Marcus Aurelius has been meme-ified (a process of social media mummification) into a fad philosophy today, into something that can be found in a fortune cookie, without any philosophical understanding or philosophical context.
thank you, you just explained the uneasy feeling I get when people constantly share "Realatble" memes. now I know why I hate it. its people engaged in nothing under the ironic banner of deep free thinking. like a bumper sticker. you have just made me so happy
Great video. This is only my own opinion: Camigle Paglia is an example of someone with “true thought”- she makes up her own mind, bringing together seemingly disparate branches of knowledge and life experience into something novel. People may disagree with her assertions but at least she owns her own mind, a rare trait in today’s age.
@@arcana5335 idk if they did the opposite of what is expressed in the video intentionally or not but if it's supposed to be a joke then it's really fucking good
@@arcana5335 Nope. You missed the point. He only rallied against the types of quotes and aphorisms that don't themselves create more thinking and critique. He stated examples of aphorisms that don't make this mistake like Nietzsche's. It isn't that quotes and aphorisms are bad. The ending of the thought process is bad, and some quotes and aphorisms which serve to end the thought process are bad because of this reason.
Another nugget of irony: Julian's personal voice changes to match RUclipsr prosody at the end of the vid, when he's dropping the recommends. We're all a part of the hivemind!
Ayn Rand refers to this phenomenon as "The cognitive second-hander". An individual whose "thinking" was composed primarily of second-hand ideas, slogans, clichés and folksy wisdom, that one clings to for psychological support but never criticizes or examines. It's too bad that Ayn Rand was schizoid in her thought processes. It's interesting to read her essays as her fear and neurosis of communist totalitarianism bleeds through everything. She failed to grasp what Zizek and others see that this phenomena is perpetuated by capitalism itself. Sorry Ayn, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
To me, philosophy starts with an aphorism that's got elements of truth while also just enigmatic enough to get you thinking. Philosophy obviously starts with thinking, so if the aphorism ends thought then the philosophy ends there. But I also think you can't always be truly living your life while thinking. You have to *do* , and just *be* sometimes, to live a full life, which involves *not* thinking.
Hello, there. On Zizek's very first pages of "Incontinence of the void" says that since Kant, and later Hegel; philosophy turns from "the love of knowledge" to knowledge. I think this point of view develops a possible continuity of the end of the aphorism you mention. To the other part of your argument, I think it's a good idea to check out some topics on aesthetics and phenomenology, in order to have a philosophical stand point to examine your feeling of the impossibility to be truly living life while thinking. Cheers
a strangely undialectical formulation comrade. thinking is a kind of doing, and a kind of being. being is a kind of doing, and a kind of thinking. doing is a kind of thinking, and a kind of being.
yet again I pop up in the comments to proclaim my deepest respect and gratitude for your work. I could go on about how you helped me work out and internalize the very stance that you talk about here but why waste our breaths on the obvious. best wishes from a fellow mind from a land far away
why u talking like that lawl, talk normal. you grew up in 21st century with ohio rizz. not 17th century with overcomplicated language, over poetisised lengthy crap to seem more intellectual relaxxx
True thought is that which multiplies itself'. This is amazing...you just summed up my whole artistic thought process for how I come up with concepts....making links.
When you said "even or precisely dwarves cast long shadows", it caught my attention because of my autistic comedic sensibility to process language. There is something poetic about how you said this book title.
Very interesting… I think we tend to expect thought to take the form of ‘an answer’ to a question, of a kind of terminus to further thinking… Especially under the influence of utilitarianism in US/western thinking… Rather than being as you say ‘generative’ of further thinking….
Movie idea: a down on his luck drifter (played by a professional wrestler) finds a mysterious pair of sunglasses. When he puts them on, suddenly all the word art slogans at the shopping center are replaced by 2 or 3 dense paragraphs elucidating their political implications.
You really made me feel assured that i am not the only one who thinks this way, who automatically multiplies one thought into a multitude of arbitrary guessing.. I feel like i am broken somewhere but i need to accept this fact and try to find ways of celebrating myself in my own way...
Excellent video, but how does this effectively break one out of the "non-thought" loop? Does anyone else not feel a bit overwhelmed with a dark sense of almost obvious hypocrisy throughout the clip? Like, yes the thought from each section split into multiplicities, but in an almost deja vu moment, it feels more so like a disguised non-thought taking merely other separate forms? And ultimately the question holds deep in my bones, "How is any of this different from the very non-thought it's attempting to 'critique'?"
