suicide note

This sorta thing hits me oddly hard. When people commit suicide over ideals or values, it shows they are not just regurgitating a bunch of none sense to look smart to impress people.

  On 9/28/2010 at 5:37 PM, acid1 said:

This sorta thing hits me oddly hard. When people commit suicide over ideals or values, it shows they are not just regurgitating a bunch of none sense to look smart to impress people.

well, clearly that's what he felt too. It's the academic's version of tryin to look hard by poppin a cap in someone's ass.

it's funny, because clearly he cared about his own book, if nothing else in life.

it hits me a little too because i have the same kinds of values. i have accepted that all "i" know, and possibly will ever know, is this world. so i just want to make this experience as pleasant as possible, by spending time working on art (music), engaging in meaningful social relationships and doing things that i just downright enjoy. the thing that this guy seems to lack is a humility that there is no right "answer" and he seems to place all that drive into the certainty of his book.

maybe he's spot on, but ultimately, wtf does it matter amirite? all we have is our own subjective experience so let's make the best of it IMHOROFLPIGTER

Dont buy this bullshit guys. This guy is a major player in the tricycle industry.

I think that he should've pretended he was in runescape and killed animals and tanned their hides and upped his armor making skill until he could make big loot. Then he probably also could get high runecrafting stats and sell laws on world 66.

nihilists don't write suicide notes

He should have hired a designer to help with the layout. I can't handle all of this IMPACT.

probably the dominant font in the tricycle industry

  On 9/28/2010 at 7:47 AM, lumpenprol said:

just think, a computer virus could have saved his life.

 

I guess he was right after all; if god existed, surely he would have caused the kid's hard drive to fail

nah, this sick psycho was having a wank watching from above.

Is anyone planning on reading the whole thing?

No.

  On 9/28/2010 at 8:22 AM, xxx said:

I think what bothers me about this is that I agree with the bulk of his treatise. The whole time I pursued a degree in biology and psychology, I couldn't avoid the inherently nihilistic and stochastic tenets of both sciences: life is a cosmological accident, no one is at the wheel and there is no "soul" or "human" or "right and wrong"--just a massively complex set of behaviors shaped by reinforcement or punishment and strictly bound by situation only; nothing absolute or universal. Those ideas can be like an infection--'nothing means anything so why suffer? Off yourself already'.

But isn't that the greatest part of being alive? No one is in control. I feel very liberated when I think about it. I feel there are no boundaries. I can certainly understand why people get depressed over the idea, but they should think about it differently. Being alive is an experience. There is no meaning. Just shut up and enjoy it, is what I say.

Life has meaning if you give it meaning. It's a matter of perception.

  On 9/28/2010 at 8:25 PM, xxx said:

But these ideas of nihilism and self-sacrifice are infectious and once you go down that road, I think you have to make a concerted effort for the rest of your life to refuse to entertain those thoughts again--just like the recovery model in addiction.

Agreed. Once you've started down that path, it's hard to turn around. Not entertaining the thought, though, is kind of a short term fix. You really have to change your overall disposition as a person, otherwise you'll just be running from it your whole life. This, however, is extremely difficult to accomplish. Turning a pessimist into an optimist is definitely a feat.

I think Heidegger is right to say that Sartre gets the phenomenology wrong, doesn't correctly describe what it is like to be a human being. Sartre describes our first-person stance on ourselves, our actions and our lives as if we do each thing in a motivational vacuum, as if at each moment we are radically free to decide what is of value, what needs to be done next, what is urgent or important, even, what makes sense. But it doesn't take much pause to reflect that things just aren't like that -- we simply find ourselves situated and constrained in various ways. Hunger, for instance, presents itself as a pressing need; our reputation motivates us to do certain things, respond to people and situations in certain ways and not others; our culture and its history makes certain kinds of deeds and ways of living available to us as intelligible courses of action or intelligible sources of identity, and rules out others. There is, for instance, no possibility of being a professional alchemist nowadays; you would simply not be recognized as having a legitimate profession by anyone. There is no sense in conducting experiments to determine the properties of the ether; we have determined that there is no such thing. There is no chance of instantaneously changing your race, class or gender; you have to start from these ways in which your life is already determined for you and orients you in a field of possible ways to live out your life.

Sure, it's your choice if you want to flout convention or break the law, but it's not for you to decide whether others will punish or ostracize you for that; you are, in many cases, at the mercy of their institutionalized power. And even if it is right in some cases to show that some of the things we value, or ways we understand ourselves and the possibilities for our lives, are mistaken or misunderstood or an illusion, that's not enough to show that all actions or self-understandings are illusory as such, that those concepts are empty.

It's as if Sartre's version of existentialism is an attempt to face up to the fact that there is no God by imbuing human beings with the very powers of freedom and omnipotence that God was traditionally conceived to have.

Also, Socrates's main concern was not with embracing the fact and the event of death, but of being wise. His attitudes toward death only follow from how he thinks we ought to think and behave, if we are to do so in a generally wise manner. And his arguments in the Apology for death being the best punishment for him in his situation are not convincing, anyway. He says (1) Either (a) the dead are nothing and have no perceptions or else (b) their soul goes to another place. Fine.

But then he says (2) that if (a) is the case, this would be good, for it would be as pleasant as having a long, dreamless sleep. But the pleasure is not felt while we are in the dreamless sleep (while we are dead, on the analogy he's drawing here); it's felt when we wake up completely refreshed and full of energy and life. But if he is right about (1a), there is no 'waking up,' on this analogy--so there is no pleasure on this option.

