de Sade’s Author Appeal

"Dolmancé, let's change hands; be nimble: pass from my sister's ass to Eugénie's"

It is astonishing to see how many people take de Sade to be a sophisticated thinker. One review I read even went so far as to say that in “Philosophy in the Bedroom” de Sade is “philosophically eloquent” and “at his most learned and compelling.” To which I have to respond, “Are you kidding me?” De Sade’s ideas are intellectually shallow and self-contradictory, and in no way merit the title “philosophy.”
The whole foundation of the ideas presented in “Philosophy in the Bedroom” is faulty from the start. De Sade dispenses with the idea of God, saying it is ridiculous to feel any kind of duty towards an imaginary deity or to give any weight to moral injunctions of religion. Having done this, de Sade then promptly substitutes for God his idea of Nature, which he fully anthropomorphizes and to whom he ascribes the same kind of intentionality he denied existing in a deity.

But de Sade gives no reason why this Nature should guide our actions any more than God. This fundamental fallacy undermines the possibility of any coherence or validity in the further development of his ideas, yet he relies on it as faithfully as a theologian throughout the book.  But this is only the beginning. Supposing we were grant de Sade the premise that we should act in accordance with Nature, what follows is still equally incoherent, for de Sade simply declares certain impulses to be “natural” and others “unnatural” according to his own whims and not by any philosophical process. Everything de Sade approves of, namely licentious actions, are natural to him, and any he despises, such as selflessness or temperance, he derides and scorns as being unnatural. Yet why should we not consider all of our impulses, thoughts, wishes and desires to be natural? Indeed, if (as de Sade asserts) we are completely products of Nature with nothing higher (i.e. God) to determine a purpose for us, then even the most elaborate social conventions should be considered natural, and we have no less reason to marry, be monogamous and obey the laws than we do to commit sodomy and acts of wanton violence.

The consequence of this is that de Sade has made no real philosophical progress in determining what we should or should not do. This is the key point that everyone would do well to understand. There is simply nothing behind de Sade’s ideas but unjustified assertions. Far from being advanced, de Sade’s thinking suffers from acute retardation. In fact the whole of de Sade’s “philosophy” consists of nothing more than fallaciously dressing up the ramblings of his Id as universal maxims. Those who find that de Sade’s exhortations appeal to their own preconceptions may find him a compelling thinker, but anyone who examines his ideas with an open and rational mind will find little here except adolescent ravings.

All Tied Up At the Moment!

I have yet to see any defense of de Sade that relies on anything but vague praise for being “ahead of his time” and for influencing or anticipating the ideas of later thinkers, such as Nietzsche. This is similar to an argument from authority, where we must apparently esteem de Sade higher the more his ideas infiltrate the minds of great philosophers. I would posit that if this linkage is so essential to de Sade’s reputation, perhaps we have it backwards, and ought to be esteem the later thinkers less according to how much they have absorbed from this wholly unimpressive, shallow and simplistic mind.

Although I am all for hardcore rough sex, de Sade’s books are nothing more than Author Appeal given philosophic pretensions.

Solopsists and Epistemic Nihilists

Ape Men? This Time You've Gone Too Far, Plato

There are certain groups of people who insist that we can know nothing, we have no way of knowing if the world of experience is reality, if the laws of logic are true, etc. I have always found this ridiculous. I’ve read my share of Wittgenstein and Aristotle, and my view would be this:

The solipsists are making a mistake in how the word ‘reality’ is used. ‘Reality’ in this context has absolutely no meaning outside of a logically consistent, material construct that exerts some power over the things within it, including the senses. This ‘ultimate reality’ they are looking for is in fact a contradiction in terms.

The people who claim that knowledge is impossible are making a mistake. Their conception of knowledge is non sense. It also fails to refer to what ‘reality’ and ‘logic’ are, and goes off on some incoherent tangent about an unimaginable anything which does or does not do undetectable things. It flat out violates the principle of parsimony.

Randroids: OCD Conservatives

 

Sometimes Randroids Make Unintentionally Funny Comics About Randroids

 

hankc1987 (4:55:00 PM): drugs
hankc1987 (4:55:11 PM): like pot?
Chromodynamic Girl (4:57:47 PM): Typically marijuana, beer or hard alcohol; sometimes salvia, LSD or something of that sort. I used to do adderall, but that lost its appeal in high school.
hankc1987 (4:57:58 PM): God you really are in hell
Chromodynamic Girl (4:59:35 PM): lol, whatever. I have a good time.
Chromodynamic Girl (5:00:06 PM): Methinks you are projecting.
hankc1987 (5:00:06 PM): 😦
hankc1987 (5:00:13 PM): no, unfortunately

Now, where have I seen this kind of condescending ‘I care about you’ bullshit before? Oh, yeah. Conservative Christians. That’s basically what Randroids are – a variant on the Secular Humanist, they play the ‘selfishness’ and ‘capitalism’ cards – though don’t you dare call them libertarians, those whim worshiping hippies – but in fact they’re more uptight and high strung than a lot of Bible Belt pastors I’ve met. This is because of their obsessive self-identification with a rigid personality cult disguised as philosophy. Watch an Objectivist use a word incorrectly and collapse into paroxysms of self-recrimination. It’s hilarious how conscious of sins these ‘egoists’ are. Naturally, they’re obsessed with morality. Everything in your life is supposed to be dictated by ‘morality’, which is effectively defined as whatever Ayn Rand preferred.

