Author Topic: Odd Man Out & Philosophical Friendship  (Read 526 times)

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Nation of One

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Odd Man Out & Philosophical Friendship
« on: June 23, 2021, 05:42:18 am »
Branching off from the Gargoyles thread created by Silenus.

Let's see ...

Quote from: I
I have been reading Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard.  It is somewhat depressing, but that is just the nature of the brute facts revealed, such as the fact that country folk can be even more brutal than city folk.   The way the owner of the tavern/hotel mourns his wife's murder as though he has lost livestock/slave, not a "life partner" ...  The way the patron who knocked her with a bottle did not even recall having committed the act ...

How does the "sensitive soul" traverse through such landscapes?

While reading it, I am reminded of the unpleasant natures of my fellow human animal creatures  --- and of the deep well of pain beneath the surface ready to erupt should my own Creaturely Presence be threatened in any way.

I have not been able to stay calm long enough to read very much (restlessness), but I sense this evening I may be able to summon the calmness required to be content to simply BE.   

Schopenhauer said that the best way to show one's contempt or disdain for those who torment you is to have nothing to do with them.

How do these novelists transform the pain and anguish and brutality we experience in this life into literature?

And then, again:

Quote from: I
Toltz also explains in that novel how all literature is commentary on previously existing literature.   In Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard has the doctor (the protagonist's father) carrying around a few books ... Kant, Nietzsche, etc ... [I sure hope he gets to Schopenhauer!]. 

Reading this forces me to confront the absence of "philosophical friendships" in my actual monkey-sphere.   I must never take this message board for granted.

I do not take my philosophical friendships on this message board for granted.

It may be our tragic fate - that our outsider status in our respective societies is part of some kind of natural aristocracy, and that we are destined to be very lonely men, especially in the company of others.   Our isolation is of a spiritual nature.

So, I am wondering if always being the Odd Man Out might be a paradoxical qualification necessary for both parties of the philosophical friendship.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Nation of One

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Odd Man Out Fails to Come to Any Conclusions
« Reply #1 on: September 24, 2021, 10:02:52 am »
I had caught a glimpse of Corporate State "People Patrol" on Horseback in Texas beating back hungry ones from Haiti seeking water, food, shelter, and basic care (i.e. "asylum") with whips of some kind.  It reminded me of how the Spaniards would ride horseback to intimidate Los Indios de Americas way back when.

 
(NPR)

Back around 2007 in Matawan, Dirty Jersey, I had met a Spanish/English speaking dark-skinned man of African descent from the Dominican Republic.  We befriended one another upon discovering we had similar senses of humor (sick yet kind).    While researching slave rebellions, I learned that it was the slave populations themselves, namely in Haiti, who were their own liberators.   There was no emancipator or so-called "white savior" (such as the courageous John Brown).   Was it not the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, the only successful slave revolt in history, that instigated the global abolishment of slavery?

What I want to interject here is simply a reminder that, while the basic necessities are surely vital to any potential reduction of suffering, if one follows the trajectory into a "white privileged" lifestyle, say of one like Mitchell Heisman, it does not appear to lead anywhere but Death.  Prosperity does not always lead to Happy-Ever-After.

The following is an excerpt from something I posted on the xhentric.wordpress.com blog which begs to be "bumped up" to front & center at this time: What is One to Do?


I prefer writing about day to day thoughts and anxieties rather than make up some story about some high brow who marries into a politically powerful family but never Shits or pisses. What about the real creature as it is, the animal thing that doesn’t care about the Olympics?

What about all the refugees without access to clean water? Surely it shames me to complain about having been born into this world when so many are suffering far worse fates.

And so I just keep reading like a patient locked up in a psychiatric ward … Survivor’s guilt?

The very well educated Mitchell Heisman shot himself on the steps at Harvard University. Evidently, having all one’s primitive needs satisfied is not enough to make life worth living.

“If the literature we are reading does not wake us why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” (Kafka)

“Overcoming the will to live, then, represents one of the final steps in overcoming the provincial and ‘primitive’ life instincts probably inherited from our evolutionary past, i.e., inclinations toward patriarchy, authoritarianism, sexism, kinism, and racism.” (Heisman)

Mitchell Heisman’s suicide note was 2000 pages. I humbly admit I can only skim through it.

