Tag: relativism
Relativism, deconstruction.
Maybe [doing X] really is the answer to it.
There is no answer. We just struggle along.
Is it actually possible to assert anything?
Is it actually possible to assert anything with 100% certainty? Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
At the end of the day, 99% of the activity is data hoarding, 1% is making use. Music years ago, other things later. Because then, when you use it, you’ll be fed up with it. Of course people like to work, because otherwise their brains explode; it’s the same mechanism. Endless search for mechanical and repetitive distractions. Tergiversations around the core of desperation.
And this is… when things are going well.
And then they say to the hoarder: «You don’t need to accumulate everything. This thing X, you don’t need to hoard it, resist it.» But if there is no need for me to save X, it means that there is no need for me to save Y, it means that there is no need for me to save anything, by simple syllogism.
And indeed, that is correct. But it only confirms the nihilism and the absolute meaninglessness of everything.
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.
Dario Fabbri – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics
XII Festa Scienza Filosofia – Dario Fabbri – 2023/04/22 – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics – How History and Customs Influence the Trajectory of Powers. Continue reading
It’s like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didn’t fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if there’s ever another day in your life when you don’t have a toothache, you’ll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly won’t complain about stupid things anymore, like, I don’t know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space – my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog “In coma è meglio” (“Being in a Coma is Better”) – Il famoso asteroide (“The Famous Asteroid”)
Chance doesn’t 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[🡕] 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 life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t 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 – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! 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.” Read the full page
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Philosophical Investigations – 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
Theory of Harmony – Arnold Schoenberg
Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being (das Bestehen). Read the full page
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 – Arte e scienza (“Art and Science”)
To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; or, The Whale