a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Stephen Greenblatt

Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions.[/b]

You know, like philosophy forums.

Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.

Set to topple over from time to time.

In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Like there are other options.

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

Let’s figure this out: How little is enough?

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

Just not out loud. You know, in public.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure – an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation – characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet.

So, what’s your contribution?

[b]Ben Goldacre

Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.[/b]

Hell, we’ve got one of them here. Right, James? :wink:

The American Academy of Pediatrics officially supports breastfeeding, but receives about half a million dollars from Ross, manufacturers of Similac infant formula.

It’s probably just a coincidence.

More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences.

They couldn’t sell it though if not for the millions who are willing to buy it.

It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence – to be surprised by this would be absurd – whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programs for doctors.

Yes, but only until Don Trump drains the swamp.

There are many ways in which journalists can mislead a reader with science: they can cherry-pick the evidence, or massage the statistics; they can pit hysteria and emotion against cold, bland statements from authority figures.

Let’s call this [for the time being] politics.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction…

Bullshit. Someone ought to write a book about it.

[b]Sad Socrates

Those who embrace the infinite have learned how to wait.[/b]

Hmm. Would someone here like to teach me?

Angst is for white males, but anxiety is for everyone.

Me, I’m saddled with both.

Hope keeps despair entertained.

In other words, less and less.

Luck is not to blame for humanity destroying everything.

Fate then?

Polls show that everything sucks.

Polls in particular.

I really look forward to our collective insanity.

Let’s decide if [here] the wait is over.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. [/b]

And then chop everyone else down to fit in turn. Right, Mr Objectivist?

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.

Or, perhaps, more to the point, what does he believe now?

…no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death.

So, does that settle it? Or shall we consider for example what the Nazis loved.

It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.

Can this be taken too far?

The human soul needs beauty more than bread.

Let’s decide if he actually means this.

Be a good animal, true to your instincts.

In other words, for some, Satyr’s instincts.
[that is still true, right?]

[b]Paul Valéry

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.[/b]

Indeed, I remember when it was once inborn in me. So, yes, there’s still hope for the rest of you.

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

One just feels this instinctively, as it were.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Or, at the very least, much further away from being true.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

For example, if you let it.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

When, for example, you actually learn this.

I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.

Aside perhaps from insisting that others agree.

[b]Celeste Ng

People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.[/b]

Not unlike we of them.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

In other words, what if it really was like that?

And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps—and this thought chokes her—that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.

If you’re lucky, it’s just a mood.

…the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them.

In other words, roll the dice.

Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.

Indeed, but why stop there?

You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.

But only if you’re really, really lucky.

[b]Mary Roach

The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It’s okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.[/b]

Let’s start with the fact that this is all true.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot.

Let’s file this one under, “there ought to be a law”.

Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quiet a patient whose hair stands up without cause”, “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema”.

Let’s file this one under, “whatever works”.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find “anal” on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.

The connotations no doubt.

As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.

Let’s decide if it’s worth it.

In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled “Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention,” Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.

Crash test cadavers? It never even occured to me.

[b]so sad today

where’s my award for getting out of bed[/b]

You know, besides ILP.

mood: abandoned building

Worse: a crack house.

new year old me

Not counting those who wouldn’t have it any other way.

[b]resolutions:

  1. make same mistakes
  2. expect different results[/b]

After all, maybe this year there will be.

can never tell if I’m fighting my demons or just hanging out with them

On the other hand, they have the same problem.

not destroying myself is a lot of work

And at minimum wage to boot.

[b]George Berkeley

Few men think; yet all have opinions. [/b]

Yes, including philosophers.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If no one is around, does the tree even exist at all?

…we ought to think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar.

Or is it the other way around?

Philosophy being nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with reason be expected that those who have spent most time and pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men. Yet so it is, we see the illiterate bulk of mankind that walk the high-road of plain common sense, and are governed by the dictates of nature, for the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing that is familiar appears unaccountable or difficult to comprehend. They complain not of any want of evidence in their senses, and are out of all danger of becoming Sceptics. But no sooner do we depart from sense and instinct to follow the light of a superior principle, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of things, but a thousand scruples spring up in our minds concerning those things which before we seemed fully to comprehend. Prejudices and errors of sense do from all parts discover themselves to our view; and, endeavouring to correct these by reason, we are insensibly drawn into uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance in speculation, till at length, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn Scepticism.

Or something like that.

I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound.

What a coincidence, I don’t either.

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?

So, is this too technical, or not technical enough.

