a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Bianco Luno

But since blame can hardly attach to a mommie, no accusation is dared here.
For all the difference it makes, we’ll say,
she merely sets the stage for the dissolution of the race, in which the principals—the catalysts of responsibility—ordinarily, more constitutionally than historically, are men.
Why don’t mommies teach their baby boys what it is they want when they are in the singular position to do so?
It cannot be that they are too young to understand, for when they reach that age, if ever, they will be proof against any psychic incursion from her side.
It is then or never.
And it is not a question of understanding in any event: she is in the potent position of laying the foundation of what he will later come to call ‘understanding’.
Almost invariably, her mothery egoism prevails.
This, her boy, will be no other woman’s ever.
It would require some loss of her power over him now so that other women may one day find him more accessible.
Unenfranchised elsewhere, for her, the boy becomes the tool of her vengeance.
She wreaks violence this way, telegraphically.
So it is not true that, as Marguerite Duras says, most men are homosexual under the veneer of socialization.
Certainly, they act as though they were; they show too little interest in the subjectivity of women.
But in fact, and less dramatically, they are generally bisexual in some measure.
(The pure extremes of homosexuality and heterosexuality are appropriately rare.
Their bisexuality is patent, though compartmentalized; as appreciative of the female body as they are charmed by its emotional effusions, but observe that, at the same time, they prefer the male mind—and they are, as trained, disconcerted to find them ever in one being, and would just as soon not.[/b]

Mommies and men. Nature and nurture. All tangled up in black and blue. All tangled up in Freud and Jung and Reich and R.D. Laing.

And, maybe, B.F. Skinner?

Then Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and…Dr. Ruth?

Or should we skip all that and read the stuff that Otto Weininger wrote?

many things cannot be determined rationally. We can look at an argument, see coherence, see logic, but not be sure what filters, semantic confusions, false dilemmas and other such mythologization may be in what seem like tough minded, science based reasoning. So these things peck at us. It is unpleasant, though i can’t say I get that bothered by the idea of determinism so much anymore. I mean, if I was in the process of being convinced it was the case, I would find that unpleasant, but that isn’t happening.

I had a long period where the non-existence of the self - especially over time - really, really bothered me. And then it didn’t so much. Not because I can defeat a materialist argument there, I just find it has less hooks for me.

Perhaps something else is really going on that allows us to get hooked and tortured by such arguments. I think this is the case for me. It was a kind of impossible worry. Nothing I could do about it, while there were many pressing down to earth issues I might possibly have been able to deal with and I really did not want to look at those for fear I couldn’t.

I am not saying this is the case with you, just that I think it is possible with humans to fixate on an issue they have no control over and this becomes a focal point, when, in fact other more concrete things are banging on the door and we don’t want to focus on them.

I mean, if determinism turns out to be the case, YOU have not failed. You have not shamed yourself. A fact would now be clearly a fact as it was all along. But there are many issues that at the very least it feels like it would be shameful, guilt producing, ridiculous if we could not change, fix or deal with them, so we focus on something that is in this way, and perhap this way alone, safe. It’s bad enough being damned, but being damned by what seems like one’s own hand, that is really aweful.

You could see if, at the edges of your consciousness, there are things that you are afraid to look at and begin taking steps to deal with, likely things other people, at least some of them, seem to have an easy(er) time with.

I think a big factor is team identification. Once you decide you are the enemy of ____________, then you take on the team’s philosophy on issues, here disidentifying with the irrational ones who have been terrible by ____________ and ______________. This does not mean other logical and rational factors were not involved in team choice and position belief, but I think this team identification is huge. I notice that irrationality produced by members of one’s own team are generally not attacked. FJ’s burden of proof thread OP a nice exception. This holds for all teams, though irrational may not be the enemy code word for other teams.

Often I have encountered ‘if the natural laws break down then there is no point in science’ and other similar statements that it seems to me indicate underlying fears of having to depend on intuition, openly.

