Thinking Ruins Life

[ExpectantlyIronic]

I'm pretty sure that his point was simply that people shouldn't be so self-conscious. He seemed to make his comments in a light-hearted and ironic manner. If you watch the vid, everyone laughs at his comments, and you get the strong impression they're laughing with him rather than at him.

[Carl G]

I'm pretty sure that his point was simply that people shouldn't be so self-conscious.

I'm pretty sure you are wrong. No terms remotely like "self" and "conscious" ever cross his lips; quite the opposite. I think you are reading into his words.

He seemed to make his comments in a light-hearted and ironic manner.

Where did you sense any irony whatsoever.

If you watch the vid, everyone laughs at his comments, and you get the strong impression they're laughing with him rather than at him.

That just means they're in the same boat.

[Carl G]

What makes him and your family dimwits? And what makes you so special and bright?

Heh, appropriate concerns from a guy named "average."

[ExpectantlyIronic]

Carl,

I'm pretty sure you are wrong. No terms remotely like "self" and "conscious" ever cross his lips

Except, y'know, at around the 1:56 mark in the posted vid.

Where did you sense any irony whatsoever.

It just is ironic. Check out this quote from the same dude:

"The whole problem of TV and movies today is summed up for me by the film Moulin Rouge. It came out a few years ago and won a lot of awards. It has 4,560 half-second clips in it. The camera never stops and holds still. So it clicks off your thinking; you can't think when you have things bombarding you like that. The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking."

He's a writer. Writers delight in being confusingly ironic and self-contradictory. It's amusing. It lightens things up. It makes people think.

That just means they're in the same boat.

I think it normally takes more then an agreed upon comment to incite laughter.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

EI:
It takes an afternoon to figure out the entire substance of Ray Bradbury's thought. It's a single hypothetical question that he didn't even seem inclined to give a clear answer to.

By way of contrast, to show who I believe to be talented and thoughtful writers, it took me 4 years to figure out Nietzsche, around 2 to figure out Sidharrtha Gautama (arguably not a writer), another 2 to figure out Lao Tzu, ....

If I were to call these men candles, Bradbury is immensed in darkness. So let's call them stars, and we'll call him a candle. Flickering candles are pretty, but they don't give life.

[ExpectantlyIronic]

Trevor,

I'm not accusing Mr. Bradbury of being a great thinker. I just don't see him as anti-thought. He does seem to think it inhibits the creative process, which he thinks should be a spontaneous act of passion, but that's about the extent of his anti-intellectualism (if it can be called that). That isn't really the whole story though, as in the interview I read, he said that his characters write his stories for him. His thought then would be more stream-of-conscious and loose as opposed to deliberate and methodical. I haven't read any of his books though, so I can't really comment on how well his methods work. I must say that I do admire his seeming passion for life and literature (as if you can really have one without the other*).

*:)

[Trevor Salyzyn]

The most that can be said about the method, imho, is occasionally it leads to really funny moments. By creating caricatures and letting the caricatures do the work, they will often say the most absurd things. in F.451, for instance, the fireman could not remember if he knew that there is dew on the grass in the morning, and got quite angry when a girl told him that. Such caricatures place his writing somewhere between Roadrunner cartoons (mass produced filler), and Bugs Bunny's antics (the meat of Loonie Toons).

As far as genre is concerned, I believe he's usually compared to Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and George Orwell. Personally, I would say Orwell is the greatest of the bunch (as he wrote successful satire, the most difficult form of humour to do well). Asimov has always seemed quite philosophical, but I don't know all that much about Sagan (he was a pretty pedantic read, so I never got very far into his work). So, I'd say his method works better than Sagan (as far as entertainment is concerned); although it's considerably less inspired than Asimov, and there quite a large gap between Bradbury and Orwell. If Bradbury survives this century, and Orwell does not, it will be a very pathetic turn of events. There's not much to worry about here, though. Orwellian vocabulary has permeated culture; whereas Bradbury is, as Shakespeare would say, just "a lot of sound...".

