be learned - and tho i can’t necessarily justify it philosophically, i have a belief that learning is one of the most important things in life - for me anyway. I was born with a fetish for the wisdom tacit in real-life experience - the kind of stuff you have to tease out of the contingencies and into the open before you can really study it.
I have a sincere philosophical conviction that anything is possible, but that’s largely in spite of my beliefs, which you are correct in pointing out do not currently include a belief in absolutes. My main philosophical objection in that regard is to certainty. I’m more of an asymptote kind of guy - forever approaching certainty but never quite getting there, which is also why i always like to stress the distinction between possibility and likelihood (or impossibility and unlikelihood). Granted beliefs like that always undermine themselves eventually - you know, like: how can i be CONVINCED that anything is possible if i don’t believe in certainty - but they are practical beliefs in that they are borne out in experience and logic, and preferable for that reason - then, taken far enough, you reach the point where pragmatically you just have to take a leap of faith and form some kind of best-guess convictions, because otherwise the ambiguity makes virtually any continued thought impossible (so to speak). Meanwhile, the Humean truth remains in all it’s infamous undeniability: we simply don’t KNOW what’s going to happen (ie - what’s possible or impossible)- it’s all educated guesswork at best.
We either go with the ambiguous or the arbitrary, depending on our motives.
If there’s an absolute, it’s that everything is relative - but even that can’t be known for sure - and d’oh! - we bang our heads (yet again) against the sloppily rendered epistemic limitations of Humankind, which themselves are merely functional, and not absolute . . . or something . . .
Sure, in some sense. There are moments when it all seems like one big sick, cosmic joke. We’re born, we live in ignorance, we suffer endlessly, then we die to no lasting avail. Am i laughing? Sometimes - i mean, if it can’t be made fun of, then why take it seriously? But, like i said, that’s cold comfort - so it’s better not to dwell on the futility and focus instead on the freedom that is the flipside of that coin. That’s what Nietzsche tried to do, only he convinced himself that it was an impossible focus for most people to have, that it was some kind of Herculean effort for the average human to escape that futility, and so he unwittingly fated even himself to never manage to live up to the ideal vision he had created - a failure which crushed him. He suffered primarily from a gross lack of humility, consequently saturating himself with both self-love (his narcissism) and self-hate (his utter contempt for the masses). And, of course, that’s also one of the primary things that made him great, even though it drove him insane - probably leading him in the end to the realization that even OVERCOMING is a futile gesture, one which freedom makes possible, even necessarry, but also one which has as its flipside that everpresent and (to his mind)super-heavy futility which negates the self-love that propelled it. In other words, he made the coin too weighted on one side to flip properly . . . but i’m just talking out my ass, so i’ll shut up before i offend one of his many disciples.
I do believe in social conditioning, i was being ironic: i don’t believe that it works on ME because i was gifted with the rare and extraordinary ability to see through the whole artificial facade of social values and mores, rendering me immune.
No, as a pre-pubescent boy I went through a brief phase where i collected wrestling magazines, but that was mainly because i was obsessed with pulp publications of just about any sort - i collected comics and horror movie mags and all sorts of fanzines growing up. Ric Flair does make a great “blonde beast”, tho.
UPF’s alter ego is bipolar (isn’t everyone these days?), so he goes through some pretty severe depressive episodes where all of life’s little shitinesses get blown out of proportion. That post was probably made during one of those episodes. It’s like each person is allocated an umbrella baseline of joy that helps shield them from the periodic shitstorms of life, but UPF’s umbrella is one of those small ones that dont really keep you dry, and the flaps pop off the spines, affording an even smaller area of protection from the shit raining down, and it’s flimsy so it turns inside out in the wind, etc. Other people walk around with those nice big umbrellas with the extra flaps and the reinforced spines, the kind that even keep your shoes dry - Me, on the other hand, all i have is my malfunctioning little pocket-sized umbrella. Of course sometimes, i really enjoy life, but i feel like that kind of enjoyment is like the weather, and not something i can control - those shitstorms have a way of occuring with interminable regularity - after all, life’s a bitch.
