Notes and Quotes

Random Notes and Unattributed Quotes (mostly from Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher) on almost everything, but principally on a thing called philosophy

A human who has been wrestling with philosophical questions would tend to look with askance at those who don't, no matter how successful and smart the latter are. Life is all about questions, facts, reality, and understanding within a finite earthy existence. To live is to be ready to say goodbye decisively at anytime to everything and everybody one holds dear and precious. Thus, there should be no room in one's life for petty envy, lies, and false pride. Among all living humans, how many can actually silently say to themselves that they are walking on that path and all the misunderstanding and ridicule and mockery be damned. To thine own self be true, exhorted the Bard, but who have listened? 

I started writing these notes and quotes with a rather smug and pompous notion of sharing and displaying my philosophical acumen and zeal, but as I went deeper into an unfamiliar terrain of subtlety, my pride became less pronounced and self-consciousness got more acute. It began to dawn on me that in the advanced stages of stupidity, lack of originality and profundity is made up by an excess of vacuity evidenced by a plethora of words. 

 It didn't matter that nobody was in awe and shock of what I knew; what really counts is whether I have learned anything before I die, whether I have finally mastered the art of not suffering over triviality. So, here I am, with the memory of two pretty pubescent girls almost naked in their skimpy bikinis frolicking in the warm waters of the Caribbean freshly imprinted in my mind, I see clearly the nature of sex and lust and procreation; the peacefulness that comes with self-understanding; the destructive forces of false pride and anger; and the power of forgiveness. So, I forgive her and many others that came after her. I forgive also all the stupid errors, mistakes, and missteps that I committed in the name of pride, revenge, and justice. One day, a woman like her would come along and I would tell that woman "No thanks, but I don't wish to suffer again." I would be back to my books and study with earnest. I would take care of myself while striving to be nice and understanding and forgiving. You see, love is just a habit, a memory, a game of pride and ego.

You talk too much. And I certainly talk too much. You think you are somebody. So do I. And we both delude ourselves that we are too good, too nice and nobody really deserves us, but deep down within us, in the marrow of our bones,  in the wee hours of the morning when loneliness weighs down on us, a nagging doubt comes up: perhaps we are not rich enough, not good-looking enough, not nice enough to catch anybody worthwhile. Reality always makes its presence known. False pride is an incompetent actor.

An incompetent writer like yours truly never forgets the first time he received a few words of (insincere) praise for his whimpering prose. He let the sweet poison of vanity seep into his blood and corrode his soul. He convincers  himself that he possessed talent. From that moment on, he dreams that his name will outlive him. He also fancies that he is comfortable underneath his skin and at ease with the world at large. So he writes and writes, day in and day out, hope against hope, with a fervent desire that one day out of his worn-out pen and petty mind emerges a book or a poem that ensures his immortality. Certainly he is not a coward for he is trying his best; he gives all what he has.

"By cowardice I do not mean fear. Cowardice...is a label we reserve for something a man does. What passes through his mind is his own affair."
                                                     
"Fear has a whole taxonomy---anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding---and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another. It's okay to be scared, you just don't want to show it."

In other words, be a good actor, in everything: love, life, and death. Mask your emotions. Your face must be an empty, serene, unaffected indifferent, uncaring, disinterested, blank expression. If you can do that, you have finally figured how to live, how to interact with humans. Yes, you cam show your true emotions with your dog, but never with humans because a dog would not betray you. Humans are unpredictable and don't always value loyalty and gratitude. Most  have an easily understood attitude of putting their own interests above everybody else's, and in the process they fuck real good old- fashioned values like lotalty and gratitude. Trust me. I know what I'm talking about, having been many times the receiving end of that attitude. Now you probably understand why I have an insouciant, blasé, I-don't-give-a-shit-if-you-drop-dead-right-in-front-of-me way about me. Last night, I had two bad dreams one after another. The first one about the last job I had. I was fired and then rehired and some assholes co-workers behaved strangely towards me when I showed up at my old desk. The other dream involved my standing up to my elder brother who used to beat the shit out of me. In the second dream I was shouting and was about to fucking hit him over the head with a two-by-four. Of course, the dreams were gravid with meaning. I was glad that I didn't dream about past girlfriends. Those dreams are getting old. Come on, I am 63 now, practically not a spring chicken anymore. If I dream about women, it should be about "find them, fuck them, and forget them" since almost all of them are all bullshitters and liars. However, I must admit that Peachy is really different from most, if not all, women I've met. In her, vivaciousness rules supreme and resides an intelligence that is immeasurably delightful. I must further confess whenever I'm around her, I can't help but be possessed by a lusty and lustful urge to hold her tight and squeeze her tiny behind and suck on her shapely tits. But dreams are all I can have. Silent dreams and secret dreams that she never knows about. 

I was amused by the stupid behavior of certain assholes who were old enough to know better. Note that I said I was amused, not angry . I just finished reading a cheap, preposterous, but well written tear jerker novel called "Dear Joanna"  and I cried like a baby after I reached the end, despite the fact the author is a mercenary of words and a trafficker in human longings. 

Anyway, I am reading a report about the miserable war in Afghanistan. A journalist spent fifteen months with an army platoon at an outpost in a hostile territory and was lucky enough to live to write about it. Reading it is making me feel numb, cynical, blessed with luck, and appreciative of life. I am learning to act strong and generous. Acting is but a short step towards actuality. Everyday I sit down and have a few minutes of meditation during which I thank fate and chance that I am still alive, and remind myself that respect (or pretense of respect) for others costs me nothing while disrespect to them may cost me my life. I only need to reflect on a simple fact I cannot bring myself to love some assholes and bitches because these jackasses have smart mouths. Sarcasm brings temporary satisfaction but lifetime enmity.

