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Nation of One

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The Cave Is Empty
« on: October 04, 2015, 10:27:02 pm »
Taking a break from math and computing for a moment, I did a quick search for "Metzinger" (author of Being No One - which theorizes that no one is or has ever been a "self" let alone a "soul") and "does the soul exist".

We are discussing ideas here, and it is funny how we refer to thinkers who dispute with words ... it seems that words are all we have ... No wonder this is so frustrating.

While Metzinger's book, Being No One is 700 pages, this critique I just found is only 30 pages.

 The Problem With Metzinger

Graham Harman introduces us to a clever term, "Object Oriented Ontology".   ::)

Quote from: Graham Harmann
This article on Metzinger is of course not written in a vacuum. Any reader even loosely familiar with my publications knows that I defend a position called ‘object-oriented ontology’ (OOO).    As the article proceeds, it will be interesting to assess how Metzinger looks from an OOO standpoint. The answer so far is that he does not look bad at all. Against the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology, OOO argues that reality is withdrawn from direct conscious access, which gives us nothing but loose translations of a world extending deep beneath our awareness. 18 We can even agree with Metzinger about the derivative status of the human experience of time. In fact, OOO goes a step further, and holds that the flow of time exists only for some observer.

In short, Metzinger and OOO are in total agreement that there is no direct access to the real, which forever lurks at a layer of the world that consciousness cannot possibly unlock. On this point, the obscurity of Metzinger’s cosmos resembles the obscurity of our own

NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY VS. PHENOMENOLOGY

Isn't it uncanny how one thing leads to another.  Does the soul exist leads me to ask the stronger question, does the self exist?   A 30 page paper criticizing Thomas Metzinger's 700 page theoretical work in neurophenomenology in which he criticizes Husserl ... leads me to a little book written in 1894, which means this Twardowski was a contemporary of Husserl.

The little book, On the Content and Object of Presentations is available in PDF and DJVU format at en.bookfi.org.

Quote from: Graham Harman
In this sparkling little work, Twardowski tries to clarify the relations between an ‘object’ outside the mind and a ‘content’ inside it. Although Husserl was seven years older than Twardowski, he developed more slowly, and reached philosophical maturity only after wrestling with Twardowski’s ideas throughout much of the 1890’s.

Harman continues (about Metzinger), "In short, rather than turning the self into a fictional unreality he turns it into a science fictional reality, in which the human is just another bizarre species whose experience is generated by specific constraints, just as reptiles, insects, and extraterrestrials might have different lives from ours at this very moment."

In none of the texts is Schopenhauer mentioned, not even the one from 1894. 

I wonder if this is what Schopenhauer is criticizing in "The Will in Nature" when he mocks "Rational Psychology" and the shallow-minded Rationalists ...


THERE IS NO SELF

The non-existence of the self is intended as the major theme of Metzinger’s book.

"[This book’s] main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self."

The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model…   You don’t see it. But you see with it.

Here we may find a rational reason to forgive ourselves and others (and even other species) for being such nasty creatures:  This is not your fault.  Evolution has made you this way.

Conceptual confusions can only be avoided if one stops making broad claims referring to the “self” in a naive-realistic way (p.379 of Being No One)


Quote
The radical conclusion Metzinger draws from this is that ‘all selves are either hallucinated
(phenomenologically), or elements of inaccurate, reificatory phenomenological descriptions’. (462) The everyday notion of the self is merely folk-psychological (302), any personal-level self is merely metaphorical (393), and belief in the self is not epistemically justified (403). It is helpful to remember that Metzinger already made the same critique of phenomenological objects. The title Being No One could easily have been expanded to Being Nothing, covering objects of experience no less than the experiencing self. The only difference is that the self, as what underlies all of these shifting objects of experience, is upheld even more naively and desperately by folk psychologists. Where ‘the folk-psychology of self-consciousness naively, successfully, and [consistently] tells us that a self simply is whatever I subjectively experience myself as’, (268) the fact is that ‘what we often, naively, call “the self” in folk-psychological contexts is the phenomenal self, the content of self-consciousness, given in phenomenal experience’. (302-303) On one level this simply reflects the perfectly valid point that mental self-representation ‘is not a process
by which we truly are “infinitely close” to ourselves’. (273) But from the fact that a pure,
direct gaze at ourselves is impossible it does not follow that we ourselves do not exist.

