Philosophy Now Forum

Posted: **Fri Oct 27, 2023 7:02 pm**

Nihilism...

The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly." Simone de Beauvoir

Up in the philosophical clouds as it were. And nihilists are not always "him".

“To recognize the nature of nihilism, we see feces and death as the "dark side" of the mouth, and through that recognize life beyond the human perspective. Humans fear things that disturb them personally, and then assign to those things a universal status, like a monkey trying to convince a tribe that his enemy is its enemy. Escaping this is the essence of nihilism, or a reduction of all value except the inherent and holistic. "Disgusting" is not important; the function of the world and the human body is. Function, measures in real-world changes and results, is more important than sensations or moral judgements, feelings and emotions.” Brett Stevens

Up in the philosophical clouds as it were. Way up there.

“God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Virtually here.

“When we emigrate to the moon, we will be the first settlers ever to run from Nothingness to Nothingness.” Naguib Mahfouz

Not Mars though, right?

“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.” Jon Krakauer

Call it the Christopher Johnson McCandless Syndrome.

“When she asked him why he'd shot her daddy, he just shrugged and said that he'd been planning on shooting six people when he rode into town. She looked up at him, eyes wide, batting her eyelashes, feigning awe, looking on him the way that Joshua must have looked on the walls of Jericho, and asked him why six; and he said back to her: because his pistol had six bullets in it. With another shrug, as though that answered everything. And then he turned to face her, with his livid scar and gap teeth and breath that stank like the devil and hell, and the words flashed sudden through her mind, clear as if they'd been laid out on parchment: this is what the face of a free man looks like.” Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

That or a sociopath.

Posted: **Fri Oct 27, 2023 9:35 pm**

David Grann from Killers of the Flower Moon

In 1850 Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company motto, "We Never Sleep" was inscribed under a large, unblinking Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term "private eye". William J. Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph--a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.... Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century was known as the eye, Burns, In the twentieth century had become "the ear".

Next up: what the private dicks have access to today.

Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar: Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.

Unless, of course, that's no less a conspiracy.

The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene. “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.” “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?” One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.” Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

If only we could run all of this by Michael Landon...

The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates, an Osage leader said, adding, There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves. This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.

"More woke bullshit!", some here will no doubt seethe.

Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures. This part of Progressivism mirrored Hoover’s darkest impulses.

Ah, something along the lines of this: https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA?si=bG4c5WWoKHVX1t5p

The Osage elders sang the traditional songs for the dead, only now the songs seemed for the living, for those who had to endure this world of killing.

Ah, something along the lines of this: https://youtu.be/KwOyconXiGM?si=2oTnmaZ0hrOBFylc

Posted: **Sat Oct 28, 2023 6:51 pm**

God...

“No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn't in submission to God!” T D Jakes

Any exceptions here?

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins

Right, like that makes Him any less loving, just and merciful.

“He -- and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he -- because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.” George Carlin

Actually, I can think of a few.

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Mahatma Gandhi

Don't hold your breath though.

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” Woody Allen

To wipe out Hamas?

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” Albert Camus

And now?

Posted: **Sun Oct 29, 2023 12:18 am**

Existentialism...

"There is no reality except in action." Jean-Paul Sartre

That and what we do here, of course.

“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.” Simone de Beauvoir

Next up: real posting.

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Judge away!

“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched my selves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.” Richard Siken

That works for me. Except when it doesn't.

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” Jean-Luc Godard

Uh, whatever that means?

“One thought---murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.” Saul Bellow

How's that working out for you?

Posted: **Sun Oct 29, 2023 1:08 am**

"if a million people see your willy, you're a celebrity porn star. If one person sees your willy, you're a perverted sex offender" - promethean75

Posted: **Sun Oct 29, 2023 6:22 pm**

Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

Who hasn't tried that.

The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.

Not unlike the existence of existence itself.

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.

And that's just on this side of the grave.

People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness—because they impair our judgment. Don’t try to think too much.

Starting tomorrow, okay?

I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

Next up: space.

I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

Of course, some come here to slow it down.

Posted: **Sun Oct 29, 2023 10:33 pm**

Doom...

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” Ernest Hemingway

So, is that doomed enough for you?

“The future is uncertain but the end is always near." Jim Morrison

Especially if you are a heroin addict, I'm guessing.
You know, if he was.

“Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?” Jodi Picoult

Oh, yeah, you bet.

“You see, there are no pretty pink flowers in the woods at night.” J.K. Franko

I've never seen any.

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.” Thomas Harris

Until Lector ate them?

