a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophical Tweets

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” Baruch Spinoza[/b]

Same with how thick you slice it.

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” Baruch Spinoza

And who is that more applicable to here than me?

“Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.” Marcus Aurelius

That and curse the darkness.

“Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.” Marcus Aurelius

Or else, as some insist, you can never have too much.

“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Cue, for example, the serious philosophers pedants here.

“The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.” Bertrand Russel

True, but even that will only take you so far.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.[/b]

You don’t get this, do you?

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.

So, has that actually worked for you?

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Of course the more you know what you want, you more painful it is not getting it.

Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.

If only because they don’t seem to know themselves.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Time to get out my stopwatch, he mused.

There’s a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.

Me, I don’t have anyone to tell. So sometimes it’s really quiet.

[b]Man Ray

Quote me as much as you like; as a matter of fact I don’t even mind if you misquote me![/b]

Sure, go ahead, misquote me too.

Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons.

Like we didn’t know that.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

We still do.

All critics should be assassinated.

Starting now? Or starting here?

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

Talk about a world of words.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

And what spirit might that be?

[b]Nein

Yes, life, you have defeated me. But you’ve got to win by two.[/b]

Just give it time.

Monday just wants you to know. It doesn’t want to be here either.

Again, in other words.

Friday. Everybody’s favorite capitalism.

Not counting Sunday morning perhaps.

If there’s one thing we learned this week, friends, it’s everything we already knew.

And it’s not like we can just skip to next week.

The poets regret to inform you: Every month is the cruelest.

Not unlike every year.

After the revolution, friends, every day will feel like Friday. Until further notice.

Needless to say: Don’t hold your breath. And the best they’ll come up with now is Joe Biden.

[b]Joan Miro

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. [/b]

Why would anyone look at a picture for a week?

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

Or, as likely as not, lack of meaning.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

And a simple word written here?

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

Unless, perhaps, you live in the real world.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I’ll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

Sounds more like something he’d like us to believe.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

Fortunately for us, few philosophers are likely to agree.

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

You can never represent yourself totally … to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which … will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described. [/b]

Not totally, but, here, just enough to know the “real me”.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Not counting all that apriori stuff.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

For some of course that means [and only means] me, myself and I.

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

Until death do you part.

How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some “gullibility center” in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.

Okay, but what might that cost?

If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don’t have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I’m a little more respectful of ants.

How close is this to being irrational?

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with ‘reality,’ next to the ‘real’ world.[/b]

How about paint by numbers?

The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.

And, believe it or not, not just on Wall Street.

Color cannot stand alone.

Why on earth would it want to?

Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.

And, given that blue is my favorite color, how ironic is that?

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.

What’s that make brown then?

Music is the ultimate teacher.

Not counting country music of course.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

If you look in a mirror long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself avoiding eye contact with your reflection.[/b]

Unless of course you are [among other things] a narcissist.

Feeling nostalgic about my future in the past.

And this too shall pass.

Can you say something sexy in French?
Oui, j’ai mal à la tête.

You tell me.

So little time, so much eternity.

Just not yet.

Pessimist: This will end badly.
True pessimist: This will never end.

I think she has a point there.

I put procrastination on my to-do list, so technically I’m not procrastinating any more.

Let’s just say she’s only fooling herself.

[b]Angie Thomas

People say misery loves company, but I think it’s like that with anger too.[/b]

Well, it is here anyway.

A hairbrush is not a gun.

Not that in particular contexts it can’t look like one.

I hope none of them ask about my spring break. They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.

Back again to that hairbrush.

Right. Lack of opportunities, Daddy says. Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack that it is the find a good school around here.
Now, think 'bout this, he says. How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking 'bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?
No.
Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community, he says. You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.

One man’s point of view?

This is exactly what They expect you to do, Momma says.
They with a capital T.
There’s Them and then there’s Us.
Sometimes They look like Us and don’t recognize They are Us.

In other words, you’re liable to get it coming and going.

I’ve taught myself to speak with two different voices and only say certain things around certain people. I’ve mastered it.

For some though it’s three or more.

[b]Andre Breton

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?[/b]

Few of course will take it this far.

For me, the single word “God” suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.

In other words, what others insist is the Devil.

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

Right, like crucial distinctions can’t be made.

No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

Let’s note some actual examples.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows.

Yeah, but how important?

I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

Sounds rather imponderable to me.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Why do I rock so hard? Because one is a long time dead.[/b]

I hear that.

I do not need a “safe word,” but for you I would suggest two.

Or one that is really long.

“Splainsplainin’” : The tendency of self-righteous people to think that they, alone, are in possession of the truth, and that others who disagree with them should remain deferentially silent.

He means objectivism of course.

It is important, before enrolling in any humanities graduate program, to begin training for a career, ten years from now, that has nothing to do with your degree. Also, you should have at least $500,000 in savings.

You know, being a pragmatist.

When you are no longer needed to build wealth and power for the capitalist oligarchs, your numbers will be systematically reduced through healthcare policy, food scarcity, drug addiction, war, unheralded mass sterilization, and justified despair, as we all know.

For some in the name of God.

