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

There are so many books out there.  Look at the statistics.

Now, I am certainly indebted to those who took the trouble to get their writings published, but I think that just keeping notes on existence for oneself may be enough.  This way, what we write doesn't have to be organized.

If I ever were to attempt to organize something into book-form, I would do so for a very small audience, and only out of my indebtedness to those who have reached me.  Books are a huge part of my life.  If ever I were to go blind or suffer injury to my brain, my life would be altered drastically.  In fact, one of the great benefits of abstaining from imbibing alcohol (and other drugs) is that I am better able to concentrate.

Alas, ever since I have been mandated to attend the "day program" something got triggered within me ... bibliomania ... at one time, before 2009, I had a huge library of books that were stored in my mothers basement.  She had sold her house while I was out west, and I lost all those books.  For years I only kept a core collection - Schopenhauer, Cioran, and some math/programming books.

Recently I have went off the deep end collecting books ... I am very particular about the ones I choose, and I have tried to get them used when possible.  Now I feel I can stop again, as I have enough to keep my attention for a couple years I think. 

What would I do if the writers whose books I cherish had been as lazy as I am when it comes to "publication"?

My notes are just so haphazard and chaotic.  I seem to always be studying something and never ready to take a position.  One day, eventually, we disappear.  I don't want to put any pressure on myself.  Some of us just may feel that another book is unnecessary. 

I have to admit that it would be kind of liberating to write an autobiographical anti-novel where I could speak as a fictional protagonist, writing about how rotting teeth actually help one transcend vanity, and a decreasing sex drive might be a consequence of the denial of the will to live.

Forever reading, never to be read ... 

Thanks Holden.  If it were not for you, I would have no need for a message board.

One more question for you to think about.  I am out of shelf space, and after the shipment of several books, including the Linear Algebra textbook listed for $300 that I found used for $50, I am forbidding myself anymore books.  I finally have Schopenhauer's On the Will in Nature and some others that I had my heart set on, some having to do with Depressive Realism (that Houellebecq one on HP Lovecraft is in transit ... the Amazon God willing); but, as I have turned into a bibliomaniac again [I am obsessed], I have to really consider the possibility that eventually I will have to give in and get an ereader.  It will have to be one that handles PDF files well, just to justify the purchase since I have a ton of textbooks stored from when Library Genesis was up and accessible. 

My question is, Have you tried reading pdf files on an eReader?  I have looked into it, and the Kindle Voyage seems to handle them alright.  Awhile back I had gotten my mother a Kindle DX because of the large screen, and this is lifeblood for her since she could only read large print books.  The screen is larger than the eReaders available these days, but for pdf files, it's no good.

With the amount of texts I have in pdf and the price of actual textbooks these days, even the Voyage would pay for itself if I live long enough to study them.  It's just a thought for the future.  I have to stop buying books for a long time since I am sure to have more than enough to occupy my mind for a good long time.  I just pray (to what, I have no idea) that I don't go blind, become homeless, get put in a cage, or ... the creek doesn't rise.  Actually, if the creek rises or if I just die, I won't know any better, so that won't really be a problem.

I feel such empathy for those who are blind.  So much of my life revolves around literature!

I won't be in need of an eReader for awhile yet since I already have a s-h-i-t storm of hardcopy books heading my way.  If I am able to take some notes from what I go over, maybe eventually I might expand the notes with commentary, but along the way, I don't have any kind of plan.   

I have done some exploration, and there is a handful of writers that seem to be in our orbit:  Colin Feltham (Keeping Ourselves in the Dark), Sarah Perry (Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide), Eugene Thacker, Michel Houellebecq, David Peak (Spectacle of the Void), Ben Jeffery (Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism), and some others.

If it were just thinkers like this who interest me, I would never even contemplate the possibility of me breaking down and getting an eReader, but the textbooks are so very expensive, and, what's more, even if I had the funds to collect a library, I do not have the space.  I have already reached a limit, and I was very particular about which texts would make it on the shelf, texts that I would be able to study as opposed to reading once.  Never again can I allow myself to feel a false security when kneeling before a collection of texts ...

But alas, even poor old Schopenhauer had quite a collection he dragged around ... so, we all have our weaknesses.  I have seen pictures of Cioran's apartment where stacks of books were piled all around.  He suffered from insomnia.  He said that if it were not for insomniacs, there would probably not be too much literature.

Very little has been done in philosophy between Schopenhauer & you.

Do you think this is because Arthur Schopenhauer is such a tough act to follow?  I mean, there is Zapffe, and yet his work has yet to be translated ... That in itself might be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, for these new Kindle Voyage contraptions are able to translate passages --- EVEN IN PDF FILES !   WTF?

