[b]Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.[/b]
Well, after music of course.
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
True. But we all know that some ports are more excruciatingly painful than others.
[b]Bianco Luno
To repeat: What is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
To repeat: It is a difference that lies between “we die so life means nothing” and “we die so life means everything”.
It is no accident that I dress like Mr. Rogers; could I ape his soul?
Well, that’s all he is now. And it’s not an accident some say.
Not the co-existence of evil and good that is so appalling as that there is no breach between them, all the while a very forward justice masquerades as the bandage for this hypochondriac’s wound.
Words co-exist all the time “in here”. We need but insist they do. And then argue back and forth about things like “logic” and “poetry”. “Out there” however any number of breaches exist as well. Indeed, they can, among other things, get you banned.
In here, for example.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Franz Kafka
This is a subjunctive point of view. I can’t even imagine it as a philosophy of life. Not in the manner in which most construe that expression.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Franz Kafka
As, it might be said, is the man of letters forced into a state of action far removed from the world of words.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
Franz Kafka
Worse perhaps is wanting things advertised you cannot afford. For some, the bare necessities of life itself.
[b]Bianco Luno
When you left, saying we had been “off” all day and unable to take my silence about all that wasn’t mundane, that class of things you so despise and which functions for me, when anything does, to stave off a hopeless, utterly lightless, pall…[/b]
I think I know someone who eschews the mundane. She lives in a world of words…a world far, far, far removed from all things quotidian. A thanatophobic who is creeping ever closer and closer to the final solution.
We shared her in common. Unless of course we didn’t.
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett
How many arguments have a beginning, a middle and an end? But then don’t really say much at all about the beginning, the middle and the end of the lives we live? But no matter. They’re still well-built.
I would say all arguments - except perhaps some of the obssessive stuff by Wittgenstein and Russell - only have middles. Beginnings are assumed. Ends can’t be reached except by immortals and not by them either.
[b]Bianco Luno
I was accused yesterday of being sincere and resigned.[/b]
I am rarely resigned to be sincere. There is simply not that much I am inclined to believe in sincerely anymore. So, I may be lying about this too.
Unbelievers that we are, obliged to make divine the seams between our great ideas, my relationship to the mundane is, thus, one of terror.
Talk it up, sidle up to it, as Pascal used to say of faith,19 maybe he’ll give you an “A” for effort?
So if I discuss apartments for rent, the different textures of the cats on our walk, how the neighborhood has changed…
I know everything! I see can everything!
but only when I can keep my eyes from welling up, you see.
They do this too easily, it is unbecoming of a terrorist.
A terrorist? Only in the sense of imagining others understanding what this means and viewing it as you imagine they would if they understood it as you do. But in reality almost no one does. Not even me today.
First of all, I think we’re all on the same page here. What differences there are appear to be primarily situated around matters of methods and the degree we want to go to. It comes down to Rorty’s distinction between the systematic and the edifying philosopher. And our allegiance seems to be decidedly within the edifying one. This has been clear to me as far as Ambig’s concerned, and has been pretty much confirmed with Moreno by his decided focus on the middle –or what I like to call process. I could not agree more with Moreno (yeah, you, man!) in that there is every reason to put a focus on process above an end in that those who seek and delude themselves into finding such an end are all too prone to bringing folly into the world –if not through their selves, then through those who act on that solid foundation to impose their own agenda on us all.
Unfortunately, I just finished Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (a systematic philosopher and classicist), had some thoughts on it, and saw an essay coming. Therefore, you, Moreno, and you, Ambig, as reward for being of a common soul with me, get to deal with me meandering through those thoughts in hopes of drawing them in to something more finished. Squirm, resist, protest: but you are my komrads; so fucking deal with it; alright?
First of all, I expected it to be a little smugger than it was based on an interview in which Searle described Derrida as a philosopher for those who knew nothing about philosophy. However, the impression I got from the two times I heard him on PhilosophyTalk was a little more humble. And what I got from the book carried on that impression. Furthermore, I enjoyed his decision to be clear about what he was saying and would actually like to incorporate his style of simply building an argument as compared to my own of poetic meandering like that of Zizek.
