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More Philosobabble
"What is the truth? Where did it go?" (Bob Dylan)
| 1.0l | I never could buy "Nothing", as in the title of Jean Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". Nothing is nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing of any value could come from my childhood social surround of origin, which latter, of course, was not on that account just nothing: It was a lot of Scheißestückwelt, which I much wore than nothing. Instead of "Being and Nothingness", would prefer: "Being and Not-a-thing-ness". |
| 2.0l | The big invisible elephant in my philosophy class rooms was that we discussed philosophical babble, not the phenomenon of the babbling, per se. We babbled on about the concptual content of Plato's Foetusteatus Theatetus, not about the psycho-social situation in which that babble took place, and how it related to our living experiencing in our here and now: Persons were discussing without ob-lig-ations (shackles), not preparing for a final exam and writing a term paper. Socrates did not have a gradebook. Marchall McLuhan said: "The medium is the message". We weren't listening. |
| 3.0l |  I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) was childrear-end-ed on this stuff. There was very little fiber in what they fed me. |
| 4.0l | Ask not what you can do for your God; ask what your God can do for you.[*α] |
| 4.1l | Man is Creation's (Nature's, God's...) mistake: A creature that can tell its Creator: "Non serviam!" – "Hell no, I won't go! Evolution keeps developingp better worker bees, but men (women, other genders) can break the Obedience Barrier. (Fortunately for the Big Boss, few try.) |
| 5.0l | Important topics for philosophical reflection: (1) The magnificence of the starry heavens above you. (2) The paradoxical stuff in your head (more technically stated: transcendental intersubjectivity and mortal/empirical psychology). (3) What you deposit in the toilet before you flush it. |
| 6.0l | The practical solution to all the problems of human existence being an object in the world and the world being an objet in human existence, etcetera and so forth: Everything a person does needs to be creative play beyond Being which also shapes the existing world of Being and beings. |
| 7.0l | For Professor Heidegger: Granted that Being is not a being, that does not qualify either of them as any good for "me", where "me" is an unbound variable to be substitituted in each and every situation with the value: "You who are reading this sentence here and now". |
| 8.0l | The earth is round not flat? So what? I can fall down the steps outside my front door even if I am safe from falling off the edge of the earth. |
| 9.0l | Each sentence I read should pass the test of transfiguring my appreciation of living, else why bother? In the reverse direction, if the sentence passes that test I should take the time to really absorb what it has to offer and not just move on to the next sentence in hopes it will tell me The Big Secret (that's a "recursive function" sentence), because nothing can do anything more than transfigure my life. Wherever I go I need to recall that here I still am and cannot get away from it, but it needs to be worth it. |
| 9.1l | Tempus fidgit. |
| 10.0l | What in my schooling experience was not apprenticeship in philosophizing but rather something like philosography, like a person might learn "academically" (i.e: without purpose) about geography as opposed, say, learning how to navigate a ship or plane. They don't even teach that each student lives on some particular continent or other, just that there are "n" continents for some "n" greater than zero on earth at present.. Uh, huh. |
| 11.0l | No thought can affect me other than how I choose to be affeted by it: I need to welcome even the most repugnant thought (not behavior: Noli me tangere!). The only desideratum is that I THINK I should study it in case I can get anytihng out of it for myself. Even should I be wrong about everything, that must not in the least affect that I must firmly judge that I have been wrongED by it all. Eppur si muove and by any means avilable nor is it any of their business. What I cannot accept is that snybody else including a Big Bully in the Sky should be able to mess with up my mind to prevent me from judging whether it is any good for me, exept on condition of making me cease to exist wihich obviously even a single microscopic oncogene of an uncouth street thug anthropoid biped or a meteor falling from the starry heavens can do. And that is the ultimate criterion, not whaever It/They/it/they cook up, whatever/whoever/whatwhoeverother it/they/Ir/They are. I am a final judge of the world, albeit there maybe other judges too. The defendent has no immunity against infinitely repeated, not just "double" jeopardy. The defendent is Being itself. When I'm donw with you I have no any objection whatever to handing you over to the nect judge, for instande some dude whom I have juged who would judge me.We an disagree about judging each other. It can boil down to the bumper sticker I once saw on a run down car: "I HATE YOU AS MUCH AS YOU HATE ME". |