(Asimov and Sagan are sci. fi. staples -- no amount of complaining on my part will change that, even could I think of anything to criticize about them.)

[cat10542]

Literature has to do with people. You can't write without feeling, that's what he's saying. Writing can't be bland, methodical, uninspired. Novels are about people, you can't be a writer if you can't understand people, because the greatest literature is a universal story about the human condition. Even Orwell's 1984 is rich with feeling, with the struggle of a man trying to do the right thing, to rebel against the dystopy he's trap in, and ultimately the story is tragic. It's a call to humanity not to let such a horrible thing happen.

How do you know what's right? How do you know what's good? How do you know what's okay and what's injustice? Every value judgement you make is based in feeling. So Bradbury is talking about being a writer, about writing, and if you don't value life, people, the future, if writing holds know value to your, then you should not be a writer.

Ultimately I think people confuse feeling and sensation. Feeling is about value judgements, about understanding what's worth something. Feeling gives meaning to life. If you value truth then you have some feeling. Sensation on the other hand is driven by your senses, it's addictions, it's highs and lows. Anyone who's read Fahrenheit 451 knows Bradbury uses the novel to show that living passively, unconsciously, irrationaly leads people only to unhappiness and suffering. Feeling doesn't mean living off your sensations, it means finding value and meaning in your life.

I think life works best when feeling and thinking work together. You need enough thought to question your feelings, and enough feeling to give purpose to your thought.

[Alexander]

Life ruins thinking!

Is the over unanalyzed life worth living?
Is it worth analyzing?

Knowing how a movie was made destroys the experience of watching it.

[Imadrongo]

Literature has to do with people. You can't write without feeling, that's what he's saying.

Depends if you are writing pointless drama books or books I might actually be interested in. Also you don't have to be emotional to write emotionally if you need to for certain characters.

Novels are about people, you can't be a writer if you can't understand people, because the greatest literature is a universal story about the human condition.

I'd hazard to say some of the most detached, unemotional people understand people the best.

How do you know what's right? How do you know what's good? How do you know what's okay and what's injustice? Every value judgement you make is based in feeling.

Most of us were raised by our parents and society to feel certain things were right and wrong. Some of us overcome these by thinking for ourselves.

[Alexander]

Their thinking is superficial and scant, so failing to penetrate all layers of any particual issue or subject at hand they remain ignorant, and therefore dimwitted. My thinking is deep and thorough as I penetrate to the heart of of matters leaving myself on the other hand enlightened. [grammatically incorrect]

I doubt that. You've just got delusions of granduer, which seems to happen to virtually everyone as they investigate reality.

Who are you to say whats delusional, and whats a higher awareness and understanding? You think there's whole independent categories of people that share a defect called delusion? Or is there a chance there aware of something you miss. We only process a fraction of the info we perceive.

[ChochemV2]

By way of contrast, to show who I believe to be talented and thoughtful writers, it took me 4 years to figure out Nietzsche, around 2 to figure out Sidharrtha Gautama (arguably not a writer), another 2 to figure out Lao Tzu, ....

That's like a grade school kid who keeps mentioning how many pages are in the book he is reading or the literary critic who judges a book based on how many twelve letter words the author uses instead of the content. The meaning of an author's writing is more important than how complex it is or how long it takes you to grasp their writing fully.

The moral of Fahrenheit 451 may only be "Burning books is bad" but I tend to agree with that sentiment and if you got past the first ten pages I'm sure you would find more to the book than that. I'm not disagreeing that Nietzsche and Lao Tzu are more thoughtful just that I don't find Bradbury to be any less of a writer than Asimov, Sagan or Orwell.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Chochem: I judge a book based on how long it keeps me enamored. This has nothing to do with how long it is. The Diamond Sutra, which is about the extent of my exposure to Siddhartha, is only a couple dozen pages, but I spent 2 years with the concepts in it.

