Ok I'm going to write this up quick because I should be studying, but I keep forgetting to make this topic.
I study philosophy, and occasionally I come across something that shares some ideas found in the Principia. Last year I gave a speech about the part in the Principia about "psycho-metaphysics", but I didn't have any other established arguments to lean on, and they're certainly not explicated in the Principia, so I got torn up when I had to defend my presentation. It wasn't for a class, thankfully, just a philosophy student group, but now when I see links to that section in the works of philosophers such as Kant or Nietzsche, I take care to note them.
Nietzsche is easy. He's even quoted in the principia, his think about needing chaos to be a dancing star. But even further than that, his anthropology deals with chaos pretty often. When he talks about human perception and life, he often links it back to chaos. He criticized metaphysicians and hailed artists, saying that they both took the chaos that is existence, and while the metaphysicians tried to make it fit neat and orderly into boxes, the artist simply interpreted it. He went as far as to say that to live is to interpret.
Kant deserves mention just because he's so goddamn famous(albeit annoying as hell). His 12 categories correspond slightly to the section on psycho-metaphysics and grids and windows. But not as much as this guy:
Richard Rorty - I wonder if the section on psycho-metaphysics was not completely based on his work. His concepts on the "linguistic community"'s affect on the individual's perception of reality corresponds directly to this section of the principia. However, in the principia, the 'material' of the grids is not specified, whereas Rorty clearly defines it as the language, in the broadest sense of the term, and he bases this work on the "language game" work of Wittgenstein. I haven't had the chance to read Wittgenstein yet, I've only read about him, but I imagine his work could be related to Discordian ideals in some ways as well.
Rorty is still very controversial, so it's not as "established" as the others, but he is super famous, before he died in 2007 he was probably 1 or the 2 most influential living philosophers(with Habermas). But his relative epistemology is pretty much the exact same thing as this part of the principia, explained differently.
There is also of course the eastern aspects of Zen, especially with the koans found in the Principia, but in the western world, those hold less weight.
Are there any other links, direct or otherwise, that you guys see between Discordian works and "established" philosophers?
My thread about the Apostles (I covered Sri Syadasti) show heavy links into not only Zen(Chan Buddhism) but also Hinduism and Jainism.
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=18260.0
Thanks for the other Links!
As far as I can tell, Discordia when boiled down to fundamentals consists of the major religious theme (the trancendent experience), and David Hume fighting to the death with John Locke.
Quote from: Telarus on May 27, 2010, 06:33:43 PM
My thread about the Apostles (I covered Sri Syadasti) show heavy links into not only Zen(Chan Buddhism) but also Hinduism and Jainism.
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=18260.0
Looks great! I haven't read the whole thing, but I've looking for a broken down translation of the Sanskrit text for a long time! I always wondered if it was real Sanskrit or convincing bullshit. I
Quote from: LMNO on May 27, 2010, 06:41:57 PM
As far as I can tell, Discordia when boiled down to fundamentals consists of the major religious theme (the trancendent experience), and David Hume fighting to the death with John Locke.
Where do you see that? I can see the religious theme, if you want to put it that way, though I wouldn't use the word religious. But I don't see where you see the tension between the two English empiricists. The epistemological aspects I saw were all way past both of them, because both of them believed in the existence of an objective truth, which I don't feel is reflected in the principia.
It might help if I knew exactly what you think of when you think of discordianism, there's a lot of different stuff in there.
Camus, for absurdism. The Myth of Sisyphus in particular links in to horrormirth.
As for the TFY,S bits, I don't know of any established philosophies that get into that. Some branches of gnosticism do the whole 'don't believe things' schtick, but those aren't exactly recognizable. If you want to construct your own arguments about it, I can dig up my psych references on the pervasiveness of cognitive biases.
Quote from: Requia ☣ on June 03, 2010, 09:16:08 AM
It might help if I knew exactly what you think of when you think of discordianism, there's a lot of different stuff in there.
Camus, for absurdism. The Myth of Sisyphus in particular links in to horrormirth.
