Everything Human, Nothing Alien

Existentialism is philosophical suicide yet I feel so alive.

[ginzyblog]

“I’m happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s finally made it: discovered a new young cat, and my imagination of an eternal boy walks on the streets of San Francisco, handsome, and meets me in cafeterias and loves me. Ah don’t think I’m sickening. You’re angry at me. For all of my lovers? It’s hard to eat shit, without having visions; when they have eyes for me it’s like Heaven.”

excerpt: Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo, from “Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems 1947–1997”

[Peter Orlovsky, North Beach, San Francisco, Spring, 1955, snapped by Allen Ginsberg,  courtesy Stanford University Libraries/Allen Ginsberg Estate]

#allenginsberg #peterorlovsky #malestcornificituocatullo #jackkerouac #sanfrancisco #beatgeneration #beatliterature #literature #poetry #instapoet #poetsofinstagram #photography #queer #gay #poetrycommunity (at San Francisco, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsq7iwknyLe/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=k79vd1r122in

[papillonnne]

ANNIE HSIAO-CHING WANG

ARTIST

[scientificphilosopher]

[footnotestoplato]

Cute Philosophy Asks! <3

Diogenes - Would you rather be accused of public masturbation or live in a barrel? On a more serious note, do you know anything about the Cynics beyond a fondness for Diogenes because he’s zany? Plato - Do you really, genuinely believe that because triangles exist, there is necessarily a perfect example of their kind from which all examples are derived? Follow up question, are you stupid? Kant - Are you more of an inquiring murderer or a would-let-the-inquiring-murderer-kill-your-mate kinda person? Marx - Do you think liberals are people? Follow up question, if not, what’ll you use them for when historic inevitability comes to pass? Hegel - Is there a point in writing philosophy if no one understands you? Follow up question, why answer the first? No one’s gonna understand anyway ya dingaling. Marcus Aurelius - Have you ever had fun ever at all ever? Wittgenstein - Ever rubbed one out to a number? If not, liar. Ayn Rand - Post a selfie like everyone knows you want to you narcissistic piece of shit. Nietzsche - So, you a sexist? Or do you really just think you’re all that? Confucius - Name exactly one (1) other philosopher outside the western tradition. Jung - How much do you love pseudoscience? Freud - Why do you love pseudoscience so much? Spinoza - How’s it feel always playing second fiddle to people with less exciting opinions than you? Dawkins - If you had to go without doritos or mountain dew, which? Hume - Ever get bored of pretending you don’t think that being a skeptic makes you super smart?

[virtualnihil]

[eggsistentialegg-blog-blog-blog]

Gaze out into the abyss and fear not what you find. You will only find yourself. Your true self.

[we-kant-even]

[we-kant-even]

Philosophy Memeing Merch! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

[we-kant-even]

i d k   w h a t   i ’ m   d o i n g   w i t h   m y   l i f e

[mansplainedmarxist-blog]

#FullCommunism2k15

[001001001001001001]

The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn’t exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you’d prefer not to bother with anyway). He’s funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you’re a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I’m a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you’re a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic. […] If you’re a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn’t you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there’s something in every book you’re likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy. […] Nietzsche is aphoristic even when he’s being systematic, and when he’s being aphoristic, his writing is simply unmatched in its beauty and mayhem, its uncanny mix of compression and infinite suggestion. And for a young guy who’s intellectually hungry but doesn’t much enjoy reading, finding this section of philosophy-bits in the middle of this famous book is like a homecoming. You don’t even have to know what these epigrams mean to enjoy them. You just feel manly and brave in entertaining them at all, not flinching but laughing when Nietzsche says: “One is best punished for ones virtues.” (You even get to work out some of your girl-troubles by lingering over Nietzsche’s several jabs at women.) Of course, Nietzsche scholars will tell you not to run too far with these little wisecracks. You need to understand them in the context of his larger body of work, in which he often circles back to themes, again and again, revising and even contradicting his earlier writings. You have to understand the aphorisms as part of a vast poetic project of self-creation or becoming in which nothing is truly settled. Nietzsche himself predicted he would be misread, acquire misguided disciples, and so he has.

Matt Feeney, How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types (via 01030104)

[in-touching]

[fyp-philosophy]

It is often claimed in this context that people define themselves, which is often perceived as stating that they can wish to be something—anything, a bird, for instance—and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that people are  defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons). This is as opposed to their genes, or human nature, bearing the blame.

As Sartre writes in his work Existentialism is a Humanism: “… man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.” Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact, neither of these things essentially.

“The subjective thinker’s form, the form of his communication, is his style. His form must be just as manifold as are the opposites that he holds together. The systematic eins, zwei, drei is an abstract form that also must inevitably run into trouble whenever it is to be applied to the concrete. To the same degree as the subjective thinker is concrete, to the same degree his form must also be concretely dialectical. But just as he himself is not a poet, not an ethicist, not a dialectician, so also his form is none of these directly. His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. Subordinate character, setting, etc., which belong to the well balanced character of the esthetic production, are in themselves breadth; the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things. The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy is not a concern. The setting is inwardness in existing as a human being; the concretion is the relation of the existence-categories to one another. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth.”

- Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Postscript, Hong p. 357–358)

[src]

[wordsnquotes]

Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

Eckhart Tolle (via alittlebitoflace) @cataclysick (via invironment)

[in-touching]

Me: *stares into the Abyss*

The Abyss: *stares back at me*

Me: lol so,,, what are we

[nihilsuggestion]

it makes me laugh that u believe ur 100% right about no god or afterlife existing. ur gonna see ur wrong :)

I’m glad you’re having fun and laughing. You’re not the only one, because exactly four miliseconds after I saw this ask, I burst into laughter too. Cheers to laughing together and having fun!

[in-touching]

Is this blog run by Kierkegaard

[nihilsuggestion]

Let the universe blind you with its gleam. Let the bravest people fall at its majesty. Let nothing leave you tranquil. You will toss at night from thoughts of vastness and redshift and the uncaring nature of the universe.