Tag: Philosophy

Searching for the Book of Vindication – The Library of Babel, Borges

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad . . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges

The Slacker – Background and Philosophy of

The term achieved renewed popularity following its use in the 1985 film Back to the Future in which James Tolkan‘s character Mr. Strickland chronically refers to Marty McFly, his father George McFly, Biff Tannen, and a group of teenage delinquents as “slackers”.[11] It gained subsequent exposure from the 1989 Superchunk single “Slack Motherfucker”, and the 1990 film Slacker.[12] The television series Rox has been noted for its “depiction of the slacker lifestyle … of the early ’90s”.[13][14][15]

Slacker became widely used in the 1990s to refer to a type of apathetic youth who were cynical and uninterested in political or social causes and as a stereotype for members of Generation X.[16] Richard Linklater, director of the aforementioned 1990 film, commented on the term’s meaning in a 1995 interview, stating that “I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who’s just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I’d like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who’s trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”[17]

The term has connotations of “apathy and aimlessness”.[18] It is also used to refer to an educated person who avoids work, possibly as an anti-materialist stance, who may be viewed as an underachiever.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker

V: What are your parent’s occupations?
DP: My mom’s a teacher and my dad was a white collar clerk working in the customs field. We were pretty poor, and throughout childhood we watched our dad lament about coming to America filled with visions of wealth, and how everybody was becoming rich except him. He struggled and worked well beyond the age of retirement and still never really got ahead. I don’t know how young  I was – maybe around ten – when I realized that you can work all your life and still end up poor. I’d rather not go chasing those rainbows and just be happy with what I have.

Zines, Volume 2 – RE/Search
More self-expression obsession coming at you: in-depth interviews with 12 more unusual publishers. From a 15-year-old suburbanite former punk, to a filmmaker and “tracker” (8-track collector/expert); a French self-publisher of art books (in the original meaning of the word), to the dishwasher whose goal it is to wash dishes in every state of the U.S.A. Also, a history of proletarian novels, zine reviews and much, much more. Read all about it in Zines! Vol. 2!

Excerpt from the interview with Dishwasher Pete

Sunday Evening with Emerson

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.

AN ADDRESS Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838

“The Divinity School Address” is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered as a lecture to the divinity school of Harvard College in 1838. In the essay, Emerson critiques traditional forms of Christianity and religious institutions and calls for a new kind of spirituality based on individual experience and personal insight. He argues that organized religion and its institutions have become stale and irrelevant and that people should seek a deeper understanding of the divine through intuition and experience. He believes that each person has access to the divine within themselves and that this inner spiritual connection is more important than any external religious authority. Throughout the essay, Emerson emphasizes the importance of individuality, self-reliance, and self-discovery in the spiritual realm and calls for a return to a more authentic and personal form of spirituality. By doing so, he challenges the dominant religious and intellectual norms of his time and lays the foundation for a new kind of spiritual and philosophical thought in America.

Good Person Drag

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,” Gabe responded.

Cyrus sat with the thought. Gabe went on, “There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

“Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar

Walt Whitman – The Expansive Self

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.

“ His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, “seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,” continues Dr. Bucke, ”it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history, or against any trades or occupations — not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it.”

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
William James

“feelings don’t just matter – they are what mattering means”

As Plato asked, “Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?” Indeed, feelings don’t just matter—they are what mattering means. We would expect any creature that feels pain when burned and pleasure when fed to call burning and eating bad and good, respectively, just as we would expect an asbestos creature with no digestive tract to find such designations arbitrary. Moral philosophers have tried for centuries to find some other way to define good and bad, but none has ever convinced the rest (or me). We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.

Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert

Desire and the Airport

Senior year of high school my best friend and I, who were both virgins, had to spend at least one night a week hanging around the San Francisco Airport. Why? The dirty magazines they let us flip through at the newstand, of course, and the sexy stewardesses tugging their luggage like dogs on a leash, but more than that it was everybody marching with such military urgency to their destinations, as if everywhere – everywhere in the world: Winnepeg, Tokyo, Milwaukee – were to be desired.