In a truly refreshing move, Metzinger draws on a classical Indian source to justify the point: ‘Śa ṃ kara… in his Vivikacudamani, or Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, argued that just as we don’t confuse ourselves with the shadow cast by our own body, or with a reflection of it, or with the body as it appears in a dream or in imagination, we should not identify with what appears to be our bodily self right now’. (549-550) What Metzinger neglects to note is that Śa ṃ kara makes this point not in order to decompose the self into a ‘dynamic subpersonal physical process’, but in order to defend the concept of the soul in its union with Brahma, not the sort of doctrine that Metzinger generally endorses.


Quote from: Thomas Metzinger
You cannot believe it… You cannot believe in the truth of this idea.  But take comfort in your errors,  for ‘some types of false belief may even be conducive to mental health.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2017, 09:46:15 am by Raskolnikov »
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Holden

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The First Antinomy (of Space and Time)
Thesis:
The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.
Anti-thesis:
The world has no beginning, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.
The Second Antinomy (of Atomism)   
Thesis:
Every composite substance in the world is made up of simple parts, and nothing anywhere exists save the simple or what is composed of the simple.
Anti-thesis:
No composite thing in the world is made up of simple parts, and there nowhere exists in the world anything simple.

The Third Antinomy (of Spontaneity and Causal Determinism)   
Thesis:
Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. To explain these appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of Spontaneity.
Anti-thesis:
There is no Spontaneity; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.
The Fourth Antinomy (of Necessary Being or Not)   
Thesis:
There belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, a being that is absolutely necessary.
Anti-thesis:
An absolutely necessary being nowhere exists in the world, nor does it exist outside the world as its cause.
« Last Edit: October 07, 2015, 02:52:23 pm by Holden »
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Nation of One

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #2 on: October 08, 2015, 10:09:33 pm »
"There is no Spontaneity; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature."

There is a section in Ligotti's philosophical manifesto, the one where he is boldly blaspheming, where he even goes so far as to blaspheme against Nature.

Everything is Nature's fault, both Creator and Devil at once.

Quote
Thesis: Every composite substance in the world is made up of simple parts, and nothing anywhere exists save the simple or what is composed of the simple.

Anti-thesis: No composite thing in the world is made up of simple parts, and there nowhere exists in the world anything simple.

Do we, as human beings, try to simplify things for the sake of mental health?

Was Kant himself trying to protect his head from going insane?  Is this why he wanted to map out the limits of reason, so as to protect himself from his own mind?

I like "Anti" things ... What had caught my eye about one, FL, was his Anti-Badiou and his Non-Philosophy.   I had wanted to discuss these things, but have not, basically for two reasons, (1) I did not want to discourage you from reading Kant and Schopenhauer.  I am glad you are reading Schopenhauer.   and (2) I think I subconsciously want to go insane (in a harmless manner, if possible) by studying in a radically honest manner:  by going slow, by only giving my attention to that which interests me at the moment, and to move along when I lose interest.

So much becomes like a religion unless we choose our own insanity as our one true religion.  Even which "programming language" one explores can become religious.  Even though I have the Python fever, I want to force myself to go over some C++ and even some C.

Quote
One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound.

One would think one has all the time in the world to explore everything of interest, but this is not the way our minds work ... right?

I'm going to check out this 11 paged Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy because this is what I hunted down on a whim. 

Madness beckons us.

Quote
Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical (making critical remarks about Bergson and Freud for example) while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (especially the latter in the guise of the former).