“Eat, Your Highness. "
"Everything tastes like doom, " he whispered.
"Then add salt.” Leigh Bardugo

Or, sure, sweeten it with sugar.

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2023 6:29 pm**

Despair...

“The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.” Juliette Lewis

And now she's a cannibal.

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.” Irvin D. Yalom

What, even here?

"You can spend your life wallowing in despair, wondering why you were the one who was led towards the road strewn with pain, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough to survive it." J.D. Stroube

Well, if you do survive it, of course.

“The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” Woody Allen

Next up: our job here.

“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.” Haruki Murakami

Still, some come a lot closer to it than others. Here, for example.

“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive." May Sarton

Also: https://youtu.be/2y04V56qyJA?si=EM-zSZz7gHLaaa0V

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2023 11:03 pm**

Suicide...

“It's better to burn out than to fade away.” Kurt Cobain

Pick one:
1] suicide
2] murder

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.” James Baldwin

I hear that.

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again." Antonin Artaud

You tell me. Or I'll tell you.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient” Marilynne Robinson

Name 10.

“I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively.” Stephen Fry

Well, he is a comedian.

“Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...” Sanhita Baruah

Now, of course, you just Google it.

Posted: **Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:56 pm**

Umberto Eco from Foucault's Pendulum

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

Or by bigger scraps of ignorance.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Define harmless?

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics…Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble…Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation…Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent…Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats bark…Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason…A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…

Five kinds if you count pinheads. And I certainly do.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

Dasein, right?

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Or into philosophy here.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Yo, Satyr!

Posted: **Tue Oct 31, 2023 9:14 pm**

Dodie Smith from I Capture the Castle

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

Me? A John Fowles novel of course. You know the one.

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

Teach you what? About God perhaps?

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Anyone here sitting in the kitchen sink reading this?

I like seeing people when they can't see me.

Will here do?

Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

Will here do?

And no bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.

Sounds like a personal problem to me.

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2023 5:33 pm**

August Strindberg

Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.

And now you know.

There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.

Next up: how to tell them apart.
If only philosophically.

Autumn is my spring!

Not counting winter of course.

We are already in Hell. It is the earth itself that is Hell, the prison constructed for us by an intelligence superior to our own, in which I could not take a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which my fellow creatures could not enjoy their own happiness without causing me pain.

Conflicting goods let's call them.

Love between a man and woman is war.

Next up: Love between transgender men and women.

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

Virtually as it were.

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2023 8:58 pm**

Nihilism...

“Moral Psychology is a manifestation in the philosophical discipline of ethical nihilism.” Sebastian Rödl

See, I told you.

“A horribly bitter taste came into his mouth: the futility of everything, the eternal pain of existence.” Émile Zola

Go ahead, try to spit it out.

“After a battle lasting many ages,
The Devil won,
And said to God
(who had been his Maker):
"Lord,
We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation
By my hand.
I would not wish you
to think me cruel,
So I beg you, take three things
From this world before I destroy it.
Three things, and then the rest will be
wiped away."

God thought for a little time.
And at last He said:
"No, there is nothing."
The Devil was surprised.
"Not even you, Lord?" he said.
And God said:
"No. Not even me.”
Clive Barker

That probably surprises some here.

“Eventually, all our graves go unattended.” Conan O'Brien

Next up: our ashes.

“Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.” Henry Miller

Me, I'll be sticking with the distractions for now.

“There were many slippery slopes to nihilism in this new world, and the higher up you were the easier it was to fall down one of them.” Tom B. Night

Here? Theoretically, of course.

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2023 10:31 pm**

Robert Musil from The Man Without Qualities

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.

Well, maybe if he starts reading a few books it's okay.
Next up: the librarian's a woman.

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!

Unless, of course, that particular one is all it takes.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

Well, if he also has a "condition", he goes here: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

'True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

So, true or false?

Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought.

What I call the Veritas Aequitas Syndrome. And what Will Durant called something else.

A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.

Let's try to avoid that here.
Starting tomorrow, okay?

Posted: **Thu Nov 02, 2023 6:04 pm**

God...

“God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.” Woody Allen

Ronan in particular?

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"
"I give."
"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.” David Foster Wallace

If that's ever actually happened, of course.

“Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.” Will Smith

Amen: https://youtu.be/myjEoDypUD8?si=Aqwyt4T3V6QNLzpR

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.” Voltaire

He meant not to laugh, of course.
Though, if not, point taken.

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.” Douglas Adams

Next up: all the puffs of logic here.

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.” Bertrand Russell

Roasting in Hell, now he knows.

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