Kisses of the Viper

Observations and Reflections for the Moral Education of Young Ladies of Quality

Love = friendship + orgasm

I feel sorry for sentimentalists, both godly and otherwise because they make their happiness depend entirely on someone else.

Goddists are miserable unless they find approval in some mirage in the sky. Too many secularists can't feel satisfied without the love of the other half of a pair bond or else of undifferentiated humankind.

Women have so many more opportunities for erotic sensations than heterosexual males: vaginal, oral, anal, DP, double vag, double anal, triple play, quadruple play, quintuple play (although I must admit I’ve never seen a successful quintuple play).

Theology and religion is the basso continuo murmuring beneath almost all philosophy including the most stentorian outcries of positivists and the sense data crowd. I wouldn’t mind firing that orchestra and adopting the harmonies of art and pornography as the background music of fuckosophy.

The thing about Italian opera is you can never tell from the music alone where you are in the plot.

A sugar baby is a type of pet. Maintaining her requires a great deal of expense, time, care and commitment. That’s why we all look forward to the day when sex dolls will be so lifelike they can replace the wasteful and frustrating custom of sugar babies.

Why when idly reading history and biography do we run across so many odd couples, pairs who just don't seem to fit, who would never be found in the same interest groups? Perhaps a biological and social mandate is at work and inner and outer voices begin whispering, "It's time. Act now before the universe goes its own way." And from any specific mismatch comes a new consciousness, born of desperation and disappointment, at war with itself.

Isn't it possible, probable even that the vast majority of the human species don't have a rich inner life or the ability and inclination to dream great dreams and do great things? The summa felicitas for the average guy is digging enough ditches to stay fed, breeding and watching his NFL football. Anything more is beyond his comprehension.

Credo quia absurdum is Latin. It translates as, "I'm stupid enough to believe any bullshit. "

Can god peer inside his own butthole or suck his own cock like Ron Jeremy? If not, what good is he?

Philosophy is dead. It died from a lack of babes. Man up and call a hooker.

- Thus Spake Domingo

Only pussies look for meaning in life.

My goal is to get rid of god, soul and mind - of metaphysics and epistemology - in order to make room for porn.

The need to interpret, to find meaning is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most interpretations appear ludicrous from the outside, but this doesn’t seem to stop us.

The English are the only nation I know who are simulacra of themselves.

Sorry Keats. Truth is nudity. Nudity is truth.

The struggle to remove the stigma from masturbation seems impossibly quaint today.

Were Elsa's nuptials prefigured in Lucia di Lammermoor? Blasphemy!!? Just askin'.

I wonder if Cézanne was just an old guy whose eyesight was fading.

Death by Fuckosophy. I want to go with a woman on her back.

"The Catholic inquisitors of Europe...defended nonsense by cruelty...." Gibbon

The Communist Hoax: Convincing artists, poets and philosophers that the proletariat was the Gold Key Club of demonic individuals and that the only way to practice authentic satanism was to play a humble role in the proletarian revolution.

Same sex marriage is the mob strategy for lifting once despised homosexuals from out the abyss of demonic individualism and onto the high road of bourgeois moral rectitude.

Revolutionaries invariably betray the early adherents who were beguiled into believing revolutions were something more than a change of masters. Behold the fate of the free love advocates after the English Civil War and the sexual reformers in Leninist Russia.

There are two types of philosophers: Those for whom the universe is self-referential and its being so is earth-shaking, and those for whom the universe is not self-referential or its being so is not a particularly big deal.

Philosophy on the Porn Set: The successor to the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden, the Stoa, Sade's Boudoir and Feynman's Strip Club.

The danger in writing a biography of a wit is that the biographer tries to be wittier than his subject, which more often than not leads to ignominy.

It is the same with friends as with women: experience often makes one see that the merchandise is false. - D.A.F. de Sade

We've made it this far - got rid of personalist religion and some individual named god. Now let's take the obvious next step and dump the religion of fellow feeling whose god is the community.

The Domingonian categorical imperative: I don't give a shit what you do, as long as you don't interfere with what I do.

What characterizes the decadents is a dislike of other people and a love of material things. Des Esseintes surrounds himself in a villa alone with perfumes, flowers and bibelots. This is also true of Baudelaire, the éminence grise of the decadents, for whom the corpse is a person transformed into an object - revealing the true horrific nature of humanity.

A major advance in civilization will occur once we replace being in love with being in lust with someone.

Nothing better reminds us that individualism and alienation are a good thing than Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family.

Baudelaire and Nietzsche share the honor of turning misogyny into an aesthetic experience.

No company is so pleasant that you never want to call it a night.

"I've been coming to this church for 68 years asking for guidance when nothing seemed right. I never once received a fucking answer." - Meg in Sinner

Categories of female beauty. The genus beautiful can be subdivided into species such as hot, cute, pretty, babe, fox, goddess, honey, knockout. Species of the genus ugly include dog, woofer, hag, troll.

When the garden variety intellectual makes pronouncements about Sartre, he's mostly really talking about Camus.

Sex is an end in itself.

If there is a biological basis for multiple genders and individual choice of gender, why shouldn't there be a biological basis for trans-speciation and individual choice of species. An enterprising biologist could gain instant social media fame by proposing a theory that would show how this is possible. Similarly a skilled physician should, on the basis of that theory, be able to devise a combination of operations and chemical therapies that could, for example, change a male human into a female cat, if indeed the subject believed he was a female cat all along.

The principle of tolerance and not hurting anyone's feelings in the course of the gender wars needs to be tempered by the role the notion of gender multiplicity plays in Lesbo Left ideology. As once downtrodden groups - racial minorities, females, homosexuals etc. - are progressively liberated, the left seems to feel obliged to rev its engines by seeking out hitherto underrepresented downtrodden groups as unspeakable victims of "patriarchal capitalism." There's also a special significance in the central role given to gender and sexuality. Upon the assumption that the exemplary downtrodden group in some quarters is women, part of the strategy of the Lesbo Left is to make women more like men and men more like women. I believe the virago Fonda observed somewhere that once the first goal had been accomplished, the ongoing revolutionary imperative would be the second. Naively the world believed that this meant a few behavioral changes - non-aggressivity, practice in nurturing and a preference for baby pink polo shirts. Alas, the revolutionary apparatchiks had something more drastic in mind for which gender (if not DNA) modification provided the tools: the diminution of heterosexual desire and pleasure accompanied by male genocide in a fog of gender indeterminacy.

There's nothing like a model or porn star wearing poorly chosen makeup to cover for a hard night. Or for the bite of time.

Baudelaire was not a moral philosopher. He was a moral visionary and indeed one of the greatest moral visionaries of modern times. Philosophers need visionaries to take them by the hand and show them where they need to go.

Sometimes we shouldn't read people's biographies. Duchamp's later life, if we focus on just the externals, was spent as a suburban pipe-smoking quietist with a skeptical turn of mind. Sade strides the world stage as an aristocratic layabout and Enlightenment petit maître whose one foray into civic duty and bourgeois restraint nearly got him guillotined. He appears to have been gifted with the sort of charm which, coupled with a lack of empathy, tends to turn lovers into haters.

What pornography showed us, once it was free to develop without interference, is that it could be a product of light, brilliance, elegance and joy.

A perversion is a type of sexual pleasure that doesn't turn me on.

Fuckosophy: Putting the filth back in philosophy!

Moral nominalism: Admit as few moral maxims as possible.

The most difficult thing about girls is you have to pretend you like animals.

Baudelaire shifting from verse to prose is like a beautiful woman shaving her head.

Postmodernism - I'm not spending my time undermining philosophical essentialism just so some fruitcake can get his dick cut off.

The essence of surrealism is pornography.

Pandora's Box was her vagina. The evil unleashed on the world was future generations.

Trapped between the Lesbo Left, the Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians and the Muzzies, what's a poor rock & roll boy gonna do?

Many of the most famous scenes of The Odyssey come from a tale told by Odysseus. Given that he is best known for deception, it is just possible that he invented the whole thing.

Poe was Marlowe to Baudelaire's Shakespeare.

To me existentialist literature isn't L'Etranger (You don't have to be a philosopher to shoot someone) or La Nausée (Nothing a couple of Tums wouldn't take care of). No, it's The Wasteland and Prufrock - despair in a teaspoon of Demerara sugar.

