Existential Comics – Telegram
Existential Comics
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If you think poor people are poor because they were too stupid to invest is property...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think that without entrepreneurs no one would bother to do any work...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think "freedom" means having more power to boss around your employees...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you the person who should get credit for a new technology is the guy who hired people to make it...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think the people on welfare are the ones sponging off society...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think the "homeless problem" is that if there are too many of them around it lowers property values...you might be bourgeoisie.
If someone asks you what you do for a living, and you describe your investment portfolio...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think poor people are poor because they were too stupid to invest in property...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think that without entrepreneurs no one would bother to do any work...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think "freedom" means having more power to boss around your employees...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you the person who should get credit for a new technology is the guy who hired people to make it...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think the people on welfare are the ones sponging off society...you might be bourgeoisie.
If you think the "homeless problem" is that if there are too many of them around it lowers property values...you might be bourgeoisie.
If someone asks you what you do for a living, and you describe your investment portfolio...you might be bourgeoisie.
"Oh my god, de Beauvoir! I've just realized what I should do with my life! I should write novels!"
"Sartre...you've already written like five novels..."
"Oh yeah..."
In one of the most famous scenes in Sartre's most famous novel, Nausea, the main character Antoine Roquentin has a sort of existential crisis, and comes upon a chestnut tree and sees the root of the tree "as it really is", that is to say, without his mind imposing the structure of a "chestnut tree" upon it. One might be tempted, of course, to read this as though it was a drug trip, but it is presented in a way like the character just thought his way into another mode of phenomenological experience.
Sartre himself took a number of drugs in his life to experiment with perception, most notably Mescaline. He apparently saw hallucinated crabs for years after he took the drug, even when he was sober, which isn't so much known as a side effect of the drug, so we might imagine that Sartre took other hallucinogens aside from the Mescaline. Well, either that or he was just so smart that he saw reality, like, as it is really is or something.
"Derrida is actually quite clear, more clear in some ways than the analytic philosophers."
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him". This seems contradictory, because of course if he is speaking, it seems like we would understand him. But for Wittgenstein, the words themselves don't so much convey meaning, but express intent that is confined within a particular situation that takes place within our shared culture and experience. So, for example, if a surgeon is performing surgery and said "nurse, scalpel", it isn't simple the two words together that convey the meaning of the surgeon wanting the nurse to hand him a scalpel, it is their shared knowledge of what a surgery is, and what is expected under those circumstances. If, for example, the nurse and surgeon are later at a company dinner, and the surgeon says "nurse, salt", in the same cadence, this will be understood to be a joke, parodying the former circumstance. Nothing about the words themselves really conveys this, but only the shared world that both the nurse and surgeon occupy. This shared world is necessary for any language to function, and learning a language is not only learning the words, but the world in which we are expected to use the worlds.
On the hand, if a lion could suddenly speak English, it wouldn't matter much, because the world that the lion exists in is so divorced from ours, that his expressions, desires, and intents could still never be communicated. The lion doesn't know what a surgery is, or a dinner party, or a joke for that matter. Likewise, we don't know what sort world the lion occupies, so words would be useless. This phenomenon isn't as outlandish as it might sound at first, and even occurs frequently among humans. For example, I had two coworkers who played World of Warcraft constantly, and would talk about it at lunch. They could speak to each other for ten minutes, in English, and I wouldn't be able to decipher a single sentence. It isn't because I didn't understand the meaning of the worlds, but because I had no ability to relate the words to a situation or world that I knew, so the meaning was lost on me. If I can't understand a conversation about a video game I haven't played, even when I've played similar games, how can I be expected to understand a conversation between lions?
"Derrida is actually quite clear, more clear in some ways than the analytic philosophers."
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him". This seems contradictory, because of course if he is speaking, it seems like we would understand him. But for Wittgenstein, the words themselves don't so much convey meaning, but express intent that is confined within a particular situation that takes place within our shared culture and experience. So, for example, if a surgeon is performing surgery and said "nurse, scalpel", it isn't simple the two words together that convey the meaning of the surgeon wanting the nurse to hand him a scalpel, it is their shared knowledge of what a surgery is, and what is expected under those circumstances. If, for example, the nurse and surgeon are later at a company dinner, and the surgeon says "nurse, salt", in the same cadence, this will be understood to be a joke, parodying the former circumstance. Nothing about the words themselves really conveys this, but only the shared world that both the nurse and surgeon occupy. This shared world is necessary for any language to function, and learning a language is not only learning the words, but the world in which we are expected to use the words.
On the hand, if a lion could suddenly speak English, it wouldn't matter much, because the world that the lion exists in is so divorced from ours, that his expressions, desires, and intents could still never be communicated. The lion doesn't know what a surgery is, or a dinner party, or a joke for that matter. Likewise, we don't know what sort world the lion occupies, so words would be useless. This phenomenon isn't as outlandish as it might sound at first, and even occurs frequently among humans. For example, I had two coworkers who played World of Warcraft constantly, and would talk about it at lunch. They could speak to each other for ten minutes, in English, and I wouldn't be able to decipher a single sentence. It isn't because I didn't understand the meaning of the words, but because I had no ability to relate the words to a situation or world that I knew, so the meaning was lost on me. If I can't understand a conversation about a video game I haven't played, even when I've played similar games, how can I be expected to understand a conversation between lions?
Sartre, what would you do?
I would do nothing. Just sit on my ass all day.
You don't need to be an immortal God to do nothing, man, Merleau-Ponty does nothing and he is going to die any day.
There is nothing more punk rock than mutual aid.