Thread for mundane ironists

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202

Philosophy

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.” Virginia Woolf

Let’s just hope we steer clear of that here.

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack… The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist… And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something… What chaos! What a farce!” Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Of course, that’s still true.

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?” Soren Kierkegaard

“I know! I’ll take an existential leap of faith to God!!”

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer

Here? Place your bets!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.” James Madison

Up in the clouds as likely as not.

“If you’ve got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn’t prove it.” Robert A. Heinlein

Not to worry. That will never catch on here.

203

Free Will

“Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only ‘pseudo problems,’ because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.” Percy Williams Bridgman

Pick one:
1] going all the way back to the Big Bang
2] going all the way back to God

“The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.” Sam Harris

There he goes again. Arguing as though his frame of mind reflects the optimal assessment even though he was never free to opt to choose another one?

“…if there really is someday discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Underground, say?

“There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.” Clarence Darrow

Not here though, right?

[b]“Take the Holocaust for example: Why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn’t want to step on Hitler’s toes and interfere with his free will? That’s a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those Jews who died? I’m pretty sure that getting gassed to death was obviously not their choice.

So, was the Holocaust part of God’s great plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn’t answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler drop dead?

Why didn’t God just make Hitler have a heart attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn’t he simply prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust?

Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to understand God’s divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the greater good that came out of the Holocaust?

If that were true, and everything that happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God’s perfect plan, then that means that Hitler really wasn’t a bad man at all. He was actually doing God’s work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was supposed to do in God’s great plan, then Hitler obviously didn’t have free will, but was just God’s puppet. So that means Hitler was a good guy. A man of God.

Sorry, but there is no religion in the world that could sell me on believing THAT bullshit.” Oliver Markus[/b]

Yo, Immanuel Can! Among others.

“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).” Albert Einstein

Back to that again, of course.

204

Logic

“For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.” Lin Yutang

We’ll need an actual proposition, of course.

“Logic is like the sword—those who appeal to it shall perish by it.” Samuel Butler

We’ll need an actual appeal, of course.

“We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.” Stefan Molyneux

Next up: who decides that.

“Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all ‘faith’ is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: ‘By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.’ It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. ‘Faith’ is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. ‘Faith’ is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence." Alan Sokal

Meno!

“There are no things man was not meant to know. There are, perhaps, things man is too dumb to figure out, but that’s a different problem.” Michael Kurland

Pinheads, you’re up!

“In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. For instance, here’s an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.” Gloria Steinem

New thread?

205

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

“Tell me something. Do you believe in God?’
Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. ‘What? Who still believes nowadays?’
‘It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I’m no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new–do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an…imperfect God?’
‘What do you mean by imperfect?’ Snow frowned. ‘In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals…’
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a…sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.’
Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:
‘There was Manicheanism…’
‘Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,’ I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot…
Snow pondered for a while:
‘I don’t know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been…necessary. If i understand you, and I’m afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn’t this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.’
I kept on:
‘No, it’s nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom–apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being–the being I have in mind–cannot exist in the plural, you see? …Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while…’
‘We already have,’ Snow said sarcastically. ‘Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.’
‘If you’re going to take what I say literally…’
…Snow asked abruptly:
‘What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?’
'I don’t know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose–a god who simply is.”

Add this to your collection of takes on God and religion.

But what am I going to see?
I don’t know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.

I told you.

“Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it’s simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?”

Next up: corny philosophy.

The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.

Sort of?

The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary.

Let alone the Benjamin Button quagmire.

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

Of course, only God can do that.

206

Epistemology

“It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.” Carl Jung

Next up: human psychology and everlasting truth.

“Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Next up: what we do here.

“But doesn’t it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?” Ludwig Wittgenstein

For example, to bring or not to bring that knowledge down out of the philosophical clouds.

“Information came into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing those assertions up with further assertions.” Rorty Richard

Of course, some things never change.

“There you go again, doubting. You doubt that the moon ever existed, you doubt the gods, you doubt the cards, and you doubt magic. Is there anything you don’t doubt?”
“Quite a lot,” Rowan told her, laughing despite herself. “I don’t doubt that some things people believe are true, and some are false. And I don’t doubt that there’s some means to tell the difference.” Then she admitted, “But I sometimes doubt that I possess the means.” Rosemary Kirstein

Then those like me who doubt that anyone possesses the means.

“The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.” Will Durant

On the other hand, what if a new experience prompts you to reconstruct your philosophy of life? Well, not counting most of these folks…

…no doubt.