I go back to William Barrett’s “conflicting goods” argument here, reconfiguring it from ethics to autonomy. There are reasons to believe in determinism and there are reasons not to believe in it.

And sometimes it is consoling imagining everything is as it must be and sometimes it is consoling imagining it more or less as dasein is predisposed. Either way I am at a considerable distance from the radical egoism embedded in, say, libertarianism.

When we start to think [really think] about human existence we come to the inevitable paradoxes and antinomies strewn throughout philosophical discourse. We reach points beyond which reason and logic and human knowledge cannot seem to penetrate.

But those who thrive [psychologically] on certainty find ways to convince themselves that what they think is so necessarily. I abandoned that when I began to stumble on folks like Bianco Luno.

I root these things in dasein. And, of course, there are folks as apalled by this as others are by determinism.

Dasein is an existential contraption situated out in a particular world awash in contingency, chance and change. “One’s own hand”? What does that really mean if who you think you are is a prefabricated point of view that you endlessly refabricate at the juncture of “inside my particular head” and “out in my particular world”?

That is why I am more intrigued by this instead: what is true for all of us? what transcends dasein?

Math, science, logic…certainly. But what of identity and value judgments? How certain can we ever be of them?

Here we can only agree with or not agree with the arguments of others. But we [like them] do not have the capacity to demonstrate our arguments wholly. Or so it seems to me.

This may well be the sort of motivation lurking behind those who heap scorn on folks who still manage to believe in God. There is a part of them that wishes they could too.

That [in part] is why I come into places like this: looking for arguments that will challenge my own. In other words, trust me: it is far, far from easy thinking and feeling like I do.

Here is how I posited something similar on an earlier post:

[i]This, in my view, is how the psychology of truth telling unfolds.

1. For whatever reason initially you take an interest in philosophy

2. As time goes by you find yourself increasingly pulled into exploring the Big Questions systemically, as a discipline

3. Over time you gravitate towards particular philosophers and schools thought

4. After a while you are convinced these thinkers and perspectives express the Most Rational Philosophy of all

5. Eventually, you begin to bump into others who feel the same way; you may even begin to actually seek out folks similarly inclined to view the world in a particular way

6. Then you are sharing this philosophy with family, friends, colleagues, associates and Internet denizens; it becomes more and more a part of your life

7. As more time passes, the line between “my philosophy” and “my life” starts to become increasingly more blurred

8. As yet more time passes you start to feel increasingly compelled not only to share your Philosophy Of Life with others but, in turn, to vigorously defend it against any and all detractors

9. For some, it reaches the point where they are no longer able to realistically construe an argument that disputes their own as merely a difference of opinion; they see it instead as, for all intents and pirposes, an attack on their intellectual integrity…on their very Self

10. Finally a stage is reached [again, for some] where the original philosophical quest for truth, for wisdom has become so profoundly integrated into their self-identity [professionally, socially, psychologically] defending it has less and less to do with philosophy at all.[/i]

Or something like that.

[b]Bianco Luno

Remember to always keep the veil of manly conceit thin enough to keep visible the awed boy.
This will make you attractive but fatal to their purposes.
You shall not beget a child.[/b]

The child is the father to the man. Unless, of course, the child is the mother instead. But who begot the children that, more and more, are less and less inclined to emulate either one?

Beneath the veil, a mask. Beneath the mask, a veil.
And, above all else, we are what we consume in this modern world.

The irresponsibility of the truth will make a boy out of a man.

And how irresponsible is it for the man to suggest that?

[b]Bianco Luno

I played at being homosexual when I was six or so with a visiting cousin (like nearly everyone).
We were doubled up in the same bed by unthinking parents (are not all parents thoughtless?).
What a sadness descends upon me now.
I am made uneasy in the company of gay men, straight ones as well, and women too, now as an elderly boy.
The whole business of human contact has left and gone to the moon.
You agree with me on the facts but think this was somehow avoidable, or at least desirably so.[/b]

All of the existential threads that come together to make us who we think we are.

