a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth” Albert Camus[/b]

But, no, not that far.

“You can best reward a liar by believing nothing of what he says.” Aristippus

No collusion!

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.” Leo Tolstoy

What’s that make philosophers then?

“How perilous it is to free a people who prefer slavery.” Niccolo Machiavelli

For them and for us as likely as not.

“Politics have no relation to morals.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not unlike logic.

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Epictetus

Objectively for example.

[b]Jim Holt

The total absence of humor from the Bible, Alfred North Whitehead once observed, is one of the most singular things in all literature.[/b]

Of course for some the whole thing’s a joke.

I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything. . . . To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable.

So, close enough?

Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.

Like me, right?

Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both.

Or, sure, something else entirely.

Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

Well, it doesn’t appear that way to me. Whatever that means.

It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.

Should that worry us?

[b]Nick Cave

The rock star is dying. And it’s a small tragedy. Rock stars have blogs now. I have no use for that kind of rock star. [/b]

Are there still rock stars around? I thought the last one was Bruce Springsteen.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

How exactly would a muse show up?

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.

Or just making it up as he goes along.

You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.

And he doesn’t even exist.

If I’m hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you go downstairs and start a new novel?’

Sounds like paradise to some of us.

I’ve never been interested in being relevant.

Of course they all say that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.” Harry Truman[/b]

Explain that to Trump on Fox and Friends.

“An honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid … because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.” Bertrand Russell

Any stupid politicians still around today? Aside from him.

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Like any true believer will ever admit it.

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

More to the point: not even knowing it.

"Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

No, it’s other people too.

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” Sigmund Freud

And then there’s the part about dasein.

[b]David Bowie

Hitler was the first superstar.[/b]

How to take that, right?

People don’t get a chance to think, “Why am I a consumer?” Because the decisions come at them so fast and furiously, they’re not [even] given time to think, I am a consumer.

The morons maybe.

The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.

Sedate works for me. At least now it does.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

Anyone here actually doubt it?

Of course, we found out later Syd Barrett had mental problems. But there was something so otherworldly about him. He was hovering, like, six inches above the ground.

youtu.be/qqojcKJs6aU

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

Not so strange, the ones you don’t want to listen to.

[b]Iggy Pop

Nihilism is best done by professionals.[/b]

Or, occasionally, the exceptional amateur.

What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.

That and die for our sins.

When it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge unimportant detail.

And when it comes to philosophy?

I kinda feel like everything comes full circle in life, even though that’s a cliche.

Full circle or a spiral down.

The future of rock n roll is Justin Bieber.

Wow, who would have thunk that?

What some people would call antics, I would just call a good show.

Unlike, for example, the antics here.

[b]Werner Twertzog

I have traveled the planet–in war zones, the jungle, in places beyond the reach of ordinary law: Only in the U.S. have I been shot.[/b]

This thing: youtu.be/HrRNM9cMBDk

Hell is other people.
Hell, also, is being alone.
Everything is hell.

I’ve never known it not to be.

Practice grieving, for that, as we all know, will not be replaced by machines.

Not anytime soon at least.

Now that I have made a film on every continent, I am working towards filming on another planet. The most likely candidate is Mars, as we all know.

Don’t bet on it.

I shall enjoy Hannah Montana’s gin-soaked reveries at the beginning of the remake of Citizen Kane directed by James Franco.

Don’t bet on it.

What your question misses is that no-one cares.

Ditto my answer.

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.[/b]

You never really know whether to believe something like this.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out…

So, close enough?

In an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster), in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way), in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

Of course God knows better.

Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?

Well, me more than you of course.

Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?

So much for dasein, right?

…some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

Their piss in other words?

[b]Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. [/b]

Imagine actually believing this.

First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.

Yes, including me here.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Of course you can’t have one without the other.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Not counting all the things that are taboo.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

Like the two aren’t inextricably bound.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

Well, he being a she here.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.[/b]

Any benders of history here?

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Well, at least she learned that.

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line… People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

You being the exception, right?

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.

Or, for some, an empty syringe.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Or the equivalent of that here.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Marked and…scarred.

[b]Jackson Pollock

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you’re not painting.[/b]

Of course I have my own equivalent of that.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

And that narrows it down to almost nothing.

A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.

Or at least a hundred.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

I use a slingshot myself.

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

Anyone like that here?

You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

I suspect however that in some respects the two are indistinguishable.

“I shall enjoy Hannah Montana’s gin-soaked reveries at the beginning of the remake of Citizen Kane directed by James Franco.”

This made my day.

[b]God

Orgasms are My way of apologizing for everything else.[/b]

Like that even comes close.

I never would have made you this smart if I knew you were going to be this stupid.

Does even He understand what that means?