Reciprocal rights - a smokescreen for ersatz morality.

Until the invention of photography, visual pornography was socially acceptable in Western culture and literary pornography generally not. These values reversed at the beginning of the 20th century.

A melody is like a woman. It's the theme which confers identity upon a piece of music. Variations are the model's wardrobe and makeup.

Nudity is the right of the gods. The Greeks considered themselves to be so θεῷ ἐναλίγκιοι ἄντην their own full frontals were meant to represent the gods. The Italians of the Renaissance reserved that privilege for courtesans.

Solti is like coke. Karajan is like molly.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unfolds like the revolving doors of Hegel's Phänomenologie. What's the connection? Schiller.

Music is poison to the demonic individual. Perhaps this is why Baudelaire and Rimbaud turned to prose.

The only music I can think of which feels like an abjuration of intimacy, community and celebration is the incidental music of classical Japanese theater. But apparently that wasn't what it felt like to the original audience.

Russia's greatest contribution to world civilization is babes.

Logical and metaphysical essentialism is utterly devoid of social or political significance. Anyone who believes otherwise is a gullible halfwit.

The same rule holds in philosophy as in the arts, science and mountain climbing - You do something because you can.

Alex Grey reminds me of Stephen Hawking. She's good at only one thing, but at that thing she's the best.

With the exception of the hard sciences, academe destroys whatever it touches.

Fucking is more fundamental than being.

Existentialist literature is not unique or original in depicting a world without god. That sort of literature has been current since at least the Renaissance in the modern West and since forever in China and Japan. What is somewhat novel about existentialist writers is the fact that they let it bother them.

There can be too much morality in the world.

I wonder what a heavy metal version of The Wings of the Dove would look like? Or an R. Crumb version of Pride and Prejudice.

He Fought the Law and the Law Didn't Quite Win

Paradoxically Sade's imprisonment and consequent isolation was probably a necessary condition for the flowering of his literary genius.

Philosophy tends to wobble between the indemonstrable and the unspeakable.

The American Revolution was a 17th century bourgeois revolution (Think the Fronde and the English Civil War) speaking the language of 18th century freedom and egalitarianism.

When someone appeals to religion to justify his conclusions, we immediately assume there must be something wrong with his argument.

Goddists play a kind of conceptual Yahtzee. They take words and scraps of words, shake the words up in a canister and toss them onto the table. Then they append “..and therefore god exists.” to whatever falls face up. This is why most of what goddists say simply makes no sense.

The religion addiction. All religions are cults.

My feelings are a self-transcendence through the agency of ideal unearthly beauty. The same feelings in someone else are gross sensuality.

The irony that people are often personally the most free in the anonymity of large cities.

Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ. - Gibbon

Beware the critic with bad taste and a gift for language.

It's hard to say whether the mavens of manga have populated the world with 21st cent. Japanese or populated Japan with Anglo Saxons and other Northern Europeans.

There are two types of academics, those who fuck their colleagues' wives and, of course, their counterparts.

The spectrum of antitheism in rock music is deep and broad, stretching as it does from the satanism of Marilyn Manson to the secular atheism of Nine Inch Nails.

"Friends are like boobs. Some are big, some are small. Some are real, some are fake. . ." From The Wit & Wisdom of Putri Cinta. (Are you listening, Aristotle?)

I wonder what would happen if Žižek and Camille Paglia were locked in a room together?

Language is the medium in which the hive mind communes with itself.

People like paradoxes for the same reason they do crossword puzzles - the tickle of the brain teaser. Other than that paradoxes don't have a great deal of philosophical significance.

Formalism in art and literature: Fear of the truth.

Eliot - Existentialism for the upper classes.

The triumph of science fiction is a signal that religion is finally beginning to disappear from the popular imagination.

It is important to realize that the Renaissance view of the extraordinary individual is not demonic even though Machiavellians maintained that extraordinary individuals could bypass some types of morality. Rather, it's closer to what's on the resume of our enterprising high school seniors vying for entrance to the Ivy League: straight A's, plays both the French horn and the bass guitar, founded an organization to save endangered Amazon tribes.

As the spider sees it she didn't have to build a web but she decided to do so out of her own free will. From the Saturnian standpoint humans are biologically programmed to build and drive cars.

If all feminism means is the rule of female commissars, then I have no choice but to be anti-feminist.

Difficulty in a work of art is a little like anal sex: A bit of pain is a precondition for a much more intense pleasure. It is in fact the difficulty that increases the pleasure.

Great beauty is not to be confused with moral worth. On the other hand, it is not something to be tossed away lightly.

100

The most rigorous sort of philosophizing would be to not say anything. That way you can be sure you're not saying anything untrue.

101

Some of us don't want to coach Little League and pitch in to build a better neighborhood. But we also don't want to expand our consciousness and just connect. What do we want to do? None of your fucking business.

102

Economic libertarians, beware. When the market (or a popular vote) is allowed to decide in matters of taste, the results are usually disastrous.

103

The average philosophy grad student is a guy who thinks that, because he got an A on his paper about "I think therefore I am," he knows something about philosophy.

104

The Lesbo Left is the new bourgeoisie.

105

Opening the home page of one of the online search engines is like being trapped in a dentist's waiting room with thousands of back issues of People Magazine and Martha Stewart plus an endless loop of Good Morning America playing on the TeeVee.

106

"Necessary" means just one thing: Deny it and you violate the Law of Non-Contradiction. Period. That's it. The rest is maggot-brained gobbledygook.

107

Def. Southern Baptist: A stupid person with a gun.

108

The perfect fuck: That entity which is the best fuck in all possible worlds.

109

Critique of Pure 'Pataphysics

110

Just as deism can be described as Xtian theology without the myth, the religion of the average Joe is the myth without the theology.

111

Trends, polls and surveys in social science - who cares what the little people think?

112

Most academic debate can be summarized in a single issue: Which ideology is best suited for removing individual freedom?

113

Between domestication and criminality the demonic individual must slash his way along a perilous path.

114

Despair is a powerful tool.

115

Fonda never had the animal sexuality of Bardot. She emanated the sort of bovine Flemish placidity that would have made her more fitting for a Van Eyck than a Watteau.

116

Cultures are not unitary phenomena even though most of the cultural histories we read give the impression that they are. Rather they are composed of several independent tendencies, institutions, customs, activities and ideologies. Often, if two of these strains conflict one will come to dominate and stamp out all or nearly all trace that the other existed. Popular culture almost never leaves a trace of its activity relative to courtly culture in pre-industrial societies.

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Opposing strains - Botticelli and Savanarola - in the Renaissance. Opposing strains in the classical world are only now being sorted out by histories of classical eroticism.

118

What if the only records left of contemporary American culture were the art exhibited in modern art museums? What if the opposite were the case and records of that art disappeared without a trace? The history of contemporary American culture would be very different in the two cases. But these sorts of eventualities are what we have to deal with in past cultures, partly because of the destruction of records and artifacts, partly because of deliberate choice on the part of historians.

119

It's not that god doesn't exist. It's that the word "god" is meaningless.

120

There is some nonsense that it's just a waste of valuable time and intellectual energy to answer. Think of the Maoist rejection of relativity as a capitalist hoax. Or the goddist blather about how evolution doesn't happen because the Bible says so (or alternatively, because monkeys still exist - a self-referential tautology if I ever heard one!). Or the Lesbo Left slogan that meiosis is a patriarchal capitalist plot. Better to just dismiss this nonsense with an effortless and hurtful quip.

121

The key to understanding Shakespeare is the final act of The Winter's Tale where the poet misidentifies Giulio Romano as a sculptor.

122

Mind is for suckers.

123

Do we create things or do they find us?

124

Erotophobia as an individual disorder and cultural threat

125

Religion is a tool of the wicked to relieve the gullible of their money.

126

A fuckosopher is a philosopher who has lost all hope and couldn't care less.

127

A philosopher is a fuckosopher who can’t get it up.

128

While all those philosophers were waiting under Wisdom's window, candy and flowers at the ready, chanting their dithyrambs and strumming their ukeleles, the fuckosopher was in her precious box fucking her brains out. FYI Wisdom gives great head!

129

While Socrates dutifully took notes as Diotima spouted off, the fuckosopher was clit sucking the flute girl. (Sending out the flute girl and invoking Diotima are the two poles around which The Symposium revolves).