Well, UPF loves attention, because he has such low self-esteem. And it’s an wholly unearned but nonetheless pleasurable honor to be interviewed alongside such venerable heavies as Faust and Tab. It’s a masturbatory form of fun, kinda like the message board as a whole.
11.) You mentioned that your job is, “Soul-sucking,” do you think that any part of your, “Soul,” has been permanently lost, or should this time away from work help you re-claim your soul completely?
12.) You speak of the characters people invent for themselves. I don’t know how true this is, I know that PavlovianModel146 is very, very close to the actual me. How close would you say that UPF is to the alter-ego of UPF, that of course, being yourself?
13.) When you said that you didn’t think you would live 25, were you being metaphorical or literal? If literal, why not? If metaphorical, when did you come to the realization that you would, and what brought about that realization?
14.) It seems that your Philosophy is much like Faust’s, with a twist. You know that the duck-test must be used if we are to actually do the whole living thing, but at the same time, believe there are answers and questions out there that the duck-test does not cover. Would you say this is accurate?
15.) You speak of an immunity to Social Conditioning, I imagine this may be true to an extent as you mention enjoying rubbing peoples’ faces in stuff that they would just as soon do without. At the same time, though, you must at least be conditioned to a strong enough extent that you pretend to conform to social norms as the situation makes appropriate, do you think there is anyway that this pretending will ever no longer be a requirement? I mean, both for you individually and people in general, by the way.
16.) I like your shitstorm analogy, how do you weather the shitstorm without a decent umbrella? In other words, in addition to learning, what makes day-to-day life livable for you?
17.) You mention that UPF has low self-esteem, you recognize this in UPF. Does the alter-ego have low self-esteem? If so, why?
18.) You refer to the Boards as Masturbatory fun, I personally know that getting an opportunity to mentally masturbate with people in real life happens with some rarity. Does this adversely impact how you view others?
19.) To be blunt, you clearly know your shit when it comes to Philosophy. Many new members we have here (and some old ones, like me) are little more than Beginners when it comes to Philosophy. Do you have any advice on what a good starting point is in terms of Philosophical Assumptions?
That’s the hope. I really do feel like part of myself, my vitality and personal energy, has been sapped by this job, and i hope to try and restore that. A couple months of reading, running and relaxing seems like a decent bet in that regard. Hopefully, i won’t spend the whole time nervous about finding a new job. Unless your wealthy, you don’t get the opportunity to do something like this many times in life, so i intend to make the most of it.
Well, that’s just the thing - some people keep their own real-life personas, and it’s part of the intrigue to try and figure out who and to what extent. Obviously, very few, if any, of the online personas we see are completely made up - but some of the more extreme folks (i think of people like Satyr) must be at least somewhat different in real life - i doubt if most people are as combative in real life as some of them are here - for instance . . . It’s psych 101, some people have these suppressed parts of themselves that come out online. Some you can watch their personalities evolve as they go from newbie to regular on the boards. It’s the kind of social observation i don’t do much in real-life situations because i’m naturally pretty anti-social - the quasi-anonymity of the online social realm makes for some fascinating psycho-social fodder.
UPF and his alter ego share the same basic personal histories and basic personality traits - but UPF remains a character that i play. I make him a little more forthcoming and occasionally adopt intellectual positions that i remain skeptical of in real life - I like to think of him as primarily a question-asker and a critic more than someone who has a complete philosophy already worked out which he is trying to persuade others to adopt. I have philosophical interests and ideas that UPF doesn’t share, and sometimes the reverse is true - i’ll entertain ideas online for the sake of discussion that i might just shrug off and dismiss entirely in real life, and i take advantage of the aforementioned quasi-anonymity in various ways. Politics can also be fun to play with from behind the curtain, so to speak - just experimenting with defferent viewpoints and pursuing them to their logical end to see where you end up . . .
