The idiocy of analytic thinking

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Kripke uses it as a concrete demonstration of (his interpretation of) Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations, framing them as a skeptical paradox. The problem is, if you have never added together numbers higher than 50, all your additions are compatible both with taking "add" to mean "mathematical plus" and with taking "add" to mean "quus". It may be that everyone asking you to add things together has really been meaning you to quus them all along, and you've been plussing them. It's only when we deal with numbers over 50 that we start to see that plus and quus are different, and the question arises of which rule we are meant to follow when we are told to "add", and we discover whether we have been following the same rule as everyone else. But more than that, in what way is it true that we have been quusing when they have been plussing, because in what have they following the plus rule rather than the quus rule? Not because of what they did, since what they did was compatible with both rules. And not because of what they thought, because it's possible that they never even considered what they would do when dealing with numbers over 50 (have you ever consciously considered how you would answer 547+789? Maybe you would answer '5'. You probably wouldn't, but that fact doesn't come from what you have consciously thought before about what you would do in this situation). And of course you can't try to explain by using other rules (like 'x+y means give the yth successor of x'), because those rules are themselves subject to the same ambiguities, and indeed in the case of mathematical rules are just restatements of the problem in other words ('the successor of x' is no less ambiguous than 'x+1').
So how are we ever able to learn, and use correctly and in the same way as everybody else, rules that cover an infinite number of different circumstances, when we can only learn from a finite number of circumstances, and when an infinite number of eventually-conflicting rules are compatible both with our finite experiences and with any attempt to describe the rule in language?

What is analytic thinking? Essentially it is a deliberate removal of a given appropriate range of meaning/context and of 'information' from acts of consciousness, usually these acts of consciousness being what are called thoughts. The specter is raised that the analytic error could easily also apply to literal acts, not just speech (which is easy to see) but also behavior, movement, motivation, and feeling. The analytic method exemplifies a near-fundamental problem of human consciousness: the fact that we are capable of extracting objects rationally-perceptibly means that we can also extract from objects other objects within them (typical abstract-conceptual thinking) but which is also possible to objectify-extract away a critical component of that object, to "cut out the heart" of the object in our rational (or again, behavioral or otherwise) analysis and act. When the rational extraction yields the falsification of that from which the object extracted came, certain logical and psychological phenomena appear or become possible to appear as a result; one test of honesty and of the capacity for honesty is whether or not these newly-appearing phenomena are sensible to a mind and whether or not, if they are sensible, one responds to and prioritizes these phenomena. These are the signs of intellectual honesty which simply indicate the methodology of consciousness before the possibility of the presencing of an error. Over time the methodology here will become either more or less honest, which is to say more or less sensitive and self-directed toward error. The method of analytic thinking is based on the fact that the larger methodology with respect to how to approach and deal with possibly-sensible errors has over time cornered itself into a rut, wherein the fundamental error is repelled both in form and in the specifics of the given situation and problem, and what is most interesting is that as a result of this fact other facts appear: that the refusal of the fundamental error yields a proliferation of more superficial errors which gravitate to themselves their own 'fundaments', their own acting as if they were fundamental (not just to the erroneous analysis in question but to the form of such analyses, and even to analysis as such). In this way conception is broken apart and fragmented, and it becomes the task of the analytic thinker to attempt to "mend back together" these fragments, however he cannot do so for the simple reason that the breaking-apart itself is the very absence of that which would allow for the fragments to be brought back together. The psychological devolution and series of devolutions arising from the original fundamental error is unable to be recovered by any derivative order or end within that same series.

I have made it one of my tasks to analyze and expose analytic thought, although this is a somewhat depressing task and perhaps I could be concerned with greater things rather than mucking around like that. The reason I am interested however is because this analytical problem has infected, in the sense that I wrote about magical-pathological infection of triadic sign systems, much of philosophy today. One reason for the easy spread of this infection is related to how well analytic thinking is able to function smoothly within capitalist systems, not the least of which being how well it acts to further and lend an image of credibility (threshold-ignorance vis a vis pre-emptive catalytic stasis) to empiricism and scientific work today. The philosophical vacuum in which such work takes place is able to be ignored more effectively by the addition of a little "analytic philosophy", which demonstrates one of the effectivenesses of the original error of analytic method, and also as psychological type.