As a child, I never won a “spelling bee” because I understood that correct spelling is historically contextual and rooted in imperialism.

As we all know.

[b]Lenny Bruce

I tried the religion scam in Miami, so I know how hard that gig is. But, if you can get it to work, starting your own religion is a license to print money.[/b]

Tax free to boot.

When earth gets good and crowded, like 15th century England, then some new Pilgrims are gonna rocket their Mayflowers to a new solar system.

Good luck with that: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=194813

Children ought to watch pornographic movies: it’s healthier than learning about sex from Hollywood.

Next up: Children and violence.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it.

What’s funny about that?

Every group needs a comedian. A comic who is politically incorrect at the Berkeley campus might slay them at a Klan rally.

Who is slaying us here?

You put a guy on a desert island, he’ll do it to mud, a chicken, a barrel, anything, a knothole.

A fifi?

[b]Ray Brassier

Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.[/b]

Would I go that far?

If nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters doesn’t matter. And if it doesn’t matter whether anything matters or not, then there’s no real difference between believing nothing matters and believing something matters.

Of course this tells us more about language than anything else.

Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.

Of course this tells us more about language than anything else.

Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche’s solution - his attempted overcoming of nihilism - consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such - all becoming, without reservation or discrimination.

One word: Distractions.

Like many, I suspect, I found the difficulty of analytic philosophy unglamorous and therefore less appealing. This is regrettably superficial but superficiality is characteristic of youth. In my late teens I became enamored of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Artaud.

Me too, right?

I was trying to develop a notion of “non-dialectical negativity” as part of a concept of extinction that would transform the understanding of death and time elaborated in phenomenology.

Admittedly, I’ve never tried that myself.

[b]Nikola Tesla

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.[/b]

Anyone here ever tried that?

I don’t care that they stole my idea … I care that they don’t have any of their own.

Of course no one here would think of stealing mine.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

For one thing, I’ll need some examples of this.

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

No, really, what the fuck does this mean?

If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world.

Indeed. If not really.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

More to the point does he still know this?

[b]Timothy Snyder

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.[/b]

Well, that hasn’t changed.

If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one, great bloody accident.

I know: Let’s start here!

Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

With survival itself at stake? Say no more.

Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored.

Never heard that one before.

The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.

Is that a good thing?

We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero invetsment? We get what we pay for.

What some call the “media industrial complex”.

[b]God

Be careful what you wish for: you just might get it.
Kidding! You won’t get it.[/b]

Unless of course you do.

Wow. He even found a way for the US to lose in Vietnam again.

I wonder who that could be?

Time to start over again.

And, it now seems, with millions of planets to choose from.

For every ten people who are stupid, there are 100 others who are also stupid.

So, are you one of them?

“If a man meets a virgin who is unmarried and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her.” - Deuteronomy 22:28-29.
Now that’s empowerment!

Though some might not agree.

“God! Why hast thou forsaken us?”
Because, I mean, just look at you.

Point taken.

[b]Jim Jarmusch

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.[/b]

So, what have you stolen lately?

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Like it can never be both.

If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Unless, of course, you’re telling yourself that.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go ‘think of all the music I haven’t even heard yet!’ So, it’s the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

On the other hand, think of all the music you will never get to hear. Being, for example, dead and gone.

It’s hard to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.

Sure, if that works for you.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

I like them both myself.

[b]Francis Crick

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.[/b]

Lots of different directions we can take this of course.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

If you don’t tell me yours, I won’t tell you mine.

Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.

Let’s find the morality molecule.

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.

Is this worth googling or not?

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

Let’s do it anyway.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

As often as not though it works both ways.

[b]Existential Comics

Republicans: “we should kill every socialist in Venezuela and take their oil.”
Democrats: “we are holding out that there is a non-violent way we can take their oil.”
Bernie Sanders/AOC: “we promise to close the tax loopholes on all American companies plundering Venezuelan oil!!”[/b]

No, really.

It’s a little known fact but existentialism was actually invented by Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when he correctly pointed out that everything is sad.

So, is this a true story?

[b]There are a few things we can never truly know:

1. Why we are here.
2. What happens when we die.
3. How the universe was created.
4. Why some 20 year old dudes think growing just a mustache is a good idea.[/b]

Worse: Just a beard.

What philosophers would think if taking selfies:
Aristotle: it is too much vanity.
Kant: you must at the same time think everyone should take selfies.
Sartre: only do it if you authentically want to.
Marx: jesus christ, who cares!? just do a communist revolution already.

Well, it should be Marx, he bellowed.

I’ve found that the secret to building a large twitter audience is making as many jokes about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as possible.

Let’s see if that works here.

If life gives you lemons:
Epicurus: make lemonade.
Epictetus: learn to accept it.
Sartre: make whatever you want.
Hegel: throw away the lemons and write an enormous philosophy book that no one understands.

Lots of lemons here, aren’t there?

[b]Jim Holt

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.[/b]

Not easy to pin down though.

In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” he answered, “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings”.

Sure, he thought, why not?

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this ‘I’. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

Who wants to believe that, right?

I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.

Or even as clearly as I do here.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Farce, sure, but the grace of tragedy?

It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.

Autonomically as it were.