Philosophy is a Joke

Introduction:

From my title, most can already tell that I am being extremely provocative, especially as someone who thinks itself a philosopher. I admit it too.

Contrary to popular opinion, philosophy is not simply serious. It is a joke, which most philosophers do not even realize. There is a barrier to their understanding, which prevents them from seeing the joke they themselves perform.

The View of the Over-human: 

The over-human is a pretend role philosophers perform in which they envision the human and its condition from outside it. In other words, the over-human is the meta-level which underlies philosophy. This is not to be confused with Nietzsche's overman, though I do draw inspiration from that.

The joke is that a philosopher has to do the impossible (be something other than human) in order to pretend to be a philosopher. It does what is in principle what it cannot do, or rather it has to pretend to do the impossible to do philosophy.

There are three levels of philosophers. Level one maintains the paradox of being human and over-human in its game of philosophy without knowing it. Level two pretends to be merely over-human in a dehumanizing philosophy. Level three is the cynical recognition of the paradox and the even more cynical continuing to play at philosophy.

Take meta-ethics. The level one philosopher will unconsciously do the ethics of meta-ethics, in which it appeals to a normative criteria in the game of selecting or creating a ethical system. Of course, this is a joke because there can be no criteria, especially normative criteria, at the meta-level.

The level two philosopher will do meta-ethics without bringing in an ethics. It is essentially unhuman. This philosopher looks at those ants called humans. It looks down on social immune system or social program called morality, and this philosopher begins to describe it. This is the science of the over-human.

Level three realizes the flaws of both level one and two. It does not give any credit to putting the human in the over-human as with level one nor does it believe that the philosopher can actually be the over-human in case of level two. Upon achieving level three, one could abandon the philosophical game in despair that comes when any grand narrative falls from underneath the human. The philosopher could also embrace game playing because there was never anything else to do and perhaps it was a bit bored.

The Ultimate Joke: 

Some may have already realized a major flaw in the analysis of the philosopher. It seems to be a level two analysis or perhaps level one if one thinks the levels are normative. This is intentional because to reject my argument and the paradox that I maintain in order to play at it is to simultaneously reject philosophy. This is the ultimate joke on philosophy. To discover that philosophy is a joke, one must use philosophy, but philosophy is a joke so the conclusion that philosophy is a joke is a joke. Since philosophy depends on the pretending on being a over-human, this joke is a necessary conclusion of any serious philosopher who plays at the over-over-human.  

Looking In Myself at Midnight

I am writing this because I must. I will tell you that it is a reflection, a confession. You may ask me if it is for school, and I will tell you that it is not. I write this because I must, for it will irritate me to no end if I do not. Maybe this does not make sense to you, so I will give an example. Imagine you are at a bar, and you see someone that you just have to meet. Well, if you do not, you felt that you missed an opportunity. You will feel regret. That is what it is like writing this, it is siezing the moment.

The Confession

I have always had a bad habit of touching my wounds and making them worse. That is why my face and back are covered in infections. That is disgusting, is it not? Well, another wound lives within me. This wound drives me to have conversations with Christians. The reason why is because Christianity bothers me, or better put, the Christian in me bothers me. When I confront the Christian, I am trying to confront myself. I want to convince this impassioned part of me to let go of this religious love.

My love lies in the power of my imagination. The love is guilty, the love is shameful, the love is eternal, and without reason. It kills you in the name of being as loving as possible. To become this love is to cease being biological, to cease living for the sake of an ideal. As some die for freedom, this Christian in me dies for love. For me, a Christian does not follow Christ nor depend on him. The CHristian is Christ-like, and strives to take on the same burden as Christ, tries to change the world in the same way, suffering.


While it is true that this is scary, do not worry. I spent a long time learning to handle myself and act "rationally". In other words, there are stronger elements in me than this Christian self, which is this unique personality most of you know so well. I can overcome the Christian self because it is a failure, and it knows that. Christianity is not true, I should not feel guilty for things I have not done, and I do not have to carry the world's burden in suffering. More than that, my Christian is a failure for all that passion is useless. You cannot feel or suffer your way into helping the world. Like the aphorism goes, a pair or working hands is worth more than a thousand clasped in prayer. 

But I should address more on the power of my imagination. You probably have no idea how much I can identify with Macbeth, not in the killing thing but in the imagination. I can found waiting at intersection, and suddenly the passion of the imagination besieges me with the vision of purposefully crashing the car. When the vision ends, I feel guilt for something I never did, and never wanted to do.  This is the thousand scorpions of the mind.

 This imagination created my Christian self, and the disturbing thing about it is that I have so much sympathy for this passion saint of divine love. This self loves everyone without judgment or ambition, cares for everyone’s well-being, and thus cries at the constant suffering and disconnect in the relationship with the world.  This love is suffering and it is crippling and there is no transcendence to its manifestation as a lifelong emotional crucifixion.