207

Henry James from The Portrait of a Lady

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Explain that please.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

You tell me.

“I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do."
“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.
“So as to choose,” said Isabel”

Click, of course.

I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

Imagine telling that to…Adolph Hitler?

And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.

[i]Not counting here, perhaps?

She is written in a foreign tongue.

Aren’t we all?

208

Slavoj Žižek

…the pandemic shook what we (thought we) knew that we knew; it made us aware of what we didn’t know that we didn’t know; and, in the way we confronted it, we relied on what we didn’t know that we know (all our presumptions and prejudices that determine our actions although we are not even aware of them). We are not dealing here with the simple passage from not-knowing to knowing but with the much more subtle passage from not-knowing to knowing what we don’t know—our positive knowing remains the same in this passage, but we gain a free space for action.

Yo, Rummy!

Science remains caught in the hermeneutic circle, i.e., the space of what it discovers remains predetermined by its approach.

Next up: a deontological approach to morality.

Oppression (the brutal exercise of power) is not repression: oppression is directly experienced as such, but we are not aware of repression (in the Freudian sense). When I am oppressed, what is often repressed is the way I enjoy this oppression…

Start here: Amazon.com

In the Trump era, the United States was in a de facto state of ideologico-political civil war between the populist new Right and the liberal-democratic center, with even occasional threats of physical violence. Now that Trump’s authoritarian populism has been defeated, is there a chance for a new “democracy reborn” in the United States?

Sure, why not?

…sexual difference is ultimately the one between becoming and being, and this is how one can also read Lacan’s claim that the woman doesn’t exist: man exists, woman is becoming. Which also means: man is object, woman is subject.

Let’s translate this into “ordinary language philosophy”.

Between the two extremes of liberty and freedom there is a tension between the universality of Law and its species in the sense that particular species function as attempts to formulate the exception to the universal law—this exception can also be conceived as a space of freedom.

Let’s translate this into “ordinary language philosophy”.

209

God

“By Hays’ reasoning, penetrating a rectum with a penis is a violation of how God meant humans to function. However, penetrating a human body with a sword, a common way to kill people in biblical times, is acceptable. Apparently human bodies were designed to be penetrated by metal implements, but not by flesh.” Hector Avalos

Next up: penetrating the rectrum with a…gerbil?

“God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline…To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.” Elisabeth Elliot

See how it works? Either way, it’s all about God.

“When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending – something dead, cold, and lifeless.” Bertrand Russell

Burn, Bertrand, burn!

“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.” Richard Dawkins

Yeah, what about that?

“New struggles. After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” Friedrich Nietzsche

Take that, Immanuel Can!

“I think God is a callous bitch not making me a lesbian. I’m deeply disappointed by my sexual interest in men.” Diamanda Galás

Wake up, God!

210

Science

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” Stephen Hawking

Sure, take that as far as you can.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens

Uh, that which goes around comes around? Though here mostly in a world of words.

“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.” Dan Brown

You first.

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” Terry Pratchett

Into this something of all things.

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.” Albert Einstein

Let alone simplistic.

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” Charles Darwin

Anyone wasting it here?

211

Death

“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.” Irvin D. Yalom

Of course he’s only paraphrasing, well, lots of people.

“…for some reason, dying men always ask the question they know the answer to. Perhaps it’s so they can die being right.” Markus Zusak

That ever happen to you?

“I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.” Yann Martel

That work for anyone else here? Someone, say, now hundreds and hundreds of years old?

“when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies
we often talked
about
how
we’d like to
die
and
we all
agreed on the
same
thing;
we’d all
like to die
fucking
(although
none of us
had
done any
fucking)
and now
that
we are hardly
kids
any longer
we think more
about
how
not to
die
and
although
we’re
ready
most of
us
would
prefer to
do it
alone
under the
sheets
now
that
most of
us
have fucked
our lives
away.” Charles Bukowski

And he ought to know. Though not any more of course.

“Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.” J.D. Salinger

Let’s run this by Paul above.

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.” Svetlana Aleksievich

Voices from Chernobyl let’s call it.

212

Philosophy

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” Rebecca Solnit

If no longer fractured and fragmented?

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.” Marcus Aurelius

That make possibly explain these guys: AGORA

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself." Harry Frankfurt

Of course, your rendition of bullshit might be different. My own certainly is.

“The map is not the territory.” Alfred Korzybski

Next up: the words are not the world.

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned” Antonio Gramsci

Next up: the point of postmodernity.

“I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen.” Rene Descartes

At least that’s what he thought.

