a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Sad Socrates

I don’t believe in anything because that’s how you make friends.[/b]

On the other hand, I don’t have lots of them.

Absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun.

And then you die.

What dies inside me, stays inside me.

You know to the best of his knowledge.

What would I do without me?

Metaphysically as it were.

Sometimes you just have to gaze at the fake reality, breathe in the fake air and think the fake thoughts to make it through the fake day.

At least for the next four years.

I think you can make a lot of great metaphors about how shitty life is.

Similes too.

[b]Hans-Georg Gadamer

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said…Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.[/b]

I know, let’s decide if this is worth understanding.

In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.

Either way most of us are fucked.

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.

Pick one:
Yes ___
No ___
Maybe ___

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

Or, nowadays, not so hidden.

In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted.

For example, in a No God world.

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.

Here we go again: 'The concept of…"

Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena and processes. In the field of natural phenomena this goal cannot always be reached everywhere to the same extent, but the reason for this variation is only that sufficient data on which the similarities are to be established cannot always be obtained. Thus the method of meteorology is just the same as that of physics, but its data is incomplete and therefore its predictions are more uncertain.

Noted. Now, let’s move on to the social sciences.

[b]Liane Moriarty

They say it’s good to let your grudges go, but I don’t know, I’m quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.[/b]

And then one day it grows to become a monster.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.

Trust me: You don’t want to see mine.

Every day I think, ‘Gosh, you look a bit tired today,’ and it’s just recently occurred to me that it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that this is the way I look now.

Looking tired being the least of it.

I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful, continued Jane. But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.
But you weren’t, you’re not— began Madeline.
Yes, OK, but so what if I was! interrupted Jane. What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?

It’s all in the genes, right, Satyr?

It’s because a woman’s entire self-worth rests on her looks, said Jane. That’s why. It’s because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

Let’s ask Reece and Nicole.

It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.

I’m trying to imagine now if I had only revealed my own…

[b]tiny nietzsche

trump did 9/11[/b]

And, with any luck, that will come out at the impeachment hearings.

what do we want? existentialism
when do we want it? now

Nope, it’ll never catch on. Not that it should mind you.

Why Do Anything, Charlie Brown?

Of course that may well have been the whole point of the strip, right, Charlie Brown?
Or is that Calvin and Hobbes?

twitter is condemned to be free

Broadly speaking as it were.

watches the earth become a tiny dot as I drift through space and the void consumes me…
this is what I’ve always wanted

Don’t we all?

nietzsche don’t surf

He didn’t, did he?

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roasted chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.[/b]

Well, that and everything else.

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.

Better perhaps to teach them that they never can.

God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.

And wretched is the man who can’t. You know, if there is a God.

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

Either that or just throw them in the dungeon.

You can knock on a deaf man’s door forever.

Much like, for example, praying to God.

I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

I suppose that could happen, sure. On the other hand, come on, I am running out of time.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.[/b]

Or, more often than not, it finds you.

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

There’s still a time for them to be born and a time for them to die. And a time to do all that other shit inbetween. Just like the rest of us.

I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

Glum, sure, but glum enough?

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

So we scream for it.

One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, and then being on somebody else’s.

Especially if that was the plan right from the beginning.

It doesn’t have to be like that but mostly it is.

And even when it’s not it mostly feels that way.

[b]so sad today

my favorite people are the ones who don’t exist[/b]

And, in fact, never did.

look, i hate myself as much as the next guy

I know, I know: but not as much as you do.

do you feel me thinking about you

Nope, I don’t either.

what the fuck is everything

And let’s not forget everything else.

doing stuff that isn’t sleeping is hard

You know, if you can sleep at all.

you had me at suicide pact

Go ahead though, it might work with me.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.[/b]

On the other hand, here in particular, one size doesn’t fit all.

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

I know that look. Unless, of course, I don’t.

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

On the other hand, I know it doesn’t exist because I have it.

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Let’s file this one [clearly] under “easier said than done”.
Well, most of it.

It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Works the same when you read in third person. You know, if that’s possible.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.

Of course in the Army, they ordered me to be brave. And I had the medals to prove it.

[b]Thomas Nagel

I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist. So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth. That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty. To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicisim, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment. Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that it is not what we are going to get.[/b]

What a damn fool, right, Mr. Objectivist?

The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves.

Wow, who would have thunk it?

It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.

And then it’s that all the way down.

If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

I’m sort of saying that. I think.

I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.

James S. Saint is sort of saying that. I think.

Even if we acknowledge the existence of distinct and irreducible perspectives, the wish for a unified conception of the world doesn’t go away. If we can’t achieve it in a form that eliminates individual perspectives, we may inquire to what extent it can be achieved if we admit them.

I know: Let’s take this mystery to the grave.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.” Michel Foucault[/b]

Right, like we could anyway.

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?” Michel Foucault

I know: Let’s not go there.

“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance” Albert Einstein

And then there are the Kids here: arrogantly ignorant.

"Sect and error are synonymous.” Voltaire

Their sect, in other words, not ours.

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” Voltaire

If any of them do.

“If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.” Immanuel Kant

Yes, he really said that.

[b]Werner Heisenberg

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.[/b]

Revere is hardly the right word though, is it?

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli’s, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

And that’s before we get to the world of is/ought.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

This may well be the mother of all ironies. Or at the very least the first cousin.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality,
and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we
proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we
may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.

Not even counting those [here for example] who are hell bent on actually defining it.

In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.

Or, for some, only in reference to ourselves.

The probability wave meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

And not just sub-atomically. Whatever that means.