I have turned to philosophy to put reason in control, but the passion of the imagination creates everything about me. To be anything, I must see myself as something, whether it be a truth or fiction. The fiction though may through the residual passion make me change into something else and therefore change truth.

The Advice

Many have argued for the power of my mind, seeing it as my great advantage, but here I tell you, the grass may not be as green as it seems. The contemplative life requires much of you; it demands that you care for what much of society takes for granted. The important thing is that contemplation is not a choice nor a practice but rather a necessity create by the forces of the mind. The contemplator scratches at the sensitivities of the mind. Am I a moral person, who I am really, why do I feel this way? Pleeing behind those questions opens a wound sometimes (though the hope is relevation or closure), and this can cause an infection, and infections of the mind like this Christian self become ghosts to haunt you.

Prelude- The Old Boy

Hark! For We sing His story.

Behold! For We reveal to you a scared place.

Come! For We shall lead you to Him.

Remember! For We are your memory.

Wake from your slumber Old Boy!

We celebrate you today!

So show this Acolyte of Memory your light.

And she shall have eternal life!

Old Boy woke, and spaketh He:

I transcend you and me.

I hear, and I live a new life.

I speak, and you gain life.

Wake from your slumber Old Boy!

We celebrate you today!

So show the lowly of the Earth your light.

And they shall have eternal life!

Old Boy woke, and spaketh He:

I transcend hate and fear.

I carry the people's burden.

Through them you find me.

Wake from your slumber Old Boy!

We celebrate you today!

So show the evil of the Earth your light.

And they shall have eternal life!

Old Boy woke, and spaketh He:

I transcend the cave of the good.

I embrace the human enemy of humans.

Because I am only just as human.

Wake from your slumber Old Boy!

We celebrate you today!

So show the people the way of eternal life.

For that is the light they seek.

Old Boy woke, and spaketh He:

I transcend eternal life.

I have already died, and I shall die again

For every death I share in is also another life.

Have multiplicity of being, share in what others give you.

Dedicate yourself, make your own story.

This is the way of eternal life for the We that is Memory.

Now let this phantom rest.

Slumber Old Boy, We shall put you back in bed in the back of their minds.

Go to sleep, we shall tuck you in the covers of time.

A Response to Austin Rogers: On Emotions

1) Emotion is part and parcel with experience. In my opinion, it is misguided to divide how we perceive a situation and how an experience makes us feel (or how we feel a situation). Instead of thinking that 'emotions affect how we experience life', think that emotions are part of that experience. 

2) I see the distinct emotions as different modes of thinking an experience. 

3) Though one can carry an emotion beyond the initial, there is something in the situation that is translated into emotion. It could be danger or romance possibilities.

4) Emotions can be put into language which other people of like minds understand similarly.

5) One does not have had a particular emotion before to understand the emotion express in language. For example, music easily carries in it organized sounds which convey emotions that I never had about longing, distress, pride, solidarity, etc...

6) It is hard to number how many modes of thinking an experience (i.e. emotions) there are. When you read a lot of books, there are so many complicated emotions that exist. I am a fan of existentialism, and that kind of literature might be the most complex to convey in the pseudo-rationalism we try to limit our writing to.

7) When I said in my earlier papers that motion becomes emotion, I mean that the emotion of which I am describing is very much based in movement. Our actions outward toward others and our projects convey emotions. The actions towards us by others and things convey emotions as well. I argued that there was a transference of emotion via motion between the individual an his or her environment and that is necessary for human life. If a child is sense-deprived, the child dies. Cover a persons eyes long enough, and they become blind because that part of the brain dies.

link to that old paper: http://seeminglyimpossiblequestions.blogspot.com/2010/04/old-essay-of-mine-on-meaning-of-life.html 

Austin Roger's response:

1. I agree that emotions are part of the experience. Wouldn't you agree that because emotions affect how we perceive a given situation that the emotions become part of that experience? Because that's all I'm trying to say in this regard.

2. Though, [unlike thought] every emotion has pre-programmed physical responses, and these responses are involuntary. How can emotion be a mode of conscious thinking if emotions are involuntary reactions? I'm not saying I disagree with you, I may just be misunderstanding.

3. Ok, I can agree with that.

4. I disagree, I do not think emotion is as one-dimensional as language. In my opinion, emotions are primarily characterized by the chemical reactions, hormone changes and the immediate thoughts that follow-- this would be very hard to covert into language.

5. I agree with that.

6. Interesting.

7. That makes sense. How can this be tested though?

My second response: 

1. I cannot say that emotions affect your experience because that would suggest that that emotions act separately from a persons experience. 

2. I do not believe in free will, but I understand what you are saying. There is a difference between thinking through a problem and having an emotional response to a problem. The nature of that difference is beyond my understanding.