Hi, I’m glad I happened to see this comment. My personal suggestion, which I didn’t elucidate in the video of is that another feature of today’s “non-thought” is that it appears detached from any intellectual or theoretical tradition. From a philosophical standpoint it is quite important to clearly specify “where one stands” with regards to how one uses concepts in relationship to the tradition/discourse from which they stem. Common sense (of which non-thought is one form) masquerades as “universal” and therefore outside any tradition or system. However the first task of critique (as non-non-thought) is to show the hidden assumptions and power structures at work in such a supposed universal stance. My own goal with this channel has been to try to introduce people to the more complex ideas that don’t necessarily make “good content”, and instead have focused more on what you might call university discourse (which can of course be critiqued -as it should be- in its own right). Hope that helps.
Even more ironic is that by becoming (to some extent) a RUclips showman persona he reduces himself to a form of entertainment. Notice how in his speeches he always says the same few things. If You watched three or four longer videos of his You've seen them all. Apart from books (tho he likes to plagiarise himself) he's just a sum of these few clever observations giving us the feeling of being like him without much behind it. Zizek on RUclips is less of a philosopher and more of a lifestyle.
@@solventman8307Jesus christ dude. God forbid anyone should try to popularize philosophy/left wing ideas and make them more accessible to ordinary working people. What exactly have you contributed? You sound like an oxbridge snob.
@@solventman8307 he certainly refers back to his earlier works, however he also references many others in his work. its true , that when a writer (in any field) quotes themselves its right to raise an eyebrow, if for nothing else then to check that all thats being said or spoken about rings "true" (on point), but it doesnt mean they are wrong, not automatically so.
he does it deliberately. non-thinking is just regurgitation without and effort or resistance. thinking is self-consciously voracious and recombinatory. surely you can notice the difference in the way zizek ruthlessly and openly pillages and plunders.
8:55 it captures the phenomena so well. Especially when one is in a process of writing something, there is a constant math going on in the head as every text that have been read multiplies thoughts and delivers inspiration for our own paragraphs. Writing is hard in both phases ;)
Now that I’m kinda old I’m not so driven to think and figure out stuff. I can sit on the porch, pat the cat and watch clouds. Other people are going to have to figure out their own problems because I’m not going to be here much longer.
I am currently reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which he uses a lot of aphorisms but believe me Nietzsche never fails to make me lost in thoughts.
practical question: thinking like this, how do you read so many books in so little time? You read a few paragraphs in the evening and the next day you're still thinking "But what if..." or "If that's so then..." and go on an adventure and likely never return to the actual book. Or it can be an idea, a conversation, whatever.
Hey Julian - can you please make a short expainer of what Lacan / Zizek means when they refer to the 'constitutive lack' of the subject? is it due to no fix signifiers for male or female identify, some non-complete ontology? I think you said before in a video it has to do when you enter symbolic order, but why is this the case; why does entering language with its norms and regulations create a lack?
because language is incomplete, inconsistent, and contradictory. it's also partially outside of us, isn't it. language creates a lack because it decenters us while simultaneously generates us.
we can't even refer to ourselves without reaching outside of ourselves with signifiers for signifieds = we are forever outside of ourselves, broken fragments interdependent with the transindividual structure of language.
@@postholocene I think I heard this before but can you break it down in detail or with examples? what are the contradictions, what are the incompleteness, and why is it outside of us?
@@daediaz186 deleuze is one of the reasons i make that assessment. although the continuing rancid corruption of nietzsche is everywhere. deleuze was a suicide. he couldn't hack it. nietzsche is why.
@@johnanderson1421 thanks for the tip. Didn't think anyone would respond to my comment by now. Helps me in becoming opening to the world and not being isolated
interesting question to post to this specific video, if you're not trolling then I'll say this- philosophy is meant to recontextualize knowledge, so honestly you can't just start at philosophy, you have to (in a sense) end there, and thusly reappraise your acquired knowledge and modes of thinking... if you heard Julian he even brings up Hegel as an example: Hegel cannot be taught in aphorisms (his work is actually anti-aphoristic, anti-common sense) Hegel is intentionally writing in a way that forces you to puzzle through his work, reassessing and rereading, over and over, as that process is key to the essence of critical thought and philosophy: it cannot be contained in one simple idea or sentence, it cannot be distilled, for simple distilled "truth" runs antithetical to the entire project of philosophy, hence Julian's video is (in part) about how the word "philosophy" is being used in an anti-philosophical way today: it isn't that the "Philosophy of X" is cheapening the word philosophy but rather it's being used in an anti-philosophical way, reducing philosophy to "common sense" or "non-thinking" i.e. "a guide to thinking" rather than "thought-provoking"........ To your question: just keep reading and learning, read every day, not philosophical texts but just anything that interests you, encounter more ideas, don't look for the "simple secret" or "key to understanding" anything, just read, think about what you read, re-read and discuss your thoughts with other intellectually curious people... honestly Julian here is doing a huge service and does succeed at making these most complicated of philosophical ideas digestible, but his explanations are about as "stripped down" as it gets, so just increase your repertoire of knowledge and vocabulary and keep coming back to the more complicated concepts, they will start to make sense if you work at it.
