That's right, those penis jokes were just the setup for that sweet, sweet indeterminacy of translation payoff.
The Indeterminacy of Translation is an idea by Quine, which says that direct, uniquely correct translations of a foreign language, even theoretically, are impossible. For Quine, knowledge was holistic, so in order to understand even simply sentence from a foreign culture, you would have to understand everything about the culture. For example, if you visit a tribe, and they point out a rabbit and say "tzqqa", you might assume the word refers to the rabbit. But if the tribe believes in some sort of idealism, they might be referring to merely the representation of those sensations, or if the tribe only thinks of objects as what they aren't, they might be pointing out everything in the universe but the rabbit. These kind of questions are undecidable from the language alone, no matter how much you try.
Of course, it was really a meta commentary on how art can never fully communicate the inward feelings of the artist.
Some people might find the penis jokes for Freud to be a bit reductive, since Freud wrote on an enormous amount of topics. These people are wrong. Penises are funny.
Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony is explained (sort of) in the notes on this comic.
Marx thought that the ideal society would have no class hierarchies (i.e., there would not be a division between those who owned businesses, and those who sold their labor to the business owners), and no state. He didn't spend a lot of time describing exactly what this meant, because Marx did not believe in Utopian thinking. He thought history was a process, and we should work towards freedom from oppression in the society we live in, not attempt to imagine wholesale what a perfect society would be like from scratch.
Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony is explained (sort of) in the notes on this comic.
Marx thought that the ideal society would have no class hierarchies (i.e., there would not be a division between those who owned businesses, and those who sold their labor to the business owners), and no state. He didn't spend a lot of time describing exactly what this meant, because Marx did not believe in Utopian thinking. He thought history was a process, and we should work towards freedom from oppression in the society we live in, not attempt to imagine wholesale what a perfect society would be like from scratch.
What's really tragic is that there are people out there leading happy, carefree lives.
On second thought, maybe I'll just use the ring real quick to put down this communist revolution. In fact, maybe I should work with Sauron to stamp out communism everywhere...