You observe, I rarely talk about ‘justice’.
Be assured, I’m not going to start now.[/b]
But, in a sense, you just did.
For all my solipsism I am remarkably unprivate.
I never confess personal sins or secrets, without having first to implicate you.
I deflect personal responsibility by declaiming our conspiracy.
In this way I can move from the smell of my own farts to the glory of God.
I am not to be trusted; I will stab you in the back the first chance I get.
But my perfume is a real lure, isn’t it?
Why do you keep coming to me?
Why are you so weak?
“From the smell of my own farts to the glory of God.”
Yet another observation I wish I had thought of first.
History and mathematics.
Less pain per se is caused by immolating two people than by starving one.
It takes many more gassed to equal one starved.[/b]
Well, I don’t know about “per se”, but they all sound rather unpleasant to me.
Shall we begin our calculations then before or after __________________? [insert human atrocity of choice please].
A soft dew and the patience of eternity may overcome a “hundred-ton hammer”.
How many people in the world knowingly starve themselves?
How many starve to death?
…then, who starves them?
Let’s do the math…historically:
According to reliable sources, 6,000,000 children starve to death before their 5th birthday each and every year. That’s 60,000,000 each decade and 600,000,000 each century.
I suspect few do so intentionally. And it’s not so much who starves them as who does nothing to stop them from starving.
That’s most of us. But, of course, not intentionally. For “I”, the way the world works is simply overwhelming.
anorexia could be seen as starving onself to death. I think one could also make a case that the standard american diet is a kind of starving to death, though it tend to take decades before the incredible pain sets in.
Intent is what counts here. Most anorexics become obsessed with being thin in a culture that values thin women and thin girls. For some, sure, the “complex” may run deeper and involve suicidal tendencies. This however is largely a reflection of dasein. But I would certainly make a distinction between anorexics here and starving children there. The 600,000,000 children who died in the 20th century had not yet reached their sixth birthday.
It’s in that culture, but that is at most one of the causes, and I don’t think it is always a cause. And it is often fatal. At some point the body must be screaming that it is threatened and yet this is gone past. I can’t see this as other than a willingness to potentially die rather than live without control or with more weight, etc.
yes.
[/quote]
yes, if this group is choosing to die, we are dealing with some kind of supernatural form of choice.
The compunction to shield from horrifying thoughts, art-objects, substances, experiences…:small children and women…
If I didn’t feel that an eight year old ought to be introduced to pornography at the first spark of curiosity, toured through a slaughter-house as part of a school field trip, permitted to drink and drive, make free use of any mind-altering substance or medium (e.g., television) as might encourage them to dream of worse things, witness an execution or shadow an ambulance—if I might have my way and every child learn by watching its parents copulate about the beginning of its history, and curiosity only determine not just which but the order of its objects—if I expected much result from this, then I would not object to the request that my writing be more accessible.
But although I am able to vouch for its usefulness in a small chamber of my heart, I expect it everywhere else to convey back to the keen ears of haters the sympathy scrutable in the lined faces of the “innocent” and “sensitive”, who alone can appreciate what horrifies and outrages; the others, who define and hoard “horror” and “outrage”: poseurs all.[/b]
Is it good or is it bad that only the tiniest fraction of the world’s population will read this stuff? And among them only a fraction still will be poseurs. And only a fraction still more will be moderators.
This is not really a response to your question, but a response to this guy…
Some of his wording is interesting and sometimes I get a new angle on an old issue, but
he seems to be posing as something.
something a little Nietscziean, someone likely to be rejected and projected on. A bit of an outsider, I tell it like it is swagger
that so far is not justified by insights.
While I do not easily suffer from an -ist attitude, I am susceptible to the autistic disorders that assail estranged existences.[/b]
Do the autistic assail an estranged existence? It would seem they make these distinctions from an entirely predictable point of view.
I used to notice more.
My sight is not as impressed as before by what is commonly in focus for us.
I see patterns pretty clearly.
Answers crowd my mind before a single genuine question can enter.
Before the fierce white light cauterizes her retina and renders her sensible, a mad person must cup her hands to her eyes to hear.
Or cup her hands to her ears to see. However, what does she cup to her mind to think? And wasn’t it Emile Cioran who marveled at Nietzsche’s luck to have died insane?
Sure, I can enjoy cryptic. Or perhaps ambiguous writing, or even polyphonic or multi-interpretable. I can enjoy that. It’s just he seems self-infatuated without the necessary depth. I don’t get much new, yet, from him.
I won’t continue what are basically value judgments without argument, but could you give me an example of something from him that was cryptic, but you felt was very useful or insightful?
Maybe, but you might as well argue over what a particular poem or song “means”. Sometimes words circling around and around something is just the authors way of suggesting there’s no place to land. The words nudge you more toward a subjunctive reflection on the world. And that is as useful as it needs to be as far as I am concerned.
For the other stuff, you can always flip over to the SAPC. For me though he is less effective communicating there than here. And back then this guy was rather contemptuous of me.
A little bit of sexism.
“They don’t need your sympathy, they need your humiliation.
Learn to crush all that makes you most male.
How can you maintain your dignity in the face of that? Your dignity is the very thing in the way.
Be crushed and you shall crush, and you must crush what is male in them to have yours vindicated.
This can only be achieved by a kind of spiritual self-violence, though they—being what they are: averse to sudden movements—will not stand for this.
But always remember, be courteous, for even if you fail at the bigger task (and you will), if you do this at least, you will be well thought of.
