Dost off yor idea machine!!

From Notes from Underground:

“…who was it who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because  being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his advantage in the good and nothing else; and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?”

“Oh the babe!  Oh the pure innocent child!”

“What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously , that is fully understanding their own interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, , compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out in another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness?”

One thinks of Anna and Vronsky. (Anna Karenina that is) 

The only practical thing one can say about pragmatism is that it’s impossible to practice. For one thing, curses often turn to blessings after sometimes a very long time, and vice versa.  To even begin to practice pragmatism one would have to see most of one’s future, as it actually will be. And that is only the first of many impossibilities.  So I think that I, not being God, can cease to pursue that path.  Does a child know what’s good for him or her? No, how could they?  Yet as “adults” (so called)  we calculate as if we knew; but we are so far from the truth of our condition that we launch out in the above directions simply by faith—faith with zero actual content, other than the determination to drag oneself—and as many others as possible, for “confirmation (social proof) into it. “Man wrapped up in self make very small package.” –attributed to Charles Chan—I think it helped him solve a mystery, anyway.

That’s interesting, I mean, about detectives’ modi operandi…they never use ideas and especially not ideals to solve mysteries; and if they pursue ideology, it is the way Freud did—as the Underground Man anticipates.  Philosophy is often forged to reflect our own inadequacies and insecurities—and all philosophy is in the broad definition of the word, reactionary. Every human idea is taken to its logical and emotional extremes, and finally abandoned in the deserts of human futility and unfruitfulness.  These phrases come to mind: “He’s shooting himself in his own foot.”  And “give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”  Or as one of my friends from Wholistic once said after a lecture on “Neurolinguistic Programming”, “ a pound of hog manure in a 5 gallon bucket.” I take the latter to be a rustic saying that still should be comprehensible even to the most urbane…