Tag: knowledge
On Truth. On philosophical investigation. Metaphilosophy.
About the âhard problemâ of consciousness. Read the full page
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[đĄ] Continue reading
Maybe [doing X] really is the answer to it.
There is no answer. We just struggle along.
How sad it is to be ill⊠knowing so much about your own illness and yet being unable to do anything about it.
I donât want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesnât really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
Why do we want to create an ASI
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Fernando Olszewski, https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/01/the-mistake-of-rokos-basilisk.html[đĄ]
r/Schizoid, u/Concrete_Grapes
Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.
So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is âthe normââand we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We donât need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or âmove onâ from some emotional attachment or slight.
However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.
They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless itâs measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If theyâre sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the âotherâ⊠they cannot do this on their own.
Thatâs why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
Thatâs why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, itâs not emotions for us, weâre stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.
Other. People. Never. Do.
So theyâre reaching out to process and connectâtheyâre unfulfilled, or some door isnât closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they âmustââsome how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, thatâs nonsense.
I mean, Iâm saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue itâs not always like thisâand itâs not.
But go read what âmindfulnessâ isâthe thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell meâif, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because itâs describing a state youâre in 99 percent of the time as default.
Thatâs what I mean.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[đĄ] Continue reading
Is it actually possible to assert anything?
Is it actually possible to assert anything with 100% certainty? Read the full page
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, itâs obvious that most real lives donât even come close to that. Continue reading
(EN Wikipedia) Depressive realism[đĄ] Continue reading
On defeatism
r/Pessimism, u/defectivedisabled
Defeatism is just a term society use to gaslight people into conforming with social expectations. You could very well be considered a defeatist in a capitalist society by embracing minimalism. There is no such thing as a defeatist in absolute terms. This term solely exist to shame and guilt trap people to fall in line with what is expected of them. It is also a relativistic term that requires a specific setting for the term to have a meaning. You might be considered a defeatist in capitalistic society by giving up on the rat race and becoming a minimalist. But on the other hand, you are an âoptimistâ within the minimalist community.
There is no such thing as âgive upâ. Even embracing nothingness requires effort. Activities that induces a sense of liberation such as meditation actually requires putting effort to work. Therefore, it is nothing but gaslighting to say one is a defeatist when one decide to go on a path of liberation rather than participate in the rat race. The word defeatism is designed to keep people trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. It is done by holding onto the idea that there is some kind of reward waiting for them at the end when they eventually âwinâ at whatever they are doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering_risks[đĄ] Continue reading
Applying âthatâs subjective thoâ to that rings very, very hollow. To criticise them, you have to take the claims apart; [âŠ] Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh â The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[âŠ] that whole insane âget up and goâ mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake â what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
Two diametrically opposed things, pushed to their extremes, end up looking very much alike.
An obese person who eats until he explodes and an anorexic who fasts until he implodes, both die.
Bright light that blinds you to nothing is the same as absolute darkness.
Who wouldâve thought, that after nihilism, there was a further involuntary step to take. In nullism, everything is different, and even more ridiculous when seen from the outside.
âRational depressionâ is the worst kind, because it simply acknowledges the truth of the cesspit that is oneâs existence. The other kind, yes, reaches deeper abysses, but one holds on to the knowledge that itâs like a passing wind. Lucidity, instead, makes the soul suffer with truth.
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health â papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency â are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise donât have any idea itâs happening. They donât even know. So much so that Iâve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum⊠When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst â Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
(expanding from Wittgenstein)
The digits of Ï are just a buffer overflow in the nonsense of language.
William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with âoverwhelming sadnessâ
William Shatner (Captain Kirk in Star Trek), after his trip in Jeff Bezosâ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Continue reading
An idea about why most people are so irrational
r/Pessimism, u/Wanderer974 Continue reading
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[âŠ]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[âŠ]
The sweet-spot of delusion. Thatâs where itâs at.
[âŠ]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and itâs just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
My take on the ending of âMartyrsâ (2008)
Lots of discussions on the Internet. Continue reading
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.
From Wikipedia.
The irony. Thinking is bad. Having a consciousness is bad. You have to be dumb and live the illusion.
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[âŠ]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.
When youâre suffering, thatâs when youâre most real. Read the full page
Anonymous 02/29/16 (Mon) 08:44:00 No.5738, hikkichan.com (dead)
[âŠ]Maybe life is better enjoyed when we forget we even have one? [âŠ]
â Thereâs a common, sentimental notion that angels are all around us, solving little domestic problems. But in the Bible, when humans encounter an angel, they fall to their knees in fear. These are beings of tremendous power. Think of the first renegade angels, in league with Lucifer. They were strong enough to challenge God. And surely, GodâŠ
[âŠ]
God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?