Randroids say they believe in ‘rational selfishness’, which essentially means living like a stock broker from the 80’s, only without the cocaine. Doing drugs would be irrational. I’ve never figured out why

 

Faces of Meth

 

Randroids have such an animus against drugs, or why they’re so confident that it’s horrible. It’s kind of funny, because Ayn Rand was on speed for decades. They also tend to be ambivalent about homos or any sort of swinger lifestyle, preferring spending money to squirreling it away or reading literature that’s anti-life, anti-mind (which means whatever they want it to). Most of them (such as Mr. Cropper) believe that children should be taught in the most boring and awkward way possible, so that the instructor becomes a cardboard character from one of Rand’s overrated novels and his lessons begin to take on her wooden prose.

Nathaniel Branden, once Ayn Rand’s lover and closest confidant in the Objectivist movement, has written several books detailing his experiences with them. Especially important to him (Branden is a psychiatrist) is the unrealistic psychological views and expectations which came out of the Objectivist circle, permeated into the philosophy, and produced such absurd caricatures as Leonard ‘The Peacock’ Peikoff. Perhaps the more entertaining assessment of Objectivist silliness is the play of anarchist economist Murray Rothbard, Mozart Was a Red. Rothbard was a piss poor philosopher, but he was funny as hell. He also wrote the Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. Also see Rand v. Rothbard.

More Moral Fantasies

A brilliant Jesus-follower at an atheism forum has taken upon himself to prove the magical origin of morality. Which is almost right, in that magic and morality have equal logical standing.

solja247 Wrote:  Whether you like it or not. There ARE things which are absolutely evil and things which are absolutely good.

 

If You Don't Swallow It, It Ain't In You

 

Whether or not you like it, there are not things which are ‘evil’ or ‘good’ at all. These words do not mean anything, they’re tropes for social signaling and psychological triggers. Just projecting your evolutionary biases onto the Universe. Reality doesn’t give a shit about your fantasies.

I know most atheists atempt to discredit this idea (There is a huge problem if there is such thing).

I wish most atheists would try to discredit this idea. Instead they spend all their time being moral masturbators; they’ve replaced the theology of God with the theology of Humanism. Our atheists are pious people.

So what is one example of something absolutely evil?
Killing a baby, an innocent baby for any reason is evil. (please dont derail this thread with attacking the Bible)

Nonsense.

If you think killing a baby is ever justified, I think it is safe to say, that you are sick and perveted.

You’re stupid if you think it makes sense to repudiate morality and talk about ‘justification’. Nothing is ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’. It’s all just your personal feelings. I also love your circular reasoning here, “Everyone agrees that killing babies is evil, and if you don’t there is something wrong with you.”
Idiot.

Some cultures did practice killing babies, however, we would call them ‘immoral’.

Perhaps you would. I don’t really care. Besides, eugenics are underrated. What good are retards, really?

Quote:Since we are the only creature on this planet, who has the ability to do evil and good and not just to respond to external stimuli. This notion of good and evil had to come from somewhere.

Well, as I explained, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ don’t exist; and humans (just like everything else) operate on a mixture of internal machinery and external stimulai. Whether or not you like it, we are animals, and machines. We just have some fancy (if ultimately disappointing) cognitive gears spinning around in our heads.

Evolutionarily speaking why should I care if a child was killed in Africa?

I don’t. I couldn’t give a damn about that. However, if you’re looking for ‘why do most people respond to this’ it has to do with sociobiological tropism, evolved herd characteristics which integrate with cultural cues and social signaling practices. You’re also stupid if you think there is some direct connexion between cognition and your biology; even if it didn’t make any sense for your DNA’s sake your DNA is not conscious and intentional; it has no opinions. What you have are a slapdash of feelings and thoughts which, historically, have assisted the survival of your DNA. There is no high-precision engineering going on in human beings, just recipes.

There is no natural explanation for the concept of good and evil. So where did it come from?

Imagination. Fantasy. Evolutionary psychology. It’s bullshit, but people believe in it because they’re built that way. Just like they usually believe survival is inherently desirable.

I personally think it came from a cosmological battle between good and evil, although I cant conclude and prove that it, it explains things much better than anything else.

That’s not even an ‘explanation’, that’s magical nonsense which means nothing, entails nothing, predicts nothing, and models nothing.
“I personally think it came from an unknowable battle between nonsensical forces in a manner which can not be described.”
Will you people go extinct, already? You clutter the world.

 

I'm Not Buying Your Bullshit at Any Price

 

Freetards are Deterministically Morons and Their Ignorance is a Cause of Much Pollution

I am fucking sick of these asinine ‘free will versus determinism’ debates, where it’s obvious no one even knows the subject of their so-called debate. It’s just a bunch of feeling exchanges, a game for the philosophically inept. Determinism is not causality. Determinism is not an epistemic principle. Determinism is an ontological and metaphysical principle. It can not be contradicted by empirical facts. Empirical facts can only be interpreted and modeled according to a metaphysical theory. William James, in the Dilemma of Determinism, defined the determinist position best:

What does determinism profess?