130

Le philosophe pense. Le fuckosophe dépense. Loose translation: The philosopher saves, the fuckosopher spends. Le philosophe embauche. Le fuckosophe débauche. –bauche balk (Germ.) like “fuck” Indo-european.

131

Most average people who dabble in philosophy are looking for a comforting thought which will give meaning to their wretched lives. Here are the top three popular answers to their quest: (1) Life is for shit. Let's get wasted. (2) Life is for shit. Let's hope something or someone appears out of nowhere to make us all (or at least me) happy. (3) Life is for shit. If we all just love one another, we can make a shit omelet.

132

Professor and scholar are not the same thing. Some of history's best scholars never set foot in a university. They probably suspected their work would die from lack of sunlight.

133

When anyone utters the word "epistemology" I pull out my semi-automatic.

134

Susan Sontag's greatest contribution to culture was to ignore nearly every book or article written by a college professor.

135

It is not a given that the description or depiction of a sexual act is itself arousing. On the other hand, the depiction of a sexually attractive individual is or under most circumstances can be arousing by definition.

136

Sexual arousal is produced by the image of beautiful women in situations and actions which show off their beauty to the best advantage. These can but need not include the sexual act. Nudity or near nudity is close to required. Describing sexually arousing beauty cannot really go beyond the gesture of pointing and saying, "That...."

137

There's nothing wrong with the modern investigation of deviant sex. However, one consequence is that heterosexual sexuality and the phenomenology of heterosexual desire tends to get ignored. Even worse, it is stigmatized as purely reproductive in nature or even somehow a manifestation or accessory of an unacceptable social order.

138

As early as Gautier's Melancolia there is evident a rebuff of the human beauty in Raphael and Titian and like Italian Renaissance masters. I have no doubt this helped influence the rejection of human beauty so constitutive of the avant garde.

139

Why, despite presenting a largely secular face to the world, do so many philosophy departments still stink of the seminary?

140

Dilemma: Is Pussy Liquor a great rock song or the greatest rock song?

141

The conservative bourgeoisie should probably be allowed to run government administration since that is what they do best. However part of the bargain should be that they not be allowed to impose their tastes and morality on the rest of the population.

142

The liberal arts are dead. They died of their own prejudices.

143

Despite producing a number of major works, the Surrealist movement dealt a mortal wound to the lively adolescent herd of ideas and tendencies surrounding the decadence and budding neoclassicism of the pre WWI period. Tel Quel aspired to the same lethality, but it waved its spear over a long dead corpse.

144

Calling the average philosophy prof a pussy is an insult to cats.

145

The gift of generalizing is like a drug. In proper doses it supports survival and stimulates life. An overdose kills.

146

Beauty is the fuel that powers sexual desire.

147

The Lesbo Left wants to castrate men and the Neo-Nazi Anti-Abortion Right wants to turn women into brood sows. Not democracy's finest moment.

148

The transcendental ego is really nothing more than an external observer, a lab technician in a white coat.

149

The Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians are generically different from most other political movements in that they draw bounds around the rules of liberal democracy. Once a tenet becomes an article of faith with them, they are beyond the reach of argument. At that point all they understand is relations of power. The way to convince them is through coercion.

150

People who live in liberal democracies live in authoritarian societies not because the government itself is authoritarian, but because quasi-governments are rightly allowed to flourish under the democratic umbrella, and these quasi-governments control the lives of their subjects without checks and balances and without accountability. Churches are the most evident such quasi-goverments. A democratic government cannot shut down a quasi-government unless the latter acts in a seditious manner. But it is not inconsistent with democracy to subject the quasi-governments to the same checks and balances and the same protections of human rights which restrain the general democratic government.

151

Almost all discussions of political theory begin with a simple and apparently obvious observation: There are people and there is the government they form. The people on one side and the government on the other. This picture is false and misleading. Government is just one of many organizations which influence, guide and in extreme cases run people's lives. Some of these other institutions can have a greater reality than the government.

152

Either there are multiple universes, or god favors the home team or the Super Bowl winner is just incredibly lucky. Physicists should stay in their lane and stay out of metaphysics.

153

If we have so much free will, why are we humans so completely predictable?

154

Freud's masterful analysis of conscience was the death blow which put Kantism out of its misery.

155

Beauty is the ultimate transgression.

156

Philosophy is for pinheads.

157

What trips me up in my advocacy of nihilism is that I'm biologically programmed to be a cheerful person.

158

Hemingway, the writer of choice for minds so blurred or underdeveloped that they can't retain sentences longer than two or three words.

159

Kreator, Enemy of God "Dying Race of Apocalypse": The Final hours coming / Closing chapter of time...Those who believe in gods start praying their prayers of lies.

160

Gautier: Entre néant et rien quelle est la différence?

161

Cixin Liu:...the only thing encountered by humanity thus far that absolutely could not be captured by language.

162

The decline began when Ivana Sugar went hairy.

163

Ecchi manga and anime is the commedia dell'arte of postpostmodernism.

164

In the end it doesn't matter which team wins the super bowl. They're all just different faces of a generic football team. Likewise it didn't much matter which mystery cult among the many emerged to replace public Roman religion. All the cults were the same thing masquerading under different names.

165

Freud’s use of sexual metaphors was reductionist. It was a way of cutting "great" works of art down to size by showing their origin in basic sexual impulses. That interpretative technique, however, is misleading as far as a general theory of art is concerned since it implies that artworks communicate, if only metaphorically, their sexual origin. A general theory needs to ignore meaning and interpretation and start from a sociobiological analysis of art as a sexual phenotype.

166

Ya gotta feel sorry for these Xtians. They spend their whole lives denyin’ themselves stuff and makin’ life miserable for everyone else. Then, as they lie dyin’ and the gold ring is in sight, they realize, “Dere ain’t nuttin’ up ahead!”

167

Why are there no decadent philosophers? Only Nietzsche comes to mind as a sort of dubious example.

168

Artaud - The poet shouldn't make himself the issue.

169

KMFDM:...last call on planet fucked....

170

Eliot is perhaps the only poet I can forgive for being a papist - because the music is satanist. (Gautier? Definitely not.)

171

The race is on to see who can show greater hatred of beauty and its earthly representative, sexuality - Ms. Priss the Women's Studies lecturer in Old Prynne MA or Pastor Billy Bob of the HoocheeCoochee Drive Thru Church in HoocheeCoochee AL.

172

Hegel's jokes - all the wit of a galumping Bauerkerl.

173

It's such a shame that beauty needs to apologize, that sexuality must reduce herself to the status of revolutionary handmaid in order to find political shelter against the rage of the cultural Tories who would rather that beauty be locked in the scullery but compromise at Venus Genetrix, the erstwhile nymphet doomed to the tasteless and disfiguring task of breeding.

174

Heidegger writes as if a gong should sound after every sentence. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that. Wittgenstein writes the same way. It’s a rhetorical technique just as my snide remarks are a rhetorical technique. So is the sober just-like-a-scientific-report style preferred by the hordes of minor philosophers who take up space in our universities. The stylistic accoutrements of gong philosophers appeal to anyone looking for profundity and someone to have faith in against all comers. My jokes appeal to people who like a bit of a slap and a tickle along with their medicine. The lab coat style is perhaps the sneakiest of all. It can sugar coat utter nonsense with an appearance of unsentimental objectivity.

175

Amazing how Nietzsche beat women at their own game. He found a way to be on the rag 24/7.

176

The various directors, playwrights and scholars who have attempted to recreate or understand Nabokov's Lolita exhibit the same hopeless longing as Humbert himself, though without the self-conscious irony. Truth is, Humbert's screed is itself an irresistible but untouchable nymphet.

177

Anatole France stands out among French writers as someone who is neither a religionist nor a revolutionary.

178

Does anyone write for The New York Times who is not a dried up old maid? Just askin'.

179

The difference between Locke and Leibniz, on the one hand, and Hume and Kant, on the other, may come down to a change in men's wig fashions - heavy to light.

180

The cornerstone of Freudian aesthetics: Es scheint mir unzweifelhaft, daẞ der Begriff des “Schönen” auf dem Boden der Sexualerregung wurzelt und ursprünglich das sexuell Reizende (die “Reize”) bedeutet. GW V p. 55 ftn. 1. The etymology is probably not valid, but etymology doesn’t determine meaning.

