Whimsical Eloquence

"Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest and riddle of the world."

27 notes

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find… that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (via sunrec)

(Source: lykzomgitsjako, via sunrec)

27 notes

Walk Like a Man

Men have a lot of freedom, but not when it comes to gender expression.

For all the scare articles about the pressure on little girls to be Disney Princesses™, from girlhood to womanhood, females have a lot of options for gender expression. For the most part, women can stand wherever they want on the masculine/feminine spectrum and it’s not shocking. We stopped freaking out about the “Oh my god, women want to wear pants!” thing a really long time ago. Women wandered into the traditionally masculine realms of self-expression and ambition and now it’s just normal.

Not so with masculinity. It is still as rigid and well defended as ever, despite a few David Bowies or Johnny Depps in the mix. Just look at last year’s total freaking meltdown about a J. Crew catalog that carried a photo of a woman painting her young son’s toenails. Just look at the way the more delicate boys of the world are bullied by their classmates and accused of being gay. Just look at the gender imbalance in the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder in children, with gender disordered pre-pubescent boys outnumbering girls at a rate of up to 30 to 1. When a girl is boyish, or even claims she’d rather be a boy, it’s cute. She’s a tomboy. When a boy is girlish, wanting to wear dresses or try on some makeup, it’s a mental disorder and needs an immediate medical intervention.

There are GID boys aplenty in Ken Corbett’s Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities. Corbett is an analyst specializing in the condition, and he has to assure a lot of parents that their sons are not doomed. That the bracelets or the pink clothing or playing dolls with girls rather than wrestling with other boys is not a sign that he’ll turn into some sort of tragic transsexual like the kind on the cop shows, hustling on the streets and then murdered and left in a dumpster.

“Traditionally,” Corbett writes, “boys and masculinity have been characterized by aggression, muscularity, exhibitionism, dominance, and phallic preoccupation. This view of boys is something of a normative mainstay. It is what we expect of them: ‘Boys will be boys.’ … Modern efforts, my own included have mostly been directed at understanding phallic narcissism as a symptom, a defense, or a manifestation of character pathology.”

In other words, not only can young boys survive experimenting a little with their psyches intact, but perhaps the behavior we expect from boys, the dick-swinging machoness of it all, is actually a sign that’s something wrong.

The parents become tragic figures, huddled on Corbett’s couch. They love their sons, but they can’t help thinking there is something terribly wrong with them. They find them embarrassing, really, when they are out in public and a stranger tries to let the boy know that, gender-wise, he’s out of line: “No, that toy is for girls.” One boy’s mother feels obligated to push back: “It’s a toy, a toy, not a gender,” and later tells Corbett, “I’m giving this woman a lecture in gender theory. Not good.” The parents feel fiercely defensive of their sons, but without really understanding why they are this way. The same mother, a women’s studies academic, chafes at her son’s “parodic femininity,” with his focus on pink and princesses. Another father mourns the fact that he did not get a son, he got someone in between that he cannot connect with. He wants to take the boy fishing, but the boy wants to “princess dance.”

The parents seem like they would prefer the defense, the phallic narcissism, the overly aggressive, fights, troublemakers, because that at least would be recognizable. If the parents have anxieties that their sons are gay, they don’t voice them, or at least Corbett wisely omits them. Because that is just another layer of assumption, that the feminine boy is gay, that he has to be gay, because then we would once again be in the realm of the understandable.

(Source: sunrec)

Filed under gender masculinity femnism GID masculine societ male

1,413 notes

Capitalism and Art:

thesaddestbitchinallofspectrum:

whimsicaleloqunce:

thesaddestbitchinallofspectrum:

“Capitalism doesn’t inspire creativity, it stifles it. There are millions of geniuses that might be doing something brilliant, but instead are putting stickers on packets of biscuits they can barely afford for 12 hours a day so some lazy prick can play golf every Sunday with all the other impotent do nothing pricks.”

—

Ourben:  (via theorthodoxheretic)

One interesting thing about the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, is that they actively employed artists, to be artists. Not to work in factories or farms, but to be artists. 

(via brosephstalin)

Creativity is only limited by one’s mind and stimuli; realising creativity will always be limited (like everything else in life) by resources - both physical and that of time. Capitalism enables innovation (which can be thought of as creativity will practical benefits) to be rewarded and incentivised by letting people profit off their ingenuity while at the same time facilitating others to copy and mimic - the inventor regains their expense of time and energy while the whole of society benefits and can create more value. The market connects these two - innovations that actually add to society do better than the present alternative and so profit which is then used to reward the creator.