And isn’t this what you want? No? Tell me, you pathetic creature, you.”[/b]
Is this quoted in first person, second person, third person?..singular, plural?..past, present, future? Or is it a biological fact in which philosophical speculation is quite beside the point?
But this is a defense of cryptic. I have no problem with ambiguity and crypticness, per se. I just don’t see much depth.
I can read a good poem with a lot of ambiguity or layers and then I can read a bad poem with the same things. The better poems must handle the language in beautiful ways, but they are also more likely to stimulate my mind in ways the crypticness of a poor poem will not.
So the issue is not degree of clarity. The issue for me is, does the guy have anything interesting in his cryptic language?
What have you found that was useful, profound, deep in some of his cryptic writings? What did it mean to you? What did it do?
[/quote]
I am not surprised he expressed contempt. That seems to be part of his persona and or real personality. I would hope that someone who could communicate valuably cryptically could also do that with clarity.
It’s nice of you to come up with a good reason for him expressing contempt for you and then also a potential reason why he doesn’t communicate so well there.’
I quoted poorly in the last post, so if you go back you can see I responded more inside the quotes. I’ll change it now. Again, I am not against ambiguous commincation, per se. In some situations it can be terrible, but in philosophy it can be fine. However, I am still hoping to find out why this person’s crytpic communication is valuable to you. Not in general, but with a specific example that you found useful, deep, profound, enlightening…etc.
But I suspect there are folks here at ilp who feel threatened by it. Agree or disagree with them about this or that, fine…but don’t argue that either or neither side either or neither is right or wrong. They have logic [and demand logic] for practically everything.
Am I not equally cryptic here, in turn? And the examples I give of the ambiguity I am awash in is everywhere. Abortion, in particular. But many of my posts relating to identity, value judgments and the limitations of language [re words and worlds] are bursting at the seams with irony.
I am an ironist who makes the assumption that Luno is an ironist too. At least in the Notebooks.
Metaphor for Rationality: A Ticking Clock.
Each piece of the finely wrought mechanism, working through the properties and the permission of matter, of physics, does its job, what it was designed to do, in a way we are drawn to admire because we (like it) are such small creatures in time which almost casually—in return for being measured—will (and also not without its own grace) confer upon this machine a last conscious moment then recover its parts for itself.
Now logic, it is in respectable quarters assumed, is as reliable a guide as we may possess to the better understanding of what happens in time.
It is the most reliable thing in the universe, I think.
(Reliable, as though this had much interest for us.)
Like this clock, it attempts by taking the measure to possess what destroys it.
It is the most reliable thing in the universe, all the same.
For what is time?
What does it promise you?
Why do we expect it to stop for us?[/b]
A clock ticking time like a heart pumping blood: until it stops. In the interim though all hell can break loose. Does that seem logical? And where does it fit into all that space?
I don’t think you are being cryptic, but simply not meeting my request. Sure, you have defended ambiguity, but that’s not about this particular philosopher. Sure, you have given us a wealth of quotes by this guy and your responses, but this isn’t what I am asking for. I am asking for you to give an example of something cryptic this guy said that you found valuable and then how you found this valuable, useful, etc.
Obviously you are free not to do this, but I would end up wondering why.
You certainly present arguments in a number of threads that are meant to be clear and logical. You do post with the goal of clarity, frequently as far as I can tell. In fact, I would say this is the primary way you post. You often do this in defense of ambiguity.
So what I am asking for is for you to use this kind of writing you regularly use to show me what you have gotten from this philosopher in a concrete instance. So I can connect, at least a little bit, with your reasons for posting so much of his writing here. Why this writer and not some other cryptic writer?
Well, my aim here is to articulate [as best I can] my own particular subjunctive reaction to Luno’s words. He seems intent on fabricating his own elliptical reactions—problematic ambiguities [of the “poet”] that reflect the complex interaction between “in my head” and “out in the world”.
But only with respect to those relationships that warrant it.
Regarding complex concerns like these, there is always going to be a gap between what we want and what others give. I am saying what I think I mean, you are reading what you think I’m saying. But what I think I mean here is necessarily a reflection of dasein. The gaps between us are the whole point.
In his own way, Luno seems to recognize the implications of why, over and over again, “what we have here is a failure to communicate”, is the norm. Like me, he wouldn’t expect us to succeed.
On the other hand, he might read these very words and snicker all the more at me. Or maybe I’m getting closer to his own sense of futility.
But over and again I note there are any number of things we can be clear and logical about.
This particular cryptic writer [through Olivia] introduced me to Emile Cioran and Fernando Pessoa. Read them long enough and you will become entangled in “the trouble with being born”.
But then the gap between an intellectual wager like this and the life you happen to live can [of course] be considerable.
Some persons have a moral right to oppress others; you will reckon which those are.
We need hope they are compassionate, or at least informed by a passion of some kind or other for us to curry.
Why can’t I take comfort in the laws of logic or morality or even a historicist’s conversation? I think I am broken or misbegotten.
Don’t dash my hope—contra-indications aside—that you maybe aren’t.
I stroke my cat and begin to weep.
I revert.
I become the emulsification of holy water.
My body aches.
I believe that even in death I will know pain.
Because I don’t know that it (death) is sufficient to kill off the knowing smile, and because, while alive, I never learned to smile properly, according to custom.
I can’t experience even self-pity as the handbooks say.
My tears must not be real: blood of the mind or something.[/b]
Been there, done that.
But we can no more be there and do that underground than we can up on the surface. And I have narrowed this down to 3 explanations: