So I would think that he certainly acknowledges the reality of 'the imperishable', although I'm only up to the first few chapters of the book. — Wayfarer

I'm reading the Wallace bio. I think Schopenhauer recognizes two imperishables -- the demonic Will and something like Platonic forms. A strange fusion, really, but fascinating.

Schop is saying that philosophy's task is purely critical - in the Kantian sense of making us aware of the limitations of discursive reason. It 'drops you at the border', so to speak. — Wayfarer

My take is that he fundamentally relied upon a direct intuition of the will. We have special direct access to the will in ourselves (our own little piece of the will ) but must simply watch the stone be overpowered by gravity from the outside. The will splits into pieces that eat one another.

But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?). — apokrisis

The other issue is whether philosophy is understood in terms of a quasi-scientific serious-objective metaphysics or as something like a self-critical conceptual response to existence, the working out of an identity perhaps. Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ?
This is a bit like the problem of the criterion. At the highest level there's no 'algorithmic' necessity, but maybe something more like a comparison of hero types.

I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. We could also include drama and epic inasmuch as the history and prestige of personalities plays a role in a rhetoric that may take itself for logic. Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team.

I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics, which is to say that meaning and logic are melted together. We perform logic and semantics at the same time in the inferences we do and do not allow, and our logicsemantics evolves as we use it, always unstable, increasingly self-referential and metacognitive.

I grant that there are formal games that can be played too : symbolic logic, math from a formalist perspective. But we are still stuck at the higher strategic, analogical level when it comes to creating, using, and evaluating them. One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric.

I like the sound of those scrolls. An entire culture sharing an epic like that is nice. They had a language of references in common. That's maybe becoming more difficult as the memory of our world gets larger, and we have, seriously, at least a million channels to choose from. Every once in a while I hear about so-and-so who is apparently famous among the youth, but I've never heard of them. Probably the present has always drowned out much of the past. Is it worse in these days of live projection across a billion screens ? I love my old books for the leverage they give me against my age.

Speaking of scrolls, I suppose we live in the supreme picture age. At their best, modern movies are supreme delivery systems for stories that are already great. But there's (as you say) lots of trash. What kind of pop culture did the Athens of Socrates have ? Horseracing ? Pornography ? Celebrity gossip ? I've read about the Rome of Nero and it's sounds a bit like us, though our Colosseum brutality is simulated. I watched Extractor 2 recently, and the choreography of the violence was amazing and absurd. The star beats down about 40 (?) enemies in a row in an insane prison fight scene. No gladiator could ever live up to Hollywood's hyperreal forgeries. Coming soon: bespoke adaptive synthetic 'wives' who really do know what you want before you do.

The cosy "history of ideas" view on this would be that the Brits/Dutch were unified populations, secure in their community and seeking to express their individuality — apokrisis

I like this approach. The anti-Hegel movement can be read as an expression of egoism (an atomistic ideology of traditional liberalism) against the awareness of the sociality and temporality of reason. The little king of the castle is a ghost made of freewill behind a wall of screens. Even if this is silly, it goes with what really mattered -- the (relative) personal freedom and far more serious interest in technology, the thing itself (giving not only wealth but military power.)

Yes, the ancient idea of passion was actually related to passivity, to being helplessly affected. The more modern idea is to love whatever is your calling intensely. — Janus

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Yes, helplessly affected. That's the meaning I tend. Ovemastered, washed away, swept up, drugged. Young love is like that, or it was for me. When it's reciprocal, it's beyond anything.
Becker writes well on the 'religion of love' that's common among us, analyzes pop songs.

O first great love affair / does anything compare ?

When it's not reciprocated, it's a hell that perhaps one nevertheless is reluctant to part with, for then all magic leaves the world with it. I'm channelling some old memories to write all this.

I think the poem speaks to the idea that loving another should honor their individuality and freedom to the utmost. If this involves letting them go their own way, then so be it. — Janus

As a half-civilized man with some grey hairs creeping in, I agree. But I can't help but think that only a cooling of passion makes this possible. 'I can live without you' seems implied in that admittedly mature attitude. Fair enough...but then life moves toward being a spectacle on the screen for an ego. I speak of this ambivalently. I understand the pull of radical autonomy and basically reconceiving marriage as an intense friendship that includes sex (though sex too loses some of its barbaric-mystic meaning here.)

Let's try this in a different key. Imagine two single mothers trading their children, because in both cases they expect a better fit. Does this not offend us ? But is there no cold-bloodedly ethical/rational case to be made for a switch in some situations ?