@@mikalzanna2076 I think I get what you are saying but how am I supposed to critically think about what information given if I don't understand anything that's been said. It's explaining a big concept by using big words. I'm an idiot with average vocabulary,who's trying to improve his thought process so that I can get to the truth and avoid Bs as possible. And once someone explains the big concepts with plain words I wouldn't need to be taught again and be able to assess, criticize and learn from being corrected or have corrected others
I genuinely love the left wing lock down matrix and the npc meme so long as the political right are committed to remaining law abiding citizen.. ie.. npcs.. Just following orders? follow my order then
My Complete Guide to Žižek ebook can be found here: www.patreon.com/julianphilosophy
Marcus Aurelius has been meme-ified (a process of social media mummification) into a fad philosophy today, into something that can be found in a fortune cookie, without any philosophical understanding or philosophical context.
thank you, you just explained the uneasy feeling I get when people constantly share "Realatble" memes. now I know why I hate it. its people engaged in nothing under the ironic banner of deep free thinking. like a bumper sticker. you have just made me so happy
Great video. This is only my own opinion: Camigle Paglia is an example of someone with “true thought”- she makes up her own mind, bringing together seemingly disparate branches of knowledge and life experience into something novel. People may disagree with her assertions but at least she owns her own mind, a rare trait in today’s age.
"To critique is to practice true though " i am going to use this from now on😁
Didn't he just spend ten minutes railing against quotations and aphorisms?
@@arcana5335 idk if they did the opposite of what is expressed in the video intentionally or not but if it's supposed to be a joke then it's really fucking good
@@arcana5335 Nope. You missed the point. He only rallied against the types of quotes and aphorisms that don't themselves create more thinking and critique. He stated examples of aphorisms that don't make this mistake like Nietzsche's. It isn't that quotes and aphorisms are bad. The ending of the thought process is bad, and some quotes and aphorisms which serve to end the thought process are bad because of this reason.
Another nugget of irony: Julian's personal voice changes to match RUclipsr prosody at the end of the vid, when he's dropping the recommends. We're all a part of the hivemind!
Ayn Rand refers to this phenomenon as "The cognitive second-hander". An individual whose "thinking" was composed primarily of second-hand ideas, slogans, clichés and folksy wisdom, that one clings to for psychological support but never criticizes or examines. It's too bad that Ayn Rand was schizoid in her thought processes. It's interesting to read her essays as her fear and neurosis of communist totalitarianism bleeds through everything. She failed to grasp what Zizek and others see that this phenomena is perpetuated by capitalism itself. Sorry Ayn, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
she knew what she was doing and saying, and why she was saying it. and yes, she was very disturbed .
i mean, rand formulating this is a confession dawg.
all of 'libertarianism' is this.
To me, philosophy starts with an aphorism that's got elements of truth while also just enigmatic enough to get you thinking. Philosophy obviously starts with thinking, so if the aphorism ends thought then the philosophy ends there. But I also think you can't always be truly living your life while thinking. You have to *do* , and just *be* sometimes, to live a full life, which involves *not* thinking.
Hello, there.
On Zizek's very first pages of "Incontinence of the void" says that since Kant, and later Hegel; philosophy turns from "the love of knowledge" to knowledge.
I think this point of view develops a possible continuity of the end of the aphorism you mention.
To the other part of your argument, I think it's a good idea to check out some topics on aesthetics and phenomenology, in order to have a philosophical stand point to examine your feeling of the impossibility to be truly living life while thinking.
Cheers
a strangely undialectical formulation comrade.
thinking is a kind of doing, and a kind of being. being is a kind of doing, and a kind of thinking. doing is a kind of thinking, and a kind of being.
@@postholocene do you know what dialectical means?
This is probably one of the most important ideas of Zizek for me personally.
yet again I pop up in the comments to proclaim my deepest respect and gratitude for your work. I could go on about how you helped me work out and internalize the very stance that you talk about here but why waste our breaths on the obvious. best wishes from a fellow mind from a land far away
sometimes its a reminder of whats obvious that keeps us grounded.
why u talking like that lawl, talk normal. you grew up in 21st century with ohio rizz. not 17th century with overcomplicated language, over poetisised lengthy crap to seem more intellectual relaxxx
True thought is that which multiplies itself'. This is amazing...you just summed up my whole artistic thought process for how I come up with concepts....making links.
