Thread for mundane ironists

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502

Richard Rorty

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Ironic enough for you?

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

What, even here?!

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

You’ve got about six hours then. Eastern Standard Time.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Right, like after you’re dead and gone that has any relevance at all.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Not to mention chance and change.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Then the part where most of us will go to the grave utterly oblivious to the actual existential implications of this.

503

Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Dean: My dear fellow, who will let you?
Roark: That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

So, do those of his ilk need to be stopped?

I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.

No, really, who would you be willing to die for?
Me? No one. At least no one comes to mind

To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.

Uh, start here, perhaps?

After all, there is almost nothing they don’t already know about what it truly means to both love and to know yourself. Well, if only as they do.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

In other words, to see and to understand it exactly as she does.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?

What soul, Ms. Objectivist?

But you see, said Roark quietly, "I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

A perfectly scripted assessment, let’s call it.

504

Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

Let’s not even begin to explain this.

The Theory of Relativity makes nobody angry because it doesn’t contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don’t care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well be my guest. …In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you really understand the Theory of Evolution, you understand that there is no soul. This is a terrifying thought, not only to devote Christians and Muslims, but also to many secular people who don’t hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless, want to believe that each human possess an eternal, individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life and can survive even death intact.

There’s theory this and theory that…and then there’s theory everywhere in between

If you are really in love with someone, you never worry about the meaning of life.

As often as not, let’s say

Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our new-found knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future. In 1016 it was relatively easy to predict how Europe would look in 1050. Sure, dynasties might fall, unknown raiders might invade, and natural disasters might strike; yet it was clear that in 1050 Europe would still be ruled by kings and priests, that it would be an agricultural society, that most of its inhabitants would be peasants, and that it would continue to suffer greatly from famines, plagues and wars. In contrast, in 2016 we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess.

Next up: imagining America in 2050. Or, perhaps, what’s left of it?

Consistency is the playground of dull minds

Tell me we won’t need a context here.

Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.

Well, that and crony capitalism.

505

Meaning

“Humans are born to die, anything in between is just pure nonsense.” Anupam S Shlok

You know, essentially.

“Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.” C.G. Jung

Our own meaning, for example.

“The ordinary man gets motivation from power and fame. The superior finds motivation in meaning and work itself.” Maxime Lagacé

Unless, of course, he’s wrong.

“I think life is one big fluctuation between horniness and a sincere quest for meaning. We just call one the other.” Karl Kristian Flores

And then how that unfolds here, of course.

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.” Bernard Shaw

Yeah, what about that?!

“Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.” Richard Powers

Mine? Pitch fucking black.

506

Yuval Noah Harari

Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict, or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.”

Yeah, what about that Mr. My Way or the Highway Objectivist?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’.

Next up: the part all women play.

We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

Or, for some here, Stoogery?

Immediately after birth the calf is separated from its mother and locked inside a tiny cage not much bigger than the calf’s own body. There the calf spends its entire life – about four months on average. It never leaves its cage, nor is it allowed to play with other calves or even walk – all so that its muscles will not grow strong. Soft muscles mean a soft and juicy steak. The first time the calf has a chance to walk, stretch its muscles and touch other calves is on its way to the slaughterhouse. In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.

Well, you can’t have everything, can you?

Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.

Go ahead, I dare you to actually think that through.
And then get back to us?

When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

The good news? Only all the way to the grave.

507

Richard Rorty

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Me? Forget asbout it.

The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

Cue the sociopaths?

What makes us moral beings is that…there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit…But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one’s choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.

Let’s pin down what thse things are once and for all.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing
well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.

MAGAspeak, for sure.

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister–corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Of course, some know better. At least [up in the clouds here] some think they do.

The difference between people and ideas is…only superficial.

Let’s name names.

508

Art

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.” Anais Nin

Distractions let’s call them.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Thomas Merton

Also, the other way around for some.

“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.” Woody Allen

Including the commercials?

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist – a master-- and that is what Auguste Rodin was – can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.” Robert Heinlein

No, really, how profound is this?

“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” Karl Lagerfeld

Spooky enough for you?

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

Or, perhaps, both?

509

Death

“Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths.” George R.R. Martin

Unless, of course, it’s the other way around.

“I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?” Epictetus

It sure as shit does me.

“Let the hounds give chase. I do not fear death, because I command it.” Leigh Bardugo

Of course, that can make all the difference in the world.

“Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.” Donna Tartt.

Next up: the maggots.

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” William Faulkner

How’s that working out for you?

“Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.” Anne Sexton

Can you say that?

510

Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me’. Then he wonders why he’s unhappy.

Of course, that’s still going on. Well, unless Schopenhauer’s assessment of human wants, uh, trumps it?

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

Good points, of course. At least until they become all but irrelevant. Or hopelessly embedded in confliciting goods.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

Next up: Maia weighs in here.

…Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Like, for instance, Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin stood by their own? All the way to the gulags or the gas chambers? Or Ayn Rand excommunicating those who refused to share her own ideas. If only about everything, for example.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

No, really, are there any Objectivists here? Let’s explore the nature of human identity on another thread.