213

Free Will

“This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.” Neal Stephenson

Let’s run this by Raymond Tallis.

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.” Niccolò Machiavelli

Uh, good to know?

“You’re saying the Gods don’t have free will.”
“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.” Lev Grossman

Uh, good to know?

The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place.
Or, at least not yet again.
As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility.” Vera Nazarian

Unless, of course, you shine.

“How can we be ‘free’ as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.” Sam Harris

And it’s now your own responsibility to agree with this.

“Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.” Criss Jami

Killosophy, of course.

214

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

Of course, that’s their problem, right?

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind.

Next up: every philosophy.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the ‘thinking ocean’ of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of ‘cosmic yogi’, a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

Instead, it turned out to be, well, what exactly?

It was not possible to think except with one’s brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.

My own point let’s say.

“We are the cause of our own sufferings.” Stanisław Lem

Sometimes, sure. But no fucking way is it always us.

Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.

Next up: the very voice of planet Earth itself. What might that sound like?

215

Logic

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Then this part: it’s logical because I believe that it is. Theoretically, for example.

“It is more Important to be of pure intention than of perfect action.” Ilyas Kassam

Then this part: my intentions are pure because I believe that they are. Theoretically, for example.

“Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.” Frank Herbert

And then there’s your logic and their logic.

“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.” Carl Lotus Becker

Anyone in my set here?

“Smartass Disciple: Which one was first created, time or things?
Master of Stupidity: No things, no changes. No changes, no time.” Toba Beta

So, which one are you?

“For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire’s Candide, in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of “metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology,” through reason, logic, and analogy “proved” that this is the best of all possible worlds: '“Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches”. The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.” Michael Shermer

Next up: the best of all possible philosophy forums.

216

Epistemology

“Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Uh, about half the posters here, right?

“Science involves the quest for knowledge. Any such quest, by necessity, involves some commitment to epistemology. The epistemology of irrationalism is fatal to all science because it makes knowledge of anything impossible. If a truth’s contrary can also be true, no truth about anything can possibly be known.” RC Sproul

If only on this side of the grave?

“One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the questions that the sciences—physical, biological, and social—cannot answer, and the reasons for that incapacity.” Edward O. Wilson

Answers? And what might yours be?

"Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Friedrich Nietzsche

Not even close, alas.

“He who would know the world must first manufacture it.” Immanuel Kant

In their head, for example.

“…ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not…” Patricia Crone

And look where we are now.

217

Meaning

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” Victor Frankl

Meaning what though?

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” Hermann Hesse

On the other hand, does he still believev that now?

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.” Thomas Merton

I actually believed that once myself.

“When you can live forever what do you live for?” Stephenie Meyer

I’ll think of something.

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.” Albert Camus

Sure, get back to us on this.

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson

I’ll write one here: dasein.

218

Sarah Perry from The Essex Serpent

It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.

It would have to be like that.

Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world.

Trust me: it doesn’t even really come close.

We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light.

Uh, start here:

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.

Let’s change that.

…in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement — you see the difference?

Oh, yeah. But the two are often hopelessly intertwined.

We are cleaved together - we are cleaved apart - everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.

Same word, entirely different consequences.

219

Jean-Paul Sartre from The Wall

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences.

Tell us about it.

I said to myself, ‘I want to die decently’.

Of course, some say to themselves, ‘I don’t want to die at all’

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

Not really though, is it?

I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.

Start here: https://www.amazon.com/Adieux-Farewell-Sartre-Simone-Beauvoir/dp/039472898X

I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.

Tell us about it.

No, my child, these things are impossible. It would have been better if she had recognize the truth courageously. She would have suffered once, then time would have erased with its sponge. There is nothing like looking things in the face, believe me.

Pick one:
1] nothing better
2] nothing worse

I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.

Whatever that means?

220

Ludwig Wittgenstein

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

I dare you to bring this down to Earth.

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

Besides, all sources are wholly determined anyway.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

Burn, Ludwig, burn!

Tell me, Wittgenstein’s asked a friend, why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?
His friend replied, Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.
Wittgenstein replied, Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?

Uh, whatever?

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

Or, if you’re a pussy, a little girl?

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

Of course, the man was a genius, right?

221

Time

“The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.” Arnold Bennett

For you though it might a cup of coffee…or dope.

“Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.” Sherman Alexie

Let’s synchronize our skeletons.

“Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” Alan Lightman

Anyone here want to be stuck there with me?

“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.” Guy de Maupassant

Uh, theoretically?

“Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.” Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My guess: it depends on the context.

“It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and – what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Are you wondering more?