Moreover, I actually agreed with some of his more classicist points in that we have to agree there is a reality beyond our representations of it, that there are, in fact, facts, and that us edifying philosophers have gone for a kind of ontological overkill. Let us look at the latter point: back in the 60’s, a lot people decided to do things that were not normally accepted (drugs, free sex, etc.): hence the cultural relativity that became popular at the time. But that wasn’t enough. We had to establish a foundation for it in the realm of the metaphysical/ontological by acting as if all reality was relative. This ultimately ended up in the absurdity of Richard Bach’s (who just died in the last couple of days) Illusions.
However, what Searle fails to recognize is that there is, on the analytic side (that which starts with the epistemological), a social/political overkill. I have seen people make statements that amounted to:
1+1=2, Capitalism is the only acceptable economic system on the face of the earth: as if we are to be so impressed by their getting the 1+1 part right, we should automatically accept that claim about Capitalism. Analytics, of course, would claim that following their system through would act against this. But given the nature of human nature, are they really that ready to stand behind such bad faith? And how sure is Searle that Capitalism isn’t the real validation of his particular approach?
Of course, Searle couldn’t answer this question because most of his argument was based on observations like “the cat is on the mat”. Like most analytics, he bases it on facts that can be easily established. And there is some merit to that to the extent that it gives us understanding. How could isolating what can be easily understood not? The problem, for me, is that there are way too many human experiences (Ambig’s Dasein) that Searle’s language of correspondence cannot describe with the same certainty, that can only seek understanding through inference from the representations derived from the reality independent of those representations. Searle can tell me that money is a social construction. But he can’t tell me shit about how the love of that money will lead those who have a lot of it to deceive those who don’t into accepting their slavehood.
Of course, I need to read the book a couple more times.
[b]Fernando Pessoa
Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while…I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.[/b]
And, as you might suspect, this is how I imagine being attached to myself.
My past is everything I failed to be.
Or, worse, everything I did become.
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
Both well beyond good and evil by and large.
You know, Ambig? Sometimes I can’t understand a damn thing you’re saying.
But it’s pretty nevertheless.
it says:
how do we know anything we say is real?
they say:
how do you know it’s not?
The soul knows it’s full of poetry
(how does the tongue not express it
(?
Thanks. It’s not always easy for an ironist to be misunderstood in the manner in which he intends to be. 
Or, as Emile Cioran once intimated:
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
And. Ambig, to be like a bitch:
give Moreno some credit.
He has been one of the few here who has returned trying to deal with what you are doing here.
And, Ambig,
I love ya, man!
But, are you going to try to tell me what the nihilistic perspective ultimately leads to?
Are you going to be like those idiots on KTS?
Are you going to offer me a teleology,
springing out of nothing?
Yes, I suppose I am more interested in edification. Though a system might edify me, it can’t really reach me since I am not highly organized.
I don’t want to find an end, though I would love it if some things ended. It’s not that I can’t enjoy and put to use some direct, certain statement ‘this is the way things are’, I would hope however that there are challenges, if not ongoing torture, after that portion of things is mastered. For example merging, permanently, with oneness - nirvana and the like - sounds not very interesting to me. Likewise some very pure, good Heaven experience, ooh and aahing at God’s amazingness FOR ETERNITY. I mean, I would choose that over being burned in boiling oil for all time, but I think after several billion years they might end up being very close to same experience.
I think the 60s exploration was fine, in general. They were still not getting at the core. And they thought changes personal and political could happen so fast. I don’t think they realized how far down the problems go and what they were really looking at in the opposition.
(I couldn’t quite follow the Searle description from here. I think I have enjoyed some short stuff from Searle. I associate him with consciousness issues.)
Hey, it’s fine. Once I understood what he is doing here, I don’t have the same expectations I might have in another thread. So it’s fine. I can dip in, spout out some stuff, perhaps it never leads to a dialogue, and that’s OK. I can adapt to many cultures.
Moreno:
beautiful:
Love ya, man!
It was,
but I have to come back at it when I’m sober
Yeah: but isn’t it cool that we are where we are, right now, doing what we are together? How can we not love it? Moreno, you have a mind that is different than most minds around you. Yet, here you are with another mind like yours. How can we be bitter about that?
For instance:
why should the citizen united ruling worry people like us?
we know how we want to vote and why.
we have found our way of thinking
and we have a reason for it.
How much advertising is out there
means shit to us.