181

There isn't a boat I haven't rocked.

182

Squabbles about the transcendence of some god or other would have been incomprehensible to the classical world including the philosophically fruitful period of high classicism stretching from the 5th to the 1st centuries before the Common Era. The gods to the ancients were physical objects like everyone else. They just lived a very long time mostly on distant mountains and possessed superhero powers.

183

Multiculturalism must not imply an uncritical acceptance of religiosity. Atheism is an authentic universal.

184

Madness and philosophy are unlovely bedmates. Living at the edge of the familiar and the intelligible, the philosopher is always tempted to go beyond. (The common sense tradition with its insistence on never leaving the way the ordinary man sees things merely exhibits a pathological symptom, a hysterical recoil from putting a single foot beyond the bounds of experience and the entirety of the known world.) - Tasio the Madman.

185

KMFDM Blitz, "People of the Lie": "Don't call it your faith/ Another way to justify hate/
....Don't push your deity on me/ Reality is bullshit." One of the best songs on the Blitz album.

186

Saying an alternative reality is all there is while insisting on calling it alternative is like pretending your nose doesn't hurt while wearing an Oculus.

187

If you are a continental philosopher, your duty is to choose between Marx and god. There are no other alternatives.

188

The good shepherd - Don't these Xtians realize that shepherds, even the best among them, tend their flocks not out of some sort of benevolence but for the sake of a hearty side of mutton or a delicious lamb stew. I understand that even today shepherds in the Aegean Peninsula eat their lamb shanks raw and freshly killed. The picture that emerges is of a Saturn-like Jesus devouring his own children.

189

Philosophy and literature are historical antagonists incapable of informing the same culture.

190

Valéry: Mallarmé Lite

191

There just aren't any attractive Americans any more. They're all immensely fat with hairy armpits and vaginas.

192

Henry Miller - Ya have to honor the man. He died with his dick in his hand.

193

Hegel wasn't the only romantic to engage in incoherent ramblings. Emerson and George Sand come readily to mind.

194

Sorry guys, Leonardo is a seriously overrated painter who had surprising misconceptions about the mechanics of fucking. Sadly the myth that the middle aged Ms. Lisa is a beautiful woman was an invention of Victorian homosexuals. In fact she just looks like someone's pissed off mom on a bad hair day.

195

Sprinkling pepper and vinegar on your crême brulée - How would young Marcel react if Artaud were to wander into a mondain dinner party? Or what would be the conversation if he stumbled on the Tarahumaras getting wasted?

196

Saul Kripke is an idiot souvent (Tip 'o the hat to M. Warhol).

197

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths. - Poe

198

I'm not sure what Žižek's Sex and the Failed Absolute has to the with sex unless by the latter he means the perverted courtship ritual embodied in the Lesbo Left War on Men.

199

Ya gotta credit Mallarmé for one thing: He scrubbed French poetry clean of the god detritus left over from the Romantics so it could finally catch up with Englishmen like Shelley and Byron.

200

Shelley is one poet I know I should like, but I just can't keep my mind from wandering when I read his work.

201

Steering one's way between the avant garde phonies of the art world and the slobbering simians of reg'lar guyhood is as perilous as mastering the narrow path between the Lesbo Left and the Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians.

202

A Ph.D. is a grad student who has proved he might be nothing more than an idiot savant.

203

What doesn't kill you might lead you astray.

204

The common or garden logical positivist behaved like a bumptious Bloch mistakenly or mischievously invited to the Duchess' afternoon and who bellowed an insouciant laugh to show his disdain at tracking street mud into the drawing room.

205

It was quite normal for romantic poets to invoke god and wear their religion on their sleeves. After Baudelaire that all came crashing down and lyric stepped boldly into the invigorating sunlight of secularism. Hugo and Gautier were the last remnants of the old guard. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were the first explorers of the new world.

206

It is perhaps to be regretted that empiricists are rebuffed by the common run of postmodernists given that the two share many of the same anti-philosophical goals. Perhaps that distaste will linger as long as the image of the average analytical philosopher is that of a pimple faced weenie who annoys real scientists.

207

I always thought of myself as the Beaver. Imagine my shock to find out I was Eddie Haskell all along.

208

The debate over beauty occurs in a kingdom beyond language.

209

Baudelaire is to modern poetry as Petrarch was to Renaissance poetry. He not only effectively introduced the prose poem, he also enriched the poet's world view. Interestingly enough he wasn't the theoretical father of modernism. That was Wagner, despite the latter's reliance on Gothic and pre-modernist mythology. Even though Baudelaire filled his poetry with la vie moderne, he always thought his work belonged to Romanticism.

210

Love is evil. Sin is sincere. - Marilyn Manson

211

Poe practically invented the Surrealist bagatelle, a literary form perfected by Artaud (Les Tarahumaras, Le Théâtre et son double) that is not traditional fiction but does not have the one-to-one correspondence with reality which is the assumption underlying most journalism. A good example can be found in the first few paragraphs of the report, "The Premature Burial." "Marie Roget" takes the opposite tack - an explicit fictional form which cites apparently actual news reports in such a way as to undermine their reliability.

212

I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. - Isaac Asimov

213

The more I think about Freud the more I come to believe that he was the most important philosopher since Aristotle and one of the greatest minds in human history. He was the incarnation of the radicalism of scientific positivism.

214

Nearly every attempt to "improve" upon Freud from Jung to Lacan has been motivated by one thing: get rid of the sex. Which means get rid of biological reductionism.

215

High Art - a bucket which includes literary journals, university humanities departments, avant-garde music and assorted museums and galleries - is shorthand for Only Fruitcakes Allowed.

216

The soft atheism of cold indifference.

217

Just as philosophy departments today are divided between the analytical and the continental, I suppose one day there will be an administrative divide between creationist and gender neutral biology faculties. The burning question for biology will be why predictions fail and experiments return indecipherable results.

218

Delenda est universitas - so the arts and scholarship may flourish.

219

What's an example of a semantic paradox? "All trannies are schmucks."

220

Lacan's contribution to philosophy? Replacing sex in Freud with some sort of neo-Hegelian transcendental signifier obsessed with death.

221

Oxford and Cambridge are just as subject to fads as any Parisian bistro and it was Quinton's rotten luck that he published right before the Davidson-Dummett fad was about to break.

222

Bataille and Klossowski - Why don't we turn things around? Instead of saying that there is a type of sexual experience which is mystical in nature, why don't we realize that mystical experiences are really a deviant sort of sexuality? The kind with an empty placeholder as the sexual object.

223

It should come as no surprise that formalism arose concurrently with the capture of writing about art and literature by the academy. The "stirrings of the heart" just like feelings of sexual excitement are largely beyond the sensibility of the average academic, scientist or otherwise.

224

Emotive intersubjectivity - We can become sexually aroused from observing someone else's sexual arousal.

225

One annoying thing about Strawson is he so frequently says "logically" when he really means "analytically." This is particularly evident in his argument against what he calls the no-ownership theory of private experiences.

226

It's probably worth noting that Freud's observational sample was probably not much smaller than Darwin's. And neither produced laws in the strict scientific sense, namely mathematically measurable inductive regularities. Rather each had an insight into a mechanism which lay behind a mass of apparently haphazard data. Darwin's mechanism was natural selection and speciation. Freud's was the phenotypic expression of aspects of developmental biology.

227

The Phänomenologie des Geistes is pretty much an endless flood of repetitive gobbledygook. Is this the young Hegel struggling to express new and perhaps exciting ideas as many academics including Hegel himself came to see it? Or is it the birth of a non-referential literature whose meaning derives from the interaction of the words he uses, as Mallarmé and any number of differentialist thinkers would have it? Cf. my "Meaning in the Art of Duchamp."

228

Gautier's Pour veiner de son front la pâleur delicate... Landscape as woman.

229

Contemporary art - Boring is the new kitsch.

230

My goal is to merge Baudelarian morality and aesthetics with scientific reductions and atheism.

231

An extrovert who gets irritated by other people - Is that a thing?

232

Academic psychologists are tabloid advice columnists who fancy themselves scientists.

233

Dawn Dunlap - Passing from Laura to Forbidden World one understands how Pooh must have felt when he said goodbye to Christopher Robin.

