Buriden’s ass, pain, rambling…

I’m not sure what this is going to be, I’m just going to word vomit a little about some stuff I’ve been thinking about.

So, um, life is pain. To live is to suffer. Buddhism starts there, which I think is good. I don’t think any religion originally tried to deny that life is pain, but the idea seems to be imported into Christianity with the idea that God is “omnibenevolent” as well as omnipotent and omniscient.

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain” is spot on, I think, for this reason. I think our relationship to “God” is often a way for us to make sense of suffering, really – either by trying to give ourselves the illusion of control, maybe, or maybe in the, like “screaming at the sky” trope that we sometimes do when terrible things happen to good people…

I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the dominant religion of the West puts a dude who suffers unjustly at its center. The only way humans know how to make sense of this life, how to keep ourselves sane, is to imagine that maybe the most central part of the whole onion of life is suffering.

The story of Jesus is so compelling to us because it’s the story that tells us that even God suffers – and presumably, if anybody had a choice, it would be the dude we imagine as running the place, right?

So, but, to get away from the Christianity part, I think the point is… God is a metaphor for our individual relationships with existence as a whole, and an exploration of the possibility that there’s some kind of direction or teleology or purpose to… reality itself, I guess. So naturally, religion has at its center the question of suffering, and is used as a way to try and make sense of life in the context of suffering, of struggle and heartache and loss and, just… all of the shitty parts of life, even when hope wears dangerously thin and you feel like all of human progress has been built on a collective delusion that what we’re doing here matters at all, in the grand scheme of things.

“What is Philosophy?” Video Extras (Part 1)

Okay, you’re here. This is exciting. So first, I might be biased but I think you should go check out my “Philosophy” tab because… I want you to?

Additionally! I know sometimes people are like “you didn’t leave the visual aid/text bit up for long enough!” – for which I’m sorry, it’s hard to time stuff like that right and I’m working on it, BUT here’s all that stuff in one convenient spot, if you want to go back over it.

All of these diagrams were made using MindMeister, which is literally my favorite thing.

Alright. So. That’ll be the end of Part 1.

Click to read Part 2!

Consent.

Okay, so, the first thing we have to get out of the way is one of the most important, I think, in a LOT of the more polarized conversations we’re having right now, so I’m going to make it big and bold:

NO ONE IS PERFECT.

Got it? You, the reader, are not perfect, nor is anyone you know, and I certainly am no exception.

Whether you’re a man, woman, left-winger, right-winger, trans, nonbinary, straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, omnisexual, your belly button is an inny or an outy, we ALL have made mistakes and we all will continue to make mistakes, because life is a confusing and messed up predicament for all of us – ESPECIALLY when it comes to sex.

Now. Let’s keep the philosophical stuff to one side, for a second, though I think those conversations are also important and interesting – I want to use this post to build bridges where before there was only confusion and fear. So if you’re a victim of sexual assault – I get it. This might feel a little like I’m extending an olive branch to the enemy. But just try and remember that the people who hurt other people do so because they’re in pain, too. So if we want to stop sexual assault, we have to start with a conversation about why people assault other people to begin with.

Is this the best of all possible worlds?

I frequently think about the following bit of sass from a letter that Voltaire wrote in response to Leibniz’s rebuttal to his argument that our world was the best possible world. 

What is this, YouTube? Anyway in Voltaire’s response to Liebniz’s response to his response, he says the following: 

I just think this is such a fantastically pithy response to a LITERAL ENTIRE BOOK that Liebniz wrote about Voltaire’s arguments against him. Imagine writing an entire book arguing against someone who disagrees with you, only to receive THIS as a response. It just… it delights me, so I think of it often.

Anyway it also highlights something about philosophy that I find both irritating and kind of beautiful, which is this: often, philosophers spend SO MUCH TIME hashing out the minutiae of their theories and arguments, splitting hairs and giving precise definitions, refining those definitions upon further investigation, then returning to the original definition having learned something new about where we started, and so on. 

There is a lot of ink spilt in the name of “rigorous philosophical argument,” is what I’m trying to say. But quite often, when it comes down to it, it would actually take far fewer words to express the same argument in a way that was not only less pedantic and tiring, but also more grounded in reality. So what Voltaire does here is take the pages of Liebniz’s argument, which I’m sure had redeeming structural and rhetorical qualities, as most philosophical argument does, and level it all out with a single blow, grounded absolutely in the actual world of lived human experience. 

“There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful…”

…has always been one of my favorite quotes. 

I don’t know if I believe that it’s true, but I want it to be. 

I want to believe that everything, everyone, has a purpose. That there are no accidents. That even the worst of us plays a role in the story of life that in a certain light makes sense, that redemption is possible for anyone, on a long enough timeline. 

I think ultimately it’s probably because like Ralph Waldo Emerson, I want to believe in God – but not a man in the sky version of God, the version of God where the Holy Trinity is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. 

This image is kind of cheating (or maybe just missing the point), but… I like pretty things…

It’s ultimately kind of a desire just to believe that even when life sucks, if you could see things the way they are, exactly how they are, that maybe the inescapable and infinite suffering of being alive isn’t a cruel joke but the mechanism by which the universe polishes consciousness into something more and more beautiful. 

I don’t think that life is fair. I don’t believe in karma, or divine justice. But I do think that even though we think we’re all separate pieces of the human puzzle, fighting to take up space, that we’re actually not puzzle pieces at all, but raindrops that only exist as drops while they’re falling, but end up back in the same body of water as all the other drops, in the end, and so everything we do to other people while we’re alive winds up being something we did to ourselves, too, and the ultimate joke is that God isn’t a Great Judge in the Sky who tallies up our good and bad deeds, but just a metaphor to understand the fact that we were never really separate from everything else, at all. 

Epic, Part ii (Hadestown)

I’ve been thinking about this song all day, and was going to tweet about it but then I was like… nah bitch, this is what we started a blog for!

I just think each word of this song is so lovely… in case I have yet to persuade you to listen to this album, Hadestown is a rock opera performed by Anaiis Mitchell and many others, that explores the story of Orpheus & Eurydice.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is an Ancient Greek one. In this song, Orpheus is singing about Hades, the god of the underworld, whose wife, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility & nature, is also a major player in the story arc of the album. Anyway so Orpheus, the idealist/artist/musician/lover of beauty, is trying to save his love, Eurydice (who symbolizes purity, justice, innocence…) from Hades after her untimely demise, and in so doing travels to & observes the Underworld (“Hadestown”).