Literal. I was a quasi-nihilist and terrified of adulthood, as well as terrified of working for a living. I did a lot of drugs and got in fights. Treated my body like a veritable crash test dummy. I figured it would be accidental death or suicide - either way, i didn’t want to get old. Live fast die young, young til you die - the whole bit. I figured i’d go to college, make the most of that experience - fuck around for a few years and then kick it. Seems SOO naive in retrospect - but i was teenager, and stayed that way well into my early 20s.
More or less - like i said, i don’t really think of UPF as having a complete, holistic philosophy, he just has a few basic POVs on which he stands while critiquing and discussing other ideas: Naturalism, Pragmatism, Physicalism, Social Liberalism - and some basic beliefs about HOW we know. The belief, for instance, that what we see is largely determined by what we are interested in, and vice versa. The belief that freedom is temporal in a fundamental way and that time is, in that significant sense, the fourth physical dimension. The belief that thoughts are actual extant entities with real ontological and causal properties that it is not wise to overlook or downplay. The belief that thought literally occurs within spatial dimensions and that has practical effects on how and what we think. The belief that consensus and usefulness are intrinsic to determining knowledge . . .and so on . . .
Of course, i am totally subject to all the same social conditioning as everyone else - like i said, i was being ironic - sort of mocking the naive view that such things are somehow escapable simply because we are made aware of them. Society determines so much, including our identity as individuals, that working outside those determinations is literally impossible. Even to go counter to them is to do them homage - i’m with you that we are all conditioned, 100% - no escape.
The usual distractions: Sex, alcohol, exercise, literature, love of freinds and family, just taking the joy wherever I can find it . . .
Not to the extent that UPF does, but yes. Why is a good question that would probably require additional pages to answer with any sort of thoroughness - suffice it to say, trouble fitting in, an unusually sensitive nature and a couple significant life failures have all made their contributions. It’s sort of humility taken to an extreme as a defensive measure, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, unless your at university somewhere the opportunities for intellectual circle-jerks are fairly limited, since the majority of people eschew philosophy as esoteric and off-putting. Frankly, i can respect that - unless philosophy is personally useful to you in understanding the world and finding meaning in life then there’s not a whole lot of point to it - if you can find your meaning and live without the understanding that philosophy affords, then more power to you. Why torture yourself with questions you’ll never answer unless you actually enjoy it? I try not to look down on people simply because they are less intellectual (or, in many cases, intellectual in different ways). I can’t escape the fact that most people are idiots, so instead i just include myself among them when i make that judgment, which is something i think more people should do. It’s easy to look around and judge everyone as stupid, it’s much harder, however, and ultimately much more useful, to confront one’s own stupidities and idiocies. Whatever, i’m not going to sermonize now - but let me just say that if you are convinced that everyone around you is deluded, chances are you’re deluded yourself. Being philosophical encourages delusion just as often as it exposes it, if not more. There is no innate virtue in being philosophical, so i try not to view others adversely based on their lack of interest in the same things as myself.
one more question, which i’ll come back to when i’m a little more clear headed -
You flatter me - i really don’t know shit - and that’s the first assumption: assume your own ignorance, and work from there.
I don’t really know: Assume as little as possible, as a rule.
Here are some things I assume:
*Assume things are as you experience them to be until evidence (or, if you will, additional experience) comes along that says differently.
*Assume that logic, maths, and language originated from humans as conceptual tools designed specifically to accomodate Human modes of understanding - DO NOT assume that those things are intrinsic to the functioning of the universe apart from how we perceive it.
*Assume that there is no distinct selfhood apart from that which we collectively create for ourselves
*Assume if something works for a given set of purposes, that thing is true
*Assume that all knowledge is subject to revision
*Assume that X=X
*Assume that the “fact” that X=X is ultimately an arbitrary one
*Assume that most philosophical disagreements are over the meanings of words, and not the ultimate nature of reality
. . . That’s just off the top of my currently muddled head - but if anybody wants to contest any of them, i’m certainly game
20.) I hope you enjoy your time away from work. Have you ever considered opening your own business? If you were to do so (whether you’ve considered or not) what would you do?