[b]Anatole France

People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.[/b]

Let’s think up ways.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Unless of course you make theirs your own.

Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

I mean, come on, really?

For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

He wondered: Is it possible to take this too far?

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.

Or, sure, you can just ask me.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

Let’s call it, say, the military industrial complex.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Plato[/b]

Unless of course they are out to make your own even harder.

“You will be what you must be, or else you will be nothing.” José de San Martín

One more frame of mind that can mean practically anything.

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.” Charlotte Brontë

He wondered: Has anyone ever been both?

“What are men to rocks and mountains?” Jane Austen

Or, for that matter, women.

“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” Jonathan Safran Foer

And then for all practical purposes crushed to smithereens.

“Whatever harm the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.” Friedrich Nietzsche

This alone makes him a fucking genius.

[b]Neil Gaiman

You were her way here, and it’s a dangerous thing to be a door.[/b]

Well, not here, of course.

And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

You tell me: How am I doing? Or, instead, should I tell you?

You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof of an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion.

Right, keep telling yourself that.

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad…

Or imagine His reaction to a vegan.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They’re just names for sides.

He means conflicting goods.

There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren’t what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be.

You know, given all the unknown unknowns.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.[/b]

Indeed, just ask them.

You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself…the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. …And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.

Especially after Don Trump and Steve Bannon drains the swamp.

Time stays long enough for those who use it.

Of course it goes without saying: for better or for worse.

An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.

Ergo objectivists.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

One of them anyway.

A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

For example:
I’m a Poet
I know it
Hope I don’t blow it

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch[/b]

I challenge someone to explain why.

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” Martin Heidegger

The second part, sure.

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Martin Heidegger

Like Hitler?

“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing” Karl R. Popper

Not counting yours, James?

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.” Blaise Pascal

That and to grapple with its limitations.

“People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.” Søren Kierkegaard

That’s still double more than they understand me.

[b]Terry Pratchett

The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, What about me? and you can just hear the universe replying, Well, what about you?[/b]

Either that or it just snickers.

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

For example, how to do it.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.

The banality of it, as it were.

I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

That or some ideal.

Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.

If not lots and lots of times.

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called ‘the people’. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.

We should all be so lucky.

[b]Joseph Heller

There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of really knowing anything.[/b]

Of course I already knew that.

Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer his men for any target available.

From a distance as it were.

That’s what Paradise is—never knowing the difference.

Or never even knowing there could be one.

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

Of course: America the Beautiful!

Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him.

One reason: Because they were ordered to.

Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.

Cue the pugil sticks.

[b]Nein

In the future, friends, we’ll all ignore social media over the holidays. And go back to ignoring our loved ones.[/b]

Eyeball to eyeball as it were.

Discontent. Everyone’s favorite season.

Indeed, why wouldn’t it be?

Locked and Loaded. Fire and Fury. Publish and Perish.

You know, if you’re a liberal.

Philosophy students. Discovering that the point is not to understand the world. But to change your major.

If, for example, you want to earn a living.

The problem with answers: the questions.
The problem with questions: the answers.

Let’s file this one under, “some things never change”.

May cooler warheads prevail.

At least through the Olympics.

[b]C.G. Jung

Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.[/b]

Let’s call this, among other things, the first person subjunctive frame of mind.

There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.

If only up in the clouds of abstraction.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Of course: Not counting yours and mine.

For better to come, good must stand aside.

What then does that say about best?

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

And how far can that be from the mystery of existence itself?
Not that we’ll ever know.

I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.

Perhaps, but from my point of view, you may as well aspire to be a unicorn.

[b]Allen Ginsberg

Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?[/b]

And then [for some] 24 hours a day.

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

And, back then, that was saying something.

All these books are published in Heaven.

Though not necessarily yours.

Sanity – a trick of agreement.

Not unlike insanity. My own for example.

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.

Probably a “Sixties” thing. But point taken.

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene.

That describe anyone here?

[b]Ali Smith

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile.[/b]

You’re wondering of course if I would go this far.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google…Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

I’m wondering of course if you would go this far.

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

On the other hand, isn’t that normal now?

Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them.

Especially this one: youtu.be/cvChjHcABPA

And which comes first…what we see or how we see it?

Obviously: Yes.

How are you feeling? Mrs. Rock said.
I’m okay, George said. I think it’s because I don’t think I am.
You’re okay because you don’t think you’re okay? Mrs. Rock said.
Feeling, George said. I think I’m okay because I don’t think I’m feeling.

Let’s explore the distinction.
You know ,“out in the world”.