So, I don't think seeking the imperishable is the royal road to eternity, in fact quite the opposite. — Janus

I can relate to what you say. Nobby Brown compared lifedeath with undeath or immortality. The immortal is neither alive nor dead. It's frozen. While life, in motion, is always also death.

I think this is part of Heidegger's point about our tendency to identify the permanent with the real. Is there is logical reason for this ? Or an irrational motive ?

At the end of Fast Sofa, a character who was uptight for most of the movie has some insight and loses all fear, basically going 'crazy' and dying in a high speed crash.

I connect this to the 'poisoncure' of philosophy, personified as Hamlet, who questions whether leaving early (dying) is really a thing to be avoided. We typically assume the importance of longevity, as if quantity is not at least threatened with absurdity in the context of the vastness of death.

I'm not equating wisdom with recklessness, but I am challenging the assumption that the goal of life is automatically to live as long as possible (and to identity with something that endures forever). Tristram and Isolde, or the fight for Freedom. We love those plots. Risk is a measure of passion. (Dying for love connects us back to Schopenhauer. The species-pole in us, the genitals, know themselves immortal -- and they overpower the deathfearing ego.

It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others. — Janus

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I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism.

You mentioned some great poets (and whatever we want to call towering Shakespeare.) I'd add some philosophical novelists too: Hesse, Kundera, Sartre.

We probably agree that philosophy is 'bigger' than a specialty topic, as potentially as big as life itself.

Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others. — Janus

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The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism. — Janus

I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism -- where the sense organs become their own product.

Fair enough, although I think it's fair to say that the bulk of their work is directed principally or solely to their academic peer group. I don't know if much of it will filter through to popular culture. — Wayfarer

Pop culture is IMO way too visceral-mythic for any 'serious' intellectualizing. They don't care about Bertrand Russel's 'famous' beef with Hegel, never heard of Popper unless you put corn in it.

.

It is beginning to change with systems theory, embodied cognition, phenomenology, and so on, but that implicit exclusion of the subject is still influential in science and culture. — Wayfarer

I think we both already touched on the main reason why. Even though I think philosophy is science in some high grand sense, it can't be denied that a methodical stupidity has functioned brilliantly. As @apokrisis put it (quoting Newton), hypothesis non fingo, motherfuckers!

I studied real analysis for years ( it has a severe beauty, and writing proofs is a craft). But how many engineers or random citizens trust their calculus because of real analysis proofs ? I think we just trust the familiar airplanes in the air and the bridges that have stood for decades and the pills that reliably make us feel good. O the brutal rhetoric of the skyscraper and the opiate! Math is respected because it's connected to 'magic' technology and not the other way around. We elite exceptions, unsullied by indoor plumbing, by are excluded of course. [In other words, I confess my monkey addiction (so far) to all the usual machines. I love my M1 chip. ]

And would you agree that this insight is more typical of phenomenology and existentialism than Anglo philosophy? — Wayfarer

I'm tempted to say yes, thinking of early AP, but there are people like Sellars and Brandom and Braver, to name just a few.

You're no doubt aware that the Hegelian (and generally German) approach to science is radically different from modern scientific method — Wayfarer

Indeed. I've tended to favor the Germans because they try to account for existence as a whole. Maybe there's something stormy and grandiose in some of it, but to me that's more good than bad. This stuff involves us. We risk ourselves (in our current formulation) when we open certain books --- though perhaps this risk diminishes with exposure.

If reason, time and space emanate from god's nature (and who is to know if this is the case?) then god presumably transcends such strictures and as such is likely unintelligible. — Tom Storm

Might add that it's hard if not impossible to think of the emergence of space and time, as if we were outside of space or before time. Someone can come along and swear that they dream of round squares, but I can't believe them (or be sure that I understand them.)

Scientists seek truth, while philosophers argue the definition of truth. Interesting interplay. — jgill

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I'd say that philosophers want the truth about truth. But in that pursuit they have to question constantly whether they do or even can know what they are supposed to mean.

Perhaps the definition (of 'truth' or 'logic') is discovered through conversation research, sort of like patterns in the natural numbers. There's a constraint on our creativity, though it's hard or impossible to specify ahead of time, for that too is part of the conversational research.

In some ways, proper science is an escape from the treacherous mud of the most radical thinking (which turns like a snake to bite itself constantly.). This doesn't mean that it's easier, of course. It's much easier to be bad philosopher than a good scientist. And even good philosophers don't obviously help much with passing out of gadgets.

The profound underlying difficulty is, however, that we're not actually outside of, or separate to, reality, as such - an awareness which is found throughout phenomenology and existentialism... — Wayfarer

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We aren't outside of it, and it isn't in us. Co-given, entangled.

Only sometimes? — Wayfarer

Yes, only sometimes. But often!

