a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.” Alfred North Whitehead[/b]

Is this the glass half or the glass half empty?

“Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.” Alfred North Whitehead

Though, for objectivists, it can be the opposite.

“There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.” Alfred North Whitehead

Or quarter-truths.

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” Alfred North Whitehead

On the other hand, there’s no getting around ignorance in the is/ought world.

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Alfred North Whitehead

Next up: an actual context.

“Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.” Alfred North Whitehead

Don’t expect miracles though.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The past is all we know of the future.[/b]

And, every now and again, the present.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Not the ones I read.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Next up: the inconspicuous benefits.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Actually, the most important parts, are the pieces that you can’t know.

Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

Or as less wrong as we can.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

We’ll need details of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Lies are the greatest murderers. They kill the Truth.” Socrates[/b]

Or, as Nietzsche opined, convictions.

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

Or, as I call it here, huffing and puffing.

"If you want to be wrong then follow the masses."Socrates

Or, as I point out here, the Kids.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle

How exactly does someone entertain a thought?

“Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.” Seneca the Younger

Come on, did he really say that?

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” Seneca the Younger

Of course he’s just paraphrasing JFK here.

[b]Man Ray

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.[/b]

I would love to see them.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

There is still what you can or cannot actually do.

When I saw I was under attack from all sides, I knew I was on the right track.

Indeed, that often works for me here.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

And how subjective is that?

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

Sigh…
People say things like this all the time.

Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.

So, tell us, how timid are you?

[b]Edward P. Jones

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.[/b]

Pragmatism let’s call it.

But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don’t put me on the nigger side. I’m still on the white man side, John. I’m still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me.

And we know that sort of thing is still going on today.

Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn’t want to catch a cold to do it.

What kind of cold is that?

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self.

Of course anything can be rationalized.

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like James Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

Okay, but, as a novelist, he would bring them down to earth.

What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.

So, would that be a good thing or not?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato[/b]

For example, Don Trump and Kim Jong-un.

“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.” Plato

I’m thinking of one man here in particular.

“A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Or, in is/ought world, the absense of facts.

“The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And would that they had remained silent.

“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.” Arthur Schopenhauer

He means the vast majority of course. Women too.

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And, I suspect, not just on this planet.

[b]David Chalmers

Now I have to say I’m a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it’s a natural fact of life. [/b]

Here and now for example

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Of course we get explanations here all the time.

does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

God’s will?

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

I’m still working on that myself.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

For that matter, what does it mean vaguely.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Luck?

[b]Marc Chagall

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.[/b]

Sounds more like something an artist might be expected to say.

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

This too. Only less so.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

What exactly does this explain?

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

What exactly does this explain?

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Let’s take a stab at where that is. Then the part where art ends and philosophy begins.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Just don’t ask how.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I needed a second opinion, so I asked myself twice.[/b]

Who wouldn’t?

Technically, the future starts now.
Realistically - tomorrow.
More realistically - next Monday.

Unless, of course, you die first. Unless, of course, technically, you still have a future even then.

What language should one study to understand True Detective without subtitles? Asking for a friend.

Not counting the second season of course.

Love is the only language with grammar so unpredictable that any rule may suddenly become an exception and vice versa, and with just one grammatical voice — passive-aggressive.

Either that or rationalization.

What is love?
a) Baby don’t hurt me
b) Don’t hurt me
c) No more

d) or I’ll cut off your dick

When you realise exactly why your phone was given the epithet ‘smart’.

For example, it can be ‘powered off’.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

Everything starts from a dot.[/b]

Just not here.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Just don’t expect everyone to agree.

The true work of art is born from the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

The intellectual’s equivalent of abstract art?

There is no must in art because art is free.

Just ask the folks from Campbell’s soup.

The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.

Not my circles.

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

Not my paintings. Or, sure, especially mine.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.[/b]

And then one day so will the future.

We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Imagine for example the folks at Fox News.

One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Not counting arithmetic of course.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

For some in pure silk.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

And that’s before they take x-rays of the parts inside it.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Or maybe it is about all of that.

[b]Werner Twertzog

We have been treated very unfairly by whomever devised the laws of physics.[/b]

Or whatever whomever is.

Dear Americans: You live in an oligarchy with a racial caste system. You always have. It is just more obvious now.

Cue Trumpworld.

Is your coffee roasted on the premises? No? Then I shall see you in hell.

No, for some, really.