If you judge books based on something else, like how much other people like it, then you are a fool.

I think the grade school kids you mention, still not aware enough of others to deliberately imitate them, are on to something. It's not bragginess, but a recommendation (in their case, on the nobility of reading; in mine, on the nobility of only spending time on good authors).

[Alexander]

It's quality not quantity. The high ratio of filler to content in books is a huge deterant for me. Plus I hate how many of them try to do the thinking for you. It's like someone else eating the jelly in your dough nut, it just doesn't taste the same. What gets me is how long winded people can be and still claim independent thought. A scientist will tell you everything, a philosopher will tell you the bits that effect you. It also bugs me that philosophy has no linear progression. One man can come up with already reached conclusions, or follow tangents known to lead in circles. It bugs me that there's no stripped down compilation philosophical progress. Instead endless books from various minds all with totally different ideas and pursuits, and little relating them all. I read a book till it starts repeating it's self, or says too many things I already know, or my attention span runs out, which ever comes first, other then a few rare cases where I see both covers.

[Alexander]

Are there any conclusions to be reached that we don't already know that will better our lives, aside from the enjoyment many of us get from the thought process. Seems to be as simple as hard work gets you good things. If I know why I'm here, will it add anything to my being here? Will it destroy my appreciation for it? What was once awe inspiring limitless and beautiful, becomes no more then electrical patterns perceived by the mind. What was once complex and confounding, becomes a mere set of reactions set in place for the sake of it. Is it worth knowing how it happens, and why, or are we better, to enjoy every taste every sense, and every emotion to the fullest. Either way curiosity will get the better of us, and we will search for the answers were not sure are worth knowing.

[ChochemV2]

I judge a book based on how long it keeps me enamored. This has nothing to do with how long it is. The Diamond Sutra, which is about the extent of my exposure to Siddhartha, is only a couple dozen pages, but I spent 2 years with the concepts in it.

Ah, I get it, I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought it was simply how long you spent reading their works and not how much time you spent trying to process them.

I can't say I've spent that much time pondering a book but I have yet to find anything which inspired that level of dedication in me.

If you judge books based on something else, like how much other people like it, then you are a fool.

Well...I guess it's good to know I'm not a fool.

I think the grade school kids you mention, still not aware enough of others to deliberately imitate them, are on to something. It's not bragginess, but a recommendation (in their case, on the nobility of reading; in mine, on the nobility of only spending time on good authors).

The grade school kids were reading books because they have a thousand pages and not because of the quality of the book. It's a phase I have noticed in many people as I aged, that they will often talk about the length of books they read as if that is an indication of anything except the number of pages in a book. I'd rather read a single paragraph in the Tao Te Ching than every book in the Harry Potter series because that one paragraph has more meaning than every single Harry Potter book put together.

[cat10542]

Literature has to do with people. You can't write without feeling, that's what he's saying.

Depends if you are writing pointless drama books or books I might actually be interested in. Also you don't have to be emotional to write emotionally if you need to for certain characters.

I'm not talking about pointless drama books, I can't stand drama by itself, namely because it's shallow and pointless. No, I'm talking about books with substance.

Novels are about people, you can't be a writer if you can't understand people, because the greatest literature is a universal story about the human condition.

I'd hazard to say some of the most detached, unemotional people understand people the best.

I would say that understanding people and emotion involves an amount of feeling, or at the very least the recognition of feeling within oneself, how else can you empathize? I don't mean to say you have to be extremely emotional to write emotionally; no, I agree, if you were extremely emotional then you'd probably have incoherent writing. Being detached is good, being apathetic is bad; there's a fine line. Writers write to help, to express, to share their insights with the world. Their act of understanding is the greastest act of compassion and feeling. A writer writer with no purpose would not make a good writer.

"Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark."
Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Swiss Philosopher and Poet

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion."
George Hegel

A person without passion for thought will not think very well, he will get caught up on concrete ideas, on self-consciousness, on details that don't matter, he will make himself miserable.

How do you know what's right? How do you know what's good? How do you know what's okay and what's injustice? Every value judgement you make is based in feeling.

Most of us were raised by our parents and society to feel certain things were right and wrong. Some of us overcome these by thinking for ourselves.

or by feeling for ourselves. (Making our own value judgements based on our thoughts)

Oh, and Alexander,

Life ruins thinking!

Is the over unanalyzed life worth living?
Is it worth analyzing?

Knowing how a movie was made destroys the experience of watching it.

You're stuck on the wrong kind of happiness. I analyze everything and I'm a happy person. Things do not make you truly happy.

[Alexander]

Everyone looks at a butterfly and wishes they could flutter around with such innocence. It's the thoughts between realizing what you want, and obtaining it that interfere with happiness. Anaylzeing what you do know is one thing, (thought lead to understanding, the more you know the less you understand), so is everything worth knowing, is everything worth understanind, or should we just bother with the bits that will make life better.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

Everyone looks at a butterfly and wishes they could flutter around with such innocence.

Do they? Life expectancy of a butterfly is only 2 to 14 days, and depending on the type, maximum lifespan is 4 days to 11 months.

How would you like to be a butterfly emerging from a cocoon just before a hurricane/typhoon? Or be a butterfly and see a car coming, but not be able to get out of the way? Or, most likely, get swallowed by some lizard, and wriggle until you die in it's stomach?

It's the thoughts between realizing what you want, and obtaining it that interfere with happiness.

But if you think about what it is you really want, you might be able to achieve it, and will be less likely to waste time achieving something you only imagined that you wanted.

is everything worth knowing, is everything worth understanind, or should we just bother with the bits that will make life better.

Tough one. How would you know what parts you need to know to make life better unless you knew it already? You might not know that you needed to know something that would make your life essentially perfect. Yet getting lost in the trivia is not going to make a person's life particularly good either.

I think the best way to handle it is to know the gestalt of Everything - which is what philosophy directs people to - and from there you will be better able to see what you personally need to know more about.

[Alexander]

I was thinking of that too, the greatest breakthroughs have been made looking at what others thought irrelevant, pointless, or non existent. Take in everything, look for connections later, cause really everything is the same, it's behavior that gives us the illusion of separation and difference.

[average]

you can just make things up to make life better, truth is overrated, don't waste your time with it.

[Shahrazad]

average,

you can just make things up to make life better, truth is overrated, don't waste your time with it.

I find it very amusing that you would say this in a forum of people that are obsessed with truth.

-

[Trevor Salyzyn]

I wonder how interesting any of those things you make up would be if you had no access to truth? Train-of-thought, spur-of-the-moment, completely random art gets boring fast. It doesn't take long before most people want to see some effort put into things. Being average yourself, I wonder how you could have over-looked the fact that average people find insincerity tedious.

[Matt Gregory]

That's why Taoist art is so appealing. It's insincere, but honest about it.

[bert]

you can just make things up to make life better, truth is overrated, don't waste your time with it.

I wonder how interesting any of those things you make up would be if you had no access to truth? Train-of-thought, spur-of-the-moment, completely random art gets boring fast. It doesn't take long before most people want to see some effort put into things. Being average yourself, I wonder how you could have over-looked the fact that average people find insincerity tedious.

if average would only appreciate what he knows as true,there would be nothing for him to enjoy.the same counts for me and you.
radical expression of him nevertheless.
truth is only overrated because you have gained such an impression - having projected a vague 'Self' and call it truth : verily once a Thing is named it becomes nothingness to its meaning.
All happiness is an illusion and a depressing trap.all righteousness is a dishonesty and all sin a pleasure.assuredly,the courages alone seem safe..without remorse.

: )