St. Monday and the Ignorants

Enjoy one picture of my new apt below while I attempt to figure out how to post more than one at a time. It's an old picture, but not much has changed, except we got three more counter stools like the one you see pictured.

More from J. Ronald Lane Latimer Professor of Progressive Thought at Brighton Technical Academy, Dr. James Robert McTweedpants:

"So I was thinking about pragmatism the other day; it's something I found immensely interesting when I began my academic career in the early 1960s, but that I find myself feeling quite different about these days. For no reason in particular, it occurred to me that pragmatism, for all its pretentions, is (equivalent to) the highest idealism imaginable. Pragmatism, with its dictum demanding that one acknowledge all contingencies, becomes in practice the end of the imagining of contingency.

"There are a couple of illusions at play here, one related to immediacy and the other to utility. I'll start with the latter. Although pragamatism claims to value only the utility of any given action (hence early critiques of it as being immoral or unprincipled), pragmatism precisely offers nothing in the way of use (think of use in the OT sense of usury, interest, profit). Use, although having its birth within a given system (a financial exchange in most cases), makes its appearance extraneous to the system. The money I pay my creditors in interest is not related in any fundamental way to our exchange, but instead irrupts as a kind of moral remainder, a balance (a debt) I knowingly take on and understand to have a certain deferred quality. It is precisely this debt, however, that pragmatism cannot accommodate. Pragmatism advises that we concern ourselves only with what can be done within the limitations of what obtains. Difference, then, is inconceivable. All actions within the system overlap each other to the degree that they are indistinguishable; therefore, what 'obtains' comes to seem natural or almost inevitable: it is doing what comes naturally.

"The other illusion has to do with immediacy. 'What obtains,' on the pragmatic view, depends for its coherence on the assumption of ubiquitous transparence. We must have the faith that we are able to recognize our contexts as what they are in order to assume that we have the ability to move as rational actors within our contexts. In this sense, pragmatism is identical with something like Christianity; but it's really identical with any context in which it happens to find itself (as pragmatists will readily allow). It's the idea that pragmatism can simply disappear within its context that is the fundamental illusion. Pragmatism, with its inability to accommodate doubt, is even guilty of idealism within a positivistic context, where pragmatism would attempt to pass itself off as positivism's twin (which it is). Christianity, in fact, is actually less idealistic than pragmatism, insofar as Christianity recognizes its mediation, asking its contexts always to fit a typological patterning. Pragmatism, meanwhile, pretends to find its contexts as they are, always dealing with them as a (somehow) separate sphere, imminently extricable from what it would study."

Thank you Dr. McTweedpants.

I was thinking that heroin is an imperfect form of the ipod. If heroin had a pause button...