This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction (or sanity breakdown) and an ontological destruction (or unleashing of the corrosive forces of the cosmos)

sanity breakdown

There are different kinds of madness.  I have tasted the madness of hitting the liquor store at 9AM repeatedly, so my current madness (for books, specifically mathematics and computing books) is, I think, a bit healthier.

Quote from: Thomas Ligotti
We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then?
« Last Edit: October 08, 2015, 11:29:40 pm by H »
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

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Holden

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #3 on: October 09, 2015, 01:34:57 pm »
I hope your probation period  gets over soon.
You want to go insane...
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion...one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2015, 01:39:38 pm by Holden »
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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #4 on: October 09, 2015, 05:17:16 pm »
Lucidity ... hmmm .... I say I want to go insane, but maybe I am not wording this properly.  As you realize, there is so much to know and explore that one can easily become overwhelmed.  Lucidity.  It appears that I can maintain lucidity only by shutting out all that is "over my head" and focusing my attention only on that which I can fathom.

So, when I say I want to go insane, maybe what I really mean is that I want to embrace the chaotic nature of thought rather than try to force it to be tame and well-ordered.   

I wonder how many of us there are, those who have a deep interest in "science" or "mathematics" or "philosophy" yet somehow feel on the outside or "just hobbyists".

Doesn't Robert Pirsig explore this phenomenon in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ... how some will not work on their own motorcycle because they see it as being a part of that complicated technology of the Giant Mass Industrial [KEEP OUT, NO TRESSPASSING] Thing ... or are just put off by technical manuals and "science" in general.

He split it up into "classical quality" versus "romantic quality" ... It is central to the rebellions of the 1960's where science was seen as "square".

Pirsig did the maintenance on his own motorcycle and was able to find the Buddha as easily in a computer circuit as from the mountain in the forest.

Do you ever find yourself at first enthusiastic about going through a text book, and then, after around the 4th chapter, losing interest?  There is a certain defiance that kicks in, as if to say, "Thank goodness I am not a mathematics student under this instructor's tutelage.  I will just skim over this stuff and see if I run across it in less intimidating form somewhere else."


By now I know my attention is limited, and I accept that i can only fathom so much.  I am just thankful that I am interested in certain areas of study as a hobby, as a pastime, and not as a professional in the industry or academia.

I feel much more content since I have acknowledged that the notes I keep are generally just notes to track where my head has been at.  I am not trying to be some kind of Kafka.  This is why the idea of madness appeals to me.

Schopenhauer referred to certain mad scribblings, and yet I see my own notes as such:  Diary of a Madman.  I have no choice but to find it funny that my intellect has exhausted itself in order to demonstrate its own limitations.

This does not discourage me from exploring areas of interest, but I do not intend to "master" any of it.  As I've said before, my goals are quite humble, and I cherish the very small breakthroughs I make as far as "understanding" goes.


« Last Edit: October 09, 2015, 06:00:00 pm by H »
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

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Holden

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #5 on: October 10, 2015, 08:19:24 am »
Could you please explain what anti-philosophy is ? Would you call Cioran's philosophy,anti-philosophy,but not Schopenhauer's?
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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #6 on: October 10, 2015, 11:18:09 am »
I had made reference to Francois Laruelle's "Non-Philosophy" ... I do not want to distract you with this, and I have to clarify that this thinker is on the queue, that I have not explored this. 

I do appreciate that Cioran was non-systematic, as was Nietzsche, in that neither is trying to create a unified philosophical system or doctrine.

While Schopenhauer did rail against academic philosophy as an institution, he did propose a "system" with Immanuel Kant's work as a kind of canon. 

Now, I'm not sure where Laruelle is coming from with "Non-Philosophy" and "Anti-Badiou", but, like I said, I appreciate Cioran's total lack of any "doctrine" ... he wrote aphorisms ... like Dostoyevsky's underground man, just jotting down little paragraphs that, as Henry Fool might say, blow a whole through this world's idea of itself, a brutal iconoclast knocking down idols.

