a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Richard Rorty

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice. [/b]

Their injustices not ours.

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

And certainly as good English.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

An ironist is born.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Well, that and chance and change.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

Of course now he doesn’t even have that. If I have a bet to lay.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have an ambition of transcendence.

In other words, he has no principle motive now.

[b]Nikola Tesla

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.[/b]

And the philosophic man? Well, those that come down out of the clouds.

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle.

Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.

And we know how far some take this.

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

And we know how far some take this.

Most certainly, some planets are not inhabited, but others are, and among these there must exist life under all conditions and phases of development.

Though, if so, like him, you and I will be long dead and gone.

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.

Anyone here know what they are?

[b]Existential Comics

Here are a few small things that everyone can do to help the environment:

• turn off the lights when you leave a room
• use a reusable water bottle
• take the bus instead of driving
• guillotine the rich
• recycle[/b]

Let’s put them in the right order.

What would philosophers say about twitter?
Heidegger: it alienated us from authentic being.
Adorno: it destroys genuine dialogue.
Kierkegaard: it distracts us from the real problems of life.
Schopenhauer: how tf does Hegel have more followers than me?!

Let’s put them in the right order.

Obama is the greatest American President because he figured out how to recover from a recession without giving any concessions to the working class, and in fact transferring even more wealth to the rich.

Well, he is a future Bilderberger. If he’s not one already.

Hilarious when people say that philosophy is useless and we shouldn’t bother with it.
Like they looked at the world and thought to themselves “the big problem I see is that too many people are questioning what they are told. People need to think less.”

Or, sure, not hilarious at all.

Science: what is there?
Philosophy: how do we know?
Literature: why do we bother?
Poetry: how can we make it rhyme?

Two words: free verse.

The funniest anti-communist argument is that “it is human nature to be selfish.” As though property rights naturally follow from this fact, and ten thousand workers should devote their lives to enrich the one man who owns the factory, because they are…naturally selfish?

Yep, that’s their argument.

[b]Harlan Coben,

There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can’t know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.[/b]

I sure as shit know that I am.

Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.

And sometimes others don’t even hear them.

So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly.

Or, at any rate, the backup plan.

I used to wonder why Lucy liked those songs so much. You know what I mean? She sits in the dark and listens and cries. Music does that to her…I didn’t understand for a long time. But I do now. The sad songs are a safe hurt. It’s a diversion. It’s controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it’s not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can’t prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.

Besides, not all pains are created equal.

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. But we don’t care. We don’t see. We just keep pushing.

Let’s call this “the real world”.

So basically, that entire theory is blown to hell.
Not basically, Win corrected. Entirely.

Basically, yeah, entirely.

[b]Bob Dylan

Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean. [/b]

And let’s not forget what they only might mean.

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

Or not repent if that’s convenient.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

Me too. Only I have a word for it, don’t I?

You always got to be prepared but you never know for what.

Either that or you know what but all the preparation in the world won’t do it.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king.

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

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

That’s me now. But not me then.

[b]tiny nietzsche

rock, paper, unrequited love[/b]

Get the scissors.

if you can’t murder yourself, who can you murder?

You know, if you’re willing to risk prison.

you’re reading van gogh’s name wrong

And, then, the next thing you know, you’re saying it wrong.

keep fast forwarding, there are no good parts

Maybe rewinding?

now I am become death, the destroyer of waffles

Not if you smother them in syrup.

said hey to a bird. it gave me a look that said “humans are untrustworthy”

Probably an owl.

[b]Leonard Cohen

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.[/b]

Unbearably light was once suggested. In love or not.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.

And then…just like that…we’re gone.

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.

So, if it could be in one word, which word ought it to be?

It’s the notion that there is no perfection - that there is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still there is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.

On the contrary, no can do.

I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

Imagine then being soaked to the bone.

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?

My guess: You don’t really have much choice.

[b]Iggy Pop

Your skin starts itching once you buy that gimmick about something called love.[/b]

Or even more without it.

I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there are others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.

Does nothing for me.

I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I’d recorded I’d try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted. So, it’s no surprise to me that he got the hit and I didn’t.

Works that way for me too. And not just here.

I’ve probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.

Of course in there it’s not just piss.

I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don’t believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet.

So, anyone, did they?

Something I like to do a lot is just sit by water when there’s a current and just stare into the water. I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I don’t scuba, I don’t spear, don’t boat, don’t play basketball or football – I excel at staring into space. I’m really good at that.

I’m staring into space right now. Or will be shortly.

[b]so sad today

i don’t like you anymore and it’s beautiful[/b]

Let’s make that mutual, okay?

by relaxed i mean very anxious

By okay I mean so what?

only coke zero understands me

Me? Diet Mountain Dew.

i was born to give up

Yeah, there’s a gene for that too.

i don’t give a fuck but i totally do

The new normal.

can’t decide if i’ve made enough mistakes yet to go to bed

Keep making them then.