Well said. I should probably clarify. When I talk about philosophy, I'm thinking of 'Shakespeare' -- something that ruthlessly transcends but also includes academia. Socrates earned himself a drink of hemlock. I definitely want to include thoughtcrime, 'inadmissible' views. I don't mean that I want to approve of them all. I mean that I want philosophy to be that radical of a concept. I don't like the idea of it being the pet of respectable people or limited to (shine of the crawls, sin of the cause, sign of the gross) what one can say on campuses.

The idea of radical thinking is (I claim) 'possibility rather than substance' -- a necessarily vague intention leading to unpredictable results, an identity crisis that drags a partially constraining history behind it. Socrates was a corruptor of the youth. At least I prefer him as that kind of unsentimentalized and undecidable figure -- foolosophy as pharmakon, as poisoncure poured in the porches of my near.

The consensus achievable in 'science proper' is beautiful. I was unwordly enough to go to grad school for pure math myself (not exactly science but). Lately I'm studying Joyce. Ulysses is not not science ! More seriously, I personally prefer a broader conception of what knowledge is and how it's obtained and communicated. Is there knowledge in music? In visual art ? If not, that'd be logocentrism -- a term that of course preceded Derrida. It's not automatic of course that logocentrism is bad, and it'd be questionable to argue such a point. It's more about pointing out a horizon, gesturing toward the vastness of the space of possibility. [But I'm incapable of believing in ghosts, however fun it looks. So there's that. ]

Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone.

But there was always a valuable insight at the core of MS. The living body (the blazing brain) is not a bit player but the tragic hero on our stage. The living flesh is as primordial as language and world and tribe.

All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men.

I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this?

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

Your mathematics background shining through. :cool: — jgill

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Thanks!

Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to. — Srap Tasmaner

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I think 'philosophy' also works. Or really it's the idea of open-mindedness itself, right ? A metaphor too. Open, permeable, inclusive, ...

If we've done an assessment of logical possibility and determined that of all the ways the universe could appear, the chances of it appearing as it is are 1 in 10^10^123, that doesn't really tell us anything about how this one possibility manifested, whether there was divine intervention or not. It just means we can imagine a huge number of other ways the universe could have been. — frank

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If we start from the Principle of Indifference, shouldn't we expect a whirlwind of possible experiences, not a seemingly law governed progression such that empirical efforts succeed in defining future experiences based on mathematical laws (e.g., the successes of the sciences)? — Count Timothy von Icarus

For me it's hard to imagine intelligent life that hasn't imposed order on its perceptions. Life itself seems to be a kind of order that exploits its environment. It may be that you are trying to see around the very cognition that makes the attempt intelligible.

Something along the lines of, "Our knowledge of how things work in reality proves that we know nothing about how things work in reality." — wonderer1

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I gave the work a look once, and to me it was pretty bad in just this way.

More generally, this mistake is surprisingly common.

FWIW, I think a similar projection is involved in the personal hero myth or the archetype of The Cause. In this case, sorting projection from actual human nature tends toward Qoheleth. Or the best lack all convention, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. This old man, as I picture him, drifts above the world that he can almost take or leave. As James put it, the world is a stage for heroic action.

To me it seems like the two great incitements to life (the two glues that keep a soul in the world) are the romantic-sexual game and the egoistic status game, both largely dependent perhaps on illusion/projection.

love is everything
the universal glue that binds
yet bondage is unkind
to love so let it go—
although
you held on tight
you must be ever ready
to say “goodnight” — Janus

Reminds me of 'Love is a rose but you better not pluck it, it only grows when it's on the vine.' Deep idea there. I think it'd be very difficult to be detached from a spouse or a dear friend (a creative partner perhaps in a project that's going well.). Definitely a noble ideal, to transcend a grasping possessive jealousy. The quote reminds me also a bit of some stuff in Phaedrus. How does a greedy young soul become wise ? What emotional training is necessary ?

To me projection seems like a key concept. The young person's love object is largely 'false.' The beloved as a real person functions largely as a screen for this unconscious projection. The lover is self-fooled and finds something essential to him out of his control.

Through suffering and reflection, the lover separates projection from reality, becoming less capable of intense passion. This is the form of beauty becoming detached from individual bodies and being recognizing as an idea (etymologically a [projected] image).

It's a requirement for me that the approach I end up with is science-friendly. — Srap Tasmaner

I relate, but I also like to see this heroic identification with science from the outside, as part of the performance of that heroic role. Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism?

I sometimes think we tend to kneel beneath the god of engineering. It's not so much careful reasoning that convinces but naked power. I like the countercultural edge of philosophy (it's way too easy to side with the machines) and tend to respect the scientific status of someone like Husserl.

