Philosophers in Rags :: We dive deeper, and come up muddier.

The intellect can cause offense by its very presence, and yet, one can no more hide their intellect than their height.

Similarly a tall person will offend someone of a smaller stature just by standing there.   I try not to be jealous of those much larger than myself because I know what it feels like to be "hated on" just for being me.

In fact - and I learned this from Schopenhauer, of all people (in volume 2 of The World as Will and Representation - the chapter, "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love"), I am most likely a large man trapped in a small body.  I may have the internal organs fit for a much larger male. 

For successive generations, large men had been attracted to and mated with much smaller women, and the male "shrinks".

This is how Schopenhauer explains it, and I can verify he is on point with this.  Both my grandfathers were over 6 foot tall and both reproduced with women under 5 foot tall.   My father is around 5 foot 10 or a little more.  My mother is 5 foot even and shrinking.   Me?  5 foot 7.

I am not trying to be vulgar but my bowel movements are gargantuan.   

I am also very interested in Diogenes.  He would lay about and philosophize.  When the emperor heard about him, he went to meet him.  He offered him anything he wanted.  Diogenes asked him to move three feet to the right as the stupid big shot was blocking the sun!   

In reconstructing Diogenes’ ethical model, the life he lived is as much his philosophical work as any texts he may have composed.


When Plato is asked what sort of man Diogenes is, he responds, “A Socrates gone mad” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 54).


Diogenes is a harsh critic of Plato, regularly disparaging Plato’s metaphysical pursuits and thereby signaling a clear break from primarily theoretical ethics.

You asked me about I video I had posted but you could not play in your country,well, sorry for the late response. It was about a woman who prays to Jesus for everything-even for things like getting the floor cleaned properly.So Jesus comes down from heaven himself to tell her to give it a rest-but she starts to cry so he makes her forget that he ever appeared and goes back and she begins to pray again.
https://youtu.be/I6HLl9nnz60

Well, let's just say that couples assume that someone who is unattached must be wishing to "meet a girl."  Like my nephew's wife.  She's older than I am, and a while back, when they were living in South America, she insinuated that if I joined them down there by the equator I might meet a woman who I would go goo-goo ga-ga over.  These weren't her exact words, but the idea is that she wrongly assumed I was looking to become attached (emotionally entangled).

I'm not denying the sexual attraction I feel for exotic women.  What I am denying is any desire to seek some kind of fulfillment in satisfying any such desires.  I just instinctively understand a couple important details:  (1) that such attraction is rarely mutual, and (2) what I need to endure this life is already within me and, for me, seeking wholeness in a romantic union with a woman would mark a step backwards for me.

I've made it clear to myself that I may be better off alone without having to deal with the demands of another human being (and her relatives!).

So, that's one aspect of interacting with couples that is off putting, that unspoken assumption that the single man can't possibly be "complete" without a significant woman to make him "whole."

Although I have not spoken to my one cousin for nearly 10 years, I recall his asking me in front of his wife when was the last time I "had any".  I told him, at the time, that I gave myself an orgasm that morning.  You see, he and she assumed wrongly that one had to have a partner to be a sexual creature.   

Anyway, I'm not exactly comfortable discussing just what I find so off putting about conversations with couples.  There's just something not quite authentic about the discourse.   Couples may be forced to share certain beliefs or attitudes just to make for peaceful cohabitation.   

There's also a feeling that the couple is at liberty to just be goofy as a way to not really take anything you say seriously.

I'm sure there's more to it which I could elaborate on, but I would prefer not to at the moment.

I'm enjoying a certain detachment from such concerns.

It's wonderful not to feel pressured to "do anything," to make some kind of "impact" in the so-called "community," to learn how to sustain some kind of relationship which one might be better off without.   

There are those who will say I am less of a man for not having "love" in my life, and yet I have had to learn to accept myself unconditionally, and this means that my self-worth is not dependent upon any significant person's momentary judgments of me.