[b]But I don’t think of you: https://youtu.be/Q_E0tfoDSEA?si=i2qgVjHUVKNh3fUw[/b]

On the contrary, that is often all the Ayn Randroids ever think about.

511

Blindness

“Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn’t mean it does not exist.” Margaret Cho

Her inner beauty for sure.

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit.
For what every man wishes,
that he also believes to be true.” Demosthenes

Blinded by the light, let’s say.

“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one’s own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.” Sheri S. Tepper

Next up: the blind leading the blind.

“…blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.” José Saramago

See what he means?

“We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen.” Ursula K. Le Guin

On the other hand: Amazon.com : total sound blocking headphones

“That we’re going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That’s why, in some ways, it’s as if we were born dead.” José Saramago

That’s what religion is for thank God.

512

Meaning

“Things don’t have significance: they only have existence. Things are the only hidden meaning of things.” Alberto Caeiro

On the other hand, how insignificant is that?

“Find what is meaningful to you and stand by it. Even if you begin to wonder if there is any meaning to anything, continue to be yourself.” Jay Woodman

And if that is no longer an option?

“So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.” Iris Murdoch

Drip by drip by drip by drip by drip for some of us.

“Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.” Alberto Caeiro

Not much that doesn’t include, I imagine.

“The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.” David Mutti Clark

Maybe, but I’m sticking with this:

“If everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie. As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, ‘well, what is it? What state was I in?’ You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared.” Emil Cioran

“Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.” Dejan Stojanovic

No clouds either?

513

Eugène Ionesco

That’s how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

If you get his drift.
Though what are the odds of that.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.

He means philosopher, of course.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Next up: a poster here.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

Actually, solitude is now the only thing I can stand.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Gibberish, perhaps, but our gibberish?

People who don’t read are brutes.

On the other hand, those who’s brutality is derived precisely from what they read? And, no, not just Mein Kampf.

514

Richard M. Rorty

This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

I know that I did.

The sectarian divisions which plagued Marxism are manifestations of an urge for purity which the Left would be better off without.

Tell me about it!

…‘the homosexual,’ ‘the Negro,’ and ‘the female’ are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good.

Let’s run this by, among others, Angela Davis.

One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called “the people”

Trust me: not any more.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which was become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

See! I told you!!

Ontology is more like a playground than a science.

Next up: teleology.

515

R.D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease, and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

Bummer?

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.

Either way, something breaks.

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

I tried that a few times myself. The pain, however, was never impressed

Insanity – a perfectly rational adjunt to an insane world.

A “Sixties thing” let’s call it.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

The fucking masses!

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

That and many, many other things.

516

Death

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.” Christopher Hitchens

Really, if the party is heavenly in every respect, I’ll take my chances with immortality.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.” Vladimir Nabokov

I know that I do.

“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning.” Paulo Coelho

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

“What am I dying for?” Stephenie Meyer

Next up: what are you living for?

“There’s difference between being dead and dying. We’re all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it.” Robyn Schneider

Instead, cue the distractions.

“It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

On the other hand, why would they want to?

517

Yeah. Why did any “god” decide heaven wasn’t enough (a thing to be grasped)?

What distinguishes a fallen “god” on earth from an incarnate “risen” one?

A great question on the traditionally celebrated day of the Incarnation. Unless you’re eastern orthodox.

518

Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Never ask people about your work.

Unless, of course, they are “one of us”.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments.

Whatever that means.
In other words, whatever you need it to mean.

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

Obviously: some a hell of a lot more than others.

I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means.

Of course, immortality as a concept is one thing, immortality for all practical purposes, something altogether different.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Processed philosophy let’s call it.

No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

Which man? What idea?

519

Blindness

“I didn’t realize it until now, but I don’t really know anything about them, or what kind of people they are, really. You can’t see inside a person’s heart.” Koushun Takami

Besides, all it does is pump blood.

“Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” Jose Saramago

Dasein among other things.

“I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.” John Wyndham

Or hear, touch, smell and taste them?

“We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.” Audre Lorde

Next up: what we see here.

“Eyes and ears are not the problem…It is rage that blinds and deafens us. Or fear. Envy, mistrust. The world contracts, gets all out of joint when you are angry or afraid.” Jan-Philipp Sendker

I know that mine does.

“There must be a government, said the first blind man, I’m not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.” José Saramago

Metaphorically as it were.

520

Meaning

“If you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that’s what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it’s a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn’t matter, it’s good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another…” Samuel Beckett

Muck to muck here.
You first.

“Don’t worry about meaning. If a story’s any good, it can’t help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.” William Kittredge

Or, sure, AI.

“Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.” John Connolly

Or, here, none that I will ever understand.

“Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.” Fernán Caballero

Resulting in considerableble unhappiness, of course.

“The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.” Susan Griffin

In other words, one or another “strict literal interpretation to scriptures”.
The rest then being history.

“Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, “I did see a few Indians on the way over here.” And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, ‘Don’t worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren’t any there.’ I don’t remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?” Haruki Murakami

New thread?

521

Jordan B. Peterson

I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.

Two words: conflicting goods.

You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.

Him being one of them, of course.

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

Given the option, of course.

To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.

You first.

The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

How’s that working out for you?

“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”

You tell me.