I will do research over the winter to see if Zapffe's books are available and in what format, and be sure they can be translated, even if it is one page at a time.

Now, if this is true that such a device can translate, why wouldn't someone just use a Kindle Voyage to manually translate Zapffe's work into whatever languages?   Is there some kind of law against this?

Maybe, since there is not much left to be said after writers such as Schopenahauer, Cioran, Zapffe, and now Ligotti and other horror types who have a knack for writing philosophical manifestos as well, a humble task for a Schopenhauer Scholar would be to translate Zapffe.   We don't even have to be linguistically gifted.  We might be able to pull off a bootleg (for disciples only with no money involved) with a Kindle Voyage ... The wheels are turning in my head.   

I just so prefer the hard copies and have invested a considerable amount of funds in actual books that I plan to get into, and not just once.  I will hold off until I am absolutely sure I could dedicate myself to the Zapffe project ... unless someone else does it first ... that would save me the anxiety over getting the technology.   

You know, while I'm not a huge fan of Nietzsche's work, I do love the person I imagine he was.  It is said he had no friends ... maybe a few throughout his life.  We both know that even were he to have access to the Internet, he still would have been spiritually lonely.  We are fortunate that we have had access, at least until the creek does indeed rise, to this medium to exchange ideas.  Something like Facebook is unnecessary.  To have one individual understand where you are coming from is probably as good as it gets in this life that can so quickly become a nightmare.

The frightening part about being alive is fear of the unknown.  We gather books with the intention of having endless opportunities to study, and yet some horror could be around the corner. 

Where is that Hesse quote I am so fond of? 

“Are you scared?  Do you notice something?  Yes, the world is full of death, full of death.  Death sits on every fence, stands behind every tree.  Building walls and dormitories and churches won’t keep death out; death looks in through the window, laughing, knowing every one of you.”

“Go ahead, say your evening prayers, say your morning prayers, sing your psalms, gather herbs in your laboratory, collect books in your libraries.  Are you fasting, my friend?  He’ll lend you a hand, our old friend, the Reaper.  He’ll strip you to the bones.  Run, run to the fields and see that your bones stay together.  They’re trying to escape, they don’t want to be with us.  Our poor bones want to be free, it all wants to go to the devil.  The crows are sitting in the trees.” (From Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund)

Yes, we won't kid ourselves ... our poor bones want to be free ... but, while we're here, let's strive to hole up in a room scribbling whenever we have the opportunity! 

Much of our anxiety probably stems from an innate awareness that Fate is indifferent to our plans.

My question is, Have you tried reading pdf files on an eReader? 
I am a smart phone,which have an inbuilt PDF reader(powered by Android),it serves my purpose.
The said phone also has a Kindle app.That's where I read the ebooks I buy from Amazon.

The main reason why I don't buy hardbacks is that they are beyond my budget, and I  ebooks are easier to carry around.

Quote
Very little has been done in philosophy between Schopenhauer & you.

Do you think this is because Arthur Schopenhauer is such a tough act to follow? 
I think its a question of temperament.Now in case of Schopenhauer ,serendipity certainly was at play.He was not poor.He was classically trained in philosophy and he was obviously gifted intellectually.But above all ,he had the right temperament & personality for the job.
Schopenhauer=Ciroran +Syllogisms .

It was found here that Gisle R. Tangenes (the guy who translated The Last Messiah) was planning to start translating On the Tragic in the summer of 2007.

I wonder what happened ...

Oh, I see ... Malone from ligotti.net informs us that, "Unfortunately Giles Tangenes/Sirocco, the guy who was hoping to translate it, has shut down his blog and he informed me some time back that his plans to translate more Zapffe were on ice."

How about this word I had to look up while researching Zapffe:   perspicacity?

perspicacity - 1. intelligence manifested by being astute;  2. the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and to draw sound conclusions

This perspicacity is the cause of our plight whether we call it “existential angst” or “existential crisis” or “existential despair,” or Zapffe's choice, “cosmic panic.”

Our capacity to access our situation and draw conclusions causes us anxiety.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.  We learn to retard our own thought processes.  Could this be linked to the desire to become incapacitated?  I would not doubt it.

Summary of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s ‘On the Tragic’ (orig. “Om det tragiske”, PAX Forlag 1941)
The summary was first published in English, in the 1983 edition, pp. 619-622.

This summary is protected by Norwegian and International Copyright Laws, hereby violated in the name of Existentialistic Philosophy, due to the lack of translated material.



SUMMARY


The world of experience is considered in this work from the point of view of the concerns of the individual entities. This means that the entities are classified according to what is important and necessary for them, what they are concerned with. They can thus be classified in an ascending scale from an assumed lack of all concern (the non-organic world), via entities to which humans attribute concerns (plants, animals without consciousness), to what we call conscious animals with a more differentiated range of concerns (§§ 1, 3, 4).