When you said "even or precisely dwarves cast long shadows", it caught my attention because of my autistic comedic sensibility to process language. There is something poetic about how you said this book title.
balls
Very interesting… I think we tend to expect thought to take the form of ‘an answer’ to a question, of a kind of terminus to further thinking…
Especially under the influence of utilitarianism in US/western thinking…
Rather than being as you say ‘generative’ of further thinking….
Movie idea: a down on his luck drifter (played by a professional wrestler) finds a mysterious pair of sunglasses. When he puts them on, suddenly all the word art slogans at the shopping center are replaced by 2 or 3 dense paragraphs elucidating their political implications.
That's already a movie? I don't remember the name. 😂
You really made me feel assured that i am not the only one who thinks this way, who automatically multiplies one thought into a multitude of arbitrary guessing.. I feel like i am broken somewhere but i need to accept this fact and try to find ways of celebrating myself in my own way...
Excellent video, but how does this effectively break one out of the "non-thought" loop? Does anyone else not feel a bit overwhelmed with a dark sense of almost obvious hypocrisy throughout the clip? Like, yes the thought from each section split into multiplicities, but in an almost deja vu moment, it feels more so like a disguised non-thought taking merely other separate forms? And ultimately the question holds deep in my bones, "How is any of this different from the very non-thought it's attempting to 'critique'?"
Hi, I’m glad I happened to see this comment. My personal suggestion, which I didn’t elucidate in the video of is that another feature of today’s “non-thought” is that it appears detached from any intellectual or theoretical tradition. From a philosophical standpoint it is quite important to clearly specify “where one stands” with regards to how one uses concepts in relationship to the tradition/discourse from which they stem. Common sense (of which non-thought is one form) masquerades as “universal” and therefore outside any tradition or system. However the first task of critique (as non-non-thought) is to show the hidden assumptions and power structures at work in such a supposed universal stance. My own goal with this channel has been to try to introduce people to the more complex ideas that don’t necessarily make “good content”, and instead have focused more on what you might call university discourse (which can of course be critiqued -as it should be- in its own right). Hope that helps.
Ironic, considering Žižek himself has admitted he tends to use references and pull quotes from books he hasn't actually read.
Even more ironic is that by becoming (to some extent) a RUclips showman persona he reduces himself to a form of entertainment. Notice how in his speeches he always says the same few things. If You watched three or four longer videos of his You've seen them all. Apart from books (tho he likes to plagiarise himself) he's just a sum of these few clever observations giving us the feeling of being like him without much behind it. Zizek on RUclips is less of a philosopher and more of a lifestyle.
@@solventman8307Jesus christ dude. God forbid anyone should try to popularize philosophy/left wing ideas and make them more accessible to ordinary working people. What exactly have you contributed? You sound like an oxbridge snob.
@@solventman8307 he certainly refers back to his earlier works, however he also references many others in his work. its true , that when a writer (in any field) quotes themselves its right to raise an eyebrow, if for nothing else then to check that all thats being said or spoken about rings "true" (on point), but it doesnt mean they are wrong, not automatically so.
Have you his books? You can be part of doxa and still criticize doxology, it’s not a contradiction.
he does it deliberately. non-thinking is just regurgitation without and effort or resistance. thinking is self-consciously voracious and recombinatory.
surely you can notice the difference in the way zizek ruthlessly and openly pillages and plunders.
8:55 it captures the phenomena so well. Especially when one is in a process of writing something, there is a constant math going on in the head as every text that have been read multiplies thoughts and delivers inspiration for our own paragraphs. Writing is hard in both phases ;)
Now that I’m kinda old I’m not so driven to think and figure out stuff. I can sit on the porch, pat the cat and watch clouds. Other people are going to have to figure out their own problems because I’m not going to be here much longer.
Sounds like giving up with extra steps
Thinking is hard, really hard, maybe even harder. Doing....changes the world (and has no time for reconsideration).
Great video, thanks
Great video! Ironically I do wish you’d pulled some more quotes about this from zizek lmao or at least pointed to specific texts of his
What about aphoristic philosophers like Nietzsche?
I am currently reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which he uses a lot of aphorisms but believe me Nietzsche never fails to make me lost in thoughts.
Hello Julian, can you please watch Chronopolis 1982 ?
I am really curious to hear your interpretation. thank you
Perfect
What page did you read from his book?
practical question: thinking like this, how do you read so many books in so little time?
You read a few paragraphs in the evening and the next day you're still thinking "But what if..." or "If that's so then..." and go on an adventure and likely never return to the actual book.