A slow consciousness is taking shape: I must do the right things without getting self-conscious and smug about it. Bragging is a sign of weakness and self-doubt. So does constant harping about lost loves. I mean Laura and many others frankly don't  give a fuck about me, so why should I keep feeling soft and mushy of long-gone puppy love memories, right? Fuck, when will I ever grow up?

I was very lucky of not being drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, but I always thought what I would do and act if I ever got conscripted and was forced to kill to defend myself. I have always had a nagging fear that I don't much courage and that deep down I am a coward. This fear has stayed with me throughout my life, ever since I was a little boy. All my acts of irrationality stemmed from a desire to prove that I don't fear death and I don't fear failure. 

That's why the remark that a human being is a material object that know  itself from inside resonates deeply with me. There is something awesome about this fact.  That also explains why I am attracted to tales of violence and thriller novels. I live vicariously through the characters and will myself to be like them: cool, resourceful, and fearless.

If we dig deep inside ourselves as deeply as we can , the ultimate being that we come to is some sort of will to live, to survive, just to be. And yet we see the also the ultimate futility and meaninglessness of our existence because we know we all die someday and all those things and people that mean a lot to us cease to have a hold on us, so why bother to fight, to struggle, to have a moment in the sun.

Early this morning when he tentatively asked her if she still loved him, she exploded with pent-anger and frustrations. She brought up all his past sins and mistakes while forgetting all the nice and generous things he had done for her. He prompted retreated into his shell and vowed to himself that henceforth he would be silent like a stone that lies deep in the sea. 

Schopenhauer saw the intellect as being the servant, not the master, of the will (as, for that matter, did Hume) and thus our inner lives as either consisting of or being dominated by will in one or other of its manifestations.

Schopenhauerw does not say, and does not believe, that the knowledge we have of ourselves from inside is knowledge of the noumenal. He gives three reasons why it cannot be.

First, Kant taught, and Schopenhauer agreed, that time is the very form of inner sense. Time exists in the phenomenal domain alone. 

Second, knowledge of any kind at all can exist only in the realm of the phenomenal. This is because, knowledge as such is inherently dualistic in nature: there has to be something that is known and something that knows it.

His third reason is derived from empirical observation. His investigations of inner experience and of our knowledge of ourselves from within have led him to the conclusion that most of our perceptions and wishes and h opes and fears do not present themselves to conscious experience. Before Freud was even born, Schopenhauer expounded what is normally thought as Freud's theory of repression, a theory which Freud himself pronounced to be the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Schopenhauer provided all thef necessary connecting links I the argument: he spelled out the greater part of our inner lives is unknown to us; that it is unknown to us because it is repressed; that it is repressed because to face up to it would cause a degree of disturbance that we could not handle; that it is so because it does not fit with the view of ourselves that we wish to maintain; that this incompatibility is caused by high levels of such things as sexual motivation, self-seeking, aggression, envy, fear, and cruelty whose presence within us we do not wish to acknowledge, not even in the secrecy of our own thoughts; and so we deceive ourselves about what our own characters and motivations are, allowing only such interpretations of them to appear in our conscious minds as we can deal with. This means that we are exactly as far from knowing our inner lives as our inner selves are unconscious, and we would be so even if such knowledge were theoretically possible on other grounds; and moreover that we would be unable to cope with it even if we had---we would indeed, many of us, break down under it.

This means that within ourselves as well as without there is an underlying realitythat remains hidden from us and can never be met with an experience. What it is in itself we shall never know. Knowledge of any kind at all,  knowledge as such, can come to us only through the apparatus that we as phenomenal beings find ourselves embodied in, and in forms whose nature is determined by that apparatus. Unless we are in some way the creators of all the phenomena thus experienced---a proposition which most of us find incredible, though it was believed by Fichte---those phenomena cannot be all there is apart from us: there must be a sense in which they are manifestations of something other than themselves or ourselves, something whose existence accounts for them, but something with which we can never make direct contact.

It has been said that often that the more powerful an experience, or the deeper an emotion, the more likely we are to feel we need to resort to metaphor to give it adequate expression. Metaphor, it would appear, goes deeper than literal speech. That must be one reason why poetry can penetrate depths inaccessible to prose. And perhaps also it is why there is such an important element of "as if" in great philosophy. What I understand, near the end of my search for meaning of my existence on this planet is this:

Truth/reality is not really conductive to expository prose; it must be felt and apprehended via the totality of one's experiences and being. And since everybody has his own level, his own depth of life experiences and of the experience of his being, his grasp/comprehension/feel of reality/truth only makes sense to him and to others who have similar life experiences/exposures or self-study. Essentially, what I am typing here as well as all the words I have written, prose or verse, are my efforts to understand the meaning of my existence and thus to prepare myself for the end of my life. That's why I find most sensuous pleasures boring and prosaic and are indeed an hindrance to my quest for knowledge and peace. I mean to say that I don't really enjoy good food or material comforts while knowledge and creative efforts turn me on tremendously. Even the sensuous pleasures associated with sex bore me if the woman I am with is not spiritual or unselfish. Selfishness reflects a still sub-human development. And I am fully human, unlike most assholes I know (cont.)