234

If Baudelaire is to modern poetry as Petrarch was to Renaissance poetry, then who is the modern Dante? The Count of High Water.

235

We have all these critical movements saying the English aren't as bad as they seem compared to the French when it comes to art and literature. But then we run up against the roadblock of English cooking. Buck up, lads! Who do the French have to compare with Mick Jagger? Chantal Goya?

236

The accusation that some philosophers are logic choppers who lose themselves in the weeds is appropriate in cases where philosophical thinking leads to no actionable results or gets lost in a maze of distinctions. However, this accusation is too often a cover for someone who prefers to draw highly contestable generalizations without taking the trouble to think them through.

237

Even if I thought humanity could be saved and was worth saving, I can't be bothered.

238

A dadaist is a nihilist who likes to show off.

239

Where Heidegger notoriously burbled, "How does it stand with being?" Sartre had to worry about how his latest article stood with André Stil.

240

A good porn pic is tactile as well as visual. You don't just see form and color. You feel the model's flesh.

241

Is BEING just a suppository which sneaks the deity back into philosophy via the back door? In the cloudy minds of most Heideggerians being is god in mufti.

242

It really pisses me off that music’s not dangerous anymore. - Marilyn Manson allegedly quoting Trent Reznor,

243

Was a time when civil libertarians could live in uneasy alliance with the left. Well, with the bloodless putsch engineered by the Muzzy loving Lesbo Left, that's certainly a thing of the past.

244

Some people write from a love of humanity. I write from excess adrenaline and feelings of irritation.

245

The Marxian Foucauldian approach did us a service by replacing the great man approach to writing history with histories based on the collective mentality. I would like to take this a step in a different direction by looking at occasions where there is conflict between extraordinary individuals and the mass or majority mentality. To be fair, some of this is adumbrated in Foucault's work on insanity and on prisons.

246

Winckelmann the homosexual laid the basis for our understanding of classical art. Quite naturally he focused on depictions of the male nude. The same respect and acuity has not been manifested by heterosexual critics of the female nude.

247

The repressed fear lurking in the professorial amygdala is: No Necessity, no philosophy. That's why they tie themselves into knots trying to devise ways to concoct necessarily true statements.

248

There are only three genders: men, women and babes.

249

Freud's fault lay not so much in the theory of sexuality as an explanation of neurotic disorders but in his claim that the recognition of sexual causes in individual cases could bring about the alleviation or disappearance of neurotic symptoms. Drop the latter claim and we have a theory much more in line with contemporary evolutionary biology.

250

Montaigne was to ethics as Copernicus was to physics. In this light Kant was the ghost of Roger Bellarmine.

251

Was a time when the New York art world was divided into two camps: (1) People who hate Morris Louis and (2) Michael Fried.

252

"Seduction is an art, and tonight, I am the artist." From The Wit & Wisdom of Putri Cinta.

253

The difference between Harvard and Yale. Harvard men got straight A's in high school French. Yale men spoke French with the nanny.

254

The fundamental theorem of evolutionary biology: Everything comprised in an organism's phenotype can be explained by way of its role in species or genetic survival and propagation.

255

Unquestionably Ekaterina Skaredina (porn name Mango/Katya Clover) had the most sublime butt in the entire universe of Callipygia.

256

In the world of ecchi anime the upper crust sip tea from Wedgewood while an English butler hovers in the vicinity. Ordinary slobs slurp instant ramen in the Japanese equivalent of a 7-11.

257

If you don't like getting into the weeds, then don't become a philosopher. Just stand on a street corner and proclaim your opinions.

258

Porn stars and rock musicians are the gods and goddesses of the modern pantheon. They are the glorious elect concerning whom Honni soit... remains a firm warning.

259

Any porn star older than 20 needs to have silicone inserted. All porn stars need Brazilian waxing.

260

There are only two reasons people seek you out. Either they want to mate or they want to sell you something. If someone wants to buy something, he is not seeking you; you are merely a means to buy what he wants. This is why Aristotle's φιλία should be revised or retranslated (depending on what Aristotle actually meant) as benevolence. The psychological (as opposed to the normative) side of Hume's notion of benevolence should be rephrased as everything-else-being-equal-benevolence, i.e. benevolence unless I am harmed or discomfited in some way.

261

Marx was the theory. Soviet gulags were the practice. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze were theories. They were monopolized by the Lesbo Left and the War on Men is the practice.

262

We need to distinguish between rational behavior, which (if natural selection is a valid explanation of behavior) is universal, and supposedly rational behavior which does not guide a person's actions when it conflicts with another more rational feature of a phenotype. In principle, close inspection should reveal the conflict. A person might pursue a course of action not in his rational best interests. But we find there is an underlying reason for why he acts the way he does.

263

What we thought was essence is really a placeholder.

264

Bouguereau is the new Manet, the flashpoint for intense hatred - and finally equally intense appreciation.

265

Future tyrants are at their best when they represent an oppressed minority.

266

The two greatest threats to individual freedom in a nation are the mob, sometimes called the majority, and governmentally structured associations permitted to operate in a nation.

267

Aesthetic value is a mark of the repression of sexual feeling.

268

The hatred of Bouguereau by the fruity elites and the little people who trail along in their wake is, in its virulence, a neurotic symptom - something like the violent outlashing of the repressed homosexual against his William Wilsons.

269

So art world art is all about actually being philosophy? And here I thought it was all about being smug self-indulgent college boy pranks.

270

Absurdist techniques have become such a commonplace in even the best films and literature that it's increasingly difficult to spark the feelings of uneasiness which usher in the modernist marvelous. It's like the elderly having lost even the memory of the first wild stirrings of sexual desire.

271

Sometimes I think I would like to live forever, because there is no end to what I intend to write. At other times, I would like to die now because I could use the sleep.

272

Hey freshman sitting in Phil. 101, look at your teacher standing at the blackboard. He's an academic faggot. But you shouldn't feel superior. You are a sniveling careerist pussy.

273

Watch what you wish for. A female who's high is kinda cute. A female addict is just as repulsive as a male addict - perhaps more so,

274

The courtly picture of love endorsed and revived by the Romantic movement portrays love as irrational behavior directed to the goal of achieving orgasm with a specific sex object. Striking that Rousseau's Julie already cast doubts on this model.

275

Mohammed worship - or the religion of camel shit.

276

What Heidegger got wrong: Being is an entity.

277

The choice is not between individual freedom and oppression. It is between varying types and degrees of oppression.

278

I don't know why people get so excited over "The Raven" and "The Bells." I would hardly qualify them as horror and the prosody reads like amateurish kitsch. The elegies for dead girls, on the other hand, are lyric poetry at its highest level and surely served as melodic if not thematic models for Baudelaire. But I wouldn't call the elegies horror or Gothic either. A better word would be "disturbing."

279

The products of Dada and Surrealism and whatever else came out of them no longer horrify the high art elites. What does horrify them? Pornography. Consequently pornography (as Man Ray and Jindrich Štyrský might have foreseen) functions within culture in exactly the way the Dadaists and some Surrealists had intended for their art works. Conversely the museum pieces they produced are now praised as the high art some wished to bring down. The case of Duchamp is a particularly sad example.

280

What appears as a circumstantial change in attitude, sensibility or focus rarely happens by chance. The Zeitgeist can be guided, usually under the radar. The Lesbo Left stranglehold on culture is an example. It began with the seemingly unrelated attacks on J.S. Mill and Margaret Mead, the bastardization of anti-essentialism into one of the shibboleths of radical politics and the decentering of Freud from intellectual life.

281

What I like about Marilyn Manson is that no one can say about him, "Down deep he's a good kid."

282

Heidegger was one of any number of philosophers who misused metaphysical terminology to score ethical points or to support some empirical claim. Plato was the first and worst offender.

283

Refuting proofs that the Führer is the greatest thing since sliced bread does not make room for simple faith in the Führer as the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is the sense in which both Pyrrho (if we can believe ancient commentary) and Kant were crackpots and the American Second Great Awakening provided the model for Nazi irrationalism.

284

Sometimes I think the only thing more boring than a bad scene in a porn flick is the kind of artist movie they show at MOMA.

285

Man is born free, so why does Rousseauism lead to the chains of mob tyranny?

286

High art avant garde music is a fraud.