This phenomenon forces me to be less judgmental of people by appearances as I can not know how each person really feels. Some people go insane with drugs. Others go insane with books or philosophical concepts. As Thomas Metzinger argues, there are solid grounds for maintaining that the phenomenological subject of appearance is itself a phenomenal appearance generated by neurobiological processes. I am the thing-in-itself observing itself, questioning itself, doubting the representation of itself …

I remember out in Seattle drinking with an elderly black dude, and he started getting very angry while he was shaking his Bible around, yelling at me about how he wrote the Bible. In a strange way, now I understand what he was saying. When I read Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation or some of his essays, I find a part of me saying just that: I wrote this. I am this thing that wrote that. I am still that self-same thing writing this.

Damn it to Hell, I am still here … there is no way out, not even in death! How does this end?

What is this metaphysically transcendent empirical entity?

What is this I THINK? What is this that Husserl called Pure Phenomenological Consciousness?

When we go extinct, nothing will have happened. Tick tock tick tock … Do you understand how easy it is to go insane? When someone digs deeper and deeper into the mechanisms of their own mind, when one considers these bones and this blood we have become so attached to, the teeth, the stomach, the intestines, the veins, the sinews … and there is no switch to turn it off … So many people complain of racing thoughts, insomnia, migraine headaches, toothaches, every day angst … How to explain it?

No wonder there is an epidemic of addiction to pain-killers, opiates, alcohol … It is no wonder! And yet do these chemicals bring genuine relief?

The case against hope: Hope makes people feel worse. What happens to the long-term unemployed when they reach retirement age? They experience relief in the end of hoping to find a suitable job. Giving up hope sets you free. And so I give up hope in ever feeling at ease about existing. I am this THING, this self-same thing that was Arthur Schopenhauer.

Since ‘reality’ is itself a transcendental concept, Kant’s usage of a distinction between appearance and reality suggests a critical difficulty with his project. Every attempt to formulate a relation or distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal realms must itself fall back upon conceptual and abstract thought! Why bother trying to explain reality when all we end up doing is chasing our tails?

Can we blame the poets like Georg Trakl who fail to keep a job, become addicted to opium, become enmeshed in alcoholism, fail to defeat their psychoses, and die of a cocaine overdose?

Trakl’s traces are the ruins of a horrific failure – a failure to adapt or conform, a failure to repress, a failure to produce, a failure to come to any conclusions.

Lunatic? Werewolf? How many of us on a similar trajectory and just don’t know it?

We do not know what we want. If we have a strong death instinct and find daily existence ridiculous, how long do we go on philosophizing about it before our death instinct manifests itself?

What did Nietzsche learn from Schopenhauer?

Anti-humanism; anti-academicism; misogyny; the distrust of mathematical thinking.

It is great to have broken through so many mental barriers throughout my life, but once breaking through to the Dark Side, there really is no turning back. One can’t unsee what one has seen. Have I come to value my mental faculties enough to resist self-destructive impulses?

Do not be in public when intoxicated! It’s like full fledged demonic possession!

Maybe the real reason I write is because the process consoles me. I give advice to myself. Doing nothing all day, day after day, is not as easy as it sounds. It could be that writing down one’s thoughts in a free flowing manner gives access to a secret reality below the surface of consciousness. Who keeps track of the mundane details of The Thingly Presence? I observe the creature-in-itself … I don’t feel ashamed of the creature’s nature, because the creature is life itself, a microcosm of Nature. It’s very nature hardwired into the sinews of being: anxiety, paranoia, want, dissatisfaction, fear.

“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?” (Leo Tolstoy)

What is one to do? Think deep thoughts. Avoid marching.

Does one courageously refuse to “man up”?

That isolated men kill themselves because they don’t seek help is a redundant excuse. Men are shamed into marriage by playing on the fear that they will die alone, but who does not die alone? We, each of us, is in our head alone.

This shaming is a snide way to pressure someone to conform to idiocy. The corporate world want obedient workers … they don’t want deep thinkers. They will make snide remarks like, “ … that’s a little bit too much information …” or “ … OK, Mr. Philosopher, are you taking your medication?”

There is no brotherhood. If a living man does not remain a slave to the Machine, he is ostracized, viewed with disdain and contempt. When I am able to view myself as a living phenomenon, my capacity for introspection grows, and I will not subject myself to the denigrating judgments of a systematically stupid society.

