Poetry

Day 3598-2, Thinking.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I think, therefore I am is what Descartes famously said. He seems to clarify later that the thinking is undeniable, but that little can yet be concluded about the nature of the thinker. A critique that you can make, and is made, is the “I” in this phrase. How could Descartes concluded thet the “I” he identifies with is the thing that does the thinking?

It is hard to ignore the feeling that there is something in us that does the thinking and that we call I. The reason is that I feel like I think about it. But the I that thinks is also the I that makes bodily sounds, and how much do you control those?

In light of this, “I” seems more like a linguistic tool we use to communicate with others and with ourselves. Our bodies breathe and digest without our intervention, yet we still say that we breathe and digest, just as we say “I think this or that,” even though our control over thinking may not be very different.

But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ ego ” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.

Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Part III, Lecture XVIII (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.278046/page/241/mode/2up)

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Day 3595, foresight in hindsight

Daily picture, Definitions

Back in the summer of 2016, we were in America visiting family. We, of course, talked about the upcoming elections and, like any sane person, assumed that Hillary would win. We all know what happened, and back home, I got a spark of inspiration. Over a few weeks, I created many “portraits” of the situation using pictures I took in America and Photoshop.

I’m just a nobody, but for me, it was pretty clear what was going on. I studied history and paid close attention to what happened in Germany between the wars. I had also read several biographies about Trump, which might not tell the whole story, but certainly paint a bright picture.

Back then, many people who should know better took him seriously and maybe questioned him, but not the role he played as president of the most powerful country in the world. I never understood this, and to me, it was clear what kind of person he was. I don’t say he would do what the Nazis did, but I do say that if he had lived in Germany back then, he would definitely have built the concentration camps with “Arbeit macht frei” in neon letters, with an even larger sign on top of it bearing his name.

Sadly, after ten years, we see that he is actually moving closer to becoming a full-blown sadist, much like a typical Nazi who partied just a stone’s throw away from the ovens. And the people are gleefully arresting the hated aliens, smiling behind a mask, while most Americans remain silent, praying to God to protect their savior. All the disbelievers start to realize that the path he’s paving for many of his critics leads straight to Auschwitz, and it doesn’t matter if we might never get there or how you call your concentration camp, enough people with official titles are planning it, and more than enough are willing to look the other way.

Below, you can see what I created and, in a sense, predicted in 2016.

This is a picture I took when we drove into Utah. I got the distinctive feeling that a lot of Americans are not so into the “you”-tah, so I changed the sign into Me-tah. Selfish as they sometimes are, like good Christians.

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Day 3584, ABSURD.

Daily picture, Definitions, Poetry 
Do you lift a roof over your head
or is the lifting
roof enough?

Do any of them keep the rain out?

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSURD, THE. A term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality. For example, in Sartre’s philosophy the ‘original choice’ of one’s fundamental project is said to be ‘absurd’, since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental
project. Arguably, this case in fact shows that Sartre is mistaken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves grounded in a choice; and one can argue that other cases which are supposed to involve experience of the ‘absurd’ are in fact a *reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions which produce this conclusion. The ‘absurd’ does not in fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy; but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural context of existentialism, for example in the ‘theatre of the absurd’, as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett.

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Day 3583, ABSTRACTION.

Daily picture, Definitions
Rørvik, 2019, Huawei P20 Pro

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSTRACTION. A putative psychological process for the acquisition of a concept x either by attending to the features common to all and only xs* or by disregarding just the spatiotemporal locations of xs. The existence of abstraction is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (esp. II. xi. 9 and 10 and III. iii. 6 ff.) but rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge (esp. paras. 6 ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125). For Locke the capacity to abstract distinguishes human beings from animals. It enables them to think in abstract ideas and hence use language. Berkeley argues that the concept of an abstract *idea is incoherent because it entails both the inclusion and the exclusion of one and the same property. This in turn is because any such putative idea would have to be general enough to subsume all xs yet precise enough to subsume only xs. For example, the abstract idea of triangle ‘is neither oblique nor rectangular, equilateral norscalenon, but all and none of these at once’ (The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para. 13).

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Day 3568, not the fault.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

317 The judgment ofthe evening. – He who reflects on the work he has done during the day and during his life, but does so when he has finished it and is tired, usually arrives at a melancholy conclusion: this however is not the fault of his day or his life, but ofhis tiredness.- In the midst of our work we usually have no leisure to pass judgment on life and existence, nor in the midst ofour pleasures: but ifwe should happen to do so, we should no longer agree with him who waited for the seventh day and its repose before he decided that everything was very beautiful – he had let the better moment go by.

Day 3555, You know.

Ai, Quotes

Today I had a long “discussion” with AI. I have tried different versions now and also downloaded some AI models to try them offline. Story short. Some of them know a lot and can present it quite impressively. Here is an AI-generated summary and podcast of our exchange. 

Understanding the Great Divide: Nietzsche vs. Krishnamurti

Introduction: Two Rebels, Two Different Paths

Both Friedrich Nietzsche and Jiddu Krishnamurti were radical thinkers who challenged the foundations of human belief and social structures. They saw humanity as trapped in a prison of its own making—a prison built from tradition, morality, and second-hand truths. This document is designed to guide you through their philosophies, starting with the common ground where they tore down the old world and then exploring the vastly different paths they forged. As one analysis puts it, their relationship can be summed up perfectly: “They meet in negation but diverge sharply in direction.”

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