After these comes the primitive or «low-status» human being, characterized by basic concerns (biological concerns, simple desires), and the scale continues with increasing differentation, ending with the «great» men and women, the highest representatives of their respective cultures. In addition to the concerns of primitive people, such people have the desires and values in the broadest senses of these worlds, together with the most highly differentiated social and metaphysical concerns. This system has the advantage of including a great deal of material under a single viewpoint.


Alongside the scale of concerns one can draw up a scale of abilities (a distinctive group of qualities in the entity, or organism); these are associated with a group of concerns relating to development or realization (§8 et passim). The concerned individual consciously attempts to realize his concerns by using his abilities. Sometimes the abilities are adequate (sufficiency), sometimes they are inadequate (deficiency), and sometimes there is a surplus of ability in relation to the demands of the problem or situation. The surplus may provide additional advantages, it may be irrelevant to the solution of the problem, or it may have harmful consequences (§8 and ch. 5.). When an ability occurs with a single or a very few functional variations it is referred to as predetermined; when it is mutable, sometimes with an unlimited applicability, it is referred to as non-determined. These are also the two extremes of a scale; in between one finds for example a wrong determination, where an ability is determined in a way that is unfortunate compared with another way assumed to be more fortunate, and variations of this are over-determination, where an ability is too strictly determined, and under-determination, where it is too little determined (ch. 3, 5 and 6, §82).


The normal and valid realization of a concern is referred to as the proper solution to the problem that existed prior to the realization. When a proper realization cannot be obtained (owing to conditions inside or outside the organism), then the concerned individual may settle for a pseudo-solution, a surrogate (ch. 6).


The environment (ch. 3) in which the organism attempts to realize its concerns may be so formed that it consciously promotes or wishes to promote the realization; it is then referred to as a sympathetic environment as regards of these factors. Sometimes the environment takes no conscious part in the realization; it is then indifferent. Finally, it may sometimes consciously work against the organism, and then it is referred to as inimical or satanic. In all three cases the environment may have been propitious, unpropitious, or neither, irrelevant (§4).


The result of the conflict (after a single clash or over a longer period) may be the attainment of the concern (sanction), or its non-attainment (veto); sometimes, on the other hand, it may be opposed or violated. When primary concerns are deeply and irreversibly violated the event is referred to as a catastrophe (ch. 7). A catastrophe may be elementary or qualified, i.e. contain qualities that drawn attention to it rather than to something else. Some of these catastrophes have a particular quality referred to as tragic; they are then part of a whole, a tragic process (§75).


The tragic process has three characteristics; a culturally relevant greatness, or magnitude, in the afflicted individual, a catastrophe that befalls him, and a functional relation between the greatness and the catastrophe. With this definition of tragedy the study approaches its principal aim: to give a meaning to the word «tragic» that is sufficiently nambiguous [1] and that cannot naturally be applied to any other term (§1), and one that at the same time lies well within the mainstream of aesthetic and literary tradition.


This choice of meaning has a further advantage, in addition to the purely terminological one: The quality of the process described by the word tragic, in its empirical aspect, has strong philosophical implications. Tragedy is given a central and dominating role in the human battle of concerns and throws a significant light on the human condition here on earth (§§76,90,91). «Significant light» means a light that reveals consequences that are relevant for human concerns. The victim not only undergoes immediate suffering, through the violation of the relevant concern, he is also deprived of his fundamental expectation; a spectator with the same concerns as the victim will therefore also feel his expectation waver. This expectation is that of a universal moral system, a regulation of history according to human values. In other words: the expectation that perfectibility will lead to fulfilment is confounded when a tragic constellation blocks the way to a proper solution and opens the way for a pseudo-solution or defeat (§93).


The adequate affective reactions of a spectator to the violation of a concern of his own or of a person he identifies with are aversion, dejection, disgust, bitter revolt, and so on. His reaction as a whole is to reject what has happened; to use Volkelt’s expression, the event «should not happen». This ought to be particularly true of qualified catastrophes and especially tragic processes. But experience shows that accidents to others can under certain circumstances attract the spectator. How can one explain (i.e. make available to the understanding through some structural model) this apparent paradox? Is this merely a special case of the fascination contained in all unusual events of great magnitude in spite of the suffering they may cause a fellow human being? Or are there indications that the spectator is attracted because of the human suffering involved? Or are we dealing with two completely different ways of experiencing the event, two irreconcilable aspects? An elucidation of this question in practical terms is attempted in ch. 9, cf. §§13 and 81.


