7 PHILOSOPHICAL APHORISMS

I think you have summed it up pretty well in these seven thoughts. Now put them together and you will find out how to live life as it suits you. That is the most any of us can do, seek contentment. That is more important than any other thing in life you can search for. Find contentment and you have everything.

Someday, when I have the money, I will have #3 tattooed onto my skull. This is pure Kafka, Mr G. Pure Kafka.

Well, remember I told you all about the parasitic/ symbiotic relationship that exists between Kafka and me, sometimes I feel like I'm channeling him beyond the grave.

What about #4? Can you relate to that?

Soren, send me a photo of that tattoo ( or better still, the scalp itself ) once you have it done and I will give it the pride of place in the scrapbook of the madness of my life.

Can I relate to number four? Short said, yes.

#3 is the shiznit.

I have to elaborate more later.

Unfortunately I have to go do what it is I have been programmed to think I must.

WORK.

Ill be back Boris.

Much Love.

Ah yes, seven answers for seven questions that lie infinately apart, like star-crossed lovers, never to join!! Love this!!

1.You go beyond mystical Wittgenstein in the TRACTATUS with his 'proposition theory' to the Kabbalistic tetragrammaton element or the Hindu 'bisma' seed sound, and seek a metaphor for an abstract existent. That's either scary, or enlightened. But it's daring, so I like it.

2) And looking for the key outside, "where the light is better," instead of inside where we left it. (Before we forgot we leave the door unlocked.)

3) I just survived seven months of cancer treatment. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

4) Unless we are self-remembering to observe our conscious state most of the time, which is something you have to not only need to learn how to do but also need to actually want to do.

5) Simulate whatever lay under the earth, I suppose, and then go underground,, at least in our virtual worlds.

6) Sounds mysterious, interior, unknown. Something Duchamp would leave behind in the Art Institute of Chicago, or like the dark energy wrapped around spacetime. This is spooky interesting, Boris.

7) Fiddlesticks! Bring on experience—experience comes before language. Keep the map, but strike out into that vast territory uncovered, that Australia of the sensing, feeling wordless consciousness at play in chaos.

This was very wry and intuitive for a philosopher, Boris, you strike me as a literary man first, simply because you write so well, and most philosophers don't. I hope you don't mind me playing with your pensees.
Delightful fun!

Brandon, given that Freddy himself was a philosopher, can we not apply his thoughts on the supposed "truth value'' of philosophical writings to that very passage itself that you quoted and are we then not led to the Cretan Liar Paradox?

The Cretan Liar paradox is the paradox that arises from the statement: "Everything that I say is a lie". ( In its original form it was expressed as: A Cretan once said:"All Cretans are liars")

Now, if everything that I say is a lie, then that statement itself that I just said is a lie as well. And so we get into this vicious loop of shifting truth-values of that original statement - that statement is neither true or false.

In precisely the same way, Freddy is saying that all philosophers try to pass off their judgements as The Truths, but isn't that itself a judgement coming from a ( you might not agree that he is a philosopher but I think that the silent majority do) a philosopher?

That's exactly right Bradley: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, bait for bait

Boris,

First of all I must comment on this first because I actually wrote of it while flying on a plane at night looking down at the lights then up at the stars and it was a mirror and it made me think of exactly what you wrote:

If all of the sky was a giant mirror so that all of our actions down here on Earth projected into the Heavens themselves, what would we allow ourselves to do then?

I wrote of it. Remind me to show that to you.


#1: the closest I could come to was: Nirvana


#2: Again, why we are on that constant search, we don't know, we are but sponges and how frightening to find out that all of this while Charon does exist and we are just being lead to a sardonic cemetarial playground? I would like to think of a "Rivendell" (thanks J.R.R.) and keep searching just in case.


#3: The complete essence of Buddhism


#4: Sad, but true.


#6: And within only can we find that compartment. Or a key to open it for that matter.


#7: Touche . . . well said.


You are brilliant.

For some reason this drove me to my quote file. This, from John Fowles: "I want to propose a new man: I call him the Aristos. He is an ideal, not a real man; and ideal only for a world in which alienation and rootlessness are ubiquitous characteristics of the individual, just as brainwashing and dehumanization are ubiquitous evils of the society the individual is an atom of."

Fowles would likely say I employ this quote out of context when using it to comment on your #3. What you say may be true. Or . . . it may also be what I call the Tortured Artist Syndrome. It is self-inflicted and romanticized. Only you would know, but since you had asked me to read this, I thought I'd try to offer more than a drive-by clown chuckle.

As for the other 6: I shall print them out and pin them to my bulletin board.

Number 5 ... :-)

Good stuff. Thanks.

Lots of food for thought. #5 A lot of people might not like what they see. 

Great post, Boris! Thank you.

I guess we seek the ground of all being, especially(if we are egoistic enough) the reason for our own being, not in the past, that is history, but above and beyond us, something that will make our existence, termporal as it seems, purposeful. If that reason cannot be found, then one will be invented or accepted or sought and maybe found too soon, but maybe we will never know The Reason for our existence.