The police superintendent: â Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.
â Very goodâŠ
[âŠ]
And what did we gain from that famous snake? Knowledge, free will, the ability to think for ourselves, which led to everything you see now in this room: civilization, art, culture, music⊠life. In some strange way, these rogue angels were the architects of all that we hold dear.
Dr. John Rexroth in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 6 season 1
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
What does it mean â and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note â what does it mean to âanticipate deathâ? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You donât rush like a desperate man, you donât argue like a madman. You donât kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you donât despair, you donât die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, itâs not as if life ends: youâre the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didnât anticipated death, because they didnât assumed it as a condition⊠like a thickness of the soul, here â letâs use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But letâs keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because itâs all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things donât have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.
Umberto Galimberti at Paisiello Theater in Ruffano (Lecce)
Approaching form Approaching a deeper meaning
My fragments lay scattered Buried deep Never awaken
Still dreaming of life
Shape Of Despair â The Distant Dream of Life
Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.
Arvo PĂ€rt â Even if I lose everything (2015)
When I said to him: âProfessor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?â
And he said, âOh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldnât be satisfied.â
TED â Why does the universe exist? â Jim Holt
About the movie âMelancholiaâ â Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
Itâs not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness â thatâs it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
The Crazy Woman Next Door â Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives [âŠ], is the part that flies over matter and is the one thatâs the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it⊠above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
It turns out that, even knowing about meaninglessness is meaningless.
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
If you believe everything you read, you better not read.
A saying, generally misâlabelled as a Japanese proverb.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race â A Contrivance of Horror â Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravingsâthe complete gamut of agitationsâand finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
I noticed that it is not possible to go back. I could not step down from the throne nor undo what hitherto slipped before my eyes and was now as written in stone. I attached the utmost importance to the truth, and unconsciously found myself writing a cruel pact with it. The sensations tasted different. The features of reality were clear and cold. Corroded by a gray light, the walls showed the wrinkles of time. It is not raining. But the sun still hides behind the bare buildings. That sun that hides its true essence with all that light. So much light for so much darkness. Continue reading
Thereâs a thirst for ignorance, because for millennia there has been a thirst for knowledge. Humanity has got to know so much, too much. And as it now notices that itâs worse off than before, the desire has reversed itself, and so there is a thirst for ignorance. But this has not led to a productive step backwards, because by now the damage has already been done and it has already changed the game: it has led to a heavy, aggressive and self-destructive ignorance, not the simple smug knowledge of the old years.
The Instinct of the Wolf â The Law of Lone Wolf â Massimo Lugli
I grabbed a newspaper from a trash bin and read it from top to bottom to pass the time. Politics, sports, entertainment. I couldnât understand why people cared so much about all that bullshit. Read the full page
Gavazzeni: âMusic worsens the manâ
Alberto Sinigaglia (âttLâ, La Stampa, insert) Continue reading
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they donât have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is⊠«If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesnât matter â only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. Iâll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is â to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio⊠You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.
For me drugs arenât a specific substance: theyâre anything that youâre addicted to. When you lose what youâve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. Iâve accepted that all these âgodsâ we have, theyâre all teachers. There is one god â they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva â they are one god, who creates in three different ways.
I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, toâŠ
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «Iâm sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. Thatâs why I wonât quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise Iâll die of boredom. But I donât have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little âNarcissiâ, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «Whatâs the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper⊠Itâs kind of idyllic. Thatâs why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, thatâs why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in âInvisibleâ
Umberto Galimberti â The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, âAbout that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.â (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).
Jeremy Griffith â A Species In Denial (introduction)
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
Whatâs the point of life And whatâs the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica â The Phantom Agony
Chance doesnât exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[đĄ] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But lifeâs objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesnât exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
Iâm not afraid to die Iâm afraid to be alive without being aware of it
Iâm so afraid to, I couldnât stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we donât grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica â Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Madness is simply pain.
Vittorino Andreoli
Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.
Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (âThe Dark Sideâ) (2002)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals â John Gray
r/Pessimism, u/historyismyteacher Continue reading
You say the drinking is better than a woman And you say the thinking takes too much time Well God save your children should you have them For, to you, thereâs nothing if thereâs no wine
BĂŽa â Drinking
Waking Life â Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
Nothing left to feel nor to understand.
Shape of Despair â âŠTo Live for My DeathâŠ
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
â You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isnât the same for both sides?