As for the TFY,S bits, I don't know of any established philosophies that get into that. Some branches of gnosticism do the whole 'don't believe things' schtick, but those aren't exactly recognizable. If you want to construct your own arguments about it, I can dig up my psych references on the pervasiveness of cognitive biases.
I'm curious about any links people have seen really. Alot of philosophies are developed as a synthesis of others, so I was wondering what other pieces people recognized in the PD. However it's true that I pick and choose the parts that apply to me, so not everything would be necessarily pertinent.
Camus is a good example I already thought of, but haven't really explored yet. I recently read an essay about absurdity that dealt with him and Sartre, as well as some other existentialists, which seemed not so close to the absurdism that I find in the Principia, but however leans towards a TFY,S attitude(which is very cool! and part of the reason I can't stop reading existentialist phenomenology).
Because the world is devoid of objective or pre-determined meaning, each person has to define it for themselves.
I haven't read the The Myth of Sisyphus, but I'm curious as to where you see horrormirth, I'll put it on my summer reading list. When I read existentialism I usually read excitement, joy, and wonderful-open-ended-ness.
But yes! I would love to see what you have from a psychological perspective! One of the reasons Merleau-Ponty's work is as amazing as it is was his synthesis of philosophy and psychology(both of which I love). I would love a technical perspective if it's not too much work to find. Thanks :)
ETA: Oh I forgot one thing. RAW had quote about "agnosticism of everything", or just not having any absolute beliefs. That's just pure Descartes. He suspended all judgement over whether or not an object exists, cos he sis he knew he couldn't know, and he didn't just want to get stuck there.
Korzybski Science and Sanity, for semantics.
Various quantum mechanics physicists, for agnosticism and weirdness.
Wilhelm Reich, various works, for character armor, sexual repression, and the emotional plague.
While studying for moral philosophy, I came across another that I'd noted but forgotten about.
In fact it comes from probably my favorite page of the Principia, A Sermon on Ethics and Love. The one where at the end the deity say "OH. WELL, THEN STOP." and turns herself into an aspirin commercial. The's a section of L'être et le néant by Sartre which echoes this pretty well. It's about the absolute liberty of choice, and he gives a drawn out example about someone who's trapped in a bad cycle - they're convinced that they're ill (mentally), and they want to stay depressed and they only go to a therapist to convince themselves that they really can't be cured(it's his whole thing about la mauvaise fois ["bad faith"? not sure how it's translated]).
Anyway he talks about this will that wants nothing good of itself, and keeps getting trapped in these bad cycles, and it can't be coaxed out or anything, it's very determined. But for Sartre the will's liberty is absolute, so there's a way out. He describes it a little just like the "OH, WELL, THEN STOP", it's a moment of rupture that clicks and everything changes from there, the will's determination is redirected. A literary example he gives is the moment that Raskolnikov decides to give himself up(those who don't get the reference should really read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment!).
Ok, back to studying.
Quote from: NWC on June 03, 2010, 10:54:17 AM
But yes! I would love to see what you have from a psychological perspective! One of the reasons Merleau-Ponty's work is as amazing as it is was his synthesis of philosophy and psychology(both of which I love). I would love a technical perspective if it's not too much work to find. Thanks :)
Putting all my notes on the TFY,S stuff in psychology together has turned out to be a monumental task. I'm going to be doing a series in 'Or Kill Me' called 'Building a Better Biped' on all this. (Citations for the first piece that's up will be edited in when I get a chance and am actually in my right mind so I can make sure I didn't screw them up, the two haven't happened at the same time in a few days).
Derrida beats the fuck out of Korzybski, even though I borrow from both.
Derrida in a nutshell: all language is necessarily false, interwoven, and incomplete.
But I understand he went in other directions in his later work, so I dunno about that.
Quote from: NWC on May 27, 2010, 11:20:43 AM
There is also of course the eastern aspects of Zen, especially with the koans found in the Principia, but in the western world, those hold less weight.