4. I do not think language is one-dimensional and that is why include music as a kind of language. Because I see the brain as something like an organic computer, I believe organized sound can convey complex thoughts in emotional modes.

7. How it would be tested is a hard thing to say. I am rather emotionally sensitive so I have a strong aesthetic for the little things that I do and things that happen to me. This point is rathermy personal point of view, which I understand if others do not have such a rich emotional reaction to playing in the rain or writing a paper.

My Third Response:

A) I think it should be clear that emotions do not affect experience but are simply part of the collage we call experience. But you keep saying emotions are outside expierence (causing experience) while I am saying something causes emotions which are inside experience. 

B) For me, personality is an affinity for different emotions and ways of thinking and reacting. There is physiological basis for why people feel certain way in different situations. For instance the color blind cannot see certain colors, so those colors are absent from experience. Unlike colors, there is lots of diversity in the affinities for emotions (perhaps due to a lack of evolutionary conditioning).

C) One experiences his or her own thought, so this distinction between ones own thinking and sensory data is not a problem for my theory of emotions. Yes, there is a qualitative difference between self-stimulation and environment stimulation. As David Hume argues, the memory provides only faded or simplified versions of impressions received through sensory data. If I never experienced the color red I cannot have an idea of that color. Emotions have some similar qualities. I cannot have an accurate idea of how it feels to have an emotion I have not had. I can however experience emotions for the first time. From where do these emotions come?

-If they are placed into predestined categories, there is no big difference between the limitation of our species to categorize different colors and these categories of emotions.

-If emotions have infinite variations or numerous degrees, my intuition is that our brain changes to accommodate new emotions that could not be preprogrammed in our genetics.

D) The ego synthesizes and guides action, and by guiding action, I simply mean plays a crucial causal role in the interaction between an organic cognitive system and its environment. Emotion is something to be experienced or, in terms of the ego, synthesized. The maturity of human beings depends of the development of this ego.

                -Through emotional variance, the human becomes capable of a nuance understanding of the causal relation between environment and emotions. Some things make one sad, others make one angry.

                -Humans are natural dualists, so at a very young age, they have a theory of mind that applies to creatures like them. In rare cases, however, a child is born with a different set of natural assumptions. This is especially true of children with autism. When interacting with their environment, some children with autism have trouble associating the actions of humanoids with intentions. Some find it easier to attribute thoughts and intentions to nonliving objects like vacuum cleaners. This I learned from reading some of the diagnoses of Erik Erikson.

E) To say completely caused yet still free is a common assertion among philosophers, Austin. It is important to my theory that people cannot just choose to feel a certain emotion, just as one cannot stop thinking. If asked the origin of their thoughts, people will have a lot of difficulty. For instance, if I ask you to pick a number between one and ten, what makes you choose one number over another. By not knowing the origin of our thoughts, it indicates to me that there is something beyond our conscious experience that is important to this story of the will. Psychoanalyst have suggested a subconscious. I am not well-versed in psychology so I am just going to make the educated inference that it there is some link between the world of experience and the world of impersonal causation.

                -This is not to say that what I think is impersonal, since that would contradict what I mean by personal (i.e. in ones experience).

                -This is not to say that a person is passive in any way. I simply am saying that we need not reject our children (our thoughts and actions) in order to accept our parents (this impersonal causal story that leads to our personal thoughts).

A Response to John W. Loftus's Question, "What do you think is the greatest inhibitor to moral progress?"

It's a rather complicated question. I would say the cycle of violence is the greatest inhibitor to moral progress.

For example, some of the French and Zionists who were tortured by the Nazis later used the same methods of tortured on Muslims (French used it on Muslim Algerians). After the Algerian Revolution (1954-62), the U.S. government hired French counter-terrorist experts for Vietnam and is still using these 'enhanced interrogation' methods.

A big problem in post-colonial world is oppression. The violent of their former colonial powers made the revolutionaries violent in many cases. The many post-revolution governments emerged from this violence and now use the corrupt, oppressive methods of governance on their own people.

In war, violence between two groups escalates, and as my favorite philosopher, Albert Camus, pointed out how choosing to escalate violence demoralizes a people. For instance, rationalizing murder, according to Camus, devalues everyones life. Mouloud Feraoun, Camus's friend from the Kabyle of Algeria during the Revolution, discovered first hand the logic of a nation demoralized by war. This logic sees the murderer the just one and the murdered one the villain. In other words, strength and violence replaced progresive morality.

Also, wars tend to destroy the moderate and dissenting voices. This polarization caused by war led to Mouloud Feraoun's death by a terrorist organisation of ultra-conservative European Algerians. This group hoped to continue the war by killing the voices calling for an end to the war because knowing these European Algerians were losing land of their birth, they acted out of desperation.