Philosophy can be a recreational activity such as staring at one's own navel in order to have a personal awakening. Philosophy should also involve love of knowledge for its own sake. Philosophy also serves a function, it probes into one's deepest assumptions about the nature of being and life and finds the ones that don't hold up, and when this happens, it becomes clear how much these assumptions determine the nature of everyday personal and political life. The assumption that the underlying premises are irrelevant is a particularly effective one in mangling one's personal -- at first it might not be yours, but somebody else's, and that's bound to boomerang -- and political life. The underlying assumptions revealed in philosophical inquiry constitute the wiring behind the screen.
Is it beginning to come back to you? Very little if at all? No worries. Just don't expect to know where I'm going with all this and how it could possibly connect to the view on the screen until I fix some of the wiring and the picture begins to come back, this could, as mentioned, take quite a while. (An artist should know her tools, and I'm an abject hypocrit not to take a course in how this literal laptop works. One day.) Okay, let's dive in...
SORTING OUT THE COLOR CODED PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS AND IDENTIFYING AND REPLACING CORRODED WIRES
The rigorously skeptical view culminating in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein demands the discrediting of language as a hopeless morass, where any attempt to deny it and register faith in language, as I show below, leads decisively to a deistic view, and it won't stop there, trust me. Language is up to far worse tricks than deism. Knowing this truth about language shall not necessarily set you free either. When you discredit language, you must give up hope for the rational understanding of what makes everything tick; you can only operate on surface effects that seem matter of fact, but are deeply implicated in the language you use, which filters out whatever doesn't conform to its larger constructions. These, it has been shown beyond a reasonable doubt, can all be deconstructed, however the status quo fights back for good as well as bad reasons, as total anarchy involving as many un-evolved souls as we have on board sounds more like Lord of the Flies than anything. Nevertheless, if things are really totally random and chaotic in their nature, denying that is foolish. Own the implications. Don't keep the dirty bathwater to avoid washing the baby down the drain with it, because the dirty bathwater can kill the baby too. Face the facts. Deconstruction works. You can't even trust these words that discredit words. Far too well reasoned. To hell with all reasonable arguments. If you are ethical, after deconstruction spends itself, you don't swing back to before it ever happened. You close down your philosophy departments, which you now know can only build houses of cards that don't need a big bad wolf, just a passing breeze, to collapse and go utterly flat.
There is one alternative to discrediting language, though, which is to take it with a grain of salt, but how do you transmit a grain of salt in a facebook update or a text message, without getting yourself in all sorts of trouble?
Meanwhile scientifically rigorous, academic philosophy, which, like the Chinese government, which prohibits the electronic transmission of puns, cannot admit this incommensurable, uncontrollable grain of salt.
But the grain of salt is non-negotiable. Language is a tool formed to be used in a certain way and any other way is an abuse of the tool bound to botch some very serious, life and death projects to which it is applied. Here is the proper usage: Breathe into words the breath of life, as these beautiful iridescent bubbles stretch forth into funny, amorphous biomorphic shapes and then settle into perfect spheres that float on the air until the fragile hollow membranes collapse on themselves. I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, only I prefer, whenever possible and practical, to be and stay aware of it.
This poetic view, the view of the artist, neither inside nor outside of things, is in truth not just a very viable, useful, beautiful/true view, it is the only such view, and it behooves us to share the wealth, not just hang around with other poets and artists patting each other on the back and rolling our eyes at the others, poor lowly humanity, whose only consolation is to call us freaks and misfits, whom it exiles from its communities and propels with dispatch to the great cosmopolis, where anything goes and where artists from everywhere are being corralled to be protected or nuclear bombed -- society is always ambivalent about what to do with us, worship or resent and persecute us, iconophilia or iconoclasm (with the businessmen flocking here too, no risk no reward, they must follow the artists wherever we go). Still, as it's easier to roll down than climb up, easier to stay in bed than make it to the top of the mountain where there's a better view, pessimism trumps optimism as a working principle wherever gravity manages to hold one's feet to the ground, and that's why artists began to take off their artist hats upon leaving the studio and began pretending to be like everybody else, as the risks more and more began trumping the rewards. As birds of a feather flock together, the rest of the populace quite naturally decided to help us out by looking a bit artistic itself.
Still, the core structure persists under all the camouflage. The truth is that it could be that all of society, every society in the history of the human race, has been formed to dance in circles around, maintain, and celebrate US, the divine artists, blowing pretty bubbles in the air and leaving it at that, and what a that is truth itself! Eventually society evolves into a complex organism with middlemen who cogitate on, symbolize, and distribute our wisdom to the people at large. So that's it. Society is organized around art and lives and dies for it. All of history needs to be rewritten, and language re-rooted and augmented to reveal the actual forms and patterns this conclusion illuminates. I will leave it to my more disciplined readers to reconstruct the whole history of the world with the foundations now driven into bedrock instead of floating on slippery sand. Don't forget though that however the foundations are, figuratively speaking, driven into bedrock, it's just another bubble.