287

Formal logic and formal ontology are tied at the hip.

288

Shakespeare's histories are not just a sort of agitprop justifying Tudor legitimacy. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans professed the absolute power of royalty because the alternative (the Puritans) professed a threateningly oppressive morality and social system. (The subtle Shakespeare of course saw there could be bad as well as good royalty.) Hobbes' political theory is the Elizabethan world view become self-conscious.

289

We're living in a post-religion world. That's why the last redoubts of feudalism are sharpening their rhetoric and raising their levels of violence.

290

Endless regress is to certainty as paradox is to universality.

291

Virginia Woolf gave new meaning to the phrase "toothless crone."

292

Freud taught us that supposedly irrational behavior occurs for a reason. That is, it is rational and we simply didn't understand the motivations.

293

No matter how brazenly the English could flaunt their imperial power around the world, because of the concurrent decline of their own culture, they remained little more than vulgar arrivistes.

294

Heidegger is his own worst disciple.

295

The trouble with visual art as "philosophy" is that it doesn't say very much. Mediaeval cathedrals pretty much all said the same thing. You might call this reverse metaphoricity. One signified, many signifiers.

296

The intensity of the aesthetic experience is evidence that it is a variant on sexual feeling. The two may not feel the same. But that is due to evolutionary history. A horse does not look like a phenacodus but one is a variant of the other.

297

Instinct is just a label for uniform patterns of behavior.

298

The only reason natural scientists aren't academic faggots is that they're simple calculating machines. Or perhaps they know how to stay in their calculating robot lane.

299

Art is immoral or it's nothing.

300

Derrida: We can't be sure about anything.

Julie de Lespinaasse: Are you sure about that?

301

The quite good paintings of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Remedios Varo have the perhaps unintended effect of removing the danger and negativity from surrealist art. They deteriorate into modern day fairy tales, which may explain their great influence on cartoons, manga, comedy videos and films and the graphic arts in general. Something similar could be said about Kafka.

302

Who is the greater composer, Brittany Spears or Pierre Boulez? Despite the obvious soporific advantages of the latter's compositions, I must award the palm to Ms. Spears because she is - or was - cuter than M. Boulez.

303

Praxiteles' Aphrodite was controversial when it appeared but gradually won recognition as a celebration of female beauty. When darkness descended on Europe and the Mediterranean world, this beauty was smothered under a thick sludge of Xtian and Mohammedan morality which choked Western creativity for centuries. We are now in the initial stages of something similar in which ironically one of the forces is secular while the other remains religious. How long this will last and whether it will have the same deadly effect on civilization is a story waiting to be told.

304

It looks like Mary Beard has shifted the approach of her moralism and instead of ignoring or repressing the abundant examples of the female nude in antiquity, she has swallowed Lesbo Left ideology, with nary a crumb left over, in order to condemn that art as sexist (viz. immoral).

305

People with underdeveloped emotional sensibilities tend to prefer art and literature calibrated to adolescent levels of appreciation. I have more than once been taken aback by political types - grown men - swooning over romantic comedies. Natural scientists shamelessly slap their knees in public over rollicking good farces. On the other hand, there might be an evolutionary advantage to emotional dullness. Proust was so sensitive to external stimuli that he died out after a single generation.

306

Lichelle Marie - Was a time I mooned over this talented artist as a paradigm of the contemporary ideal of beauty. Glancing back, having now become acquainted with so many more performers, my opinion about her physique remains largely unchanged, though her butt is a degree too prominent. Her facial features, however, or more properly speaking, her choice of makeup has not stood the test of time. Poor Porn Valley makeup makes her face look like one of those bejewelled Aztec masks, all teeth and scary mineral surface.

307

Artworks which are "all about" some burning political issue or other are not art as philosophy. They are art as agitprop.

308

If philosophy is logic and morality, then scientists "refute" philosophy by ignoring it.

308

Corydon - Gide plays Proust's coy game of "I'm not gay myself, mind you, but I've got this friend..."

309

Artists don't say anything. They make. This is also true of those pseudo-demiurges the poets.

310

Beauty - speaking Barthesishly - is the gap between the edges. Or, if you prefer cliches, it is the unsaid chasing the ineffable. Eff as in Fuckosophy.

311

Convert to what? I prefer to subvert.

312

Sometimes I wonder if Lou Andreas-Salomé had one of those callipygian Russian butts. Sadly Dominique Sanda did not.

313

I can't decide between Alexandra Dovgan and Nata Lee as the shining hope for Russian youth after Putin. I guess it's a tie.

314

You can cast skeptical doubts on any assertion and philosophers are mostly justified in distinguishing between skeptical arguments which deserve attention, such as Hume's skepticism about causal laws and biblical witnesses, and Pyrhhonic skepticism which crosses some sort of line. However, there is an angelic twin to skepticism to the effect that necessary or unassailable assertions are a philosophical myth and all those attempts to create doctrines of some greater degree of validity than the formal games of mathematics or the provisional axioms of empirical science are a waste of paper.

315

There's something putrid about the idea of loving your fellow man.

316

You can saw through almost any metal bar. It might just not be possible with the tools you have on hand. The world is accessible as it is. It might just not be accessible with the language we have.

317

Epistemologically humans are little more than parrots in a covered cage facing a row of buttons. We peck at them with our beaks in any order we want. If we peck in some orders we are rewarded with a snack. Pecking in other orders results in a painful electric shock. That's reality pushing back.

318

...the Art-scarred surface of the earth...its rectangular obscenities.... - Poe

319

Fifteen minutes of reflection should have made obvious to any clear thinking 4th century Roman that a science of everything is self-contradictory or to any dispassionate philosophe that the ideal of certainty is an unending and foolish project. Yet otherwise intelligent individuals managed to hide these truths from themselves, motivated most likely by fear - fear of not fitting in, fear of moral anarchy, fear of death.

320

When you get old you start to look weird. - Charlize Theron

321

It is hard to imagine an orator in the Athenian assembly using sophistic classifications to advocate attacking Sicily, or Demosthenes using Aristotelian category theory to warn against Philip of Macedon, without the carpenters in the audience getting a bit glassy eyed. Speaking personally, I too after the fifteenth distinction would start wondering when Phryne or one of her successors would make an appearance. However, when a politician says something like "Empire building and self-defense are not the same thing," he is reasoning in the spirit of the sophists and Aristotle.

322

No writer, it seems to me, is so un-American as Poe. His work - through the intermediary of Baudelaire - served as a touchstone for the European decadents but had not a single major imitator in his own country. Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Furniture," on the other hand, reads like a draft for A Rebours.

323

The limited role for philosophy today consists in struggling against moral repression by way of scientific and logical counter arguments.

324

There are four styles of sexuality in art and literature: the bawdy, the decadent, the romantic and the callistic.

325

Barthes - La modernité...veut résister...à la bonne sexualité...par la perversion, qui soustrait la jouissance à la finalité de la reproduction. Yet modernity is not the only choice and perversion is not the only means to this end. It is a strategy in the decadent style. There are corresponding bawdy and vénuste strategies.

326

It can be affirmed with little to no hesitation that the French language contains more terms for variations on sexuality than Arabic does for parts of camels.

327

Good is the thing that you favor, evil is your sour flavor. - Marilyn Manson

328

The scarifying images of the gods of most primitive societies are meant to inspire terror and obedience. The Greeks discovered something previously hidden about terror and obedience: Beauty. The vision of beauty more than any other phenomenon inspires reverence and terror.

329

If it weren't for Marx Hegel would probably be a footnote to philosophical history somewhat on the order of Fichte and Schelling.

330

L'Université, je n'en ai rien à foutre, qu'elle crève. - Gabriel Matzneff

331

The blessings of breast implants (and more recently AI): Big tits are no longer associated solely with age and maternity but fitting for youth and vitality.

332

Decadents play a dangerous game of chicken with goddism.

333

Decadence, libertarianism and scientific positivism can form a powerful alliance.

334

Contemporary painting is either illustration or decoration. There are no alternatives.

335

The need for a meaning of life is a neurotic disorder. It may be caused by traumatic fear.

336

Large swaths of the literary community both in the US and France profess themselves hostile to literary academics. I find this amusing since by and large non-academic literary types tend to be just as fruity as their university counterparts.