I am becoming more convinced that pathological personalities in philosophy, and in science (which is to say, in the deliberate absence of the philosophical qua intellectual effort) are caused by this analytic infection. The infection may exists even if the awareness to identify it with analytic thought is not there, and even if the person themselves has no idea what analytic thought is -- such an awareness would be required to understand their fundamental, original error from which they are vainly trying to extricate themselves. The mind is inherently, naturally noble and always attempts to right itself, like a spinning top that actively fights gravity and friction, but the lack of proper tools and the continued presence of harmful and insane environments (think ILP) makes recovery effectively impossible. So the error continues to divide and propagate, leading to the emergence of whole worlds of psychological motivations and incentives to cover over errors either as form or content and to painting-over this cover with new images of meaning and thought. In the example quoted above, this painting-over as image has taken the form of the possibility of infinite deduction inherent to speculative reason as such. In other words: the analytic trick is to conceive an image for themselves (i.e. a "paradox" or logical problem) in which their own thought is reflected back to them under the form of impossibility for that thought to recognize itself in that reflection, thereby further obscuring the operations that lie in possibility for touching upon and resonating with one of those 'errors that conceives its own fundament'. By making refusal structural, the analytic thinker ensures that every act of approach will slip away into void, thus the world of images of the refusal is extended over time to include multiple and different kinda of contents capable of arresting voids within simulations of pre-existing 'relations of meanings'. It is perhaps in those relations of meanings, the justification per se of the image-world as such, where the only hope for recovery from analytic infection resides.

Please contribute anything you can to the critical understanding of analytic thinking and ways to both avoid and correct it. Its structure and operation must be exposed to help save philosophy at this point ; although philosophy itself could never be affected by idiocies such as are represented by analytic 'thought' there is the danger that new minds in the field become swept up within analytic pathology and become lost forever, rather than conversely had they discovered real philosophy and so become capable to contribute something to history and to the great human task.

A noble task, but a very dirty one - the idiocy you so well expose is discouraging, it is rather hard, if not almost impossible to believe that there are people who take analytic philosophy seriously, and not as some sort of morose joke on the capacity for arbitrariness of the human brain.

Whenever I am confronted with analytic thinking I cringe and throw away the book or throw myself away from the screen or the conversation - or if in company I like to respect (as company) I smirk and whistle a bit, and make some visceral comment - that is to say, something Nietzsche, or Parodites might have said - a painful fact about consciousness. A glorious, true fact but something that carries to the heart and causes laughter and anguish and silence and stammering.

The idea that through the word as such, meaning can be found, derived or established, is such a fatally helpless impulse that I can only marvel at the distance that, apparently, exists between tradition and sanity - and I can not deny that belief in an omnipotent creator, as silly as this belief can be understood to be, is at least life-serving in some way, or can be made to be - whereas outright stupidity of belief in language-as-such as creator is neither life-serving nor in any way redeemable. It is not even life-destroying. It is only life-deflating and brings about a virtual absolution of the human mind from its origins. But perhaps this is the entry-key, Capable. Perhaps this weakness is so neutral in its will that it can only be taken up as an instrument.

Consider the world as a gigantic herd that is begging for direction. And consider its means of communication to be the purified absolution of being that is analytic philosophy as its consequences reverberate through the herd and tune the peoples ears to its demands and givens. Now then if you have control of the language that speaks such value-configurations, and if you have a slyness, admittedly, then... well then the possibilities are limitless.

"Possibility" - of what?
An aim, considered; one step further than prudent, ; - there is the possible thought of impregnating China, in order to force the west, by tougher aesthetic-ethical ('higher self?') competition, to overcome its feebleness, which allows it to take stock in the power of the word to astound the mind that is not up to the potential of grammar.

Semantically, China is Marxist; and what is more, in China, language is transmitted through means of directer sensory representation; their symbolic characters, of which there are several thousands, all representing more or less directly, at least recognizably their visual origin, their object.

It would be a challenge; One should learn much from the lands of the rising sun. Who knows what tools one  may find to apply - and do what was set out - recreate language so as the represents the speculative ethics  of Parodites' 2011 language - the fact that language is itself an ethics is wonderful; that ethics is speculative is masterful.

Mastering life through language demands a master-language, which means a language that commands not only mans notions but also the way he arrives at them; his motions. The language might be seen as explicitly interactive. It may adapt violently to the person who speaks it.

