Tag: Philosophy

Let Go or Get Dragged. Embracing Change, David Bowie on

CARLOS ALOMAR: The trilogy—Low, “Heroes,” Lodger—changed my life forever. In adjusting myself to the methodologies that were used, and the new form of freethinking and linear thinking that I was exposed to, it changed me. They taught me that every time I came back to David, I needed to change. He wanted R&B, rock and roll, electronic music, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, romantic music. Stir the pot and out comes the Thin White Duke. He was such a restless person. He didn’t like being comfortable. Comfortable is genre-driven, and be careful, because it will outlive you and it will surpass you. David had a lovely saying, “Let go, or be dragged.” He was David 2.0, 3.0.

David Bowie: A Life
Dylan Jones

Apology for Idlers – Robert Louis Stevenson

He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Quote from the essay, Apology for Idlers, which you can find here:
The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
Robert Louis Stevenson

Provocative Drama – Cassavetes on

When people were walking out of Husbands and Faces en masse I never felt bad about that because I thought that it was pain that was taking them out of the theater and I thought that it wasn’t the fact that the film was bad. It was that they couldn’t take it without changing their own lifestyles, which made both those films very successful to me. I thought at the time that Husbands was anti the lifestyle of almost everyone in America. We presented a lifestyle that went against their lifestyle. People walked out because they didn’t want to accept the fact that there could be anything wrong with the way they lived their lives.

It doesn’t matter whether audiences like it; it matters whether they feel something. I feel I’ve succeeded if I make them feel something — anything. The hope is that you don’t make it so easy for an audience that when they go to your movie they have nothing to think about except, ‘That was wonderful. Good. Next! What else are you going to entertain my great appetite with?’ I want to make you mad. Yeah, that’s going to take longer. And yeah, when we have it we’ll let you know, I mean. And we’ll put it there.

Cassavetes on Cassavetes
John Cassavetes, Ray Carney

If Life is a Joke Shouldn’t it be a Good One? – George Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy

“You said that my manner in that book was not serious enough — that I made people laugh in my most earnest moment. Why should humour and laughter be excommunicated? Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes; would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”

Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Tolstoy
https://www.theawl.com/2014/04/a-letter-from-tolstoy/

In Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, the character Winnie says something along the same lines:
“How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?”
(See also: John Simon on Beckett’s Happy Days)

Human beings reveal their character most clearly by what they find ridiculous. – Goethe Quote

The first time I read “Elective Affinities” was in college, when it appeared on the syllabus of a class that I swiftly dropped. The teacher pronounced “Goethe” with enthusiastic violence, making it sound like a noise someone would make when using the toilet. I read the book on my own time and strip-mined it for insights on marriage, fashion and virtue. (“Human beings reveal their character most clearly by what they find ridiculous.”)

It wasn’t until revisiting the book five years later that I saw what I had missed — and, contrarily, probably missed a lot of what I’d understood the first time. The novel is about an aristocratic married couple, Charlotte and Eduard, who fall in love with other people. They work through their rift by exchanging stiff philosophical dialogues about fate, domesticity, nature, freedom, transgression — you know, all the fun stuff. Aphorisms everywhere.

There’s a piece in The American Scholar in which Alberto Manguel describes Goethe as never merely narrating, but always injecting theories into his prose, with those theories permeating each section “like the smell of fried onions.” It remains the only novel I’ve read that feels like the work of a scientist (author) guiding lab rats (characters) through a maze (plot). It was published in 1809 to widespread bafflement.

Wind, Of Course, Goethe and Shame Our critic recommends old and new books.
Molly Young
NYTIMES

Rational Groping

How does one inquire into value? The standard answer these days is, by rational groping. That is, we begin from our intuitive sense of things and then fashion our ethical “intuitions” into a body of knowledge through reflection. Say we ask the question, is time in leisure good in itself? I’m inclined to answer, “Yes, intuitively speaking; it does seem so.” Which is to say something like “Yes, it seems so, but I don’t yet claim to have an explanation why this would be true, and I might change my mind I can’t find one.” But then I can try to think up principles or theories that would explain my intuitive reactions. I can adjust and prune either the intuitions or the principles or theories, until they all fit into a coherent system. I can keep tinkering until the overall fit seems holistically satisfying, much in the way scientists gradually refine theories. John Rawls, the twentieth century’s most influential political philosopher (and Quine’s colleague at Harvard), called this the search for “reflective equilibrium.” It is always a search, in both ethics and science. We never just coast along without the Socratic labors of reexamination. But the search has a destination. We can gain in understanding and confidence.

Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning
Aaron James

When a Scholar Acknowledges All His Sources, He Brings the Day of Redemption a Little Closer – Talmud Quote

His voice is so weightily authoritative that he hardly ever bothers to cite a source or quote a fellow critic. There is, so the sociologist Michael Walzer tells us, ‘a saying in the Talmud that when a scholar acknowledges all his sources, he brings the day of redemption a little closer’, in which case Williams has managed to postpone the Messiah’s arrival indefinitely. Not that he always had that many sources to quote. There were many significant thinkers whom he never read; and while this reflects something of his originality and independence of mind, the way he draws so deeply on his own resources, it also betrays a certain pride and aloofness, a refusal to be beholden to his fellow intellectuals, which is not easy to square with his politics.

Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
Terry Eagleton
(from the section on Raymond Williams. )

Theological Purpose of Hell – Reddit discussion


talhatahir94
I think satan just gives you a tour and shows you around like in mtv cribs

Glenn_Maffews
Shows lake of molten lava…”and this is where the magic happens😉”

HappyDiscussion5469
It could happen to you, cause it happened to me

changdarkelf
If you want an actual answer, satan isn’t punishing you for disobeying God. The Bible teaches that everything good comes from God, and Hell is simply a place of complete separation from him. So it’s pure torture.

Anon_Postings
This. Hell is a result of the fall of man and a man’s choice on earth to knowingly and totally reject God. Hell is a continuation of this separation from God, but now it is absolute separation. And the soul is very aware of this and so suffers in existing in a place devoid of God who is love. The soul realizes their rejection of God. But I do not believe what the soul in hell would feel is regret. It’s too late. There is no love there at all. I think those souls would curse at God. The devil does not really understand love, but one thing is certain–he does not want it to exist.

CatBoyTrip
So basically nothing changes when I die?

random29852367
No more rent

Schattentochter
Supposedly you’d be going through a constant agonizing state of emptiness and craving something completely out of your reach.

Why the middle ages decided to make that all about gore and torture only they know (well, we do too – fear of hell was lucrative af).

maenefa
even Inferno has Satan chained up and frozen at the centre of hell.

86edjustntime
His punishment is self inflicted though. He’s trapped in the ice because he won’t stop beating his wings in rage and generating the ice storm keeping him frozen in place. If he did stop for a while he could escape but he’s a slave to passion and can’t.

Yak_Overflow
So fucking metal

reddit

The felt presence of immediate experience is the only world you will ever know. – Terence McKenna quote

‘If we as a community believe in anything, we believe in feeling good in the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience. This is what has been stolen from you. By capitalism, by religion, by linear thinking, by strategising. We’re always about to be happy. Or we’re always about to be free. And while we’re about to be free and about to be happy, life passes us by. This is because western ideologies are always ideologies of delayed gratification. It comes after death, after retirement, after coitus. It’s always after something that it comes. Well, I’ve got news for you, this kind of thing is chasing your own tail. The felt presence of immediate experience is the only world you will ever know. Everything beyond that is conjecture and supposition.’
Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, bibliophile and butterfly collector.

‘Can I keep this one?’ I asked.
‘Which one?’
‘The quote by Terence McKenna – I’ve never heard of him before.’
‘He was a bit of a guru figure.’
‘Was?’
She must have detected the disappointment in my voice.
‘He died a few years ago.’

Above quote from:

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Mark Hodkinson

The Freedom of the Surfer

Savvy philosophers distill their core insight into a short phrase. For Adam Smith it was “invisible hand,” for David Hume “confined generosity,” for John Rawls “veil of ignorance.” In James’s book, the fundamental idea is “adaptive attunement.” This is what he takes to be “the essence of surfing.” For someone to be surfing, three conditions must be met: He must be attuned to a shifting phenomenon outside of himself (like a wave); he must be adjusting himself in response to it (adapting), “so as to be carried along by its propulsive forces”; and he must be doing so intentionally and “for its own sake” — that is, because negotiating the world in this manner strikes him as intrinsically valuable. You are surfing if and only if you are adaptively attuned.

By defining surfing in this formal and abstract way, James frees himself to talk not just about surfing waves but also about surfing “in an extended sense”: for example, “surfing” through a cocktail party conversation or down a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Surfers surf when they are in the water, but in other aspects of their lives, too — as can we all, and well we should, James contends. He presents adaptive attunement as a fruitful way to understand how much of the world works, as well as a winning strategy for life.
…
James regrets that Sartre did not get to think about surfing. If he had, he might have been led to a different and, as James sees it, more convincing theory of freedom. Sartre was an “incompatibilist” about free will: He considered freedom to be at odds with the deterministic universe implied by our best physics. (In what sense are you free if you could not have acted otherwise?) But James is a compatibilist: He thinks there is a meaningful sense of “freedom” consistent with being trapped by the laws of nature — indeed, he thinks the surfer-derived notion of adaptive attunement captures that sense.

As the surfer knows, freedom is not a matter of imposing your will, Sartre-like, on the world. That’s a surefire way to wipe out. Freedom, rather, is a matter of transcending your will, and accepting the “exchange,” or two-way relationship, between what you intend to do and what you are constrained to do by the forces around you. You take what the wave gives you. In a deterministic universe, freedom is the sensation, known to the adaptively attuned, of “efficacy without control.” The surfer is right; Sartre is wrong.

