It seems that our time is the most cynical and intensely pessimistic era ever in recorded history. Continue reading Nihilism in the Iliad and Pantheon
Nihilism in the Iliad and Pantheon
Category: Existentialism
Ethics of Piracy
The other day I got into a debate on twitter about the morality of sharing ebooks. Someone was posting free copies of Roger Zelazny’s books on kindle, and I replied that I was entitled to ebooks of the printed books I own. This writer challenged that assertion and asked for an argument. I refused to engage in his Empire-inflected moralizing, that the writer owned the medium his story is printed on, and used the Ship of Theseus example to deconstruct the notion of ownership.
…Insomnia
I’m quite interested in the possible avenues of philosophizing out of the mood of insomnia — how it shreds the so-called default state of the self — and whether insomnia can show us a more acute state of consciousness that is no longer slave to the conventional understanding of the world. Speaking from experience, insomnia helps me understand the darker aspects of existence (anxiety, angst, dread, despair, etc) and relate to writers like Beckett, Cioran. Continue reading …Insomnia
Nothing.
Every ‘why’ question is a subset of the ultimate question: Why is there Something and not Nothing instead? If you can think yourself and the world away, if you can say no, then you are acting in the dimension of the nothing. There is such a thing – the Nothing. We are, Heidegger says, “a placeholder of the nothing.” (What is Metaphysics, p. 38) The transcendence of human beings is therefore Nothing. Continue reading Nothing.
Existentialism in Pantheon
I had an epiphany a few days ago: the graphic novel I am working on, Pantheon, is a vampire novel. I mean, it doesn’t obviously share with many traditional elements (blood sucking, undead creatures), but they both feature immortal beings that reflect on our humanity in many ways, and most importantly in an existential fashion. Continue reading Existentialism in Pantheon
Fate/Zero and nihilism
While I’ve read several works in literature that could pass as nihilistic, it wasn’t until Fate/Zero I could say I’ve come across a truly nihilistic masterpiece. Even the classic Neon Genesis Evangelion did not reach this nadir of such depraved nihility. Gen Urobuchi, the writer of Fate/Zero has expressed similar sentiments in his other works such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but Fate/Zero serves as a platform that displays a potpourri of various philosophies that are exposed one by one as fictitious or illusory.
New Seven Deadly Vices: Self-Deception
“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves from other people that in the end we disguise ourselves from ourselves.” La Rochefoucauld
New Seven Deadly Vices: Mediocrity
One of the laziest things in life is copying something or being a copy of an original. Continue reading New Seven Deadly Vices: Mediocrity
On reviving the carcass of philosophy
The following are collected tweets (@thanatology) I’ve made in the past month about posthumanism, or reviving the carrion of philosophy:
Once the window to a frozen thanatosphere opens, thought becomes razor sharp enough to slice through the rotting corpse of anthropocentrism.
And the slimy pus of the absolute seeps out and clot into new-old ideas: a heretical Derrideanism that continually savages itself
is a decadent form of post-Socratic felo-de-se that faces biological contingency w its own blind eyes a Corpse w/o Organs?
Freed from miserly enforcement of rule-bound metaphysical dilemmas, we are stoned by the fumes rising from a chaotic sea of virtualities.
Cynically supercharged w obscene desire for death, we, slaves to cruel directives of base materialism, bottom out in a dark zone of thought — once we see thru the deceptions of life Ego owns up to its pathology, embarrassed with its Macbeth dagger that drips the Earth’s black blood.
Agitprops of phenomenology, in resurrecting consciousness, merely plunge themselves deeper into the quicksand of their coprophilic narcissism.
Today’s thinkers are mere maggots feeding on the carcass of Brobdingnagians, whose feces will join the deep undercurrent of chthonic thought.
Crawling out from the bubbling orifice of its decomposing tomb, posthuman thought performs an autophagous Aufhebung as cannibalism.
A perverse slave of its own meaninglessness, Posthuman Thought gnaws at the root of the Yggdrasil of its own fatuous jurisdiction.
Today our amputated Reason continues to goose-step around calcifying totems of half-baked ideologies, either out of perversity or mockery.
Vaguely, the subject will re-cohere in the void pried open by the expulsion of Nature out of its hearth, due to revitalized post-idealism.After sprinkling black salt on the wounds of theology, sliced by universal contingency, thought painfully realizes the anorexia of meaning.
Posthuman thought adjusts its peripatetic trail among the gravestones of exhausted theologies in the misty light of the Polaris of nihilism.
Bizarre avatars will usher in new techniques of thought, sporadically evolving fetid rhizomes & decaying yet again in a farcical cycle.Inciting catastrophic predictions, opening a space for self-destructive ideological scrutiny & directing thanatocratic methods, philosophy ends up as a mere choreography of furious, demented & recurring political sequences.
Being and Time: Part 1, Division 2
Apologies on the late addition. Hopefully it’s not too garbled, and please feel free to discuss anything that strikes your fancy!
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Dasein & Authenticity
At first Heidegger says Dasein exists. Sure, sounds great. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Heidegger claims that there’s a basic difference between being and existing. Dasein doesn’t JUST exist. It’s that ONLY Dasein exists. Other things, objects like furniture, cars, books, etc., are, but they do not exist in the strict sense of the word. Existence only comes into play with the realization of being. When a being becomes conscious of its own being, it begins to exist. Continue reading Being and Time: Part 1, Division 2