[b]David Byrne

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can’t conceive of it being an isolated thing. It’s whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.[/b]

Or: I forgot, I forgot, I forgot.

My favorite term for a new kind of performance is “security theater.” In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It’s a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge, off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

And now of course it’s the security industrial complex.

I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it.

God knows if he found it.

The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to hear the nuances involved, so naturally they can’t play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details take on larger meanings.

Maybe, but I’m sticking with “different strokes for different folks”.

Some of you people just about missed it…

And most of them still have.

There is always a tradeoff. As music gets disseminated, and distinct regional voices find a way to be more widely heard, certain bands and singers (who might be more creative, or possibly have just been marketed by a bigger company) begin to dominate, and peculiar regional styles—what writer Greil Marcus, echoing Harry Smith, called the “old weird America”—eventually end up getting squashed, neglected, abandoned, and often forgotten. This dissemination/homogenization process runs in all directions simultaneously; it’s not just top-down repression of individuality and peculiarity. A recording by some previously obscure backwoods or southside singer can find its way into the ear of a wide public, and an Elvis, Luiz Gonzaga, Woody Guthrie, or James Brown, can suddenly have a massive audience—what was once a local style suddenly exerts a huge influence. Pop music can be thrown off its axis by some previously unknown and talented rapper from the projects. And then the homogenization process begins again.

Sure, why not.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiled, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn’t understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. “Do? You? Really? Love? New York?” He said, “New York?” I said, “Your. Shirt.” He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said “New,” and the Y and said “York.” He looked confused or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even mad. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, because I couldn’t speak the language of his feelings. “I not know was New York. In Chinese, ny mean ‘you.’ Thought was ‘I love you.’” It was then that I noticed the “I♥NY” poster on the wall, and the “I♥NY” flag over the door, and the “I♥NY” dishtowels, and the “I♥NY” lunchbox on the kitchen table. I asked him, "Well, then why do you love everybody so much?”[/b]

Yeah, I’d like to know that myself.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

Maybe, but it’s not completely out of the question.

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

And then on to the next one…

To feel alone is to be alone.

And, then, with any luck at all, that’s all it takes.

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.

For vegetables say.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!

Fortunately, that’s not likely to come up.

[b]Alan Moore

I’ve developed a theory that there’s an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you’ve got lots of imagination then you don’t really need much money, and if you’ve got lots of money then you won’t bother with much imagination. You’ve got to be able to pay your bills, otherwise you’re not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to bring the two together.[/b]

Quite profitably as it were.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.

Pick one:
1] Rorschach
2] Rorschach
3] Rorschach
4] all of the above

I’m not exactly sure what happened. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!

As opposed to, say, true or false or fill in the blank.

I am tired of this world, these people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

Clearly one earns the right to say this.

People’s lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and, well, sometimes they can’t talk about them.

Here of course they never shut up. And not just the Kids.

Everybody is becoming a superhero. In the past I’ve tried to say, ‘Look, we are all crappy superheroes,’ because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Bat Man and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We’ve all got this immense power and we’re still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We’re rubbish, even though we are as gods.

Remember when this would actually puzzle us?

[b]Nein

It’s not the end of the world. But at least it’s a start.[/b]

My guess: Another allusion to Trump.

Did he know?
Duh.
That’s American. For “da.”

My guess: Another allusion to Trump.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what going out and buying Ivanka’s stuff can do for your country.

Let’s all pitch in, okay?

Hope in dark times: when the jokes are darker.

And occasionally even funny.

The good news: you’ve made it through another week. The bad news: so have the rest of us.

You spin it your way, I’ll spin it mine.

A gentle reminder from Potemkin: it takes a village.

Or, at the very least, the facade of one.

[b]Haruki Murakami

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.[/b]

Either that or it’s chasing me.

When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.
But there’s no place like that in this world.
Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.

Indeed, and it may well be applicable to all of us.

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

So, does this sound like serious philosophy to you?

Let me tell you something, Mari. The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on, living alone down there in the darkness…

Various shades of, among other things, pitch black.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

Sure, either that or not false.

Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.

On the other hand, is it important that they do?

[b]John Locke

The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its Author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure, all sincere; nothing too much; nothing wanting![/b]

Maybe that’s why it caught on.

What worries you, masters you.

So [naturally] I do my best to make it worry you too.

Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.

Or, to put it another way, “how ought one to live?”

All wealth is the product of labor.

True, but it always sounds different when Marx says it.

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

Like turds as it were.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

More and/or less connected to the acts of the body.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.[/b]

Let’s decide the implications of this for the present.

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.

Of course we’ll need a context, won’t we?

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving West. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

Or, if you are already there, East.

…a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

This and all that they’re connected to down here.

Just tell 'em you’re gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff. Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they’ll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven’s sakes, don’t try to improve their minds.

And now it’s Don Trump’s turn.

[b]Karl Popper

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.[/b]

In other words, our social creatures not theirs.

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.

Which of course the overwhelming majority of us will promptly ignore.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

In theory as it were.

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know; our knowledge of our ignorance. For this indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Ignorance again. On the other hand, tell that to Wittgenstein and his poker.

Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us.

I suspect however that this will clear up absolutely nothing.

It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.

And they cost money, don’t they?

[b]Charles Darwin

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.[/b]

You know, like I’m doing here. Or is that you?

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Yep, that’s the way the world is, alright, but is that the way it ought to be?

…I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope & believe what he can.

Unfortunately, that does include Kids too.

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Another rendition: youtu.be/EXJ07w3i6L0

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

And that’s not even counting the monkey on your back.

He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Either them or chimps.