Who do you think you are? And how much of it is as a result of unthinking parents? Or, perhaps, even worse, of thinking ones?

[b]Bianco Luno

It must be metaphysically restful for a woman to be a mother.
Nothing a man could possibly engage in approaches that degree of natural honor, so garnering the world’s stamp of approval.
Platitudes, to get back to them, thoroughly explain everything.[/b]

In this modern world Men seem to embrace the NFL in much the same manner. And nothing they do seems more natural or more honorable. Aside perhaps from going to war.

[b]Bianco Luno

Radio commentary: “Society only becomes aware of a fraction of the number of rapes of women by men.”
And each woman will only become aware of a fraction of the number of times she is raped in the course of her life.[/b]

There will always be a gap between imagination and reality here. Bigger in some, smaller in others.

[b]Bob Dylan:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only[/b]

Right, sure.

[b]Bianco Luno

I’m fond of oppressed groups, particularly the kind that have been oppressed almost
out of existence—or who are, still better, completely extinct.
Beautifully dead and gone.
I can champion their cause with the skimpiest reservation.
Among oppressed groups, then, women are special and problematic.
How can we imagine their oppressors outliving them?[/b]

Try to imagine the dismay [or the outrage] of those not able to admit this can only be a point of view.
And what if, instead, it were entirely consistent with the world we lived in?
The science of gender? The science of oppresssion? The science of government begetting a new world order?

I didn’t understand the second sentence.

I was in my early 20s and talking with a woman friend. She lives in a nearby city, a small city. A town. On her way to the store, she told me, men regularly walked up to her and asked for blow jobs or the like. Not that it would justify their behavior, but she didn’t dress provocatively. She dressed down, in general. She said this and I had to ask her to repeat it. Of course I knew about such things and I knew about rape statistics and quite a lot about sexual abuse. But this banal sexual attacking attention hadn’t really gone past a vague mental abstraction. I realized that she and I lived in different worlds.

Once a man walked up to me and offered me a blow job. Wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was once and it’s also not quite the same as the request.

Anyway when she told me this I flashed back to when I stayed in a rooming house in another big city. I made a call on the payphone in the hall and right after I hung up the phone rang. Some guy said he was gonna ___________________. I can’t even remember, but sexual and violent. Suddenly I felt very vulnerable and skittered back to my room and locked the door. But this was a radical exception. No one, not even the blow job offerer, gave off an aggressive, hateful sexual vibe on approach. That’s it. One instance. Whereas for my friend, this was a regular part of her life, something she worked with to avoid, had strategies to defend against and prevent.

I suppose some women have come toward me with what could be taken as a kind of hateful sexuality. But I am was not physically intimidated by any of them. No potential sticks and stones, just words.

Anyway: Her phenomenological Town X was not my phenomenological Town X.

And this isn’t of course just around negative stuff. Just that people as a rule react to her very differently then they do to me.

Luno is rather elliptical in conveying points of view. As near as I can decipher why revolves around the manner in which Victor Munoz invokes an alter ego to suggest there is no direct way in which to encompass these things.

If you’d like to experience the inventor himself he conducts discussions of philosophy at the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club web site. [Sorry I don’t know how to do the linkage bit]. Go to “Discussions” at the top and click on “message board”.

Here he is “himself”—Victor Munoz. In fact, check out his, “a peculiar kind of moral relativism” thread. You can even join the club and participate. I did but I don’t. And I don’t because these folks are top notch philosophers and I am always in way over my head “up there”.

Anyway, I think the second sentence is meant to convey the fact that many men no doubt fantacize about raping particular women they come into contact with. The women are raped…but only in their heads.

Sex is so hard wired into the human brain – males, it seems, in particular – that countless lives have been upended [even completely wrecked] as a result of one’s inability to rein it in. We know the famous folks: Spitzer, Edwards, Foley, Clinton etc. But millions of next door neighbor types also find their own lives becoming hopelessly entangled in these powerful “urges”.

What is the gap then between what some only think about in their heads and what others actually do instead? I wouldn’t even begin to try to “encompass it directly”.