Art (which we can think of as the purely aesthetic) is valued subjectively by people. The Artist faces a choice, to try and realise their creativity or to spend their time elsewhere seeking income. If people like their art they can monetise on it and satisfy both desires - otherwise they face a trade-off.  The State can play two vital roles here in guaranteeing its citizens leisure time sufficient to ensure that they can always chose to pursue Art. More importantly, we must recognise that the market only recognises profitable art which is a bad metric to judge Art whose value is nebulous and subjective. Thus the State can provide against this by creating and sustaining the practice of Art even when it is otherwise not profitable to do so, enabling our general desire to as a Society pursue Art in all its forms. We are able to do this - to have portions of our income taxed, and portions of that spent on possibly fruitless and useless exercises by someone else in pursuing something they, and not us, think sublime or beautiful  because of our wealth - that is something that Capitalism alone has proffered to us.

First issue: the statement “capitalism enables innovation”. Market competition does contribute to the proliferation of profitable inventions, which are not necessarily helpful inventions. The upper crust of society enables which innovations can come to fruition and thus can (and do) choose to endorse the innovations which benefit them. You say that capitalism facilitates the ability to copy and mimic innovations, but that’s really not true at all. The capitalist doctrine of intellectual property does the very opposite, preventing the spread of useful technologies, allowing them to be controlled or withheld according to what is most profitable.

I should mention I do not prioritise the facilitation of the creation of art in my reasons for advocating alternatives to capitalism (I just thought the quote was interesting). I will pull you up on the idea that the state should guarantee leisure time to citizens - it should, but in practise it doesn’t. In the broken capitalist system, “leisure time” is a privilege of the upper classes (something one needs only to listen to proletarians to confirm).

 How do you define helpful? If I think up a new way of doing something and it increases profits for me or the company I work for/own that isn’t just helpful for me/them - increased profits means that we are producing more stuff for less costs, society can make the same stuff for a reduced cost - whether that be time, resources or what have you. Intellectual Property (IP) is just a particular legal mechanism we use as a paradigm of Intellectual products - ideally it should cut into societies benefit from an idea only to the degree as to incentivise and reward creators. Which given your concern that people aren’t able to pursue Art seems in principle a positive thing - I do, of course, recognise that there are plenty of  terribly problematic IP legal regimes in the world; I generally don’t like Government sustained monopolies.  In terms of Innovation, IP is actually used for a small quantity of things - patents being the obvious example - but there are plenty of innovations that the market is capable of rewarding on its own; the very social networking site we’re on is just such an example (any of us are free to make another like it) but, in a different vein, just look at the extent that businesses create value by freely copying from each other.

As regards your second point, when we look at the developed world there is generally large scale access to the leisure in most countries - one is generally able to provide for oneself while enjoying substantial leisure time. I would challenge you to provide data that indicates only the wealthy enjoy meaningful leisure time.

While I agree that the creation of Art is not the prime metric of choosing Economic systems - you claimed that Capitalism in particular debilitates a person’s ability to pursue art and creativity. What Capitalism does do is people pursue the development and monetisation of their ideas in way that doesn’t benefit merely them but the whole of society. There is a genuine marriage of free innovation and societal gain that is amazing and responsible for so much of the gains that have been made by humanity in the last two centuries.

Filed under economics politics creativity capitalism innovation

1,413 notes

Capitalism and Art:

thesaddestbitchinallofspectrum:

“Capitalism doesn’t inspire creativity, it stifles it. There are millions of geniuses that might be doing something brilliant, but instead are putting stickers on packets of biscuits they can barely afford for 12 hours a day so some lazy prick can play golf every Sunday with all the other impotent do nothing pricks.”

—

Ourben:  (via theorthodoxheretic)

One interesting thing about the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, is that they actively employed artists, to be artists. Not to work in factories or farms, but to be artists. 

(via brosephstalin)

Creativity is only limited by one’s mind and stimuli; realising creativity will always be limited (like everything else in life) by resources - both physical and that of time. Capitalism enables innovation (which can be thought of as creativity will practical benefits) to be rewarded and incentivised by letting people profit off their ingenuity while at the same time facilitating others to copy and mimic - the inventor regains their expense of time and energy while the whole of society benefits and can create more value. The market connects these two - innovations that actually add to society do better than the present alternative and so profit which is then used to reward the creator.

Art (which we can think of as the purely aesthetic) is valued subjectively by people. The Artist faces a choice, to try and realise their creativity or to spend their time elsewhere seeking income. If people like their art they can monetise on it and satisfy both desires - otherwise they face a trade-off.  The State can play two vital roles here in guaranteeing its citizens leisure time sufficient to ensure that they can always chose to pursue Art. More importantly, we must recognise that the market only recognises profitable art which is a bad metric to judge Art whose value is nebulous and subjective. Thus the State can provide against this by creating and sustaining the practice of Art even when it is otherwise not profitable to do so, enabling our general desire to as a Society pursue Art in all its forms. We are able to do this - to have portions of our income taxed, and portions of that spent on possibly fruitless and useless exercises by someone else in pursuing something they, and not us, think sublime or beautiful  because of our wealth - that is something that Capitalism alone has proffered to us.

Filed under economics capitalism profit art politics communism

13 notes

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.”

But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.

Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre (via sunrec)

Filed under existentialism Jean-Paul Satre Philosophy Humanity Self Being Life Meaning Truth