Hmmm. I find they hold more weight personally, while western philosophy misses the big picture and pragmatism.
Shun-Ryu Suzuki: ""So the secret is just to say 'Yes!' and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self."
ETA: I'll elaborate on these a bit later, I gotta go right now.
Quote from: Ne+@uNGr0+ on June 09, 2010, 01:27:02 AM
Derrida beats the fuck out of Korzybski, even though I borrow from both.
Derrida in a nutshell: all language is necessarily false, interwoven, and incomplete.
But I understand he went in other directions in his later work, so I dunno about that.
Quote from: NWC on May 27, 2010, 11:20:43 AM
There is also of course the eastern aspects of Zen, especially with the koans found in the Principia, but in the western world, those hold less weight.
Hmmm. I find they hold more weight personally, while western philosophy misses the big picture and pragmatism.
Shun-Ryu Suzuki: ""So the secret is just to say 'Yes!' and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self."
ETA: I'll elaborate on these a bit later, I gotta go right now.
Haven't read Derrida, but with 20th century philosophers that theme is pretty common, though often approached from different angles. Rorty and Wittgenstein had some similar stuff, and more notably than any of them would be Merleau-Ponty I'd say, his phenomenological work is all based around language, and going to a "pre-linguistic" place.
What I meant by eastern traditions not holding as much weight in the western world was not on a personal level, but in a university setting. Yes, it receives recognition, but simply due to the fact that the method is not "rigorous" in the same way that western philosophers are expected to be, in an argumentative structure an eastern philosophy would be considered as "lesser".
However, the quote you gave from Shun-Ryu Suzuki echoes exactly what I was explaining about Sartre. Sartre was, while being an existentialist, also a phenomenologist, and so for him the "old self" no longer exists, man (re)defines himself at every moment. The preceding self acts as a "given" upon which the new self can build itself, but the new self that constructs itself at every moment is always free to go in any direction.
(le soi passé donne à la liberté humaine un 'donnée' à base duquel le soi du moment présent peut se construire, même si le choix du soi est absoluement libre à tout moment.. c'est-à-dire qu'il peut toujours y avoir une rupture profonde entre le donnée et le soi qui s'invente à tout moment, le soi n'est jamais contraint par ce qui le precède.) it's much easier to express in French.
Just came across this in my History of Philosophy course - Boèce was a middle ages guy(or late antiquity) who wrote a book about jailbreaking the human prison. I don't know much else about it, but it reminded me of the BIP.
Except this guy was actually in jail, which probably adds an interesting perspective.
Hey NWC, I just stumbled upon some MIT Open Courseware that might be helpful.
Here's the link:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/
They have some good stuff on there, I've read through some of their courses before. But I also have my own full schedule of philosophy classes, it's what I study, so I don't have as much time as I'd like to read MIT's courses :)
Deleuze is about the most Discordian philosopher I've read.
From the intro to the Routledge Critical Thinkers book on his theories:
Why Deleuze? In many ways this is a question Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) himself might have asked. Deleuze took nothing for granted and insisted that the power of life – all life and not just human life – was its power to develop problems. Life poses problems – not just to thinking beings, but to all life. Organisms, cells, machines and sound waves are all responses to the complication or 'problematising' force of life. The questions of philosophy, art and science are extensions of the questioning power of life, a power that is also expressed in smaller organisms and their tendency to evolve, mutate and become.
[...]
In Deleuze's case, like many other post-structuralists, this recognised impossibility of organising life into closed structures was not a failure or loss but a cause for celebration and liberation. The fact that we cannot secure a foundation for knowledge means that we are given the opportunity to invent, create and experiment. Deleuze asks us to grasp this opportunity, to accept the challenge to transform life.
[...]
His early book on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume – published in 1953 when Deleuze was only 28 – argued that the human subject and its stable outside world was a fiction produced within the flow of experience: 'the world (continuity and distinction) is an outright fiction of the imagination' (Deleuze 1991, 80). In arguing for the image of the subject and the world as products of the imagination, Deleuze already showed a tendency to interpret philosophy creatively and to argue that there was a creative tendency in life itself: the tendency for human life to form images of itself, such as the image of the rational mind or 'subject'.