I'd also suggest that Freud and Marx were sometimes scientific. Popper is great, but his own status is akin to that of Freud and Marx as another instance of radical thinking about thinking (emphasis on the root metaphor.) 'Science' functions politically as a marker of authority and contact with the Real. Philosophy of science, articulating/determining this elevated species essence, is like theology (ultimately political too). As I see it, we are never done clarifying / inventing the concept of the rational / scientific. As a little mortal creature of my age, I have to trust experts like anyone. I'm biased toward those who can do math, those who measure, etc. So I get it. But theory makes observation possible, and even math depends on metaphor.

I'd say it is more precisely attachment to things which makes them bad; changing the way you think may be a start, but it is not enough. — Janus

I think we agree that there are limits to mere thought. I'm trying to sketch what I see as what many spiritual life strategies have in common as 'causi sui' autonomy projects. The body remains stubbornly foundational. The world can't be completely conquered with attitude and philosophy.

How does one triumph over attachment ? I've suggested that the images (note the metaphor in Plato's 'ideas') are peeled off and internalized. Photographs replace reality. The beauty of a particular boy (I use 'boy' as a metonym here) is dangerously out of the philosopher's control. (The madness of the greedy lover is sketched in Phaedrus.) The philosopher must detach this beauty from the fragile and unruly flesh and convert it to an imperishable possession which time cannot steal.

I'm not claiming that this can be achieved completely or even that it's desirable. I'm just trying to sketch a particular enactment of the hero with a thousand faces.

it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the most effective only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties. — wonderer1

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To me the true position of the final Husserl is indeed of interest, but it is neither easily determined nor (most importantly) authoritative.

I'm trying to find the simplest words for what I see as the issue.

The lifeworld is through or for a living individual's nervous system. We must do justice to this embodied, egocentric insight.

Yet this nervous system is only intelligible as embedded within an encompassing world. Sensation needs sense organs ! Also our language (the one you talk to me in, sure of a partial meeting therein) is 'primordially' social, world-directed, and self-transcending. It's a 'sediment' compressing centuries of timebinding R & D.

One can't eliminate either factor without absurdity. For then the sense organs end up as products of the sense organs. Or there's a self somehow without an other or a world, etc. Or (in the other direction) there's a Reality having nothing to do with color, smell, concept, shape, ... and even time or space -- as if such talk could have meaning for us.

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks. — Srap Tasmaner

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'Because trains are cool.'
Perhaps there's also a tacit assumption of a narrative of the forgetting or repression of...

I like it. — wonderer1

Thanks!

It seems to me that the world is declared empty not because the world lacks things that are good but exactly because those good things are so fragile and (sometimes) difficult to obtain. As far as I can tell, much of spirituality is a version of nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Diogenes trained mind and body toward a radical independence of the goods of the world, all but the truly essential.

I think asceticism is often a kind of minimalism that economically emphasizes fantasy over reality. As Kojeve put it ( with earnest communist bias ?) stoicism and skepticism are escapisms that settle for ('merely') internal freedom. But to me the roleplay of politics can all too easily become (and probably usually is) just as fantastic. The key image is something like a squid drawing in from the world the tentacles representing simultaneously its interest, its investment, and its vulnerability. The form of beauty has been lifted away from the bodies of the fragile and expensive boys of Athens and distilled into a vapor one can carry in the pocket. The earthly crown has been replaced likewise with the idea of True status, invisible to the unworthy.

When someone says, 'There is a God' - there is almost nothing that maps onto any reality I understand or is available to us the way cats or plumbs might be. What does 'there is' mean here? What does 'a God' mean or even 'God'. These four words are like a hall of mirrors. — Tom Storm

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Excellent points. The meaning of 'there is' is elusive indeed. Maybe akin to 'why is there a here ?'. Almost lyrical.

The God issue is a great one. The root concept is maybe still a father or a king, but of course it's gone through some vaporization since then. Maybe one starts with an ideal father (actual human) and removes all inessential (vulnerable, limiting) attributes ?

I'd be inclined to say that the lifeworld is an aspect of reality, or at least the part of reality we have some epistemic access to. I don't know what it would mean to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld. — wonderer1

The bold part is where we agree. But some thinkers try to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld, as if our eyes and ears and concepts are in the way of reality as opposed to some of its ingredients.

I think sure, we might be in a simulation or multiverse, so the simulation or universe exists in some context we don't have epistemic access to. However, I would still see the simulation or universe as being an aspect of reality. — wonderer1

Exactly. So it exists conceptually as possibility. Possibility is a huge part of human reality anyway. Or so I suggest. We swim in it.