A self-inserting or self-imposing movement that is able to cohere itself in the fabric of the usurped code. For example; Tatsumakisenpukyaku; this phrase among others, lingers in my memory because its origins had shaped for some years my mind, and strewn its seeds across the mind. Similarly, Nietzsche was able, and so was Kierkegaard, and all visceral philosophers, to scatter terms into the minds of man, and Marx was even able to cohere into the chaotic terms of man into a movement, violently chaotic and personable, particular to the extreme, in spite of or naturally rather as a counterbalance to the fact of its general application to radiant instincts that so often are give no mirror-receptor; no medium to cohere self-valuing, so that only raw instinct and flimsy social contracts can bring them into calm sustenance of the ideal... which creeps into the fibers of the soul of man, his speech.

Infuse, inseminate, inject, infect mans speech with the notions we hold high; the end not only justifies the means, the means have created the end. (Now the cyclops leaves the others and enters his cave and eats the last of Odysseus men. His lair must be kept clean.)

I too used to think about the creation of a new language, and then I realized that this was already taking place in what is called philosophy (good philosophy), and perhaps an interesting semi-parallel in modern "leet speak" and jargon/colloqualisms-like trends; these are like two opposing poles of development in which language is getting stretched and tested. Languages and organisms evolve, language is a technology of life, like eyes or a mobile body, these are all appendages and extensions of 'the organism', of consciousness/self.

The total neutrality of the analytic method, as you point out, I agree could be turned against analytic method and used for the ends of philosophy, indeed this is probably what is already happening and what always happens anyway--- the elaboration of the technical means and various permutations of surface arrangements that are inevitably put to use by life and meaning, the surface bound to the depths it actively denies (and must deny, qua 'surface').

I don't much try to break into analytic minds anymore, since I've tried this so many times to realize the futility there; but I was able to probe enough times and deeply to come to understand the structural nature of analytic thought, both cognitively and emotionally-psychologically. These analytics really have no objective self-view, nothing stands to them as a mirror reflecting back to them what they are, probably because the whole discipline has become so extensive and suffused with a pseudo-prestige and image of authenticity that respectability bestows. Plus the complex intellectualist-logical games played by analytics serve as endless fancies and distractions by which efforts they become convinced that what they are doing is synonymous with philosophy and though as such.

Psychoanalysis is good because it gets inside of the relationship between self and its externalizations, between meaning and word, act snd symbol. Phenomenology and existentialism are also implicitly structured with this in mind, hence their nobility among the various methods of philosophizing. Pragmatism, utilitarianism and positivism are all simply shades of the surface-elaborations that strive to conceive meaning in the void. A massive unification and corrective synthesis is needed to both analytically reveal the error of analytic thought as well as philosophically reveal the direct and real relationship that analytic method bears to real philosophy. That is basically my task, to contribute toward these two ends.

Philosophy rightly remains indifferent to analytic games, but that doesn't mean large numbers of people including students aren't tricked into those games, losing their soul in the process. I contend as I mention in the OP that all the various pathologies and errors of personality in either philosophers or otherwise could theoretically be traced to some form of "analytic assumption", as you say the assumption that language as such yields meaning per se. This also ties into the error of modern capitalism, or rather this error of capitalism is one more derivation of merely analytic fallacy.

In terms of controlling or coordinating en mass the activities of countless people who blindly follow these errors, I am not so interested; what use trying to rule or control unintelligent herds that can't even comprehend or be counted on for anything? I have no interest in trying to use the ignorance in people, my interest is in truth itself and in spreading truth as anti-ignorance as far as it can possibly permeate into people and the world. I personally also think that the desire or will to control and utilize ignorance or low, enslaved elements/people is another form of the "analytic error", namely a kind of degeneration of hope and spirit into activities and supposed ends misaligned and categorically counter to that spirit and hope, which spirit/hope is only truth, after all.

If we use people then we capitulate to the very fact that they remain in a state of being able to be used like that; in other words, a 'capitalization' as opposed to a truth-movement. Perhaps a necessary endeavor to some degree, but not one I can reconcile to the means and ends of philosophy.