| 11.1l |  A smiling face that tells lies |
| 12.0l | To think of Reality's awareness of Itself that it exists and that it exists as the watching of "I 💗 Lucy" on the tele is a bit daunting, isn't it? |
| 14.0l | (Bruzina, around p. 342) Everywhere can't be anywhere because if it was it would be inside itself, so it would either keep getting bigger (and explode?) or else if it digested itself it would just go away. Consequently: maybe it is beside itself, i.e,: frustrated with itself. (Tempus fidgit) |
| 15.0l | Philosophy begins in wonder, which for those of us who have been normalizingly childreared, is like Wonder Bread (where they put back artificial versions of some of the nutrients they had previously taken out, to build strong bodies 12 ways; it's a wonder they can get away with calling it bread, or, in this case: wonder). |
| 16.0l | To a man whose death sentence is commuted to life without possibility of parole a few minutes bfore his execution, his prison cell may almost look like Paradise? |
| 17.0l | Normal people's "reality" is their self-alienation. (I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) want no part of either them or it.) |
| 18.0l | If the Abrahamic Deity rules the world, He is obviously guilty of mass murder. Should His punishment be: (A) Eternal imprisonment without the possibility of parole, or (B) the death sentence? |
| 19.0l | The metaphysical status of " "another person" seems to me uncertain ("Are you real or are you Memorex?"). But one thing is for sure: Another person is not a physical object, such as a cinderbblock. Why? Because we know how to treat "another person" as a physical object like a cinderblock: by disposing over them as a human resource, for example: an employee or a slave or a school pupil, concerning which we do not talk with them but tell them what to do, like we tell a hammer what to do when we heft and swing it. Interacting with "another person" as another person, is clearly different from that: We do not talk with the hammer, do we? Then there is the question of when another biologically living human body is a person or not, my paradigmatic example being the Headmaster of the so-called "prep" school I attended, who/that seemed to be an unanswered telephone☏. He/It must have had some kind of brain function, like one of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Comy Barret's pointedly proclaimed: "blessings", i.e.: a mental retard, but exhibited the same attribute of empathy as the cinderblock. |
| 20.0l | Reading Eugen Fink's "Play as symbol of the world". He "blasts" Plato's notion of play as imitation. Play obviously need not be imitation, even when it isn't really playing, like some college football coach i seem to have read cooked up the idea of doing away with "huddles" and somehow dynamically scripting the next play on the fly, which was obviously inventing something new to football although it was probably "imitating" something relating to some other sport but then there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes).... ~ It's easy to kick a dead cat. I wonder what Mr. Plato would have to say if he could defend himself against Prof. Fink? Would he say "Yep, that's what I meant. Shove it, kid!" Would he say: "Yes, that was just propaganda for the masses including 20th Century CE philosophy professors and students...." Would he say: "Yes, Professor Fink, you are right and I was flat-out wrong (or being manipulative). I really was a prig back then." ~ I think it is important to speculate that even pre-Woke philosophers and other thinkers like maybe Thomas Jefferson might not have been as stupid and ignorant and insensitive to "persons of color" as they seem in today's #MeToo kangaroo court of judging people in the past by today's standards of morality fashion? And maybe they had more valuable things to say than such transcendent immortals as Angela Davis and The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr? (But I have digressed here with politically incorrect thoughts, sorry. "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to." (Lesley Gore,1963)) |
| 21.0l | What kind of philosophy do you want to pursue? I was listening to some lectures of Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". Why bother? The "Critique of Pure Reason" sounds to me the philoaophical analog of learning about engineering automobile engines. Whereas I'm interested in how to drive the car and where to go in it, not how the engine works. What use is / uses are the philosophical equivalent of automotive engine engineering? (Or is it just puzzles like Rubik's Cube?) What kind of philosophy do you want to pursue? |
Invenit et fecit