A Shumi at the Shumi village, Final Fantasy VIII (in the marvelous Italian version, re-translated to English by me)
Original English version:
Athletes
[âŠ]
But itâs better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing⊠the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in oneâs mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way âup close and personalâ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human lifeâoutside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore whatâs obvious, that most of this straining is farce. Itâs farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a childâs world, is very small⊠[Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way⊠Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, itâs too late for anything else; heâs invested too much, is in too deep. I think heâs both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.
David Foster Wallace, âThe String Theoryâ (July 1996, Esquire)
You know how I know itâs the end of the world? Because everythingâs been done, every kind of musicâs been tried, every governmentâs been tried, every fuckinâ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?
Max Peltier in âStrange Daysâ
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written âThe World as Will and Representationâ. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (âAutograph of a Portraitâ)
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience â Eugenio Borgna
âConfess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.â Read the full page
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.
Michel Houellebecq â Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
David T. Wolf, as quoted by Robert Byrne, in The Third â And Possibly the Best â 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway â The Garden of Eden
The Annunciation â AndrĂĄs Jeles
We exist, and yet we do not exist. Read the full page
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
âFor [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be openedâŠâ
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understandingâthat is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too muchâŠ
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born â Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understandingâthat is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much⊠Read the full page
Two useful lessons, of course: loneliness, isolation, exclusion on the one hand, then the continued distrust of the other caused by the loneliness, the isolation and the exclusion. And this as a child alreadyâŠ
My mother gave me away. I lay on a fishing cutter with a woman in Holland, in Rotterdam, for one year. My mother visited me every three or four weeks there. I donât think that she cared much for me then. This changed, however, later. I was one year old, we went to Vienna, but the distrust even continued when I was brought to my grandfather who really loved me, in contrast to my mother. Then the walks with him, all these figures, male figures; in my later books, this is always my grandfather on my motherâs side. But beside my grandfather, again and again, you are alone. You can only develop alone, you will always be alone, the consciousness that a leopard canât change its spots. Everything else is deception, doubt. It doesnât change⊠During the school days, completely alone. You have a neighbor at school and you are alone. You talk to people, you are alone. You have views, strange ones, your own, you are always alone. And if you write a book, or as I write books, then you are even more aloneâŠ
It is impossible to make oneself heard. Solitude and loneliness become increased loneliness, isolation. Finally, you change the scenes more and more quickly. One puts his trust in bigger and bigger cities, the small town is not sufficient anymore, not Vienna, not even London. You have to go to another country, you try to go here and there, foreign languages, is it Brussels? Or maybe Rome? And there you go. And you are always alone with yourself and your increasingly dreadful work.
Thomas Bernhard â âThree Daysâ, documentary
To suffer is to produce knowledge.
Emil Cioran â The New Gods (âLe Mauvais dĂ©miurgeâ, literally âThe Evil Demiurgeâ)
What you are basically [âŠ] is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)
Our Lady of the Turks â Carmelo Bene
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you spend time with the most erudite ones, it doesnât mean that you get close to the absolute.
Carmelo Bene â Our Lady of the Turks
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his âexistential frustration,â âontological despairâ or âmetaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,â the chances are that Zapffe (rather than âcuredâ) would be baffled by Franklâs sophomoric philosophizing. âYou may be psychologically healthier than I,â Zapffe would gladly admit, âbut I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me â reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalkerâs certainty â to realize that itâs all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our âsituation.â You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naĂŻve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which â if you will permit me to speak your language for once â I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his âcosmic conditions,â the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.â The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering âpeace in heart,â âreconciliation with the worldâ and âatonement with the almighty,â or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.
Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy â Herman TĂžnnessen
Happiness is for the pigs.
Title of the book by Herman TĂžnnessen
â See how the smoke trembles in the roof hole? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet itâs only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesnât know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they donât know.
The Virgin Spring / JungfrukÀllan
Time Stood Still â Ermanno Olmi
Peopleâs feelings have changed. Read the full page
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan in an interview for âLâExpressâ
When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man⊠Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. âHow is suffering to be avoided?â is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.
Emil Cioran â The Temptation to Exist
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
[âŠ] only in madness
can one be clear.
âPicassoâ â P.P. Pasolini
Philosophical Investigations â Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill, probably about Stanley Baldwin; Readerâs Digest magazine
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thingâstark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thingâis always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the âBlack Man who will come and get you,â as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres â Saint Tantalus, chapter âDisenchantment: Behind the arrasâ
Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
Nikola Tesla, interviewed by OrrinâŻE.âŻDunlap Jr.