Based on my sampling of "philosophers" I've talked to online over the last couple of years, and what I've read in articles, it seems that only 1-5% of these people understand how to think properly-- the rest are to some stage lost in the insanity that characterizes so-called analytic philosophy. The rare person who can clearly see and think through these convoluted, deliberately confusing and confounding "ideas" and "arguments" in this analytic philosophy usually doesn't have much interest in analytic philosophy or in laying out its errors systemically to help correct the problems, usually because they have better things to be doing with their time.

The rest of 90%+ of philosophers are insane, meaning they think that idiocies like "if two things have the same name, and believe they are the same, then are they really the same?" actually counts as interesting philosophical work. You cannot reason with these people, simply because they have no working reason at all. I can see clearly into their reasoning and thought-process exactly where their insanity is, but there is seemingly no way to fix it.

Analytic philosophy has apparently won. It already dominates in US philosophy and it offers an approach that seals away a person from reality, creating a fake experience in place of truth and cutting off any possible routes of escape. I don't have the energy or time to properly write out a clear program and explanation for how to help these people; I wish I did, and if I had perhaps an entire year of free unhindered work and space/time I am certain that I could achieve this task, by making a detailed study of analytic philosophies and breaking it down from the larger perspective, from the vantage of truth. But I don't have that opportunity, and even if I did it most of these "philosophers" would remain happily ensconced in their little pseudo-intellectual non-realities, content with the hubristic vanity of their world-wide academic circle jerk as Bukowski called it.

So anyway, with that statement of facts laid out now, I declare that I will be devoting myself to more important matters, or at least to matters that interest me personally and for which I actually have enough space, time and energy to pursue and complete. I hope that someday another true philosopher is able and willing to expose this unprecedented madness that has infected modern philosophy so completely.

On a similar note, I seem to have some pathological obsession with discussing philosophy with analytic thinkers... I think on some level I am trying to break through their insanity, I want to witness a miraculous transition on their part, from unreality to reality, or from lower reality to higher reality. I've never seen this occur, which maybe makes me even more obsessed somehow in looking for it.


These analytics are the most inhuman monsters you could ever meet. They have excoriated their own souls, in such a complete way that they have no recognition leftover whatsoever that this is what they have done.


The simple fact alone that this is possible is terrifying. Is this what academia is for now?

There is a deep connection between "working" (employment) and analytic thinking. I don't yet know all the full scope of the logic of this, but I know that it is based on suffering-made-value.


Employment presupposes suffering-made-value, otherwise typical employment/jobs would be impossible. This is categorically different than the kinds of corporeal or human-social sufferings we know are necessarily woven into the fabric of our human lives.


Analytic philosophy was produced as the attempt at justification of the suffering-made-value that became incidentally necessary for employment in the modern world. Anyone who is a "worker" (me included, of necessity I am afraid) and especially anyone who is a "full time worker" (again, unfortunately includes me) is necessarily and de facto "analyticized" to some or other degree in their philosophy and thought. This explains my observation in the previous post, my obsession with talking to analytic philosophers... I am unconsciously trying to work through and overcome this error in myself.


This is true (" Anyone who is a "worker" and especially anyone who is a "full time worker" is necessarily and de facto "analyticized" to some or other degree in their philosophy and thought") based on the simple fact that if one were totally free of the insanity-error of analytic philosophy, then employment/having a "job"would be absolutely, completely impossible.

This is fucking brilliant.

This is the most devastating insight.

Society has labels for people who are on either end of the extreme... on the one hand you have people who are not analyticized or very minimally so, society calls these people artists, or "mentally ill"; on the other side you have people who are maximally analyticized, society calls these people CEOs, senior managers, marketing consultants, etc. The labels correspond to whatever role in the world these different kinds of people are able to have by social sanction.

Most people are somewhere in the middle, and have a kind of inner war with their humanity. Technological rationality would like to reorganize that humanity of theirs into something "productive", while that humanity resists this to whatever extent it can (usually only unconsciously/instinctively).

Maybe this war isn't always bad, it does help define boundaries and isolate the scope and effectiveness of powers. If the world has become a giant "analytic" machine then humanity needs scores of people actively struggling with and translating this analyticization back and forth between their humanity, to the always only partial gain of either. The absolute polarity and difference between humanity (includes true philosophy) and analytic philosophy bends somewhat to the daemonic active inter-relation between the two, at least given the kind of world and societies we happen to inhabit at this present moment in time/history.