The value of witnessing another’s misfortune has been shown to be isolated and to some degree intensified when a tragic process is recreated in literature or in other forms of art. The description and explanation of this and especially «the problem of tragedy» have tempted philosophers and aesthetic writers (particularly Europeans) for over 2000 years. This is briefly dealt with in ch. 11; own studies are described in §§95 ff. Each of the factors that are regularly present in a tragedy are examined for their capacity to contribute to the experience of the spectator, and the results are summed up in the following contention: the richest experience a tragedy can give is a pseudo-solution of the metaphysical problem of meaning through poetic sublimation (§102).


Although the problems associated with tragedy have been taken up by many of the most prominent European men of letters, the results are neither convincing nor conclusive for a modern reader, despite a blinding wealth of detail. The newcomer is quite willing to acknowledge the authority vested in this imposing list of names; on the other hand it is notable that the renown attached to names such as Aristotle, Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer does not derive from their researches into tragedy, which have been more or less a side issue. There seem to be two main reasons for the lack of clarity and the endless discussions: first, that researchers have not managed to describe the tragic process in such a way that it could be clearly distinguished from a non-tragic process, and secondly that they have not distinguished clearly enough between tragic process, tragic writing, and what they variously refer to as tragic experience, tragic mood, tragic feelings, etc. (cf. §§110, 111, 112).


By distinguishing as accurately as possible between these concepts, I have tried to contribute to research on the subject.

Zapffe's work would have been my sole motivation to even desire a dedicated ereader with the ability to translate Norwegian.  Now that I understand that even acquiring a hardcopy of the text seems impossible, I really have lost the desire for such a device.   

Hell, I don't even want a smart phone.  I prefer a calculator ... yep, I'ld rather has a TI-Nspire CX CAS programmable graphing calculator than an ereader, truth be told.   As long as I have access to a humble shelf of texts, I prefer having the books ...

I do understand why you use a phone for reading since you cannot lug a bunch of texts around in your situation.

I also still prefer to write my notes to myself by hand in cursive.

I have long since given up trying to articulate some kind of "philosophy" in the form of essays and aphorisms.

I am no Nietzsche.  I feel no compulsion to write "great books".

There was something I read in The Razor's Edge just prior to my psychotic fit back in March.  I wonder if I typed it up here in a semi-drunken state ...

Yes, here it is, from January 21st of last year.

It bears repeating for I truly would like to believe something of this nature is possible.

Speaking about Larry, the narrator/author writes:

He is without ambition and he has no desire for fame.  To become anything of a public figure would be deeply distasteful to him, so it may be that he is satisfied to lead his chosen life and be no more than just himself.  He is too modest to set himself up as an example to others.  It may be, he thinks, that a few uncertain souls drawn to him like moths to a candle will be brought in time to share his own glowing belief that ultimate satisfaction can only be found in the life of the spirit, and that by himself, following with selflessness and renunciation the path of perfection, he will serve as well as if he had wrote books or addressed multitudes.

The View from Mount Zapffe


An Accusation of Timeless Dimensions

Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1941/1957
From the Norwegian by Sirocco

I don't want you to think I have not read your post.  I had become very depressed quite suddenly last night and retired uncharacteristically early, perhaps as an attempt to escape the feelings.   I had read your post.  The sudden depression as most likely a result of too much mathematics.  This morning I switched gears, taking up a different text which covers similar problems.   I really am determined to stick with this.   I don't care if there is no purpose.   I find myself going over things I may even have been introduced to in high school, and, to be honest, it is like I am learning it for the first time.   The only difference is that now I can use a little calculus to find extrema rather than depending solely on a graphing calculator to estimate the range of a given function.

I think that it is only because I am pursuing understanding in this solitary manner that I am able to recognize what skills I want to develop, where I want to devote some attention to.  Were I in any kind of social setting, my ego would not allow me to develop algebraic skills or geometric intuition.  I would stubbornly stretch my brain to keep up with whatever ...

The physics can wait.  I want to spend some time on preliminary mathematics.

Someone with just the right sense of humor might find my math diaries novelesque.  Out of nowhere I will write things like, "I live to complete the square, one of my life's greatest pleasures."

Now, as for your feeling that you will continue to suffer beyond your physical death, this is not something we can really consider with too much confidence.  I would hope this is not the case.  Otherwise, there would be no way out as long as there was sentient life in the universe.

Do you really think we will continue to suffer existence (as the thing in itself) even after our individual deaths?  Aren't all the galaxies dependent upon our perception of them?   I mean, isn't it possible that this will all have been nothing more than a dream in the night?

As for those who are tormenting you, I wish there were a way you could shield yourself from their hateful attacks, like developing some kind of psychic forcefield.