I tend to stay close to the ground, so when I fall, it is only a matter of rolling on the dirt, whereas I do see how Alain Badiou may be setting himself up on a perch as "the great contender" ...  :D

I am intrigued by the writings of Nick Land as well as Ray Brassier who wrote the forward to Thomas Ligotti's "philosophical manifesto" ... and as is stated in the wiki article, English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s non-philosophy in Radical Philosophy in 2003 and critically incorporated aspects of that work into his own project, set out in Nihil Unbound.

Also from the wiki: 

Laruelle claims that all forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, but that all forms of philosophy remain constitutively blind to this decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle is concerned with here is the dialectical splitting of the world in order to grasp the world philosophically. Laruelle claims that the decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically. In this sense, non-philosophy is a science of philosophy.

I think the Great Mother of all the sciences, the Queen, Mathematics, can help keep this in perspective for us.  Weren't the first "philosophers" called Logicians?

Non-Philosophy is a subset of Philosophy, right?

I mean, non-philosophy belongs to philosophy, no?

Could this non-philosophy be related to the empty set?

We have run into the same walls as Wittgenstein and Pirsig and Kant because we are in-the-flesh and only know a world as it is filtered through our sensory apparatus.  Maybe non-philosophy is just this acknowledgement that philosophy can only go so far.  Isn't that why some student gets whacked with the "enlightenment stick" ?

I don't know.  Some psychiatrists may say that mathematics is only in the head, and yet, as you like to point out, the whole freaking world is in our head, so what's up with this "only" part?

By the way, I have not purchased a hard copy book since I had been released from the county lock-up back in May (2015).  After an exhaustive search and research and scanning, I had made a decision.  The book arrived this morning:  Elements of Programming by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones.

It is an elegant little canonical text that may have an impact on my thinking for the rest of my life on earth.  I think it will encourage be to make mathematical notation a part of my thought processes again, so any readings and exercises having to do with Propositional Logic will be beneficial to helping me think more clearly and elegantly.

I don't really want to go mad, although, when I use the term "insanity" I am using it with an understanding of Robert Pirsig's view on this (see LILA).  He said once that the insane are able to see what a bunch of phonies the sane are, and they (we?) resent it!

What is "objective reality" anyway?

So there are specific texts, some quite technical, that I want to go through (as slowly as my manic brain will allow) while slowly going through the highly theoretical Elements of Programming.  My god, Holden, I can see why the Pythagoreans formed a cult around the very things we discuss.  It matters to us.

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”  (Pirsig, from Lila)

Follow your bliss.  I suspect your bliss is contemplating mathematical ideas.
« Last Edit: November 02, 2019, 11:05:02 am by mike »
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

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Let's see, the last post in this thread was the 10th day of October, 2015.
Today is the 6th day of April, 2017. 

My mind was racing last night, so at around 2AM I was reading through Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy by Ben Woodard (author of Slime Dynamics).

He makes a claim that struck a chord with me.

Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” 

Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism — always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’ — combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism (La Folie dans la raison pure). I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it (535-536).

An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world.

Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction.

PHILOSOPHY AND MADNESS:


Quote from: Schopenhauer
The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream.

Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states:

"We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then?" (Venger Satanis, 2008)

...  :-\

There is the horror that nothing is what it appears to be.  See The philosophy of cosmic horror fiction: H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti.

Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty.

As much as I appreciate Schopenhauer's devotion to Kant, I could never get into Kant's works, except for the parts about noumena vs. phenomena. 

Further explorations into this theme:  Loving the Alien: Thomas Ligotti and the Psychology of Cosmic Horror by Michael Clune.

It's no wonder I seek refuge in the exercises in old math textbooks and tinkering around with basic computer programming dealing with elementary operations.  Do you see why?