‘Surfing With Sartre’: Does Riding a Wave Help Solve Existential Mysteries?
James Ryerson

Review of:
SURFING WITH SARTRE
An Aquatic Inquiry Into a Life of Meaning
By Aaron James

The Way We Interpret the Silence Around Us Reflects the Way We Understand the World

…so he died dry, sober, full of hatred for the old drinking self that had wasted twenty years of his life, and still waging a pitiful last campaign against his smoking self – giving up on his deathbed. It was a chosen death, as a matter of fact, he was offered either a few months lingering helplessly, rasping out short, stabby breaths, or a double or so ration of morphine and an immediate release. It was a decision he made in clear consciousness, to that extent an enviable death, but it was slightly marred, in my view, by his wife’s odd sense of style. As he was slipping from the scene, she pressed into one hand a glass of whisky, and between the fingers of the other, a lighted cigarette, thus turning him in the last moments of his life, when too enfeebled to resist but still conscious enough to be aware, into an advertisement for the two things that had destroyed his life. Though I suppose if he’d been photographed and circulated, he might have served as the ghastliest of warnings – look what I’ve done to myself, and with both hands – she described the doing of it, the getting of the lighted cigarette between his fingers, the curling of his fingers around the glass – she’d poured the whisky in after she’d got the glass firmly settled, she said – I asked her with what tenderness I could muster why she’d done it, well, she said, well, that’s how she remembered him in his heyday, when she first met him (both in their mid-forties, divorced, with children), for her he’d been the most glamorous, flamboyant, chain-smoking, whisky-guzzling – and that’s how she’d go on thinking of him, that’s how he’d like to have gone out, didn’t I think so? `He wouldn’t have been seen dead -‘ I wanted to say, but couldn’t, as actually he had been, pretty well – also she was brimming with grief, exhilarated with it, as people sometimes are when they assist a loved one to cross the line, and she had a theatrical background (her father had been famous in musical comedy) and so what could I say – well, volumes, really, but I didn’t, hoping that a brief silence would also be a deep and eloquent one. `I knew you’d approve,’ she said, confirming Wittgenstein’s remark, which I usually think is nonsensical, that our understanding of the world depends on the way we interpret the silence around us.

The Smoking Diaries
Simon Gray. The Smoking Diaries

Who’s More Real – The Character or the Actor Playing the Character – Pirandello Quote

FATHER …On the contrary, I was inviting you to come out of this game [with a warning look at the LEADING LADY]—of art! Art!—which you play here with your actors; and I ask you once again quite seriously: who are you?

DIRECTOR [turning to the ACTORS, astonished and also irritated]. Well, what a bloody nerve! Someone who claims to be a character comes and asks me who I am!

FATHER [dignified, but not overbearing]. A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character really has a life of his own, marked by his own traits, which means that he is always ‘someone’. But a man—I’m not talking about you, but about man in general—a man may well be ‘nobody’.

DIRECTOR Maybe. But you’re asking me, me the Director, the boss! Have you got that?

FATHER [almost under his breath, modestly soft-spoken]. It’s a matter of knowing, sir, whether you, as you are now, really see yourself … in the same way, for example, as you see in retrospect what you once were, with all the illusions you then had; with all those things within and around you, as they then seemed—and indeed truly were for you. Well, sir, when you think back on those illusions which you now no longer have, on everything that no longer ‘seems’ what once for you it ‘was’—don’t you feel, not the boards of this stage, but the earth, the earth itself, give way beneath your feet? For you must conclude that in the same way all ‘this’ that you feel now, all your reality of today, as it is, is destined to seem illusion tomorrow.

DIRECTOR [not understanding much and stunned by the specious argument]. So what? What are you trying to prove?

FATHER. Oh, nothing, sir. Only to make you see that if we [indicating himself and the other CHARACTERS] have no reality beyond the illusion, then maybe you also shouldn’t count too much on your own reality, this reality which you breathe and touch in yourself today, because—like yesterday’s—inevitably, it must reveal itself as illusion tomorrow.

Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello

3 Ways to Manipulate Ideas – John Locke

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:

1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.

2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.

3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke (1690)
(Found in epigraph to the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs )

In Book II of the Essay, Locke gives his positive account of how we acquire the materials of knowledge. Locke distinguishes a variety of different kinds of ideas in Book II. Locke holds that the mind is a tabula rasa or blank sheet until experience in the form of sensation and reflection provide the basic materials—simple ideas—out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed. While the mind may be a blank slate in regard to content, it is plain that Locke thinks we are born with a variety of faculties to receive and abilities to manipulate or process the content once we acquire it. Thus, for example, the mind can engage in three different types of action in putting simple ideas together. The first of these kinds of action is to combine them into complex ideas. Complex ideas are of two kinds, ideas of substances and ideas of modes. Substances are independent existences. Beings that count as substances include God, angels, humans, animals, plants and a variety of constructed things. Modes are dependent existences. These include mathematical and moral ideas, and all the conventional language of religion, politics and culture. The second action which the mind performs is the bringing of two ideas, whether simple or complex, by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them. This gives us our ideas of relations (II.12.1, N: 163). The third act of the mind is the production of our general ideas by abstraction from particulars, leaving out the particular circumstances of time and place, which would limit the application of an idea to a particular individual. In addition to these abilities, there are such faculties as memory which allow for the storing of ideas.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/