Undoubtedly part of the context of that for me, is seeing people as varying in the extent that they are in touch with different aspects of the way things are in reality. So maybe you and I are too different in the way we think of "reality" for me to understand. — wonderer1

It's probably just a different lingo from different influences. In the last few years, I've been very influenced by Heidegger and Husserl. In a strange way, both thinkers defend something akin to common sense. Marriages and promises are as real as electrons and quaternions. All of these entities have their meanings in relation to one another in a big holistic net. For instance, electrons are an output of laboratories and scientific institutions with histories and mathematical abstractions. There's an atomistic tendency to rip things out of context and pretend they can still function meaningfully. The lifeworld is the most encompassing 'unbroken' 'preabstracted' concept perhaps.

In case you find it interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld

The 'lifeworld' is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the "ground" for all shared human experience.[6] Husserl's formulation of the lifeworld was also influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey's "life-nexus" (German Lebenszusammenhang) and Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-world[citation needed] (German In-der-Welt-Sein). The concept was further developed by students of Husserl such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, and Alfred Schütz. The lifeworld can be thought of as the horizon of all our experiences, in the sense that it is that background on which all things appear as themselves and meaningful. The lifeworld cannot, however, be understood in a purely static manner; it isn't an unchangeable background, but rather a dynamic horizon in which we live, and which "lives with us" in the sense that nothing can appear in our lifeworld except as lived.

The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted.

As a matter
of fact, no,
there aren't.
Deal with it. — Srap Tasmaner

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Nice!

Of course logical positivism is untenable based on this too. In the end what all this seems to amount to (as I read it) is that for a non-realist our conversations are doomed, regardless of all the facts and rationalism we seek to muster in favour of our particular fancies. Our language doesn't mirror reality, it is just a tool which humans use to communicate and while it has many useful applications to get things done - metaphysical truth isn't one of them. — Tom Storm

This reminds me of a couple of points that may be relevant.

How could language mirror reality, at least if it's understood as words ? Words are a tiny piece of reality. So it must be meaning that mirrors reality, right ? But reality is, for humans who could raise the issue, always already meaningful. Only a metaphysician could think reality is hidden 'under' or 'behind' the blaring meaningfulness of human life with all its rules and roles.

The ordinary situation that inspires the mirroring metaphor is something like 'there's plums in the icebox' being confirmed when one goes to the icebox. Husserl wrote about this early on.

Roughly (or so I claim) the meaningful structure of reality is exactly the kind of meaning in language, so 'the world is all that is the case.' The (intelligible) structure of the world is the meaning of all true sentences, or something like that. There's a surplus in humans though, an ability to hypothesize, lie, and be mistaken.

But I do think taking seriously the pessimistic mindset is significant and not just a fun thing to toy around with. I think it leads to greater empathy (goes with commiseration). The gallows-humor is actually also part of this. — schopenhauer1

Toying around with it is the transcendence of gallowshumor. That detachment from the mortal self is the 'demonic' Will glorying in its indestructibility, seeing through the triviality of a merely personal death to the ongoing life of the species. Cosmic humor, what Blake might call perception of the infinite, is like some ironic irreverent twist on Nirvana. Golden laughter, winged feet. Easier talked about than activated of course. But traces of it are all over that Freud quote and all through Cioran.

Excellent quote!! SO much to unpack there actually. — schopenhauer1

Yes. Part of the humor and yet truth of it is Freud's avoidance of you-go-girl cheerleading. The goal is hilariously realistic.

I want everyone from sub-Saharan Africa, to Western Europe, Mongolia, and North America to achieve the level of existential ennui on par with Cioran. In other words we need to get past the socio-economic, and acute psychological issues to the existential ones so we can all see the human condition as it is. — schopenhauer1

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I'd add though that there's a wicked pleasure in Cioran. He doesn't strike me as someone who wanted to be anyone else. Same with Schopenhauer. 'I'd rather be this gloomy asshole than anyone else.' What is the perverse pleasure here? A glorious doomed rebellion against godnature or something.

The metaphors begin to blur and yet you can often see the patterns which inform them. It makes me wonder just what it is that allows us to keep things straight. Someone with dementia can speak like a poet - 'Turn the sun down, my feelings are burning.' This means, switch off the light, it's too bright. — Tom Storm

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I love that quote. It makes sense to me right away. I've been studying Finnegans Wake, which tries to catch the ambiguous blurrygoround of lifemeaning.

I'm personally quite impressed by this old movie based on the book : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V9USPiXXK8

I think it's been unjustly forgotten, though it may just happen to scratch my itch.