Though they are easy to hate, I love public and common aphorisms because often they are simplified versions of compelling philosophical questions. The "tree falls" idea as an example of the problem of qualia. The "chicken or the egg" as an example of the problem of drawing lines and defining things, of Nietzsche's problem with pluralizing "leaves" ( Read more... )

Me: "There are many pieces of great literature which encompass one of two approaches: the person standing in front of the wall and responding to it, whether loving or hating it; and the person butting their head against the immovable wall stubbornly, knowing it's immovable and not caring. I love many of the ones in those categories, but my ( Read more... )

As an aside, I want to defend physicalism, because it is defined in a negative statement on wikipedia ( Read more... )

Allegedly, as the quote goes, "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged". This is cutesie in the way that conservative Machiavellians are cutesie-- in a severely stunted way. In a way that one might feel sympathy for a beaten dog who fails to ever recover from its beating, not because it was beaten too badly but because it was just a weakling ( Read more... )

It's kind of outrageous, isn't it, the proportion of your level of dedication to your own greatness relative to how long you have felt the pull toward greatness? Finally, of course, it's not that outrageous, what with your empathy and all, your ability to understand how things became what they are, even including your own chain of progression; but ( Read more... )

So the weight of the world is on Jerome's shoulders. But he sees that suffering is the way of things, he hates it, but must have it. He sees the poor young ones fucking; they have found it, and all this time he has sought it in outrageous ways-- yet how could his life have been more interrupted than for him to have become the cure for the world's ( Read more... )

The third chapter, 'Petrifaction', should be all written without interruption. Because he is finally released of the fragmentation of understanding the world in snippets. All his snippets are shown to be unified. He experiences them as only someone with a certain understanding of the world can, not that hippie or PC or pseudo-poetical idea that ( Read more... )

This is a funny thing to say, presumed in the first place, but the irony is that it requires deep and intense study of him to understand that it's true ( Read more... )

I want to write and type simply for the sake of typing so I shall now do so and I don't quite know what to write but because I want to watch this movie called Come and See by the Russian Elem Klimov which is the favorite of one of the smartest people I know period and I have heard only amazing things about the film and its drop into insanity and ( Read more... )

How quickly one can forget that lamentation literally never solves the problem.