If Kant constructed his entire philosophical edifice to defend reason and rationality from the chaos of madness, it is quite conceivable that the purpose which my "mathematical activities" serve is to calm me down and to protect my mind from itself.

The foundations of mathematics are like some kind of raft I cling to in an ocean of cosmic horror.

I think I may even be applying a kind of defamiliarization in the way I approach mathematics.  Could it be that the feeling of having forgotten everything we had studied is this art of defamiliarization?

From Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena:

"To have original, extraordinary, perhaps even immortal ideas, one need only isolate oneself from the world for a few minutes so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence".

When I find myself fed up and disgusted with how incapable the intellect is of understanding life itself, I am comforted by its humble mathematical investigations. 

Supposedly, madness is something that is associated with a faulty intellect, but my experience of madness seems to happen in my guts, in my heart, my entire being, in what Holden refers to as "the screams of agony".

Holden is on point when he points out that my interest in fine tuning my mathematical understanding has a calming effect on me, much like music supposedly calms the savage.

I dare say, I look for existential security in my old math book from senior year in high school.  A book that might have horrified the 17 year-old seems kind of elegant to the 50 year old.  There is something calming about finding one is digesting the material.   And while it does not help me solve the great riddle of existence, it helps me to forget about the riddles I will never be able to solve and focus on problems I stand a chance at solving, like finding the distance of a point to a line.  Ah ... perhaps this is how I distract myself from the existential meltdown awaiting us all ...
« Last Edit: April 06, 2017, 11:46:10 am by Raskolnikov »
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 ~

Holden

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #8 on: April 06, 2017, 01:55:48 pm »
There’s a colleague of mine in the office who has three small daughters. The youngest one,who I think is four,suffers from epilepsy fits. All this man constantly thinks about is the next promotion. He keeps beseeching the boss constantly to give him the best "grade" possible & to promote him as soon as possible. The other day,I told the boss bluntly that I am not looking for any kind of promotion,hell,I told him that he can give the worst grade imaginable,if he is so inclined.

I have defanged the snake to the extent possible while my colleague feed milk to it.
I find great deal of comfort in horror.Lovecraftian horror.  I think I would very much like to live the way Lovecraft did,I mean a non-commerical life,how he never used to bother to collect his fee for writing stories.
People are amazed that I don't want to get married & I am amazed that they get married & keep having one kid after another.
They call Lovecraft a racist ,but as that French author Houellebecq says that when racism is distilled to its essence it’s the fear of the"other".
I think in its purest form this fear embraces not just the other ethnicities but even one's own culture ,one's own body ,even one's own self.

Maybe you have read the “Call of Cthulu” already,the chief antagonist there is this octopus like creature which I think stands for existence itself. One just can’t fight all the squirming arms of the octopus.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2019, 11:13:27 am »
Quote from: Holden
Could you please explain what anti-philosophy is ? Would you call Cioran's philosophy,anti-philosophy,but not Schopenhauer's?

I was wondering if you have come to any conclusions about the throwing about of the term anti-philosophy, and if it is similar to non-philosophy, or if it is even worth bothering our heads about?

Is all the academic philosophy and all the ancient religious scrolls just part of the grand carcass of our species?   Are not all our technological apparati, including these very alphabetic symbols, destined to be swallowed by the Great Orb of Galactic "Time" ?

At any moment, my brain might overload and snap like a twig.   :-\ :'(



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 ~

Silenus

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2019, 11:21:34 am »
I suppose it doesn't matter what the label, but maybe the small group of nerve-bundles that take refuge here would agree that we think and write without system, anti-systemic. To say that we would have a system, or that our viewpoints are outright systems of pessimism, cynicism, antinatalism, etc would be to assume that we have a solution; that the system rounds out to an "endpoint."

