Waterstones Tentacles Longer Than Night – Horror of Philosophy vol. 3
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Price: £10.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre. Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human-thought undermining itself, in thought. Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the Horror of Philosophy trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse. Waterstones Tentacles Longer Than Night – Horror of Philosophy vol. 3 - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781782798897
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ISBN: 9781782798897
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Author: Arianne
Rating: 5
Review: We seek to understand what cannot be understood with our current tools of understanding, viz., logic, reason and common sense. We impose our subjective classifications and taxonomies upon nature itself and delight ourselves with what we are pleased to call knowledge of the world. In addition to being subjective, our classification systems are often idiosyncratic, relative and ephemeral, this is why they so often fail us. Evidence that our world is created by our subjective impositions can be seen in the fragility of human memory, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and all too often rewriting and revising of history. A physicist I know once told me that it was amazing how much we learn when we change our perspective; that we come see things as we have never seen them before and finally know what is true. I thought, but did not say, that this further shows that all we really do is impose a new or alternative subjectivity onto observed existence rather than arrive at the 'truth' of existence or any form of objectivity or objective knowledge. We build and create, we then look upon the material and intellectual results of our labors as objective reality when they are still just the result of our subjective impositions upon whatever this thing called reality is. We declare objective that which accords with rational communal assent but this just to substitute community levels subjectivity for individual level subjectivity. The attachment to a false objectivity is also shown in the way we suffer with ideological pathologists and smug idealism. The world we observe is not an objective truth that we acknowledge through our observations. Rather, the world we observe is the product of our subjective impositions but by observing the results of our subjective impositions we take the observations to be of an objective reality or truth. For example, what we call a species in nature is just our subjective imposition upon the unplanned outcomes of the evolutionary process. Species is just an idea useful to us for classifying what we find. The species are not there in nature waiting to be found. We invent the species by generalizing about what we find. They are labels of convenience, nothing more but still useful in organizing our knowledge thus showing the subjective nature of our so-called objective knowledge. Objectivity of any kind carries with it the stench of theism. We then build monuments to the permanence of this so called objective and true reality, just ask Ozymandias. Please do not mistake this for the subjectification of the empirical. The point here is that the empirical itself is subjective and the subjective is a necessary condition of having any kind of experience. This is why we cannot know the social world, it is a subjective creation, there is no objective world to know, there is no science of the social, it is a subjective position. We strive for unity and completeness; that which falls outside of our subjective anthropocentric ordering of existence is classed as alien, but all this is inadequate to grasp that which cannot be grasped. The problem isn’t the limits of thought, the problem is that thought is the limit. Existence qua existence is indifferent to the human perspective and has no need to respect our imposed antinomies and consistencies. The only such unity or oneness is to be found in nothingness. Does this seem alien? There is a place of being in the primordial darkness of un-being, un-manifestation and unknowing. I have found that what is true is unknowable and what is known is untrue. I have discovered the narrow dark place but not based on a narrow band of awareness rather, from an enhanced awareness of experience. I have found that I am, all of us really are, victimized by Fate, tyrannized by Evolution and cursed by Genetics. Is not this horror enough of the non-fiction variety? This is the new frontier of the horror genre, non-fiction. It comes as a stark realization in confrontation with our Being that the greatest achievement of heightened human awareness is to realize the curse that is heightened human awareness (Zapffe Paradox). This just is the horror of philosophy. My questions have become: How empty is the void? How black are the shadows? How deep is the depth of despair? What answers could there be for a pretend person who very well might be an undiagnosed high functioning schizophrenic? A person who is inadequate in a world that is intolerable; a world that is uncertain save for the madness where I am taught to seek praise from the foolish. Just a pretend person grappling with barley understood feelings and emotions through a process of philosophy, poetry and art trying to come to terms with being and existence. Searching for expression in the kingdom of blackest shadows and deepest torment. Grouping in the darkness for the creation of a new kind of self-understanding. All is vague and imprecise in my awareness. I am only semi-conscious in the world in which I find myself where complete receptivity and awareness is not possible, this is life in an unlived world. I apologize to the reader who has had the misfortune of reading this far, I do not want to push anyone else over the edge into the corruption of consciousness, the one into which I have already fallen. We live only in the meantime yet demand timeless meaning. If we believe that there is meaning to existence we will proceed to live life looking for such meaning. This creates a circular process. We look for meaning because we have already decided it must exist. This demonstrates that delusion serves as the path out of ignorance, but the reality is that this path, or any path, is an illusion. Few understand that our current existence is just irrelevant, it is nothing but an ephemeral phenomenon in the continuing entropy of space-time. Darkness and emptiness are just the consequences of a better understanding of existence. Oblivion will always displace meaning. With this, I now understand that I have not lost anything of value because I never had anything of value. I am existence without Being.
Author: Andrew Clarke
Rating: 3
Review: This book had some interesting bits in it, but compared to the previous two volumes I felt like there was also a lot of filler, as if the author were inserting marginally relevant essays he'd previously written to bulk the book out. At one point he digresses for about 25 pages on the metaphor of the "body politic". What is the point of this digression? As far as I can tell, mostly to add about 25 pages to a book that's only 185 pages long (without "notes").