Or it can be an idea, a conversation, whatever.
Hey Julian - can you please make a short expainer of what Lacan / Zizek means when they refer to the 'constitutive lack' of the subject? is it due to no fix signifiers for male or female identify, some non-complete ontology? I think you said before in a video it has to do when you enter symbolic order, but why is this the case; why does entering language with its norms and regulations create a lack?
because language is incomplete, inconsistent, and contradictory.
it's also partially outside of us, isn't it.
language creates a lack because it decenters us while simultaneously generates us.
we can't even refer to ourselves without reaching outside of ourselves with signifiers for signifieds = we are forever outside of ourselves, broken fragments interdependent with the transindividual structure of language.
@@postholocene I think I heard this before but can you break it down in detail or with examples? what are the contradictions, what are the incompleteness, and why is it outside of us?
"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing" --G W F Hegel
How do you respond to the Nietzschean criticism of endless critique being life-denying?
nietzche was a spoiled teenager who didn't know how to think or how to live.
@@postholocenecries in Deleuze
@@daediaz186 deleuze is one of the reasons i make that assessment. although the continuing rancid corruption of nietzsche is everywhere.
deleuze was a suicide. he couldn't hack it. nietzsche is why.
laruelle also makes all these guys irrelevant.
I would love a Karl Krauss video
where exactly Zizek states that, the art of non thinking, against aphorism and common sense?
Sex and the failed absolute: p.13-14
❤❤
I'm interested in philosophy. But can someone lead me to people who can explain philosophy without having to use big words and concepts
You could try Philosophize This by Stephen West. He does a good job of explaining philosophical ideas using plain language and a bit of humor.
@@johnanderson1421 thanks for the tip. Didn't think anyone would respond to my comment by now. Helps me in becoming opening to the world and not being isolated
interesting question to post to this specific video, if you're not trolling then I'll say this- philosophy is meant to recontextualize knowledge, so honestly you can't just start at philosophy, you have to (in a sense) end there, and thusly reappraise your acquired knowledge and modes of thinking... if you heard Julian he even brings up Hegel as an example: Hegel cannot be taught in aphorisms (his work is actually anti-aphoristic, anti-common sense) Hegel is intentionally writing in a way that forces you to puzzle through his work, reassessing and rereading, over and over, as that process is key to the essence of critical thought and philosophy: it cannot be contained in one simple idea or sentence, it cannot be distilled, for simple distilled "truth" runs antithetical to the entire project of philosophy, hence Julian's video is (in part) about how the word "philosophy" is being used in an anti-philosophical way today: it isn't that the "Philosophy of X" is cheapening the word philosophy but rather it's being used in an anti-philosophical way, reducing philosophy to "common sense" or "non-thinking" i.e. "a guide to thinking" rather than "thought-provoking"........ To your question: just keep reading and learning, read every day, not philosophical texts but just anything that interests you, encounter more ideas, don't look for the "simple secret" or "key to understanding" anything, just read, think about what you read, re-read and discuss your thoughts with other intellectually curious people... honestly Julian here is doing a huge service and does succeed at making these most complicated of philosophical ideas digestible, but his explanations are about as "stripped down" as it gets, so just increase your repertoire of knowledge and vocabulary and keep coming back to the more complicated concepts, they will start to make sense if you work at it.
@@mikalzanna2076 I think I get what you are saying but how am I supposed to critically think about what information given if I don't understand anything that's been said. It's explaining a big concept by using big words. I'm an idiot with average vocabulary,who's trying to improve his thought process so that I can get to the truth and avoid Bs as possible. And once someone explains the big concepts with plain words I wouldn't need to be taught again and be able to assess, criticize and learn from being corrected or have corrected others
Infinite thought.
So, it's just a form of "thinking" in Thought Terminating Cliches.
I genuinely love the left wing lock down matrix and the npc meme so long as the political right are committed to remaining law abiding citizen.. ie.. npcs..
Just following orders? follow my order then
I'm daddy
"Every moment that you consider yourself, you are brought into existence. Stop considering yourself and you will cease to be" - Azazel
consider something interesting.
@@postholocene INDEED!
The horrific tragedy of this is they are no different
3:00 irony
So this is an argument for an economy of growth in thought? Seems like a capitalist modality -- the thinker whos capital is thought.
there's no such thing as no thinking if you're a human being 😂 you either think realistically or you think crap
Contra wisdom.
Amateur philosophers embrace anything that ends the thinking process. Relativism and radical skepticism are often used in this regard as well.
Does this thoufht speak for itself? (Truism) Instead, does it make you connect with other things, multiply on itself