Maybe I'm not being a good participant of this forum, but I don't think any of us propose solutions. We do have our niches to hide in, where one can form fragments of disillusionment within the minute moments of clarity, if any are to be had at all...
« Last Edit: November 02, 2019, 11:23:27 am by Silenus »

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

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Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #11 on: November 02, 2019, 01:26:04 pm »
Our physical vulnerability in a hostile universe seems to make a mockery of the technological marvels we take as our own.  As I type these words I feel like a grotesquely vulnerable creature, considering "I" am this bundle of nerves and appetites and frustrated, tormented, humiliated will.

When the stomach allows me to be giddy or mirthful, I jump on it.   If the brain can detach from the overall existential predicament, and get into the abstract realm between ideas and code, between invisible mind stuff into tangible processes organizing bits according to types, well, then maybe there is some kind of primordial delight in "learning" or "intellectual transformation/development".

As David Abram reminds us, all the intellectual wonder over the elegance and beauty of some software does not change the unpleasant nature of the human world in its relation to the rest of the biosphere.

The medical authorities diagnose people who cycle these drastic extremes moods as "bipolar," but I suspect we are simply those least apologetic about our internal states.    The "civilizing" process may not have been entirely successful on me in that I strongly resist feeling any guilt, sin, or blame.  I do not like to be made to feel shame not gratitude, although the "spirituality disguised as therapy" industry likes to shove gratitude down its clients' throats until they are gagging on it.    ::)
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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Edith Sitwell giving readings
14 Moscow Road
Osbert's giving champagne parties
Sachie's got a cold
Gertrude's hanging pictures
Alice making tea
Me, I do the only thing that still
Makes sense to me
I do the Rock
I do the Rock Rock

John and Yoko farming beef
Raising protein quota
Sometimes they make love and art
Inside the Dakota
Rodney's feeling sexy
Mick is really frightfully bold
Me, I do the only thing
That stops me growing old
I do the Rock
I do the Rock Rock
I do the Rock Rock Rock

Well, it's stimulating

Solzhenitsyn feels exposed
Build a barbed-wired prison
Nietzsche's six feet under
But his babies still got rhythm
Einstein's celebrating ten decades
But I'm afraid philosophy
Is just too much responsibility for me
I do the Rock
I do the Rock

Baby Ruth and Dizzy Dean
Best and Colin Cowdrey
Little Mo, Virginia Wade
Pistol Pete and O.J
I've always like DiMaggio
And Rockne's pretty Knute you know
I could never whack a ball
With such velocity
I do the Rock
I do the Rock
I do the Rock

When I can get it
It's stimulating - I'm a keen student

Liz and Dick and Britt and Liza
Jaclyn, Kate and Farah
Meg and Roddy, John Travolta
Governor Brown and Linda
Interview and People Magazine
Miss Rona and the Queen
It must be really frightful
To attract publicity
I do the Rock
Myself
I do the Rock

Carter, Begin and Sadat
Brezhnev, Teng and Castro
Everyday negotiate us closer to disastro
Idi Amin and the Shah
And Al Fatah is quite bizarre
I could never get the hang of ideology

I do the Rock
I do the Rock
I do the Ro...
I do the Ro...
I do the Ro...
I do the Ro...
Do the Ro...
Do the Ro...
I do, I do, I do, I do
Do the Rock

Sunshine, Sunshinin' in
Sunshine, Sunshine
Well you can't get enough of it man
Sunshine, Sunshine
Oh, we got the top down now
If you don't have the top down, pull the top down
How often do you get a sunny day
Come to the rock, the rock will cure your ills, man
Stimulating, stimulating
Sunshine
Sunshine, Sunshine
Been a really hard winter, man
You deserve it, ya know
Everybody do, everybody do, everybody
Sunshine, Sunshine
« Last Edit: April 23, 2021, 02:34:45 am by Sticks und Stones »
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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  • Life teaches me not to want it.
    • What Now?
Re: The Cave Is Empty
« Reply #13 on: October 31, 2021, 04:31:29 am »
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 ~