Scumbag Analytic Philosopher is the first meme-thing that’s made me wish I had more internet when I was in college.
Self Help: Navigating Between Two Kinds Of Oblivion [Grimes and Bethesda Softworks]
This morning after I got up and got the dogs ready (“got the dogs ready” = how I think about feeding them and taking them out), I washed the dishes and made coffee, which is my usual routine. And then I made an inspirational message on a piece of paper, which is not a part of my routine. The paper, pictured above, has five numbers on it that are supposed to remind me about different things, and the goal is to “be inspired”.
It’s a bright, hopeful morning, and the feeling felt right.
Related to all this, I think, is that at the end of last week, I totally got Grimes, and it made listening to her music really pleasant. That all started when I watched the video for “Oblivion”, which I just really despised at the time. It was on a Thursday I think. The oft-cited “someone on Twitter”, I think, said the video was like “hipsters discover sports are cool” or something, and that seems apt to me. Sort of.
The thing about the video that drives me batty is that all the things Grimes does — listen to her discman, wear stupid clothes, have dyed hair, dance around, cause a ruckus — are all things me and my friends did in very similar circumstances when we were young. And it wasn’t cool or anything at all, and Grimes seems like she’s really cool. So the whole enterprise smells to high heaven with the stench of cultural tourism, which I’m usually OK with as long as god damnit it’s not my culture because we don’t usually issue visas what with who would want to pretend to be poor and bored and socially inept? (This is where I mention my utter contempt for every piece ever on The Gathering of the Juggalos.)
So this Grimes thing that I tried to get into three weeks ago came to a head at the end of last week, but then I got it!
It sort of occurred to me that Grimes is not being a cultural tourist, and also that Grimes is not “being” anything at all. It’s really a facile thing, I think, to think someone is “being” any way at all unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time thinking about how they’re being. So I’m not denying the existence or explanatory capabilities of ontology, but I’m saying its results get question begged in a lot of cultural hit pieces (and, to be fair, encomia), and that’s a pretty lazy way to be! It sort of occurred to me that I should just listen to Grimes and not be a jerk about it, and try to draw my own conclusions.
Philosophical Investigations §133
133. It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question. Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and a the series of examples can be broken of.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
This is the most important four paragraphs I think I ever came across while I was in school. It’s what they call ‘deep’ for some obvious and subtle reasons. It is, I think, one of Wittgenstein’s most well-known passages (which is not really saying that much). It plays a technical role in the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work, which, I think, is sort of in a shambles since it’s a system of philosophy that defies systemification. But in a more obvious or trivial way, I think if you really think about it and understand it, it’s something of a skeleton key for unlocking virtually every problem you can encounter in life — short of sudden and unavoidable physical trespass.
Selected Items From The Latest Thought Catalog
Radical Doubt — $2,500
Descartes’ Radical Doubt inaugurated modernity as we know it. Do the church doctors — or maybe just your ‘rents — got you down? It could be the case that they’re totally wrong about everything. After all, only things seen in a clear, natural light can be thought to be true. When you wield Radical Doubt, virtually everything is blemished by skepticism. Maybe you’re just a brain in a vat, dude in the matrix, or even computer simulation. It’s impossible to know for certain as long as your criterion for truth is as muddled and illogical as the one set out by Radical Doubt. Radical Doubt can be used to dispute everything from petty interpersonal problems (How do you know for certain that I ate your leftovers?) to fairly serious crises of faith (I can’t marry you! I don’t even know that I know I love you!). The one-time, low-cost fee of $2,500, radical doubt can be yours to torture and outwit anyone who’s failed to complete Philosophy 210: Epistemology II.
Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave — $999.99
Nestled in the middle of Plato’s Republic, a treatise on government, is his infamous Allegory Of The Cave. The brief story tells of a group of people chained to a wall in a cave; onto the wall shapes are projected using a great fire. These people mistake these shadow-shapes for reality, until one person escapes only to be blinded by the sun. Once his eyes have acclimated, however, he sees reality for what it is, and goes back into the cave to tell the others. Upon his return, his prior cohort takes the newly opened eyes to be in fact corrupted, and they kill the man. While the Allegory Of The Cave is presently used in an epistemological or self-righteous manner, it was originally meant to illustrate a point about 1) Plato’s metaphysical theory of being, and 2) how politics is for fools. Still, the Allegory Of The Cave is an antique thought, and can be used decoratively like a rusty wheelbarrow to spruce up your intellectual environs, or can be entirely re-purposed for modern needs. At less than $1,000 you can hardly go wrong with the tried and true Allegory Of The Cave. Note: the analogy of the divided line is not included with Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave.
Death Of The Author — $7,444
The Death Of The Author has its basis in the 1967 essay of the same name by noted Frenchy Roland Barthes. Like many other ideas of gallic origin, the Death Of The Author has been reduced to a tshirt-sized slogan, much like “This Is Not A Pipe” (p. 237) and “Existence Precedes Essence” (p. 45). It should be noted that the Death Of The Author draws on a fairly high-level reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. That said, the Death Of The Author can be used to make virtually any florid rhetorical point about any text; combined with “Deconstruction” (p. 583), which would have us think that “everything is a text”, the Death Of The Author provides users with a puissant tool for re-constituting reality as they see fit.
Hi, I’m a macbook DJ and my EP is called ‘Discipline and Pu-niche’
A band called The New Order of Things.