337

There is a gap between literature and visual art in Western culture. Most females identified as sexually attractive in traditional literature are between the ages of 12 and 16. Most female nudes which are depicted in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts as sexually attractive appear to be in their mid-twenties (This includes Playboy and much porn), well into or a bit after their period of optimal fertility.

338

Hamlet - "...the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness..." Le fou assied la beauté sur ses genoux et, puisqu'il la trouve amère, il l'injurie. d'après Rimbaud

339

Great beauty, as we have all experienced, inspires religious awe. The fact that great beauty also inspires religious terror is not so familiar an experience largely because with terror comes repression.

340

Much of the greatest art in history is an aggression, a hostile defacement of beauty.

341

Dada - Where does earnest negativity leave off and schoolboy hijinks commence?

342

What scientific positivists say is not so much untrue as intolerably vulgar.

343

Gide was a homosexual first and therefore a pederast. Matzneff was exclusively a pederast both homosexual and heterosexual.

344

What is distinctive about Chinese intellectual life is it went straight from animism to secularism.

345

C'est l'excès même de nos passions qui les rend invivables, intolérables. - Gabriel Matzneff

346

The First Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Everything and some thing are equivalent. The Second Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Certainty is an acceptable substitute for universality. The Third Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Linguistic revision is tantamount to moral revision.

347

There is only one word to describe modernist poetry and post-modernist visual art - dainty.

348

Demonic sexuality is one variant of the decadent.

349

Fuckosophy is to philosophy as philosophy is to sophistry.

350

Alice Cooper is a Xtian and plays golf. I don't know which is worse.

351

Decadent sexuality and moral revolt needs to be distinguished (not necessarily separated) from venust sexuality and its likely association with moral libertarianism.

352

Richardson is the inventor of the women's romance. Jane Austen is his natural successor. Both are one inhibition away from writing full blown blouse rippers.

353

Even the most militant anti religionists created a sort of religion lite.

354

We need to finish the job that atheists like d'Holbach, Onfray, Sade, Russell, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche started. I'd rid the world of philosophy. Something like a Fuckosophy is needed to cleanse the Augean stables of mundane culture.

355

Philosophy is not a method or an approach. It is certainly not akin to reason. Philosophy is an ideology.

356

Humanists tend to quote the conclusions of their favorite philosophers as gospel. They are disinclined to question. Academic philosophers tend to pick apart a conclusion pyrrhonically without really suggesting a satisfactory alternative.

357

Oxford philosophy - The feat whereby spinning your wheels gets a government sinecure.

358

Dora wanted to give dear old dad a blow job, so unheimlich a prospect that she settled for coughing instead.

359

You might call Saul Kripke the Dunce Scotus of modern philosophy - castles in the air - sitting ducks for the battering ram of a Galileo.

360

Beauty is the body's transcendence over the soul.

361

If Nietzsche merely wanted to tweak Wagner, he would have chosen something by Offenbach (Meilhac and Halévy also wrote the incongruously erudite libretto for La Belle Hélène which conjures up Aristophanes as much as the music hall). Rather, as Peter Brooke would later remind us, Carmen is a masterpiece where raw sexuality infused with hostility sweeps aside Schopenhauerian myths about love in death. If we were to play the parlor game of the greatest opera of all time, the undisputed winner would be The Marriage of Figaro. Second place would be shared by Don Giovanni, Tristan und Isolde and Carmen. What makes Carmen particularly interesting is that, unlike Verdi's trendy later operas and the occasionally tedious Pelléas et Mélisande, it was completely uninfluenced by Wagner.

362

Good/evil, rights/transgressions, justice/injustice - These are all meaningless terms which can be given any content we want: "My right to force others to commit suicide," "The injustice of appropriating my earnings" All are charming verbal voodoo sitting atop a naturalistic fallacy.

363

The reason we can't move from Is to Ought is that the notion of a non-hypothetical Ought is meaningless.

364

There is no such thing as a generally valid moral principle. There is no effective rational argument for moral persuasion. There are relations of interest (group and individual interest) and explanations of how these relations come about.

365

Moral philosophy is a failure.

366

The aesthetic experience is a subvariant of sexual delight.

367

Pornography is the queen of the visual arts.

368

There is another class of the disenfranchised. These are not the usual suspects, the economically downtrodden and socially underserved so beloved of the Left. These are the extraordinary individuals who are not downtrodden so much as accursed.

369

Edward Albee is the Roger Vitrac of absurdist theater.

370

Priests and moral philosophers share a psychological trait, the need to control.

371

Individual freedom is all but absolute. Institutions are not free at all.

372

I have another term for mystics - kooks.

373

There is a price to pay for secularism - An ethics more stifling than the morality of any religion. The English proved that. If it weren't for Sade and Baudelaire, the French would have aped the English as usual.

374

Someone color blind is more likely to disapprove of a work of art if he sees something wrong in, say, the design. Obviously he isn't a particularly trustworthy art critic. So why don't we recognize other types of blindness, such as the blindness induced by sexual anorexia?

375

I’m somewhat torn about how much shelf space I should allow Voltaire. On the one hand, there is the urban/rural legend circulating among the goddists to the effect that the sage of Les Délices was an atheist. Which drives me into his arms. On the other hand, there is the reality that - like Jefferson, Franklin, Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison - Voltaire was a deist. Deism - that atheism which dare not speak its name and uses conceptual sleight of hand to affirm that god was something on the order of Newton’s First Law of Motion. This waffling - along with Voltaire’s bemused indulgence of the Quakers - turns my tastes away from Enlightenment fizzy to the stronger Côte de Nuits served up by the scientific materialists and their unexpected bedfellows, the Decadents (including Nietzsche). But then there’s Voltaire’s crystalline style and flashes of deadly wit. There’s Voltaire’s dilemma of being a literary artist in the dürftiger Zeit of dour taste-challenged Encyclopedists.

376

Modern philosophy begins with d’Holbach’s Système de la nature and La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine. By training his fire on Leibniz and Hume, Kant, to his ultimate demise, exposed his flank.

377

The only reason Baudelaire believed in god (if in fact he was a believer, which I am inclined to doubt) was so he could hate the bastard.

378

The Encyclopedists - Calvinist pastors with pulleys and levers.

379

Philosophy departments are largely populated from two social categories, failed priests and failed scientists with a smattering of failed communists.

380

Modernist poetry is just a type of euphuism.

381

The Evil of Beauty: What makes Baudelairean poison so toxic is not just his message - although he alone utters in the first person what Gothic writers, including Sade and Lautréamont, put in the mouths of stage puppets, shambling antiheroes whom the writer toys with disavowing. No, Baudelaire's poison is above all the sweet seductive music of his lyric. Baudelaire says it himself in some of his verses - Beauty is irresistible, hypnotic. In his verse it is intoxicating and so a source of terror. The terror of beauty symbolized by the transformation into its opposite. The evolutionary constant of pulchritudinis horror caused so-called modernists to banish beauty from the high art citadel. It also caused so-called popular art to reduce beauty to a sentimental cliche, a cheap empty teenage dream.

382

Nietzsche said somewhere (Fröhl. Wiss. II 98) that the misleadingly labeled Julius Caesar with its intimations of high morality was Shakespeare's best tragedy. Not so. Shakeaspeare's finest tragedy was Troilus and Cressida - whose world was devoid of morality, love and higher feelings. Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion. Fashion? No, the human condition. Live with it.

383

Existentialists consider meaning in life to be something worth bothering about. And viewing the world as uniquely composed of measurable matter and energy seems to be intimately bound up with living meaningless lives. But are scientists and engineers and other carbon based calculating machines really soulless robots? It seems to me that the vast majority of these fellows fill their lives with meaning by watching Dancing with The Stars and betting on NFL football.

384

Radical interpretation is surrender disguised as practicality.

385

Non-romantic sexuality doesn't have to be raunchy or even particularly light-hearted. It can have all the intensity of feeling described in the literature of courtly love. The difference is the unimportance of choosing and then mooning over a unique object, to echo Freud's delicious deprecation.

386

There is a myth floating about, often fostered by religionists and their ilk, to the effect that sexual caprice is somehow mentally deleterious in that it causes a lack of romantic profundity. How much worse can it be than ruining one's life obsessing over a single romantic obsession?

