Follow me, my children, and learn how to be detached from the world:
We can join a group who search for enlightenment by becoming detached from human affairs.
To be sure that we are detached we can second guess every thought by becoming psychiatrists. Or, we can become priests and abandon our human nature. Or we can become catholics or Dawkinians and shake our fist at life. But that’s no good.
To be sure, to abandon even more and enter the realm of the ultimate thingummybob we need yet more abandonment -
We can join a group who set themselves up as the numbers between one and twelve. As numbers we are pretty much vacant from the world.
Or if numbers are too worldly, then we can set ourselves up as infinity. But then making more of anything doesn’t seem the right way to vanish from the world.
So, we might set ourselves up as things that don’t have a meaning, and become a failed quale, or a square circle. But this relies too much on the forms of other things.
We can become anything but. That’s pretty vacant from the world isn’t it? and detached? But this relies too much on things, even if they are things that are not.
We can become Followers of the Lint. We can strive to become like trouser-pocket lint. Better still, we can strive to become like broken polysterene cups flying in the wind.
Here’s my answer. To be absent from and filled with the world we can be ourselves.
Monooq, didn’t you just send me a PM telling me you don’t like my interjections in JJs thread that don’t offer anything and are only insulting?
I don’t see how your sarcastic post is any different.
It’s hard for me to believe JJ and Monooq are being sincere…
but, it’s even harder to believe a couple of people would put so much time into keeping this act going, only for the enjoyment of seeing how people respond to their “characters”.
You mindlessly assume there’s no value in the OP, and then you doubt my integrity because I complimented it. You are insulting and condescending, and there’s no point to what you said beyond that.
I don’t need to justify my enjoyment of the OP to you. If you feel like actually reading with some effort and subtlety, you might find that the OP is an indirect caricature and mockery of all the ways that people express a detached attitude to the world. The post is designed to look burlesque and counterfeit. It’s an exercise in shedding light on that part of our nature—by shedding light on that part of our nature.
It is such hypocrisy to say there is no value in something, and to say it with no value while you do.
My advice to you two, and people like you, is to just refrain from posting if you don’t like the thread.
I assume he doesn’t care to respond to the kind of trolling that you and matthatter do. If read carefully, with a nose for subtelty, and then expand an actual discussion----you may get a different result.
I assume that he actually doesn’t mean what you think he means.
I assume that you read into his posts and create meaning because you have some inability to accept that what he says he means.
Because to accept that would be to accept what you’ve been arguing against this whole time: that his ideas are just really, really bad.
Do you read much philosophy? My own experience is that often times really good philosophers struggle for a means of expression—a way to fit things nicely into words, on a page. Some people seem to think that a good idea has to be very clearly stated. That’s bizarre, given the history of philosophy. I have no idea why anyone would think that—given the history of philosophy. I want to ask them if they’ve read Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Kierkegaard, or hardcore Analytic formalism. My impression of you, given the way you read JohnJones, is that you would think Kierkegaard really was talking about an actual “leap”; that Zarathustra really was talking to animals; that there really was a thingness of the thing and a worldhood of the world, that Hegel’s Spirit was someone you could shake hands with, or that in hardcore analytic formalism—they were really arguing about ‘p’ and ‘q’, and there was something independently interesting about those letters. And for all of these reasons you’ve left off reading the history of philosophy to come here, to ILP, and look for people speaking more clearly.
Once you realize that expressing ideas is a messy business, you’ll be able to read with some subtlety of interpretation, and some charitability. These qualities are required for reading philosophy.
As I said before, I don’t need to justify my enjoyment of the OP to you. If you feel like actually reading with some effort and subtlety, you might find that the OP is an indirect caricature and mockery of all the ways that people express a detached attitude to the world. The post is designed to look burlesque and counterfeit. It’s an exercise in shedding light on that part of our nature—by shedding light on that part of our nature. I never said that the OP was a masterpiece—I just said that I liked it.
If all else fails, and you still don’t like any given OP, feel free not to reply to it.
look at this and seriously tell me you think this guy has a good grasp on reality.
look at this and seriously tell me he’s capable of comprehending ideas and creating comprehensible ones.
Of course. (Except that saying it that generally, and not about a particular idea, is pretty lame). But what’s going on here amounts to calling them an idiot before they’ve even turned the cover.
Not sure why this was moved to Mundane Babble…is the OP in violation of Philosophy Forum rules…?
I’m sensing sarcasm in the OP until perhaps the last line. Each “answer,” until the last line, is a deferral of reality through abstraction – each is an example of abandoning a part of who one is, abandoning truth, in favor of what is not, in favor of what detaches one from who he is.
It’s almost like the problem is we have become so consumed with our abstract structuring of the world that we defer reality and “vanish from the world.” We encode ourselves with irrelevant identities or altogether nullify any meaning we had or could have.
Then JJ has a sincere answer:
I’ll rephrase and try to keep the meaning: Being ourselves, we will be both absent and filled with the world.
How could this work, being both absent and filled with the world? (my second question will be: why is this the answer?)