[b]Just to answer a few recent prayers:

No.
No.
Maybe.
No.
I’ll see what I can do.
Are you kidding?!?
Sure, that would be funny for Me.
Reply hazy. Ask again later.
No.
No.[/b]

Which one is yours?

Try not to take yourself too seriously. After all, you’re an idiot.

Trump or [now] Mueller?

I blame everyone in general and you in particular.

Though in no particular order.

Time to start over again.

Okay, fine, just leave me out of it.

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

I am the thought you are now thinking. [/b]

Not anymore.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

What things for example?

The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

Or not as the case may.

The paraphrase of says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.

Next up: Gödel’s Theorem and the 8-track.

I don’t feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

And, if they could, they’d thank him for it.

We don’t want to focus on the trees or their leaves at the expense of the forest.

And let’s not forget the pine needles.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble. [/b]

How about the color brown? A shit plopping into the toilet?

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these ‘walls around art’.

Things only artists say.

The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit.

Things only artists playing philosopher say.

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

That or a particularly dark grey.

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.

Can anyone here name one?

Objects damage pictures.

If not on purpose.

Jan Mieszkowski

My new book, Crises of the Sentence, is now available from @UChicagoPress. It includes:
a) Hegel on how to write a sentence
b) Freud on how not to write a sentence
c) Flaubert on never finishing a sentence
d) Nietzsche on never starting one

I’d buy one if I still read books.

Idealism: I am what I think
Materialism: I think what I am
Psychoanalysis: You aren’t what you think
Existentialism: You can only think what you aren’t, weren’t, and never will be

And in precisely that order.

The Mathematics of Desire
Hegel: 0 x 0 = 1
Lacan: 1 + 1 = -1
Deleuze: 2 ÷ 0 = 3
Twitter: 280 - Self - Other = 279

And in precisely that order.

English Lit: You’re meeting your archenemy on the bridge
French Lit: You’re dueling with your archenemy on the bridge
Russian Lit: You’re realizing that your archenemy on the bridge is you

American Lit: You’re archenemy is a comic book character.

Our children may not be learning biology, but they are learning an ideological critique of science.

You know, if you have children.

Idealism: So much for the facts!
Realism: So much for the fictions!
Materialism: So much for your thoughts!
Existentialism: So much for your feelings!

More or less as it were.

[b]Greg Iles

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.[/b]

Let’s just say that I understand this better than you.

The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.
Life is simple.
You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren’t. You are alive or you are dead.
I am alive.

Sure, call it all simple.

He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog’s brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.

Is he anyone you know?

Man plans, God laughs.

Fuck God then, he thought.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

Autonomically as it were.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

If, of course, there is even a truth to be had.

[b]Joan Lindsay

Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.[/b]

Starting with the Big Bang?

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

Sometimes literally, sometimes not.

Everything, if you could only see it clearly enough, like this, is beautiful and complete.

Either that or nothing.

Marion Quade, the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride, was a favourite pupil, in the sense that a savage who understands a few words of the language of a shipwrecked sailor is a favourite savage.

Who is the equivalent of that here?

Sometimes just to look at Miranda’s calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure.

The one in the film was stunning.

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different “realities”.

Though some prefer to have their art spoon-fed.

[b]Existential Comics

Using philosophy in my day to day life to remind the cashier that metaphysically speaking, the paper and plastic bags are the same, so the choice is spurious.[/b]

Go ahead, try this yourself. You know, if paper is even still an option.

The fact that life is short is what makes the time we have that much more beautiful.
…
…
…
…
…
APRIL FOOLS!!!
life is suffering and death is inconceivably horrifying

Of course that was yesterday.

I don’t understand how the British Isles have like 145 distinct accents but every single person from California sounds like the same idiot.

Genetics?

Sometimes we just have to accept that certain things are fundamentally unknowable, such as how the universe got created, what consciousness is, or what exactly happens when you try to leave the European Union.

Maybe the Brits here can explain it.

[b]Top ways to deal with existential despair:

1. Drown it out with alcohol.
2. Distract yourself with entertainment.
3. Try to find God.
4. Pursue meaningless sex.
5. I dunno…try to authentically find some sort of reason to live, I guess.[/b]

Actually, nothing works.

It’s actually not possible to understand Hegel, you can only dialectically approach a more refined misunderstanding of Hegel.

Or here: It’s actually not possible to understand Kids, you can only dialectically approach a more refined misunderstanding of Kids.

[b]Sarah Bernhardt

Art is not about something, Art is something.[/b]

Not unlike almost everything else.

We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget.

We’ll need a context of course.

Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.

Much as we do with our personas.

Oscar Wilde: ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Sarah Bernhardt: ‘I don’t care if you burn.’

A couple of wits let’s call them.

Slow down? Rest? With all eternity before me?

Though only if not slowing and resting is actually an option.

He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.

Uh, no shit?