387

Heartbreak is one thing / My ego's another / I beg you don't embarrass me / Mother fucker…

- Sabrina Carpenter

Ahhh, young love!

- Domingo

388

There are a couple of fetishes to which philosophers are particularly prone, but which infect much of the general public as well. The first is the fetish for fine sounding words, expressions which seem to harbor in some deep cavity a treasure of profundity and dazzling other worldly insight. In this way Aristotle's technical logical terminology became fetishized in the Roman imperial world as a way of labeling and invoking assorted gods and godlets from mostly Semitic mystery religions. The fetish cloaked foggy mythical visions in the fancy dress of rigor. Heidegger and the young Sartre recapitulated that original sin by loading the poor innocent term "being" with more meaning than it could possibly handle. Heidegger may have been subliminally aware that, had he phrased his views in less lofty more mundane language, they might have been less captivating. Of course there is something to be said for the idea that every word is a metaphor in one way or another, that, even when philosophers and others pull their vocabulary from the shelves of grammar school comprehensibility, what they say retains a good dose of ambiguity and spurious meaning. The other fetish is the fetish of formalization, the notion that, if you concoct a string of symbols from beyond the usage of natural language, that string automatically says something and something rigorous about the world, that it refers beyond itself. Americans are particularly prone to this fetish and too often refuse to recognize that, on its own, formalization is a piece of rhetoric, a zoot suit meant to give a touch of class to a bad argument.

389

The visual arts are unique among cultural institutions in being defined by their economic structure, namely the art market. Pornographic videos and movies are straight up commodities even though they are manufactured products. That is they are defined as interchangeable members of a commodity class like lesbian or anal or the class defined by a particular performer. They are like fungible goods such as oil, wheat, or iron ore that are traded in commodity exchanges. But there is no centralized Board of Trade with respect to these products. Gallery or museum artworks are quasi commodities like other precious objects such as some jewelry pieces, vintage automobiles and other collectibles. The commodity class for these precious objects is almost always the individual artist who fills a slot much like the pornographic performer. Just as with pornography there is no centralized exchange similar to a stock market which determines the value of the objects. However, it appears that non-fungible tokens belong to a structure that resembles traditional commodity exchanges.

390

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft - Can Nietzsche actually champion being a jokester? Wouldn’t that be his Achilles’ heel of glum sobriety?

391

High art is a meme investment. The rest is sex.

392

The value we place on a formal system - viz. a system of symbols, formation rules, axioms and transformation rules - is directly proportional to the number of phenomena it can model. By modeling we mean replacing the variables in the formal system by values observed in the phenomenon and reaching verifiable results when the axioms and transformation rules are applied. The phenomena in the case of formal logical systems are initially and on the whole not things or events in the physical world but rather the statements we make about physical and indeed non-physical things. It is difficult to overestimate how valuable formalisms can be. Mathematical formalisms have enabled us to create the manufacturing and technological furniture of modern life. Logical formalism has not produced similar results when restricted to modeling the ways we reason. However, when we model formal logical systems not by true and false statements, but by abstractions such as 1 and 0, and model a formula such as "if...then" or implication not as a statement schema but as a command schema, the result is a technology which rivals the technological achievements of the most sophisticated mathematics. Mathematics is the ghostly presence behind rocket ships. Formal logic runs computers. As far as I know there are no current computer languages based on modalities. But that doesn't mean, something of the sort may not be devised some day - For the mystical modal metaphysician the very possibility of such a system means it has/is/will been//be devised somewhere. Back on earth₁ we call that sophistry.

393

Self-described Surrealist art has become the kitsch of post modernist culture.

394

I understand that the refined Middle Easterners of the Hellenistic world considered the Roman conquerors to be crude bumpkins. My question is - If the cultural mavens from Alexandria through Athens were so superior and refined, why didn't they produce poets on the order of Ovid and Catullus?

395

There was almost no need for biologically female poets in Roman culture, since the Italic sensibility in general was fundamentally feminine.

396

Russell had Voltaire on speed dial.

397

Instincts and drives occupy the same logical niche as natural laws. They are labels for inductive generalizations, nothing more. A chromosomal configuration which, along with a conditioning environment, causes a phenotype is something else entirely.

398

Van Gogh - Sentimental claptrap

399

Art without sex is just as bland as science.

400

I am not much more than a refutation machine. I don't really believe in anything. So the reason I do intellectual work is to pick apart and hopefully destroy the bad arguments upon which philosophy is built.

401

All the historical records seem to indicate that the advent of explicit permissibly public atheism in the 19th and 20th centuries was some sort of big deal. Even the occasional atheist conceded that this removed all emotional support from his earthly existence and made him feel rudderless in the journey of life. Now in 2024 it is hard to empathize with or even conceptualize the emotional upheaval. It is hard to understand what the word “god" even means, to take seriously something defined by patent verbal mumbo jumbo or identified as an obviously mythical creature. We are on the other side of an emergent bold explicitness on the part of scientists and some literary figures, a willingness to admonish us that of course there is no such thing as god. It all probably started with Carl Sagan, but however it came about, the mood is certainly different. Previously atheist intellectuals either contented themselves with highlighting historical and anthropological evidence about the origins of god myths, or else they arrayed themselves under the ideological banner of Marxism, or else they behaved as if they were intellectually superior, as if, while goddism was indeed an absurdity, it was somehow vulgar to mix oneself with the unseemly atheist/goddist debate. Now, as scientific education has firmly embedded itself in our memetic genes, it is, as I mentioned, hard to mentally formulate what the argument is about, since you can’t take seriously the existence of an absurdity. Indeed current debates are not so much about the existence of mythical creatures as about the harmful effect of religious institutions. They focus on curing the neurotic disorder of religious belief, or, at the very least, modifying neurotics’ behavior such that they may function in polite society without besmirching themselves. As Nietzsche said, a dead god still putrefies - still stinks.

402

Xtianity is simply in bad taste. -After Nietzsche

403

The reaction of all well thinking scientists and other common sense types to the excesses of structuralism and post-structuralism reminds me rather of the tempest stirred up among la bonne bourgeoisie by the scandalous art of Flaubert and Baudelaire. Liberal society, of course, quickly found a more effective strategy than arrest and prosecution which, as we know, has a strange way of backfiring - to the point where the good Emperor Franz could lend his imprimatur to the Viennese Secession - in embracing Bohemia and heaping awards and rewards on pesky and obstreperous artists and poets of the tortured school as long as they didn't sully themselves with too explicit a explicit sexuality.

404

Baudelairean theology - god exists that we may blaspheme.

405

Everyone is quite often a sexual body artist just as everyone speaks prose on most occasions. Sexual poets should expect and do usually receive recompense for the finished product.

406

The universe is fantastic and mysterious enough without our imposing supercilious mystery upon it by the tricks and traps of language.

407

The purpose of big tits is not to hide (or compensate for) the fact that you're on the verge of collecting social security.

408

I never experienced Angst. As a child I was too busy being miserable. Since then I've been too busy fucking.

409

The average scientist is about as qualified to tell me how to lead my life as a refrigerator.

410

Can we ever forgive the XX chromosomes for not being sufficiently XXX?

411

Much of philosophizing is a form of schizophrenia. Medieval scholasticism was a neurotic disorder - a mass paranoia prone to fantasy. Scholastics built complex, intricate imaginary systems similar to those of kabbalists, astrologers, tantrists etc. Descartes suffered from a form of paranoid psychosis. His Meditations prefigured Schreber's writings. Kant, Hegel (and Freud too) exhibited signs of multiple personality disorder. Lacan struggled with schizophrenic thought disorder.

412

Consciousness and a sense of self are problems. They are not philosophical problems.

413

"Problem" is another name for tantalizing research opportunity.

414

The same is true in philosophy and science as in military engagements. French élan tends to trip them up.

415

Reality is like porn. We know it when we see it and we talk about it all the time. But it turns out to be fiendishly difficult to define.

416

Existence might be rotten, worthless and unbearable. But parts of it are also a lot of fun.

417

If you meet god on the road, kill him.

418

Sappho was a pederast. The ancients didn't obsess over it presumably because it wasn't a particularly unusual or noteworthy category for them.

419

Lots of philosophers challenge the discreteness of physical objecthood. Nobody seems to wonder whether the objects which populate conceptual space are discrete or continuous.

Willis Domingo

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