21.) You’ve mentioned that UPF’s Philosophy differs from your own. What about personality, are there any key differences there and what are they?
22.) You mentioned that you looked at suicide as a possibility. For lack of a better term, where you ever actively suicidal, in your thoughts? If so, what brought you out of it?
23.) You said, “We are all conditioned, 100% - no escape,” you speak of it as an absolute. Do you think perhaps that is the one absolute, the fact that humans (as a social animal) will always affect other humans?
24.) You mentioned having low self-esteem because you did not fit in very well. At the same time, you mentioned enjoying (to some extent) not fitting in very well. How does that balance work? Is your not fitting in (in a way) a rebellion against a society that you do not believe you ever could truly fit in?
25.) Earlier you mentioned having no regrets because you would not be where you are now if anything where changed. At the same time, you mentioned having significant failures in life. If the net result (where you are now) where the same is there anything you would change so that you would not have had to go through it?
26.) “… but let me say that if you’re convinced everyone around is deluded, chances are you’re deluded yourself.”
I think that’s an excellent quote. I’ve always thought that the people that are most sure of their own sanity are the most likely to be insane. Do you find it important to sometimes step back and ask, “OK, if I were someone else, would I find what I am doing here to be rational?”
27.) You refer to logic, math and language as tools. Do you believe time is merely a tool?
28.) You mentioned that your first assumption is that you don’t know shit, or to operate from a basis that you don’t know anything. However, if you know that you don’t know anything, isn’t the fact that you know that then knowledge, thus you know something. Wouldn’t that make it impossible to know nothing, unless you knew nothing, but thought you knew something?
29.) Thank you for taking the time for this Interview, UPF, did you enjoy yourself?
Thanks. I have thought vaguely about starting my own business - probably something in retail, books perhaps - or maybe a bar that doubles as a music venue - seems like quite a bit of red tape to get such things off the ground though - i wouldn’t know where to begin . . .
Key differences, hmm . . . probably that in real life i simply don’t talk or engage people as much, and i’m not terribly argumentative - i’m much more willing, in the real world, to let people just say stupid shit or spout ridiculous speculations, probably by necessity - i’m more forthcoming online - i would never agree to a real life interview for instance - i take a lot more conversational and argumentative chances online. I’m probably a little less fatalistic in real life as well. UPF tends to be very resigned to the hand he’s been dealt - i’m not sure i’m really as much like that in person, though perhaps in the past i was, which is why i can play the role - i would say UPF is an amalgam of personality traits that i’ve held to one degree or another at different times over the course of my life, kinda picked free of the timeline and all balled together like slivers of old soaps pressed together for reuse.
I don’t actually put a whole lot of thought into constructing a personality for UPF - it just sort of emerges on its own from behind the cloak of cyber-anonymity. If he were a more carefully constructed character i’m sure he’d be a lot more interesting.
I attempted suicide once, at 22. I chickened out - it was a half-assed attempt at an overdose using a few bottles of various prescription meds. Like an hour after swallowing everything i started to feel incredibly weird and uncomfortable and decided that this would not be a pleasant way to die, so i told someone and they shipped me off to the emergency room for a stomach pump just as i was passing out. They made me swallow this aqueous charcoal solution which apparently absorbs all the chemical in the digestive tract, it was the worst tasting thing i’ve ever experienced in my life - the next time i attempt suicide, i’ll just step in front of a train or something. Something more fulproof and not as subject to complication.
Not an absolute, too many hypotheticals - a human raised in isolation would not be socially conditioned, for instance - it’s also conceivable that the truly born insane people aren’t subject to the same sort of normative forces as the rest of us - i tend to think of psycopathy as a normative disorder - for whatever reason, the psychopath simply doesn’t behaviorally adapt to the same social structures that the majority of us do - so they can do things like murder without remorse and even make no attempt to justify it philosophically.
