Existential Comics

Wagner: "also, watch out, your friend Paul Ree is a jew." Nietzsche: "watch out for...what exactly?" Wagner: "just watch out..."

Also...what even is "writing clearly"? I'm not sure it exists.

"You know what, screw you guys, you obviously don't get me. Nobody gets me!"

Ludwig Wittgenstein, after finishing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, went to teach elementary school for six years in rural Austria. Perhaps he thought he could put his philosophy into practice in a sense, and teach children in a new a creative way. However he quickly became disillusioned and wrote to Bertrand Russell: I know human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere. Apparently he was very demanding, and tried to teach the children math and logic that was quite advanced, and when students got the answer wrong he would administer corporal punishment (not uncommon to the time). Sometimes this went very far, however, and he even knocked an 11 year old boy unconscious, and went to trial. Wittgenstein was, shall we say, a rather intense individual.

"Now, does anyone here have a theory of metaphysics? Because I would love to see if I could produce more behavior that is socially recognized to indicate pain."

Also...dance a little for me. See? The real dialectic is whoever has the guns makes the rules.

Unlike Hegel and Marx, who had more teleological theories of history (meaning they thought history in general moved in a given direction, more or less towards a given thing), Simone Weil thought history was more like biological evolution, where the stronger species survive and the weaker perish in any given environment, nothing is evolving towards anything, and you can't even say that species are "improving" beyond their survivability in their environment. I was just on the Partially Examined Life podcast, to discuss Weil's ideas. You can listen to it here: Part 1 on War and Oppression Part 2 on War and Oppression