cardboard adolescent

i will throw out random tidbits of philosophy here for your consumption. (and possible discussion, i'm game)

lev shestov, athens and jerusalem:

32 - THE HUMAN TRUTH AND THE LIE TO GOD

Descartes affirmed that God could not be a deceiver, that the commandment "Thou shalt not lie" is observed by God also. However, God does deceive man. That is a fact. He shows man a sky - a blue, solid crystalline dome - which does not exist. Thousands of years have been required for man to free himself from this lie and to recognize the real truth. God often deceives us, and how difficult it is to escape from these deceptions! Yet, if God never deceived us, if no man ever saw the blue sky but knew only an infinite space, empty or filled with ether, if, instead of hearing sounds, men only counted waves - it is probable that they could not have gained much. It may even be that they would have ended by feeling disheartened by their truths and would have agreed to recognize that God may violate His own commandment.

Or would they not have agreed to this? Is the truth above all? Perhaps another idea would then have come to their minds: Is the truth really that which men themselves find, while that which God shows them is only a lie? To put it another way, may it not be that the sky is nevertheless a crystalline dome, the earth is flat, and sounds themselves exist and are essentially different from movement? May it not be that colors obey, not the laws of physics, but the will of God? Is it not possible that man may one day be called to this "knowledge," that he may renounce his demonstrated truths and return to the indemonstrable truths? And - who knows - will he not then find that the commandment "Thou shalt not lie" has only a relative and temporary value? No, it is not better to die than to speak falsehood, even if it be only once, as Kant taught; but it is better not to be born at all than to live in the world of our truths. In other words, a time perhaps will come (Plato many times spoke of it, but no one listened to him) when the "better" will triumph over our truths and our self-evidences.

cardboard adolescent

47 - THOUGHT AND BEING

The more positive knowledge we obtain, the more estranged we become from the mysteries of life. The more the mechanism of our thought perfects itself, the more difficult it becomes for us to recover the sources of being. Knowledge weighs heavily upon us and paralyzes us, and perfected thought makes of us submissive, will-less beings who seek, see and appreciate in life only "order" and the laws and norms established by this "order." Our teachers and guides are no longer the prophets who spoke "as those who have power" but the scientists, for whom the supreme virtue consists in obeying the Necessity which they have not created and which never allows itself to be persuaded by anything or anyone.

Bane of your existence

This has been heavy on my mind for about a year. The "information age" is killing humanity.

crash_override

And religion. The more we know about science the stronger case people build against god/gods. Of course im sue you all knew that already. Just pointing that out.

cardboard adolescent

i would encourage (re)reading my first post.

if physics in particular has taught us anything in the last hundred years or so, it's that even though we might be able to set up experiments and formulate reasonable expectations, we don't really know what is happening, how it's happening, or why it's happening. all science tells you is that when this one thing happens, this other thing will usually happen afterwards. it can get more and more detailed, but the level of 'how' and 'why' always slips between the gaps.

cardboard adolescent

adorno, minima moralia

14

Le bourgeois revenant. – [French: the returning bourgeois] The Fascist regimes of the first half of the 20th century have absurdly stabilized an obsolete economic form, multiplying the terror and misery the latter required for its continued preservation, now that its senselessness is plain as day. Private life however is also marked by this. Along with the reach of administration, the asphyxiating social order of the private, the particularism of interests, the long since obsolete form of the family, the right of property and its reflection in the character have all been shored up once more. But with a bad conscience, the barely disguised consciousness of untruth. Whatever was once good and proper in what was bourgeois – independence, persistence, thinking ahead, consideration – is rotten to its innermost core. For while bourgeois forms of existence are doggedly preserved, their economic prerequisites have fallen away. That which is private has gone over completely into that privation, which it secretly always was, and the stubborn grip on one’s own interest is intermingled with the rage that one is no longer capable of perceiving that things could be different and better. The bourgeoisie have lost their naïvété, and for that reason have become wholly obdurate and malevolent. The benevolent hand which even now cares for and nourishes their little garden as if it had not long ago turned into a “lot” [in English in original], but fearfully holds the unknown intruder at a distance, is already that which refuses to grant the political refugee asylum. Objectively threatened, the power elite and their functionaries become subjectively utterly inhuman. Thus the class comes into itself and makes the destroying will of the course of the world into its own. The bourgeoisie live on like ghosts who threaten catastrophe.

cardboard adolescent

God is dead, and we have killed him. What does this mean? It means that once there was God, and now there is only us. God deferred the meaning of His existence to us, and ever since we have been trying to defer our meaning back to him. That is to say, we have let the abyss write our values. Now we must face it as the “void that approaches with all its forms/whose most perfect image/is the advance of an incalculable group of crab lice” (Artaud). To atone for God's death, we must become gods ourselves. That is, we must do what not even God could... create meaning.

boo boo

Yeah, google has almost become our backup brain, our external hard drive if you will.

I mean it's helpful and wonderful and all, but a lot of people will start to rely on the internet more and more, to look up anything they wont bother to actually learn about. And thus they don't have to try too hard to remember things. To learn things in a more specific way and not just quote what you read.

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It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

TheBig3

Last wednesday I watched a film at the MFA on Child Advertising and how its effects (read: corrupts) children. They made a point to say that "you can't just pick up a stick and pretend its a wand anymore, you need the Disney version Harry potter wand" and that because of this, children can't even play any longer, they just reenact what they've seen on television and in movies.

I think Boo Boo and the rest are making the same point (in a general sense) about adults here.

But still I'm hesitant to believe that humans are so easy to silence. There will always be something uniquely human about them, and to reference the set-up in CA's first post in here, The race wouldn't have dragged themselves out of the mud if not for the ability to percieve things in different and often perverted ways.

If anything i'd say that this is a set back, a new stumbling block we must mutate and adapt to. In the end, my faith with us is persistant.

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cardboard adolescent

it basically lowers all 'knowledge' to the mundane level of 'information,' no one fact is more valuable than any other, each is equally ready for consumption.