In case (b), he thinks, I suppose, that he either (i) goes to Heaven--which would be indeed pleasant--or else (ii) goes to Hades; and then he argues that (ii) would be pleasant because, on his understanding of the structure of Hades, he would be in the company of great leaders, artists and philosophers and poets and could do what pleases him most, questioning people, for eternity. But earlier in the dialogue, he claims that nobody knows whether death is a blessing or an evil, which undermines any reason he would have to believe that (ii) is likely to be the case. In other words, he has just as much reason, on his own account, to fear that death will bring him to a place of eternal pain and suffering as he does to believe it will bring him to a place of eternally pleasant philosophical conversation--namely, none! If he dared to take seriously the thought that either were true, he would be violating his main philosophical tenet, which is not to be unwise--not to believe anything that one doesn't know is true. So (2) may be true, but it doesn't give him any reason for preferring the punishment of death.

And his last reason for preferring death is that (3) his 'divine sign' did not stop him from accepting the death penalty on trial. That's just a cop-out, for by definition (the divine sign speaks to him only) it can't be convincing to anyone but himself, so it wouldn't give anyone else but him a reason to embrace the punishment of death (unless they too happen to be called by a daemon).

  On 9/28/2010 at 7:02 PM, patternoverlap said:

He should have hired a designer to help with the layout. I can't handle all of this IMPACT.

every typography choice was an experiment in zero taste.

  On 9/28/2010 at 9:26 PM, dr lopez said:

  On 9/28/2010 at 7:02 PM, patternoverlap said:

He should have hired a designer to help with the layout. I can't handle all of this IMPACT.

every typography choice was an experiment in zero taste.

lol

ps: formerly bearded!

i struggle with this shit every day. it goes up and down. sometimes it feels like all roads lead to empty nothing, and sometimes they all lead to love. i don't get it.

i feel like we make our own choices wherever we are, and that's how we can define ourselves. but when i lose touch with meaning, my choices don't matter. i don't know how you would write a 2000-page book under these conditions. obviously SOMETHING matters to you, even if it's getting your intellectual dick sucked post-mortem. "i'm going to write the least meaningless work on nihilism ever!" wat.

i don't know. fuck.

"why suffer?"

is it all really suffering? there is so much great parts too. its a personal decision. of course i'm miserable, but it's kind of interesting and beautiful. and the nothingness, living in it. it's fun sometimes! and seeing things.

the only reason you would kill yourself is if you're depressed. depression takes many forms. nihilism is one of those forms.

  On 9/28/2010 at 9:58 PM, vamos scorcho said:

there is so much great parts too!

I hope vamos ends up being embarrassed by himself later in life. "Youch, 07-11. That was my "I suck on an internet forum" phase..."

Thanks for posting your bandcamp page to your signature Braintree!

when i look into the abyss and see a doe prouncing by my heels i feel a click in my dick and i suddenly know that i survive, build a nest, the part of me that thinks anything about life is fucking retarded compared to the doe and the dick. turn over your grievances to gamagochthi. existence is neat. no problems here.

tamagatchyo

take the doe and the dick for example...

they have an intelligence greater than the 3th egyptian lord quazi3queefbar

12345

this philospher's mind was all FUCKED because he tried to use his mind and not his heart to make the pieces fit.

tamagatchu

what a self absorbed faggot

fuck this guy.

  Quote

“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.’’

Yet, he spent 5 years developing a 1905 pages "text" - ie a semantic system - in order to say that life has no meaning. Then he ceremonized his suicide, cared enough to send emails that were meant to be read after his death, because, again, life is meaningless. Stupid twat.

IMO this guy got stucked in what is characteristic of most of philosophy : philosophy is very similar to the way paths forms (sorry impotent, i'm a mad structuralist and i like TO ORGANIZED MY IDEAS WITH SECTIONS AND SUBSECTIONS:

A : efficiency : you create a new path not for itself but for where it leads you to. That's what philosophers do : they follow their intuition, give a hint of a conclusion then build up an argumentative structure in order to confirm it. See his father's death. That is meaning for real yo.

B : recursivity : you tend to follow the same path, because you're used to and because it's easy. This must probably work on the cognitive level, it's not necessarily a flaw.

I applause the use of a gun though, that was courageous. I also don't think this guy had any mental issue. I have a friend who's heavily into philosophy at the highest (scholarly) possible level, and he's a nihilist (he's more of a "what's the point" nihilist than a "life his meaningless " one) and basically he thinks nihilism is a thinking illness, a kind of philosophical entrapment.

But what if he applied his nihilistic philosophy to nihilism itself ? What if "Life is meaningless" has no meaning ? That'd be the pinnacle of nihilism. But this requires to distant yourself from content and get interested in form. It's very difficult -acid can be a good guide- and leads to stupid looking recursive thoughts - to break the breaking -, often deemed as sophism : he shouldn't have killed himself after he wrote his suicide note.

But this guy preferred to follow the same path over and over, till the path turned into a trench from where he wasn't able to see the surrounding landscape : from the moment he bought a gun (3 years before his death) on, he had already made his decision so what was the point in ending the book if not giving more importance to life and its meaning than his theory should have allowed ? It's not how one makes good science or philosophy. Philosophy (or science) is an investigation, you practices it so as to discover new prospects not to strengthen thanatic auto-erotic thoughts. You need to look back, reconsider, and build again. There are no real achievements, no final note, no conclusive thought, there is only a man that is strong enough to keep pushing forward no matter what the situation is. And if I remember well, this guy's name is Übermensch.

I can only wager this man thought he was a genius, and wanted to be considered as such afterwards, hence all the precautions around his death, which was meant to bind his existence and his work together so as to turn life into a piece of art.

FUUUUUUU

etc