All we can do is live and let live.  I don't have to sustain bonds with couples.  I used to visit my cousin years ago until I brought the wrong color and type of woman along with me.   Ever since then, even though it was many years ago, I suppose many callous and petty attacks against me have been made behind my back.   I sense those kinds of things, and so, in order not to be hurt by their judgments, I just don;t give a fuuck about what they think - in turn, I totally detach, as though they are strangers, which, after awhile, they do become.

We do not choose our families, and while there are those who I may have cared about, and still do, at the end of the day, we get through these days, through this life alone.   Even those who consider themselves married and bound to another until death do us part, they are still, subjectively, alone. 

I could see myself cohabitating with a woman (other than my mother) in the future, but I imagine it would be more like she would be providing a "dog who can read, write, and do a little math" with shelter from the hostile world.

I suppose I would have to be a "kept" man, almost like a wolf being taken in as a pet; but I am no average dog, so I would have to be left alone for the most part.

 

I do some cooking and can be handy with problem solving, so it is not too insane of a prospect to imagine me as worth saving from the streets and the floods.  I can sympathize with the predicament of the housewives.   When one finds oneself in this world without financial resources, which is most of the people in the world, we are subject face the world as it is. 

One must be prepared to store one's library in storage, paying the hefty monthly fee (no, you cannot sleep in there with your books!) ---- and then face this world, like the crawling man with the large tumor on his head that Holden mentions.

In the end, when no one will have us, when we are kicked to the curb, we finally see what this world is about, and why some still flock to the churches for three warms and a cot, why the military has such an army to feed, clothe, and provide with boots and training, why the jailhouses are filled with those who accept this as their way of life, as their place on the plantation for unruly and disobedient types who do not play by the rules becoming some poor sucker enslaved in a hospital or grocery store for the rest of their lives.

If Diogenes were alive today in the United States of Amerika, as opposed to Ancient Greece, while sleeping in the streets, some gang of youths might have beat him to death with rocks and sticks, then set his bungalow on fire.  Poor naive Diogenes, how the "modern" world would mock, harass, and abuse you.   How the modern world would eat you alive.

I don't understand how the Hollywood actors can rejoice when they bring babies into such a world, as if they can protect them with their bank accounts.  I don't know what I would do with children.  Every day I awaken, I am just so relieved I am not responsible for feeding or educating children.  I imagine they would wonder, "Why should we listen to anything you think you have to teach us?  Look at yourself.  You are a living dead man!"

Sir Kaspar,
I read some notes by Leopardi, Indeed he concluded that to live happily and healthy life, one should have illusions. with illusions out of the window, what we have left is a bare incomprehensible  reality. so people unconsciously had to  to look at reality through some type of lenses (religion, morality,believe in science, and so on). had life smiled to me or I were lucky , I might lived like others in an ignorant bliss, a slave but a happy one, a gort . but once the facade is peeled, it is impossible to un-see.

Diogenes himself surely knew this, and didn't want people to become disillusioned like himself.  as the way I read Diogenes, mind my own simplistic ideas, he chose trolling (a way to get a lulz and giggles maybe for him) as a technique to forget reality for a period of time. your technique is studying mathematics.

other disillusioned souls went a step further to provide others with new illusions in case old ones began to break. The Grand Inquisitor, I guess, was disillusioned and had to keep the masses in hallucination. Nietzsche with his UberMensch.

value and happiness are just another illusions, who cares about them. You enjoy doing Math, it is good for your mind and for staving off life.

excuse my naive/simplistic notes and enjoy those s e x y equations and proofs.

More from "Diogenes the Cynic: The War Against the World"  (Luis E. Navia)
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…  the contempt with which he (Diogenes the Cynic = Digenes the Dog = Diogenes of Sinope) looked upon his contemporaries was well reciprocated by most of them. We hear of instances in which he was insulted and physically attacked, as we learn from the twenty-seventh letter and from Diogenes Laertius, as well as from Arabic sources.  Ibn-Hindu, for instance, reports that he was warned not to enter the narrow alleys of the city because certain people had planned to beat him.

