Thread for mundane ironists

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362

Richard Wright from Native Son

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t.

Of course now all that has changed. If not actually for the better.

Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!

Not unlike posting here, for some.

… a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

Tell me that’s not rooted existentially in dasein.

But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape.

Rape here?

You can’t make me do nothing but die!

Uh, we should all be so lucky?

Did you ever feel happy in church?
Naw. I didn’t want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger.
Again Bigger’s eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain’t that poor.

Cue the Communists?

363

Gautama Buddha

As rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, do not burden your heart with judgements but rain your kindness equally on all.

People actually do believe these things!
I mean, still!!

Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law.

People actually do believe these things!
I mean, still!!

Attachment leads to suffering.

In other words, not unlike detachment: https://youtu.be/w7lBleOF9Pw?si=TNZTa_VP7yhZdmVN

With our thoughts we make the world.

Great billowing clouds of them here in fact.

Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.

Peace with honor!!!
In theory as it were.

In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.

Cue karma?

1 Like
364

Meaning

“Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.” Osho

More to the point, historically, to enforce it.

“Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.” Jacques Lacan

know, I know: they don’t know when to stop!

“The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.” Elena Ferrante

On the other hand, isn’t that what the bots are for?

"I’ve come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.” Woody Allen

Next up: the con artists?
fArtists I think some call them.

“But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.” Donna Tartt

Let’s finally settle this: blah, blah, blah?

“We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Next up: the unbearable lightness of prayer itself.

365

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

That’s why the gods invented bonfires.

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

What exactly is the equivalent of the pen here? If not ink…then what?

“If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’; he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’.

Next up: If someonbe does believe in fags?

Think, for example, of the words which you perhaps utter in this space of time. They are no longer part of this language. And in different surroundings the institution of money doesn’t exist either.

Well, other than for all practical purposes, perhaps.

The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.

Hint: It starts with a “d”.

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it— or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

This book. And of course the other one.
As for understanding both, that’s what the “serious philosohers” are for. Technically as it were.

366

Blood.

367

Science

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.” Bertrand Russell

Though, apparently, still only all the way up to the grave.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Thomas A. Edison

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gdeV4Rk9EfL-NyraEGXXwSjDNeMaRoX

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.” Richard P. Feynman

Not that this hasn’t been going on now for thousands of years.
In other words, progress in regard to what?

“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.” Sigmund Freud

Dream on, Sigmund. If only up until now.

“I went to school in drag, in art school and my day was completely different because everybody thought I was a chick. You should see me as a chick. So I went as a girl, as like an experiment and it worked really well and everyone was really nice to me but I couldn’t talk obviously…you know train conductors were really cool to me on my commute…HA! I looked hot as a chick!” Gerard Way

Another prevert!

“Millions saw the apple fall, Newton was the only one who asked why?” Bernard M. Baruch

Why? Because it never could have not fallen in the only possible world. On the other hand, why is that?

368

So that it could ignore the ground?

369

God

“We don’t know the Devil’s side of the story, because God wrote all the books.” J.A. Konrath

Want to hear my side of it?

“I have always considered “Pascal’s Wager” a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.” Alan Dershowitz

Tell me about it. And how is it not just another pinhead rendition of fantasy football?

“God lives in the place of praise. If we want to be where He is, we need to go to His address.” Nancy Leigh Demoss

No, you take a leap of faith or place your wager. Then pray like hell. Unless, of ccourse, as with most things like this, you might as well just flip that coin.

“Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?” Yann Martel

And [of course] this part: what does He then say to you?

“Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God’s power. We stutter and stammer about God’s holiness. We tremble before God’s majesty…and yet, we grow squeamish and skittish before God’s love.” Brennan Manning

All revolving around this: a God, the God, my God.

“Sometimes when we say “God is silent,” what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.” Paul E. Miller

Next up: “No problem. I’m in”.

370

Werner Herzog

“I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.”

Let’s try to explain that.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

And [of course] the equivalent of that here.

The two men see pornographic pictures. Strangely coiled naked bodies, performing unchaste acts in groups, in hopeless configurations.

The “twilight world” let’s call it.

A hunter, with a second hunter nearby, asked me what I was looking for up there. I said I liked his dog better than I liked him.

And yet he’s still around!

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Let’s say that I am the protagonist here…?

An ocean without monsters would be like sleep without dreams.

Next up: a philosophy forum without monsters.
Or, as some call them here, pinheads.

371

Death

“Wayne’s a little attached to that hat," Waxillium said. “He thinks it’s lucky.”
Wayne: “It is lucky. I ain’t never died while wearing that hat.”
Marasi frowned. “I … I’m not sure I know how to respond.”
Wax: "That’s a common reaction to Wayne.” Brandon Sanderson

Next up: a hat left on a bed.
Right Bob? Right Diane?

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Kurt Cobain

Pick one:
1] murder
2] suicide

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Ernest Becker

Bummer.

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.” Ernest Becker

What on Earth was God thinking, right?

“They never fail who die in a great cause.” George Gordon Byron

Really, how naive must you be to fall for that one?

