Philosophy Now Forum

"There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all." - Nietzsche, Friedrich

Suicide...

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.” Sylvia Plath

Of course, eventually it heated up.

“You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.” Nina LaCour

To live say.

“I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.” Roger Zelazny

Yoo-hoo, Mr. Reaper.

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair...It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life.” Erica Jong

Tell me about it...

“What's the big fucking deal? Lots of amazing people have committed suicide, and they turned out alright.” Emilie Autumn

Yeah, what about that?

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate." Franz Kafka

Same thing, except you're a bug.

Erica Jong from Fear of Flying

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Uh, blah-blah-blah?

The ultimate sexist put-down: the p**** which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp p****. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the p**** at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead p**** which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather ****. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

Of course, she's only paraphrasing vegetariantaxidermy.

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.

Next up: the transgender rendition.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Next up: the transgender rendition.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

You tell me: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. ... ess%20fuck

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...

Call that the plot.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Here certainly.

...that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.

And then one day you stop.

I leafed through Adorno, read some passages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.

Who hasn't experienced that?

Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.

Yeah, kind of.

If you are afraid of the dark, you seek the light. But what do you do when even the light is filled with terrors?

Anyone here know?

This state lasted for six months, for six months I was truly happy, truly at home in this world and in myself before slowly it began to lose its luster, and once more the world moved out of my reach.

I'd settle for six hours.

"If you are afraid of the dark, you seek the light. But what do you do when even the light is filled with terrors?

Anyone here know?"

You put on rose colored sun glasses, naturally.

Edith Wharton from The Age of Innocence

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

Any wives like that here?

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

The good old days?

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

Pick one:
1] Winona Ryder
2] Michelle Pfeiffer

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Which country though?

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

What do you pretend to be? I mean beside a philosopher.

Marriage is one long sacrifice.

For some, not unlike being born.

Alice Walker from The Color Purple

A grown child is a dangerous thing.

Got a few of them here, don't we?

Everything want to be loved.

Or for any number of men...fucked?

Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.

Let's explain why some really have no choise but to. Men too.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.
What can she become? I asked.
Why, she said, the mother of his children.

You know, back then.

Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.

Next up: conjuring up a bazooka.

I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.

I know, I know: what if that were actually true.

Nihilism...

“All nihilists have wrestled with God. One more proof of his kinship with nothingness. After you have trampled everything underfoot, his is the last bastion of nothingness left.” Emil M. Cioran

If only we could ask him about that now.

“It’s impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life” Baek Se-hee

Hear! Hear!
Unless, of course, she's wrong.

“The game has no beginning or end; it has been going on from beginningless time (anadi kal se, as Jains always say) and will continue for an infinite time to come (anant kal tak). Nor does it reflect the purposes of some divine creator; there is no rhyme or reason to it - the game simply is.” Lawrence A. Babb

Unless, of course, that's wrong.

“All of history is a rehearsal for its own extinction.” Cormac McCarthy

So far?

“Nihilism and irony are really neat until you're dead and the only person who remembers you is your weed dealer.” Mike Ma

Neat?

“It’s a matter of will. A matter of drama. I have to think of myself as an actor. What is real and what is drama anyway? It is simply a matter of convincing myself and everyone else to believe. What’s this blather about the real truth?” Sergio Troncoso

Not that it doesn't exist, of course.
Just ask Kevin McCarthy.

Stupidity...

“Greed can take the whole of our intelligence and render it ‘stupid’ in a far, far shorter period of time than it took for our intelligence to become intelligent.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

For some it's philosophy.

“Happy was not a word Nerron usually used to describe himself. It was, in his eyes, an emotional state only possible when paired with stupidity.” Cornelia Funke

Next up: the happy pinheads here.

“We are all capable of foolishness, it's just that we have a different area of expertise.” Giannis Delimitsos

Guess what yours is.

“Religion and its ugly stepbrother superstition have the unfortunate result of making humans think that a vastly unimaginable someone or something is thinking about us and concerning itself in our affairs.” Marsha Hinds

Not Deists!

“Dumb as donuts.” Anthony Liccione

Go ahead, pick one to describe me:
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=5 ... =610&dpr=1

“I'm stupider than a lot of people give me credit for!” James Riley

Let's at least give them the credit they deserve here.

Stieg Larsson...

Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.” Stieg Larsson

Let's explain it to her.

When I find the motherfucker who tortured an innocent cat to death just to send us a warning, I'm going to clobber him with a baseball bat.

We know how that turned out.

She wondered what she thought of herself, and came to the realization that she felt mostly indifference towards her entire life.

Actually, it took me years and years to grasp that myself.

Men who just call to say hello generally have ulterior motives.

Anyone here know what that might be?

The media have the ability to attract the craziest people to call in perfectly absurd tips. Every newsroom in the world gets updates from UFOlogists, graphologists, scientologists, paranoiacs, and every sort of conspiracy theorist.

And then there's social media!!! And whatever we are...

Salander was afraid of no-one and nothing. She realized that she lacked the necessary imagination -- and that was evidence enough that there was something wrong with her brain.

He wondered if anyone at all had ever been afraid of no one and nothing.

John Lennon

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

Uh, what difference does that make? No, really, point taken.

Whatever gets you through the night.

For the day, double it. At least.

The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.

Next up: the more fractured and fragmented you get.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

And now?

Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it.

Tell that to these guys?
https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com ... f-company/

Everything is clearer when you're in love.

Of course, we love philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!

Just ask the folks from the military industrial complex.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

Let's file this under, "human all too human".

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

I wonder if anyone ever did.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

Imagine then a pinhead!!

Disobedience---that is the nobility of slaves.

If only when it is actually an option.

You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war -- a war for your opinions. And when your opinion is defeated, our honesty should still cry triumph over that!

Just pick a thread, right?

Viet Thanh Nguyen from The Sympathizer

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

And then the ones that only take naps.

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage.

Next up: your arrogance.

Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.

Any confused Americans here?

I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.

Cue all my admirers here?

...in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t.

Let's run this by Satyr and Carleas.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.

How about you...here?
Pick one:
1] right?
2] righter?
3] rightest?

Anthony Doerr from All the Light We Cannot See

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

Yep, bravely.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

Until, of course, that's the point.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.

And, as often as not, the future.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

What's that got to do with it?

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

It's in the Bible?

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Go figure?

Suicide...

“It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops. And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.” Marian Keyes

Ah, the human condition!

“The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.” G.K. Chesterton

Good riddance?

“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.” Franz Kafka

Pick one:
1] the exception
2] the rule

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.” Courtney Love

Next up: the language of murder?

“I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It's all self-pity bullshit. It's bullshit. I didn't have any special grudges. I didn't fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves. I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all. I wanted to just stop being conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.” David Foster Wallace

Instead...

“Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?”
K-Ske Hasegawa

In fact, why doesn't everybody realize this?