The earth will be devoured by the sun. The universe will die. Nothing matters. It is Saturday morning.

Or, now, Thursday afternoon.

Introverts are miserable because stupid people do all of the talking.

Or here, all most of the posting.

When you have commanded 8,000 Amazonian warriors on a $1M budget, then tell me again about your directorial mojo.

Let’s file this one under, “Aguirre: the Wrath of Fitzcarraldo”.

[b]Andre Breton

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well. [/b]

If repetitively.

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

Most of course only wish they could.

The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

Especially our public.

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

How ridiculous is that, he thought. Never having been in love himself.

Dada is a state of mind.

Not unlike Lala.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

And no one has forgotten more than me. Aside, perhaps, from you.

[b]Lenny Bruce

Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers. [/b]

Of course that’s still going on.

My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. My wife came home from work one day and found me in bed with her.

That’ll do it.

I was surprised when Nixon passed the test and showed up in heaven, but, I guess Hitler threw off the curve for our century.

Trump on the other hand…

If there was absolute freedom, people would run over babies and charge admission.

Remember when that might not have been true?

If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.

[i]Pick one:

1] Mother Nature
2] God[/i]

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.

Unless of course there are two or more.

[b]God

How is church still a thing?[/b]

Indeed, he thought, how is God still a thing.

I genuinely don’t remember making you all this stupid.

Alzheimer’s?

Let Me tell you about the birds and the bees.
You are killing them all.

And that’s just on this planet.

Life goes on. Sorry.

Before or after the grave?

There shouldn’t be a stigma about mental health. That’s why I’ve been so open about My struggle with manic depression and anxiety and OCD and paranoid schizophrenia and anti-social personality and conduct disorder and psychopathy and serial killing every creature that ever lived.

God on the couch?

If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to him the other, but then at the last minute duck your head and kick him in the nuts.

Hmm. This doesn’t bode well for Heaven.

[b]Tim Crane

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.[/b]

Taken as hypotheses, death and oblivion…

I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don’t be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

Then get others to follow you. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.

Well, not counting conflicting goods of course.

There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.

If only up on the skyhooks.

Catholicism is the most philosophical branch of Christianity.

Of course that’s not saying much.

Since I don’t believe in externalism, I don’t think it can explain consciousness!

On the other hand, nothing else can either.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.[/b]

Me, I’m well below 50 for sure.

Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

What’s that make ILP then?

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that “the abundance of books is a distraction.” Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

My guess: He picked them.

…knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.

Or, sure, just thinking that you are. Like most of us here, right?

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have.

Isn’t that just common sense? Nope, not any more.

It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults.

He wondered if he had one.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.[/b]

Conviction? Conformity? Which is actually worse?

Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Of course that could never happen today.

One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking “for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk.”

As I’m sure Trump reminded Kim Jong-un.

Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”

In other words, he wasn’t a real socialist.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

Two words: conflicting goods.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.”

Professional ethics. Right.
For example, ours.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Yes, studying philosophy condemns you to an endless struggle with anxiety, melancholia, and outright catastrophe. And that’s the good part.[/b]

No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.

Are your children texting about Adorno?
TWITF = The whole is the false
TINRLITWO = There is no right life in the wrong one
EWOAIAUC = Every work of art is an uncommitted crime
IPOTEAT = In psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true

ROFLMAO?

Philosophy is an eternal struggle to
Plato: overcome sophistry
Descartes: overcome doubt
Kierkegaard: overcome dread
Žižek: get more media attention than Trump

Nobody [apparently] hates Žižek more than this guy.

Epistemology: I know what it is.
Ontology: I know what is is.
Ethics: I know what is should be.
Aesthetics: I know what it should be.

Cue Bill Clinton.

History: Question the answer
Philosophy: Question the question
Psychology: Pay for the answer
Economics: Pay for the question
Theology: I don’t need a question to know the answer
Politics: I don’t need an answer to forget the question

So, all of the above or none of the above?

[b]When grading papers, professors tend to forget that

1. the students are new at this
2. the assignment was 1 of 20 things the students had to do that week
3. it wasn’t the students who wrote the bad paper topics
4. it’s important to actually read the paper[/b]

Let’s start grading posts.

[b]Francis Crick

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[/b]

An honest God fearing man in particular.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

Unless of course they run out of it first.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Except of course in a wholly determined universe.

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

Let’s explain that.

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

No, but you can hack the bastard back.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

With the possible exception of the average analytical philosophy paper.