“When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.” Clarence Darrow

Believe it or not, I was once this optimistic myself.

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.” Sylvia Plath

On the other hand, that’s gone when you’re gone. Forever, for example.

372

Philosophy

“It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” Richard P. Feynman

On the other hand, don’t overthink it?

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.” Norman Mailer

Next up: all the good wars.

“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.” Leonardo da Vinci

Of course, he was “allowed” to say that, right? Just as Nixon was “allowed” to go to China?

“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.” Terry Pratchett

I know, I know: What if that starts happening here?!!

“Thoughts become things. If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand.” Bob Proctor

Guess what I’m seeing in my mind right now?
Nope. Guess again.

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” C.S. Lewis

That’s certainly proof enough for…some?

373

Richard Wright from Native Son

How could one find out about life when one was about to die?

What did you find out?

Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts – if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?

You first.

If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate. Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt. And this is true of all men- whether they be white or black -it is a peculiar and powerful, but common need.

Yeah, maybe?

They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.

That’s logical, right?

Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible.

Would you believe it’s only gotten considerably worse?

Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!

Clear enough for you?

374

Lord Madox Ford from The Good Soldier

I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.

And, no, not just philosophically.

The world is full of places to which I want to return.

If they’ll take you.

Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

More to the point: why can’t people have what they need?

“If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?”

Okay, but what about ten years?

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

Let’s call it the least worst of all possible worlds.

The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.

Spread the word?

375

Meaning

“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.” Salman Rushdie.

See, I told you.

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” Chris Hedges

Indeed. Recall the great wars here.

“In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.” Thomas Ligotti

Unless, of course, he’s wrong.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.” Jack Gilbert

Don’t get us started!

“I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.” Vincent Van Gogh

Or you can just grab a bite to eat.

“…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.” Dan Brown

And it’s all right there in the da Vinci code.

376

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.

It starts with a “d”.

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.

Especially around 3 in the morning.

“There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.”

More to point, however, is he happy now?

“If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.

Let’s run this by the Grim Reaper.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

Let’s get started!

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

“A picture of what?” he asked.

377

Science

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

Gag me with a spoon?

“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” Hippocrates

Actually, more often than not, the latter begets objectivism.

“Isn’t that what it means to be a scientist? To push the boundaries of the unknown? To bravely, actively explore the enormity of our universe ?” Robyn Mundell, Brainwalker

Uh, technically?

“In the Universe it may be that primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.” Stephen W. Hawking

New thread!!!

“I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.” Rene Descartes

I think, therefore he’s wrong?

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Richard P. Feynman

Start here: https://youtu.be/9Gc4QTqslN4?si=LB_US9aqgni7-y_3

378

God

“God is the name we give to the science we don’t understand. Science is the name we give to the God we don’t understand.” Steve Maraboli

We not including me, for example.

“It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. ‘How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.’
Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled ‘theologians’, whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: ‘In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)’
I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot’s Ghost and The Armies of the Night.” Christopher Hitchens

Let’s decide: which one is the Stooge?

“Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God…It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.” Joris-Karl Huysmans

Just out of curiosity, which thread here best reflects either the high-water mark of positivism, or the low-water mark of mysticism. If, of course, you can tell them apart.

“To me, God is like this happy bus driver.” Jerry Stahl

He means train conductor, of course.

“Orange is one of God’s favorite colors— He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second color in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night.” Reggie Joiner

Next up: that thing on Trump’s head.

“I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.” Clair Huffaker

Come on IC, that’s a kick in the nuts, right?

379

Iris Murdoch from The Sea, the Sea

Of course, reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

Bread and roses as some suggest.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

Not counting those [here and there] who are entirely transparent, of course.

…emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

Click, of course.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

What’s your excuse?

I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.

Of course, that is precisely what others of us crave.

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

Instead, we ended up here.

380

Death

“It’s all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.’
‘Why are you saying that?’
‘She might need permission to die, Cal.’
'I don’t want her to. She doesn’t have my permission.” Jenny Downham

These things can get convoluted to say the least.

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.”
“That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak” Franz Kafka

How else is there?

“Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.” Caitlin Doughty

Right, and how’s that working out for you?

“About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.” Virginia Woolf

And dreamily, half asleep here…?

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.” Tom Robbins

You tell me.

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, ‘You stupid ass, just wait a minute,’ and she’ll open her eyes! ‘Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!’ But they always do.” Elizabeth Wein

“Stupid ass” works for me. Though, actually, they are “pinheads”.

381

Philosophy

“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” Epictetus

So, how do you interpret this? Internally, as it were.

“I’m looking into my past lives. I’m convinced some of them still owe me money.” Graham Parke

Or at least an explanation.

“If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” Pier Paolo Pasolini

Sound familiar?

“We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.” Erich Fromm

Yes, of course virtual reality counts.

“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” Bertrand Russell

Uh, naturally?

“To win true freedom you must be a slave to philosophy.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Pick one:
1] new post
2] new thread
3] new philosophy forum