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Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This makes perfect sense if you've read Heideigger and Freud. The notion of the egg is easily understandable as the development of the id and superego as differentiable personality traits or development of the self, and being and becoming is basically a direct quote reference to Heidegger, lichtung etc. Reading this out of context without understanding the underlying work is like cracking open Topics in Orbit Equivalence by Kechris if you haven't read or understood Abstract Algebra by Judson. I'm not even a fan or deep-understander of this art movement but there is obviously some intellectual depth to the people who engage in this stuff.

I know of continental philosophy and have read some of it; I just don't like or assign any weight to that philosophical tradition at all. Frankly it comes off to me as consisting of a lot of very broad and often borderline metaphysical statements made without any empirical or logical basis, and their philosophy almost feels completely arbitrary, with their terms being so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them. Many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty, I wouldn't say that is the case with prominent continental philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger. Much of it falls into the category of not even wrong.

The concept of being (sein) is just the word for the concept of existence and presence in the world. Becoming (werden) is the state of constant change. Being and becoming are related in the sense that being is a point in, or snapshot of, the state of becoming. Heidegger's Lichtung, the "clearing", elucidates the concept of ontological Being through an analogy of a light in a clearing where beings are revealed as beings, where beings nevertheless obscure each other leading to concealment which results in the ability to form misconception and self-deception. I don't feel like I learn anything particularly meaningful about being through this, I feel as if I'm hearing somebody's kooky unfalsifiable ruminations about what it means to exist, and to extend these concepts to design (e.g. calling grey "the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away" because it is in between white and black) elevates the whole endeavour to monumental levels of meaninglessness. There is no lens through which these statements can even be whatsoever critically appraised or evaluated.