I fit in better than i used to, as some of that youthful rebellion-angst has begun to fade into adulthood (an occurence i once viewed with dread, now replaced mostly by indifference),ive learned how to make things work - it’s still not something that comes naturally to me though - fitting in socially takes constant conscious effort and requires a ton of energy - which is why i need large amounts of alone time with myself to recharge in order to keep things in my life at social par the rest of the time.
No - much in spite of myself, i’m actually a little proud of having navigated my way through the various failures - resilience is strength - and i look upon it as a demonstration of strength that i’ve persevered.
Definitely. I think (and this ties in with the whole social conditioning discussion) that one of the postulates of sanity is that we live our lives through the eyes of the other - either consciously or unconsciously depending on the moment. That’s an immensly useful ability (instinct?) for us to have, and it’s why i reject the notion of static, autonomous selfhood or individuality as an absolute - there is no fine distinction between our own POV and somebody elses.
interesting question - yes, i suppose in one sense it is, because it has a capacity to be used that way -but i think that’s a different sense than the sense in which logic, math and language are tools - we have a choice of whether or not to use the latter in any given situation, but time is a conceptual constant - like i said earlier - the fourth dimension - we don’t apply spatio-temporal conceptualizations as needed the way we do with logic or language - instead those conceptualizations are quite literally prerequisites for such tools as logic and math . . . i would say (and i’m just speaking out my bum again) that time and space are like gravity to the newton’s apple of logic, math, and language. The latter are synthetic tools (like the hammer we use to build the house), the former are elemental tools (like the dirt into which we lay the foundation of the structure). Or, uhm, something …
Well, semantically, theres a difference between assuming that you don’t know and KNOWING the same. I don’t know whether or not i know anything, so i take the default path of ASSUMING i don’t know so that the resultant skepticism colors my subsequent examinations of everything i think is true. Some people do the opposite by assuming instead that they DO know that they know - those are the absolutists and objectivists. Then there are those who assume they know for certain that they don’t know anything - those are the nihilists.
Totally - it’s been a whole crapload of fun. Thanks for doing it Pav. And thanks to anyone who bothered to read it.
Thanks UFP, and Pav, for doing this interview. It’s been an interesting read. Especially because you touch on a couple of issues that have allways been occupying me, the quote below being exemplary of one of them. If you don’t mind me going further into it…
You obviously don’t hold an absolute position on the individual-social distinction, but here you put a lot of emphesis on man as a social being. At other times you acknowledge that fitting socially doesn’t really come natural to you, and you need to recharge from the efforts you put in, on you own. And you make other somewhat mixed references to this…
There are of Nietzsche readers on this board, and philosophy generally seems a more solitary enterprise. Although Nietzsche was not that stupid to believe the individual can exist in isolation, a lot times he clearly speaks about solitude as necessary condition for the his idea of the healthy man. He wants his “ideal” to rise above the normative structure. Solitude seems necessary to rise above the rubble…
Here you equate the man who can disregard the normative structure with the insane, the psychopath. At a couple a times i’ve seen you take position against Nietzsche, although not directly on this point probably. And here comes the million dollar question :-" , do you think Niezsche was going to far? Do you think he was bordering insanity, and his views were tainted by this?
If you want this thread to be only about UFP and not about N., again , that’s ok. I’d be interested to hear more about your take on this, not Nietzsches.
I have a more dialectic view of what philosophy is as an enterprise - there’s no philosophy witout other minds - solitude is a negation - a necessarry one for some of us - but still a negation in that it is part of the means by which we reveal the normative structure to ourselves in order that we might try to examine it as an object. However, i don’t consider the normative structure to be rubble, nor does the simple act of isolating oneself from it reduce it to rubble. It’s not something we need to “rise above” so much as something we need to learn how to properly coexist with. Nietzsche’s right insofar as he says that we need to see the normative structure as synthetic and a human invention and not to absolutize portions of it, but he’s not right insofar as he implies that it’s possible to really live beyond it or transcend it. It’s a romantic notion that says that the human can exist completely unfettered by the restrictions and demands of society - which is part of the reason we’re generally so fascinated by psychopaths - the romance of their position somewhat outside of the normative structure affords such an intrigue to us - but to BE a psychopath does not necessarily indicate philosophical enlightenment . . .