What is there to do at this point? Breathe? Eat? That seems automatic. For me it’s automatic, but maybe some lose the will to live. I read somewhere that some chattel slaves were able to stop their own breath. I’m sorry if I can’t get all worked up about some play-offs. From the sidelines, it all looks rather absurd. Circuses and cake. Ah, to be an outsider living in an almost mythical dimension …

On the one hand you have the sports fans. On the other hand you have the renegade thinkers. There is mutual disdain, I’m sure.

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Forget the Olympics
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2021, 11:39:19 am »
Protect your spirit, children!   Don't let these bastards grind you down.  They will do anything in order to break your spirits.

From this past August:

Quote
Simone Biles, who three months ago made a triumphant, bronze medal-winning return at the Olympics after withdrawing from previous events, has become a model for mental health awareness.

Biles, the most decorated active gymnast in the world and a survivor of sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, prioritized her well-being over an audience hungry for her performance, withdrawing from the team final and the individual all-around competition because she had "to do what’s right for me and focus on my mental health."

In celebration of the GOAT (greatest of all time) both on and off the mat, we've rounded up her most powerful quotes about mental health.

On what she learned from the Olympics


“I feel like I learned the most about myself during Tokyo,” Biles told USA TODAY Sports over the weekend. “How courageous, how brave I am. Because I always like to fake bravery. But I really think that solidified me being brave, speaking up for myself and just putting myself first.

“A lot of things that I would have never experienced or believed in as much … if that experience didn't happen.”

'How courageous, how brave I am':
What Simone Biles learned from Tokyo Olympics

On withdrawing at the Olympics


“We also have to focus on ourselves, because at the end of the day, we’re human, too,” Biles said. “So, we have to protect our mind and our body, rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do.”

On depression


Biles told Vogue in 2020 that she was "very depressed" in 2016 as fellow gymnasts came forward about Nassar's abuse.

“At one point I slept so much because, for me, it was the closest thing to death without harming myself. It was an escape from all of my thoughts, from the world, from what I was dealing with. It was a really dark time," she said.
  ~  from 'That solidified me being brave': Simone Biles' most powerful statements about mental health

No More Tears   :'(



RELATED (Old News): Fuck the Olympics’: Inside Japan’s War to Dodge a COVID Disaster [NO TIME FOR GAMES]

Remember this? (updated this past spring):

From desperate doctors to famous film directors and former Japanese mafia members—the outrage against this summer’s “COVID Olympics” is uniting Japan.

“Maybe not everyone says it, but most people with common sense here are against holding the Olympics in the middle of what amounts to a war. The only people gunning for it are those who have a vested interest in the games or money at stake,” Takegaki told The Daily Beast.

Where spirits get eaten :: PROTECT YOUR SPIRIT

« Last Edit: October 21, 2021, 11:26:08 pm by The Idiot »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Odd Man Out & Philosophical Friendship
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2021, 03:08:09 am »
"Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, `What you too? I thought I was the only one." – C.S. Lewis


Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Odd Man Out & Philosophical Friendship
« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2021, 09:57:37 am »
If Nietzsche sees a philosopher’s metaphysical and moral views as mere manifestations of his or her psychological needs, we may suspect that Nietzsche would not seriously offer similar views of his own.   
(Jared Riggs - A Nietschean Diognosis of Philosophers)



« Last Edit: December 13, 2021, 02:03:19 pm by sentient nothing »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Odd Man Out & Philosophical Friendship
« Reply #5 on: January 16, 2022, 05:06:32 pm »
In a performance of Heart of Glass, Deborah Harey mentions that the race for "nuclear superiority" can only end with the "destruction of civilization" :

https://youtu.be/12w5wykucgk?t=142

 :-*

To have a heart of glass means to be very easily affected by something or someone. Often, this idiom is used to describe a romantic heart that is easily hurt or broken. A person with a heart of glass is generally regarded by others as being extremely sensitive and emotionally fragile.

A person who has a heart of glass is usually easily hurt by others. This person is known to be very emotionally fragile and often needs special handling in order to avoid offending. A similar expression that may apply to a person with a heart of glass includes a person who wears her heart on her sleeve.

Items made of glass are typically fragile and require special handling. In this same way, the human heart often exists, particularly in situations of romantic love. Both may be easily broken if not handled with special care.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2022, 05:16:18 pm by Gorticide »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~