[b]Frans de Waal

Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.[/b]

Back then maybe.

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

If only genetically.

Those who exclaim that “animals are not people” tend to forget that, while true, it is equally true that people are animals. To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier.

Like this will stop them.

When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.

For example, politically and economically.

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.

You can still take it too far. Like, for example, the narrator of Savage Kingdom.

The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”

What’s the equivalent of that here?

[b]Courtney Love

The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I’m not going to die.[/b]

Let us know if she does.

What makes the most money for this business? Dead rock stars.

Then this: Did he jump or was he pushed?

I might lie a lot but never in my lyrics.

Let’s pour over them.

I did not want to make the widow record. I still haven’t made the widow record.

Who the fuck would want her to?

I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think it can also mean self-reflection and poetic sensiblity. It can mean empathy, hedonism, a libertarianism.

Depending on who you take along for the ride.

The minute I got skinny and got a nose job and became photogenic, and all of a sudden I had a bidding war, and every boy I ever wanted, wanted me.

That’s how it works alright.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone–it’s still some real thing. It exists. You don’t get to fill it in with whatever you want.[/b]

Come on, how many of us don’t anyway?

It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she’d been. As opposed to the fool she was being now. People hang on to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

Right, Kids?

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though.

Here though [as always] different strokes for different folks.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

Nope, can’t imagine it at all.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

No, these lives actually do exist.

A novel! Why do you say this won’t liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!

No, this was actually once true.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.” Voltaire[/b]

This one always bears repeating. Right, Kids?

“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.” Voltaire

Let’s run this one by the top 1%.

“History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.” Walter Rauschenbusch

Among other things: Oh, shit…

“In regard to intellect and virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, God has not chosen one people rather than another.” Baruch Spinoza

America responds: Bullshit!!

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.” Philip Roth

Or exchange one noise for another.

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good.” Ernest Hemingway

Well, not counting most folks in the world we actually live in.

[b]Jackson Pollock

How do you know when you’re finished making love?[/b]

As opposed to, say, how do you know when you’re finished fucking?

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

He means some of us of course.

When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

You’re never quite sure if someone is just making this stuff up.

The idea of an isolated American painting , so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd…

Oh, come on!

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn’t have as far to fall.

You know, whatever that means.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

You know, whatever that means.

[b]David Papineau

I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive. [/b]

And we know where that takes us.

I realize that I won’t have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn’t stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.

And he’ll take that to the grave.

My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn’t help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn’t make sense.

They still don’t.

The ‘phenomenal concept’ issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn’t available to a blind person?

Clearly: Yes, no, maybe.

After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don’t think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

Clearly: Yes, no, maybe.

Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn’t care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

Let’s leave that to God, okay?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.” John Updike[/b]

Let’s fit writing philosophy in there.

“Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.” Alain Badiou

So, how emancipated are you then?

“We have the riots we deserve.” Alain Badiou

And from both sides no doubt.

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.” Alain Badiou

And from both sides no doubt.

“Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.” Adam Smith

Well, not on this planet.

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Adam Smith

Trust me: parts of it can.

[b]Jerry Fodor

…if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. [/b]

More or less as it were.

I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats. Surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.

Actually, I’ve never been on any boat at all.

If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.

It is. Just not literally.

The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.

And the content of an emotion?

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That’s no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.

So, that means it’s turned up here.

I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don’t imagine I’d ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.

Ouch?

[b]Greg Iles

If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.[/b]

Wow, how perceptive is that.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand. I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now.

Right, like you can actually know what those things are.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks.

On the other hand, with women…?

When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.

Unless of course you’re Meursault/

The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds.

Like, for some, dying.

You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.” Jeremy Bentham[/b]

Right, like that’s how they see it.

“The power of the lawyers is in the uncertainty of the law.” Jeremy Bentham

And they’ll take that all the way to the bank.

“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Jeremy Bentham

The sad truth too. For some.

“Once freedom lights its beacon in man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Ah, but only if the freedom is authentic.

“The worst part about being lied to is knowing you were not worth the truth.” Jean-Paul Sartre

On the other hand, what if they’re not?

“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude” Arthur Schopenhauer

Solitude surely, lofty not so much so.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.[/b]

No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.

You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

You’re task then is to take advantage of this.

Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?

For now, let’s just call it human nature.

I know it will be OK because everything is OK in the end. And if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

You know, if you’re dumb enough to actually believe it.

Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.

Either that or sellling it for a small fortune.

…you can’t tell a single thing about a person’s true character if you both want the same thing. That’s like a dog and a cat getting along because they both want to kill the mouse.

Or, sure, maybe not.