Not everyone who can disregard the normative structure is insane or psychopathic however. It’s a question of how you develop that ability and what you do with it. I’m sure that Nietzsche was not wittingly endorsing psychopathy as a new normative standard, for instance. It’s one thing to isolate oneself, step back from the social structure, and analyse how it works, what it looks like on paper and the best way for you as an individual already defined by that structure to fit back into it - it’s another thing to convince yourself that by stepping outside of it you’ve successfully cast it aside and can now go about the process of starting fresh from some primordial platform of potential ubermensch-ness. By stepping outside it in the first place, you’ve already demonstrated yourself as conditioned by it - it’s like you can understand everything about fire, how it burns, what exactly it does to human flesh, even what it feels like to be engulfed in flames, but that doesn’t make you impervious to fire - it just means you understand fire as an object and it’s relation to the body. The same goes with the normative structure. You can’t escape it through philosophical enlightenment, you can only understand it.
I don’t believe in morality, but neither do i believe that it’s possible to live a fully post-moral life. The psychopath does not live a post-moral life in the Nietszchean sense, s/he only lives an Amoral life in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual sense. Likewise the ostensible post-moralist does not live a psychopathic or post moral life as long as s/he relates to the normative structure as an object and adjusts his/her behavior accordingly, which is really the closest any sane person can come to “rising above” social normativity.
Yes, it does. I’m sorry I didn’t find the time to answer sooner.
I mostly find myself in ageement to what you say. And now I do too. Maybe it’s because i find myself in a somewhat comparable situation as you do, having been somewhat of a mis fit for current society most of my youth, and all the way into law school. Now i’m working a job that I also experience as soulcrushing (and I don’t see a lot of jobs that are a lot better)… Having lived this way, not being all that connected to society, also gave me look at society and all moral rules, laws, politics… as objects. They don’t allways make a lot of sense, but at the end of the day the are very real, and you need to learn how to think in this way to get anywhere. That’s why it’s energy consuming I think, because I haven’t really internalised the values of society, and don’t live them or “belief” in them. I need to think, abstract them a lot the time.
My main goal is to understand why this gab it there. It may be helpfull, but I don’t think it’s normal or natural - to use some loaded words - to have to look at it in this way, as an object. If a car is driving straight at you, you also don’t think “okay, there’s a car driving straight at me, I’m probably going to die if I stay here, and since my life has value I probably should move out of the way”. I think it’s maybe partly because of me I have this view, but also because there’s some issues with (parts of) current society. Nowadays the sane person doesn’t seem the one that is fully immersed in his culture. But it also can’t be the one completely outside of it, as you say. Nietzsche was, I think right about a lot of things, but he had to go very far personally, to be able to see this. And it’s one thing to understand something, and another to live it, if this makes sense. His discriptions are good… his solutions???
Anyway, I’m rambling, thank you very much for the clarifications.
yeah, i have trouble envisioning better jobs than the one i just quit as well, i’m kind of going on faith that there might be something a little less deadening - but i’m skeptical at the same time - if nothing else, i hope the change will do me some good . . .
Precisely, well put.
good analogy - it’s all this extra(neous) thinking in social situations about what to do and how to respond that really sucks the time and mental energy that i’d rather be spending on other things - that’s then magnified by huge amount when you’re in a workplace setting - because there’s always politics, and it’s like eight straight hours of it every day . . .
well that depends who you ask - sanity is an ambiguous standard and in many ways a cultural one.
, that’s ok. I’d be interested to hear more about your take on this, not Nietzsches.
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