Desire
David Shields
From Collection – In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal

Meditation – Surrender to Impermanence

Meditation is deceptively simple. There is really nothing to do. We sit still and know we are sitting. The mind wanders off and when we catch it wandering we use it as a reminder to continue paying attention. Right View asks us to remember why we are attempting such a peculiar thing. Much of our lives is spent thinking about the future or ruminating about the past, but this dislocation from the present contributes to an ongoing estrangement and a resulting sense of unease. When we are busy trying to manage our lives, our focus on past and future removes us from all we really have, which is the here and now. The Buddha had the rather paradoxical insight that it is difficult to remain comfortably in the moment because we are afraid of uncertainty and change. The present is not static, after all; it is constantly in motion and we can never be absolutely certain about what the next instant will bring. Past and future preoccupy us because we are trying to control things, while being in the present necessitates openness to the unexpected. Rather than resisting change by dwelling in the relative safety of our routine thoughts, as we tend to do in our regular lives, when meditating we practice going with the flow. We surrender to impermanence when we meditate. Wherever it may lead.

Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself
Mark Epstein

Does Luck Even Out or Does Luck Compound?

For example, in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, he asks us to imagine a footrace where one person starts off way behind the rest at the starting line. Would this be unfair? “Yes, if the race is a hundred-yard dash.” But it is fair if this is a marathon, because “in a marathon, such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.” As a succinct summary of this view, he writes, “After all, luck averages out in the long run.”

No, it doesn’t.[*] Suppose you’re born a crack baby. In order to counterbalance this bad luck, does society rush in to ensure that you’ll be raised in relative affluence and with various therapies to overcome your neurodevelopmental problems? No, you are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there. Well then, says society, at least let’s make sure your mother is loving, is stable, has lots of free time to nurture you with books and museum visits. Yeah, right; as we know, your mother is likely to be drowning in the pathological consequences of her own miserable luck in life, with a good chance of leaving you neglected, abused, shuttled through foster homes. Well, does society at least mobilize then to counterbalance that additional bad luck, ensuring that you live in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools? Nope, your neighborhood is likely to be gang-riddled and your school underfunded.

You start out a marathon a few steps back from the rest of the pack in this world of ours. And counter to what Dennett says, a quarter mile in, because you’re still lagging conspicuously at the back of the pack, it’s your ankles that some rogue hyena nips. At the five-mile mark, the rehydration tent is almost out of water and you can get only a few sips of the dregs. By ten miles, you’ve got stomach cramps from the bad water. By twenty miles, your way is blocked by the people who assume the race is done and are sweeping the street. And all the while, you watch the receding backsides of the rest of the runners, each thinking that they’ve earned, they’re entitled to, a decent shot at winning. Luck does not average out over time and, in the words of Levy, “we cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck”; instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further.

In the same paragraph, Dennett writes that “a good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he is really good enough to DESERVE winning, will probably have plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage” (my emphasis). This is one step above believing that God invented poverty to punish sinners.

*A point elegantly argued by philosopher Gregg Caruso in some stirring debates with Dennett.

Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Robert Sapolsky

Intellect – Quotes from Emerson Essay

“The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.”

“The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions..”

“Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.”

“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”

“How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.”

Intellect
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Rule in General, Not Good Idea in Specific Case – Example of

Kraut juice: When Circus Peanuts aren’t enough
Dear Cecil:

At the risk of dragging out an already idiotic discussion (Circus Peanuts suck, period), I just wanted to provide reader Rob Atkinson with some interesting information. A few years back, I worked in a grocery store as a night stocker. A fellow night stocker, we’ll call him “Wayne,” started a stupid morning ritual of trying some bizarre new product at the end of each shift. One morning, his choice was a fine can of kraut juice. We weren’t sure if you were supposed to drink it by itself or what, but the packaging showed a mouthwatering WINE glass full of the green sludge.

Anyway, Wayne popped the cap open and took a big swig. He then began gagging and spitting out as much as he could. His first words after tasting the kraut juice were, “How can this be a marketable product!?!”

After calming down and quelling the desperate attempts of his stomach to return to sender, Wayne sat down, looked at the can, and then chugged the rest of it. After he nearly vomited once again we asked him why he did it. With a face nearly as green as the juice, he replied, “Well, I didn’t want to waste it.”

https://www.straightdope.com/21342305/does-anybody-actually-like-circus-peanuts