The insults and blows that Diogenes received from some, and the indifference and contempt with which many must have treated him, were counterbalanced by the respect and sense of awe of the few, very few indeed, who recognized the courage and persistence with which he pursued his mission, and who were attracted by the paradox exhibited in his life-a homeless and wandering man, who recognized no country as his own, who paid no homage to the authorities or the laws, who chose a life of hardship and penury, who spoke with unequaled freedom, who rejected and often broke laws and conventions, and yet a man who claimed to have attained happiness and who remained at peace amid the turmoil of his surrounding world. Such a man must have been a source of curiosity to many and a person admired and revered by a few others.

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(The following are comments added by Kaspar the Jaded, i.e., "Hentrich":

I think of most cities and the harshness of the homeless life in the "postmodern" Industrial World.  Diogenes of Sinope AKA "The Dog" lived out in the open (in the porcelain tub) in a mild climate, and while he may have been harassed, sometimes beaten, and held in contempt, he might be hard pressed to live such a life in today's cities in a northern climate, or in certain areas where it rains often (areas of India, places like Seattle Washington).    There is no way I can glorify or romanticize homelessness, especially when it comes to wanting to engage in any sort of scholarly activity (or to store a few possessions, such as notebook or desktop computer which depends upon electricity and even access to the Internet via a network one must pay money for).   As Silenus mentions, even when you have proven to have disdain for the ambitious and require very little to be content, it would appear that the minimal would be a small room with access to electricity, some kind of place to defecate and urinate, and even a little refrigeration and kitchen.


What one requires may be ever so simple in a world of luxurious homes and cookie cutter "Mc Mansion" neighborhoods, but, as Kurt Vonnegut Jr  often remarked, most people in the Industrial World, even in the most developed areas which consume the largest portion of the planet's resources, are filled with people who have diddly squat.  It appears that there is a very thin line between homelessness, being warehoused in a jailhouse, psychiatric community, halfway house system, adult residence with required participation in so-called mental health outpatient treatment "day jail" where residents are shuffled to a kindergarten class for adults subjected to groups and visits with psychiatrics, etc …


No, come to think of it, I reckon if Diogenes were in our world today that he most certainly would have had ample encounters with law enforcement and the medical professionals associated with the psychiatric industry.   


And so, we must know who we are and not be too discouraged when we find ourselves out of synch with our contemporaries. It is best not to care at all about the opinions others have of us.  It is most important to find some kind of shelter which does not involve submitting to too many draconian rules or having to deal with small-minded and abusive authority types who love to have the unconventional at their mercy.


This can be quite a challenge.  Diogenes would advise many to hang themselves.   I don't know if this is even "legal" advice to offer in today's climate, the surveillance society, that is.


I suspect that the wheels are turning in the heads of both Silenus and Holden, searching for a solution to the problem of living as simply as possible, that is, to hole up in a small room without having to submit to a boss, without starving to death or freezing in the cold or dying of hypothermia from laying in a puddle of water trying to rest your bones.


If, like Diogenes the Dog/Cynic, myself, and Raul of Paraguay, you have an aversion to remunerated employment, and you wish to acquire a small room somewhere, you have bumped into one of the snags in the modern world, that they keep the food under lock and key and charge high rent for a little space to dwell so as to entice the masses into wage slavery.

Of course, admittedly, as has been mentioned by Holden of Northern India, our ancestors must have suffered more severely life being what it is.  No matter what one does there does not seem to be a way to avoid strife, but by limiting our demands and needs, we might minimize our disappointments.   

Now I must prepare to drive the Mother around as she has been unable to drive for nearly a month now.   I am beginning to understand what Raul meant when he said that many parents have children so that they have personal slaves as they age.

I am a patient man, and I try my best to not become very angry.  I pack my books and am glad I never married, for there are constant daily demands …