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? Itâs all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran â On the Heights of Despair
The Last Messiah â Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves â be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
The worst part is wondering how youâll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where youâll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe itâs treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasnât enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. Iâve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, Journey to the End of the Night
Health doesnât analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The old norms having collapsed, and the new ones not yet arisen or firmly established, it is natural that the concept of the relativity of everything has expanded in us to such a degree as to almost entirely make us lose our sense of evaluation. No one is any longer able to fix for themselves a firm and unshakable point of view.
Luigi Pirandello â Arte e scienza (âArt and Scienceâ)
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anneâs] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten â a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that âw-a-t-e-râ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.
Helen Keller, in her autobiography âThe Story of My Lifeâ, recounting her experience as a deafblind child.
[âŠ] that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it; [âŠ]
George Bernard Shaw
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousyâah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche â Beyond Good and Evil
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[đĄ]
Friedrich Nietzsche â The Joyous Science
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? â To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is âin a hurry.â Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow â as a goldsmithâs art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of âwork,â that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, [âŠ]
Nietzsche â Dawn â Preface â 5
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz
One only hears what one understands.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mountains are silent masters and make silent students.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Actually, when the student happens to attain a mind so ready and vigorous, he might go astray way wilder and perilouslier than his master.
Filosofia di Giacomo Leopardi (âThe Philosophy of Giacomo Leopardiâ), Domenico Solimani
A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.
Arthur Schopenhauer â The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims
With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.
SĂžren Kierkegaard â The Sickness Unto Death
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence â whether much that is glorious â whether all that is profound â does not spring from disease of thought â from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Two truths that men will generally never believe: one, that they know nothing; the other, that they are nothing. Add a third, which is closely related to the second: that they have nothing to hope for after death.
Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4525-4526
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Eleandro. Therefore those are greatly mistaken who say and proclaim that the perfection of man consists in the knowledge of truth, and that all his ills arise from false opinions and from ignorance, and that mankind will at last be happy when each man, or most men, shall know the truth, and according to that alone compose and govern their lives. And this is said by nearly all the philosophers, ancient and modern. Now according to your judgment, those truths which are the substance of all philosophy ought to be concealed from the majority of men; and I believe you would readily agree that they ought to be ignored or forgotten by everyone: for, once known and kept in the mind, they can do nothing but harm. Which is the same as saying that philosophy must be extirpated from the world. I am not unaware that the final conclusion to be drawn from true and perfect philosophy is that one must not philosophize. From this it follows, first, that philosophy is useless, because to this end of not philosophizing, it is not necessary to be a philosopher; secondly, it is most harmful, since that final conclusion cannot be learned except at oneâs own cost, and once it is learned, it cannot be put into practice; it being not in manâs power to forget the truths once known, and it being easier to lay aside any other habit than that of philosophizing. In short, philosophy, hoping and promising at the outset to cure our ills, ends by vainly wishing to remedy itself.
Giacomo Leopardi â Small Moral Works â Dialogue between Timandro and Eleandro
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
It is no longer possible to deceive ourselves or dissemble the truth. Philosophy has made us understand so much that the forgetfulness of our own selves, that once came so easy, is now impossible.
Giacomo Leopardi â Small Moral Works, Fragment on Suicide
[âŠ] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receivâd and practisâd on.
Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise â Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
RenĂ© Descartes â Principles of Philosophy
Out of the mouths of babes and drunkards comes the truth.
English saying
If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola â Oratio de hominis dignitate (âOration on the Dignity of Manâ)
The Imitation of Christ â Thomas Ă Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page
Life is, in man, the use of reason.
Dante Alighieri, Convivio (âThe Banquetâ), Book IV, Chapter VII; expanding from Aristotleâs âDe Animaâ (Book II)
But beware of the dire consequencesâŠ
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly, and of their own accord, preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.
Socrates in âPhaedoâ by âPlatoâ
In medio stat virtus.
Virtue lies in the middle.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
Moderation is key.
Balance is the key to everything.
The concept of limit, of the right measure, in Plato.
Wikipedia:
The expression goes back to the medieval scholastic philosophers, although already Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (âÎÎÏÎżÎœ ÏΔ Îșα᜶ áŒÏÎčÏÏÎżÎœâ â The mean is the best thing), Horace in the Satires (âEst modus in rebusâ â There is a measure in things), and Ovid in the Metamorphoses (âMedio tutissimus ibis â by following the middle way, you will walk most safely) had expressed a similar concept.
A comparable idea is also found in Buddhism: The path that leads to the cessation of suffering is called the Middle Way, because it avoids the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, excessive behaviors that do not lead to mental peace. This path, developed in the Noble Eightfold Path, consists in cultivating virtue, meditative serenity, and wisdom.