Besides, in here our own alter egos are always…“moderated”.

[b]Bianco Luno:

Socialization: somewhere to go or something to do.[/b]

Especially around the time of our birth. Though considerably less so around the time of our death.

Compassion is silly.
Witness Francis Ponge: a furnishing, a morsel of landscape, a cleanser.
It will attach itself to anything, and where it is resisted, it becomes your Kantian duty to force the issue.
Where it is suckered, there I may want to leave it alone, or it will snarl something murderous at my aspersions.

Let’s leave Kant out of this. After all, eventually, most Kantians do.
Some will then come to call it “compassion fatigue”. And a few will even deserve to.

[b]Bianco Luno

“…ours was the love of those who take pleasure in loving…” Lispector.
This, if you want to know, is what is so fatal in mothering.[/b]

In any event, mothering and capitalism can, in these modern times, make for some truly strange bedfellows. Capitalism [it can be argued] brings out the narcisscist in us. And God help the children who get in the way of that.

Also, as the song says, Love Kills.

My earliest ambition was to be a corner grocery clerk.
Returning the can of paprika my mother had sent me to get, I observed the clerk reading comics.
I showed him the bugs crawling in the can
and he said it was okay to exchange it.
He seemed to have a nice job, and, as far as I could see, had an important role to play.

Ah, to be young again!
Before the world we live in brings this out in you.
Take, for example, “Bartleby the Scrivener”.

FYI…

My daughter was over for lunch today and she taught me how to link stuff from web sites that are not youtube.

So, for anyone interested to exploring the mind behind Bianco Luno [in the here and now] you can encounter it at:

meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic-Philosophy-CLUB/

Bianco Luno here is Victor Munoz there. He just created a thread that revolves around free will. But he has also created threads relating to identity and morality. Click on “discussions” at the top and then scroll down to “message board”.

There he is considerably less elliptical. But not being a real philosopher myself I still find him hard to follow. You know, “up there”.

[b]Bianco Luno:

Being a housewife and mother also appealed to me.
My mother, compulsively too industrious, was not the inspiration here.
Nevertheless, for me, being around the house all day could be quite fun.
I wanted to be left alone.
I wanted to pretend to have the least impact on the world.
And more, as a mother I could have taken a righteous pleasure in something.[/b]

One can imagine any number of feminists lining up to put this in perspective. But is it really about politics at all? In any event, as I philosopher, his impact on the world can hardly be less substantial. In this day and age especially.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You lie, or you reveal some truth.
Tell me, which is worse?

Well, it all depends on how much is really at stake when you need an answer.

The whole planet has been populated by rapists.

But enough about Wall Street and Washington…

[b]Bianco Luno

To William James:
I am not allowed to work out my bleak logic without suggesting some way to avert what it describes.
I don’t profess to be an example for you, but I offer this counsel: without turning your face away stop seeing it as bleak.[/b]

Most folks deal with bleak logic by insisting it is not really logical at all. And the way they generally avert it is make the messenger go away. One way or the other as it were.

I have Flaubert’s fascination with and shyness toward religion.
For the sake of what little purity there is in it, I might have slaughtered half of Christendom, beginning with myself.
Actually, myself would suffice.

And surely any number of folks reading bleak logic of this sort will enthusiatically concur with the last part.

He could mean a few things here, but I’ll react as if I am guessing right. The first sentence seems to mean that one is not allowed to notice and point out problems unless one has a solution. I have always hated that. Oh, yeah, well if you think that system is bad, what would be better? If you can’t improve it, don’t critique it. As if everyone should have all the skills or be silent, when in fact they might have crucial but incomplete skills for getting away from something bad. But then the second sentence almost seems to contradict this. Here it seems to be that one must simply no longer see things as bleak in whatever the area is. But that’s like telling a crying kid to be happy.

I think they also label the person negative, having no distinction, when it is convenient, between reacting negatively to negative things and adding negativeness to the universe where there was none.