Instead of providing yet one more system of terms and ideas Deleuze wanted to express the dynamism and instability of thought. He reinvented his style and vocabulary with each project. No term in his work is capable of being defined in itself; any single term makes sense only in its relation to the whole which it helps to create. For this reason reading Deleuze is not an easy task; it is certainly not a question of adding one proposition to another. Rather, you have to begin by seeing the problem of Deleuze's work: whether we can think difference and becoming without relying on common sense notions of identity, reason, the human subject or even 'being'. Then, you have to read each Deleuzean term and idea as a challenge to think differently. The 'difficulty' of Deleuze is tactical; his works attempt to capture (but not completely) the chaos of life.
:mittens:
Yay, something new.
There was mention of Deleuze in a thread I made about mentions of chaos in different philosophies, but now this makes me really want to read him. Especially seeing as he's French, I won't have to read a translation(my number 1 motivation for learning German - translated philosophy can be a headache, especially from German).
A quick search shows me it was you, Cain, who mentioned him in that thread. Any reccomendations for starting off? I have a decent sized reading list already for the summer, I'd probably only have time for one more book. The three you mentioned were Capitalism and Schizophrenia, What Is Philosophy?, and Difference and Repetition.
Quote from: Cain on June 19, 2010, 05:14:00 PM
Deleuze is about the most Discordian philosopher I've read.
Cool. :) I've been wondering about that. I'm a bit of nut about Deleuze and Guattari (not an expert by any stretch - i just like thinking with them), and have been reading the PD, BIP, etc (all new to me) mainly through their writing. Wondered a little over the past few months if I was imposing coherence/Lo5ing.
NWC - Other than any suggestions cain or others might have, if you'd like something short to add to your list, there's a quick 4 page essay (1992) - "Postscript on the Societies of Control" by Deleuze. I found it here (http://libcom.org/library/postscript-on-the-societies-of-control-gilles-deleuze).
- off to click lings and crib notes from the rest of this thread :)
I started l'Anti-Œdipe today. The style takes some getting used to, but I like it so far. I'm only 20 pages in, but I'm excited to read the rest.
That's one of the more stylistically unusual books, but I do like the introduction to it by Foucault (I'm still digesting the rest).
I do have a folder full of all of Deleuze's books and major papers on my HD...somewhere. In English, no less. If I find it, I'll upload and pass on the link to anyone interested.
Found something interesting while reading a Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Wittgenstein (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/). This quotation refers to his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Quote[...]the Tractatus has gone over its own limits, and stands in danger of being nonsensical.
The "solution" to this tension is found in Wittgenstein's final remarks, where he uses the metaphor of the ladder to express the function of the Tractatus. It is to be used in order to climb on it, in order to "see the world rightly"; but thereafter it must be recognized as nonsense and be thrown away. Hence: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
[...]
More recent readings tend to take nonsense more seriously as exactly that — nonsense. This also entails taking seriously Wittgenstein's words in 6.54 — his famous ladder metaphor — and throwing out the Tractatus itself. The Tractatus, on this stance, beyond telling the reader about the ineffable (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logical form, pictorial form, etc.), is a part of the ineffable as well, and should be recognized as such. An accompanying discussion must then also deal with how this can be recognized, what this can possibly mean, and how it should be used, if at all.
This of course reminded me of the Pentabarf, specifically the 5th rule: A discordian is prohibited of believing what he reads. I get a similar vibe from this quote from Wittgenstein, talking about the Tractatus:
QuoteMy work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book; ... I've managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.
I don't really have any thoughts on all of this, but it rang a bell so I thought I'd share. I'm on an analytic philosophy kick right now, and it's rare to see an analytic philosopher as rigorous as Wittgenstein get all nonsensical. It's pleasant though, I find.
Wittgenstein was probably the last good analytic philosopher. Well, the last one who didn't make me want to slap someone.