Is it beginning to come back to you? Very little if at all? No worries. Just don't expect to know where I'm going with all this and how it could possibly connect to the view on the screen until I fix some of the wiring and the picture begins to come back, this could, as mentioned, take quite a while. (An artist should know her tools, and I'm an abject hypocrit not to take a course in how this literal laptop works. One day.) Okay, let's dive in...
SORTING OUT THE COLOR CODED PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS AND IDENTIFYING AND REPLACING CORRODED WIRES
The rigorously skeptical view culminating in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein demands the discrediting of language as a hopeless morass, where any attempt to deny it and register faith in language, as I show below, leads decisively to a deistic view, and it won't stop there, trust me. Language is up to far worse tricks than deism. Knowing this truth about language shall not necessarily set you free either. When you discredit language, you must give up hope for the rational understanding of what makes everything tick; you can only operate on surface effects that seem matter of fact, but are deeply implicated in the language you use, which filters out whatever doesn't conform to its larger constructions. These, it has been shown beyond a reasonable doubt, can all be deconstructed, however the status quo fights back for good as well as bad reasons, as total anarchy involving as many un-evolved souls as we have on board sounds more like Lord of the Flies than anything. Nevertheless, if things are really totally random and chaotic in their nature, denying that is foolish. Own the implications. Don't keep the dirty bathwater to avoid washing the baby down the drain with it, because the dirty bathwater can kill the baby too. Face the facts. Deconstruction works. You can't even trust these words that discredit words. Far too well reasoned. To hell with all reasonable arguments. If you are ethical, after deconstruction spends itself, you don't swing back to before it ever happened. You close down your philosophy departments, which you now know can only build houses of cards that don't need a big bad wolf, just a passing breeze, to collapse and go utterly flat.
There is one alternative to discrediting language, though, which is to take it with a grain of salt, but how do you transmit a grain of salt in a facebook update or a text message, without getting yourself in all sorts of trouble?
Meanwhile scientifically rigorous, academic philosophy, which, like the Chinese government, which prohibits the electronic transmission of puns, cannot admit this incommensurable, uncontrollable grain of salt.
But the grain of salt is non-negotiable. Language is a tool formed to be used in a certain way and any other way is an abuse of the tool bound to botch some very serious, life and death projects to which it is applied. Here is the proper usage: Breathe into words the breath of life, as these beautiful iridescent bubbles stretch forth into funny, amorphous biomorphic shapes and then settle into perfect spheres that float on the air until the fragile hollow membranes collapse on themselves. I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, only I prefer, whenever possible and practical, to be and stay aware of it.
This poetic view, the view of the artist, neither inside nor outside of things, is in truth not just a very viable, useful, beautiful/true view, it is the only such view, and it behooves us to share the wealth, not just hang around with other poets and artists patting each other on the back and rolling our eyes at the others, poor lowly humanity, whose only consolation is to call us freaks and misfits, whom it exiles from its communities and propels with dispatch to the great cosmopolis, where anything goes and where artists from everywhere are being corralled to be protected or nuclear bombed -- society is always ambivalent about what to do with us, worship or resent and persecute us, iconophilia or iconoclasm (with the businessmen flocking here too, no risk no reward, they must follow the artists wherever we go). Still, as it's easier to roll down than climb up, easier to stay in bed than make it to the top of the mountain where there's a better view, pessimism trumps optimism as a working principle wherever gravity manages to hold one's feet to the ground, and that's why artists began to take off their artist hats upon leaving the studio and began pretending to be like everybody else, as the risks more and more began trumping the rewards. As birds of a feather flock together, the rest of the populace quite naturally decided to help us out by looking a bit artistic itself.
Still, the core structure persists under all the camouflage. The truth is that it could be that all of society, every society in the history of the human race, has been formed to dance in circles around, maintain, and celebrate US, the divine artists, blowing pretty bubbles in the air and leaving it at that, and what a that is truth itself! Eventually society evolves into a complex organism with middlemen who cogitate on, symbolize, and distribute our wisdom to the people at large. So that's it. Society is organized around art and lives and dies for it. All of history needs to be rewritten, and language re-rooted and augmented to reveal the actual forms and patterns this conclusion illuminates. I will leave it to my more disciplined readers to reconstruct the whole history of the world with the foundations now driven into bedrock instead of floating on slippery sand. Don't forget though that however the foundations are, figuratively speaking, driven into bedrock, it's just another bubble.