With Luno that’s your only option. You can circle around a particular meaning but you can never really land. Not with respect to relationships like these.

My emphasis: Now you’re getting closer.

Or they call him a “troll” who contributes here “in bad faith”.

[b]Bianco Luno

Last night, again, a dream:
Atop a mountain peak, the abyss all around growing because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper.
So needle-sharp, I will be impaled through the one foot on which I’m balanced.
Lightning flashes in the background.
(A cartoon, which I don’t even remember liking: Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
My ‘philosophy’ self-caricatures.
An averted pregnancy, a menses, a masturbation.
What does it have to do with health or even resignation?
A pussy exudation: soak it up.
I am hardly an existentialist.
I am a bandage, a sanitary napkin …because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper, sharper.[/b]

Who is to say what being an existentialist is before the abyss? Though some might conclude that Rocky and Bullwinkle came close. As for sanitary napkins there are retail establishments now that never run out of them.

[b]Bianco Luno:

Epistemic states oscillate between prejudice and confusion.
All else is spite.[/b]

Yeah, I guess that’s logical. Not counting my own such states of course.

Pain and beauty.
The beginning and end of the Goldberg Variations and Gould’s humming, barely audible on these so soft endpieces.
Struck dumb from pain, a whole philosophy is developed, from the first stirrings of doubt through despair to resignation.
Truth having never made an appearance.
The history of philosophy in 33 chapters.

Indeed, and the film biography of Glenn Gould’s life was completed in 32 chapters.

For the record.

Glenn Gould:

[b]“At live concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian.”

“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer.”

“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

“If there’s any excuse at all for making a record, it’s to do it differently, to approach the work from a totally recreative point of view … to perform this particular work as it has never been heard before. And if one can’t do that, I would say, abandon it, forget about it, move on to something else.”

“In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. … The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.”

“Mozart died too late rather than too soon.”

“We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind.”

“‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.”[/b]

Are any of these things true?

[b]Bianco Luno

To speak the truth is to hum.
(How we do it in the West; maybe, sometimes, we also whistle.)[/b]

Yes, but you can be certain that someone will insist you are humming it the wrong way. Or that whistling is always preferable to humming.

I have to speak this way, do you understand?
Not sure why I embroil my personal defense with ours before an empty bench, as though it were some final ‘hope for humanity’.

No, I do not understand. But then, that’s the point, right? We circle the words over and again but there really is no place to actually land.

[b]Bianco Luno

I could tell you how uncomfortable I am with the shape of my nose.
If you saw it, you would respond considerately, saying perhaps that most people have awkward noses, and you would miss my point.
Where is their discomfort?
Even people with the most perfect noses are uncomfortable with them, you were going to say?
“What discomfort? Spare me, no, you mean just this nose, your nose, your personal sore spot, is what makes you an Kierkegaardian ‘individual’, with a skin the color of no other, a one-person race, and you a racist.
Yes? This is what you tried to mean, but didn’t: you were not up to meaning anything.
What I am going to say to you is the truth.
(Please hold back your knowing smile for the moment.)
Your nose has nothing to do with anything.
You are enchanted with jealousy, other people’s noses, notwithstanding.
If you had no nose, your ploy would be different but your snot the same, only more accessible.
Then, your rhymes could come to rest on your physical deformity.
As it is, your deformity is invisible.
I could discourse forever on the nature of this invisibility.
You are so patent, such a perfect backdrop to everything that happens around you that the most inconsequential biographical or material fact about you will loom smaller than your impossibly microscopic ego.
You began by saying you had to speak this way, but you lie.
Your speech is hardly within the range of hearing, let alone distinguished by some special quality.
The casual assertion of godliness only clinches the matter: carry on, call yourself ‘God’…”[/b]

Well, if you reduce reactions down to the individual, you sink to the bottom of an existential morass that is [fortunately or unfortunately] incalcuable. And just as snot is linked to the nose so its equivalent can be linked to practically everything else. And certainly to Gods.