It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities bidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.

With earthʹs first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Thus, according to determinism, everything is mutually necessary. Forward and backwards in time. Nothing could be otherwise than it is, was and shall be.  Notice it says nothing about ‘causation’. No

 

Suck It, Hawking, You Fucking Cripple

 

mention of a causing b, or c being a product of a and b’s interactions. Everything is mutually required. Why? Because of identity – the law of identity – everything must behave according to its properties, and what it is is necessary due to its being at all. If it was not specifically what it is, it would not be anything at all. Things are either determined, or nonexistent.

‘Free will‘ is not an alternative to determinism, it is a magical-thinking ‘alternative’ to caused will. It also makes absolutely no sense, since if the magical ether can somehow influence forward and in reverse the actual causal structure of consciousness (i.e., the brain) then it would itself have to be causal.
The alternative to Determinism is Indeterminism. Take the model some people (not everyone) use for Quantum Mechanics. This would in no way give you ‘free will’. This would, instead, give you random behavior instead of necessary behavior. No ‘freedom’ involved.

Sane determinists don’t think consciousness is a ‘trick’. Consciousness is what we call a self-recursive pattern. Will and intentionality are real features of this machinery. They are also necessary features. We really do want to do what we do, but we have no choice about it. This idea that there is some separation from our machinery and the processes it goes through is nonsense. From a more teleological than ontological point of view, when we act we behave according to certain definite ideas to pursue a certain value scale. If we did not act on these ideas and values, they would not be our ideas and values. Even existentially speaking, human action is deterministic.

You Don’t Understand Nihilism, So Shut the Fuck Up

Quite frequently in discussions of nihilism one will come across some bit of bullshit from some jackoff who thinks he’s clever and original and is anything but. For example:

i don’t understand why you wouldn’t just kill yourself if ur a nihilist because if there’s no point in living life then why not . i mean ordinary people don’t want to hear a bunch of losers whining on bebo so basically if your not enjoying life why bother living it

You have went against Nihilism
Nihilists have no obligation to join this group even if they believe in such a religion
So basically ur a hypocrite by making this group

 

Nihilists Even Make Jokes!

 

This is what I like to call ‘retarded’. These people, who have all the philosophical erudition of a ball of yarn, take it upon themselves to spew their folk wisdom about nihilism. Of course, like most moralists and ideologues, they are incapable of imagining a world outside of their slavish delusions and thus frame everything in terms of their bullshit psychological fixations. Since they believe the reason people live is the magical stories, they can not imagine someone wanting to live without the magical stories. The whole thrust of existential nihilism and egoism is, of course, that these magical stories are in fact false and your actual reasons are personal and arbitrary. They demand justification from those who reject the concept, and act as though suicide or inaction were the default position – which is, evolutionarily speaking, absurd.

So, cunt-face, before you vomit forth that grammatical rape-fest you call an opinion, take ten seconds to actually know what you’re talking about before I decide to start hitting you stupid niggers with my car. There are a variety of nihilisms, some which nestle inside one another, but the one I will deal with is what I consider to be the most philosophically valid form: existential nihilism. Existential nihilism essentially contends that the individual, whatever his connexion to the world, is fundamentally an individual. His values, choices, ideas, consequences, etc. are his own. There is no non-arbitrary or extrapersonal basis for these experiences and values, they are part of him and essentially unjustifiable. Reason offers no way out, nor (if the word made sense) could God; the existence or nonexistence of coherence and divinity is irrelevant to existential nihilism. The problem is a personal problem and, while universal, is also unique to each of us.

Believing in Nothing Won't Make You Many Friends

Why does a nihilist do anything? Probably for reasons, if not the same, at least comparable to those that non-nihilists do things. In other words, because they have certain ideas and feel like accomplishing certain preferential states. Whether this is building a financial empire, remixing old P-Diddy tapes or beating off to Lolicon. The nihilist, unlike the idealist, is not forever seeking to ‘justify’ his actions as he knows it is impossible – indeed, fundamentally nonsensical – to try. The only stanard he has to go by is himself, and given the recursiveness of that it’s not clear that anything comes out on top. He does not, as the moralist, believe that alien and disembodied values impose or command him to do this or that. Indeed, the moralist is so fundamentally mistaken in this that he can not see that his ‘morals’ and ‘duties’ are nothing but his own values and ideas playing a kind of trick on him.

As for why people would take a nihilist position, there are a few. These may, or may not, have some psychologizing such as discontentment with life or inborn cynicism. What it is at its core, though, is being honest with oneself about the nature of value, existence, life and the world and not painting magical pictures and fantasy lands where ethereal beings (Mankind, Justice, Truth) use humans as

 

 

puppets for their own advancement. Nihilism is simply valid, and true, whatever one feels about it. Some people can handle reality. Others, obviously, can not. Fuck them. Losers.