Human being (again including true philosophy) will ultimately succeed in re-inscribing this analytic trend back into the fold of truth, but imagine the sheer power and depth of being/life that would be needed to achieve this. The impulse to divide into artificiality and falsify for the sake of a convenient simplicity and psychological denial system is very potent, as alluded to by the quote in my signature right now. This is a great warring daemonism of self-valuing pushing being up into higher and more sophisticated tectonics. Make no mistake, the entire world is a massive hurricane; Jupiter's red spot... a grand contesting of "wills" and natures, human being and the analytic chief among these powers. Based on what I see deep into truth, life and other people I would place my bets on human being, on this one particular mode of truth, which is by every manner of falsification and moral confusion/conflation presently attempting to win for itself a more active, immediate, authentic and ethical existence. All true work in art or philosophy (including politics) is working for this end, whether or not it realizes this fact-- but politics has a more difficult time of it, since the world-forms, the great machinery and weapons of war, come down hardest and first on the political.

I would like to update that, upon another long conversation with an analytic thinker, I can see the depth of their fallacious way of thinking.

Analytic metaphysics in particular here. The idea that we can divorce determination (necessity) from causation in order to rescue free will, is this other guy's position. He thinks that causation is still meaningful without necessity and within contingency; his specific argument: "Things could always have been otherwise than they were, even if they are always the way they are and not otherwise; therefore causation is the case but so is contingency". His 'reasoning' rested heavily on modal logical contortions.

I am not kidding. You can read an article he linked me too where some modern philosophers are talking about this: http://www.academia.edu/20883864/Causation_is_Not_Your_Enemy

In this article they attempt to separate necessity out of causation, rather than accept that freedom and determinism are entirely compatible. This position of theirs rests on the idea of a fundamental contingency  regardless of what actually takes place and why. This "and why" is even more significant of an error on their part, because they can accept all the logical, physical, natural laws, etc. reasons for why something happens, and accept that it will always happen like that, but will also still claim that it could have been otherwise due to the "agency power" within the thing itself which makes the not doing what it didnt do a contingent fact, contingent upon the 'power of the agent' because the agent has the "capacity" that might or might not be "freely realized", and this is totally without regard to the logical or physical-material causes behind the thing or act in question.

Yeah. I am seriously not making any of this up.

The funny part is that in that article above, the authors dont even want to deal with the "compatibilist" idea that freedom and determinism-necessity are compatible, they just acknowledge that this is one possible argument but then say this argument isnt good enough because we want "real libertarian free will", which is somehow "stronger" in their view than the "compatibilist" idea. Lol.

Ok I have reached my saturation point for this bullshit. Time for a cigarette.

You know I actually made it halfway through that article I just linked. Go ahead and try it. This is what passes for high work in academic philosophy now.

There is barely even a single coherent argument anywhere in there; its full of endless "conclusions", unacknowledged shifts of perspective and imprecise meaning of terms used, categorical fallacies, openly undefended assertions, and vague moralistic statements such as claiming that one thing is better than another without any criteria or further explanation of that.

Goddamnit.

What the fuck is wrong with the human species, that it can produce the following in the year 2016:

Quote :

The Mumford and Anjum account adds significantly to this view insofar as it offers an alternative account of causal production in which it involves a sui generis modality of tendency or dispositionality. Causes tend or dispose to their effects with varying degrees of strength in different cases. They often succeed in producing those effects but, even when they do so, they did not through any necessitation. Mumford and Anjum (2011: ch. 3) have an antecedent strengthening argument for this conclusion. A test of necessity is offered. Where A genuinely necessitates B, then as long as you have A, then still B even if C, for any C. In other words, you should be able to add anything else to the situation in which A occurs and you will still get B, if A really does necessitate B. This does not seem to be the case in natural causal processes, which can be prevented from realising their usual effects if something else – an interferer – is added. Hence, dehydration typically produces a headache: but not if a paracetamol is taken. Even where an effect is indeed produced, this form of argument still holds. Had some further factor, C, been added to the cause, it might well not have produced its effect, B. So even there, we cannot say that B was necessitated by its cause.

If you ever doubt your resolve against academic philosophy, just recall the above paragraph.

Analytic 'philosophy' is bullshit. Just wanted to make sure that was clear.