What's that feeling called that you sometimes slip into where you can look at something like a chair, and realize how absurd and strange it is?
I think in the example I read of this they used a chair to explain it as well, if it helps anyone figure out what I'm on about.
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Dissociation?
get help op
No, dissociation is different, although I do get that from time to time, meaning it's mild as fuck so it doesn't matter.
What I'm talking about is something different.
don't worry op. i understand what you're talking about.can't think of a great word for it though.
it feels like a veil's been lifted or something
Yeah exactly. It's the realization of the absurdity and perhaps arbitrariness of everyday objects.
Like everything we see is "filtered" so it seems normal. You've seen a chair a thousand times to it's just a normal object, but in reality it's strange as fuck. And this applies to everything, not just chairs.
It's hard to explain since (for me at least) it's a very fleeting, and almost entirely emotional experience.
Meta-awareness, maybe? I don't think there is a specific term
Angst, or Nothingness.
An existential observation
Is this similar to that phenomenon where saying the same word to yourself over and over will make it sound weird and offputting?
Sounds a bit like semantic satiation, but afaik that's just words losing their meaning.
There's a J G Ballard story about this. The Overloaded Man, maybe?
Poetic Disassociation
Sometimes I see people walking and the way they walk looks so strange. We all walk with these two long limbs and a pair of feet. The way they move looks so alien, backwards and forwards over and over again.
Would that sound similar to what you're seeing OP?
Nausea
Ah yeah, thanks! That was where I got my example from.
Interestingly enough the first time this happened to me was on a train as well. It's terrifying to see "the absurdity of the world" because you feel almost separate from it. Like the world loosened from its hinges.
Can you experience this at will or does it happen to you randomly?
I can sometimes force myself to experience it, but it most often happens randomly.
Again, it's primarily an emotional experience, like that of nostalgia. You can explain it as much as you want, but it's not a substitute for actually experiencing it.
For me it was also related to the concept of absolute freedom. You can literally kill yourself right now. There's nothing stopping you. You can wander into the woods and become a hermit. In the middle of a conversation you could strip down naked and your life would never be the same again.
I guess I just independently discovered/experienced all of those things this video describes:
Yeah exactly. However when I experience it it's very scary. Like everything has been a big lie, or a scene play, and for a fleeting moment I realize that it's all a play.
Hyperawareness?
Read Nausea by Sartre.
>Read Nausea by Sartre
Will do!
I've experienced this.
A dissimilar situation (but along these lines) is having a bit of music in your head, or a bit of verse, when realizing (after wondering why you can't get it out of your head) that it actually answers some question you posed just previous or even the day before, and often with some acuity. Weird.
Perhaps a major difference between folks today and those of the deep dark past is that whereas we receive pop music bits, various memes and commercial jingles, they received bits of stories, tales and verse, i.e. spontaneously.
>Just a thought.
You're getting disconnected from the world of Forms
I have it from time to time, but that's because I've got some depersonalization/ derealization going on. It's usually not too bad but I'm also an alcoholic and alcohol can trigger such feelings, usually when sobering up.
It's especially scary when you're driving and looking at the road in front of you and all of the sudden I can only perceive the road and other surroundings as a bunch of weird shapes without any meaning.
Have you read Nausea by Sartre yet? It's basically about the experience you're having
Do you drive drunk?
la nausea
Jamais vu is the opposite of Deja vu, where the familiar feels unfamiliar.
Not sure that's what you were looking for but it is pretty on the nose.
No, but hungover. I only drink in the evenings.
i get this shit all the fucking time
i just started reading nausea, he talks about it like 10 pages in or something
there's probably a german word just for this feeling...
I remember senior year of high school I felt this feeling strongly while thinking about life. We are these weird fleshy mechanisms that are self-driven to fuck and eat until we wear out and break down. And we come from pretty much nothing. We are machines with our choices personality and opinions mapped out and written down in our biology. We just stomp around and fulfill the script written in our DNA until we break down. And this entire concept is so strange. I mean I had been reading existentialist texts and Nietzsche and shit for a few years at that point and understood that the only meaning life has comes from interpretation and projection, but I never had such a feeling that we were just these weird aimless meat robots.
Like you see the objects you just don't comprehend them? Or do they look physically different?
They look the same, but it's as if I forgot what these things were and I view them in a way as if I've never seen anything like it before.
Also, it's only a very short moment. Barely 3 seconds, before I come to my senses again.
I think it does
This
I just wouldn't exactly call it emotional though, for me at least. Certainly a daunting experience
Sometimes when I'm outside driving, I become aware of how insanely improbable my current experience is. It just strikes me how ludicrously complex everything is, and driving seems harder because of how overwhelming reality is.
Interesting... I have felt something similar to a slightly milder degree a few times in my life. It's strange and overwhelming. How frequently does this happen to you?
OP here.
Yeah, it tends to last for a very short time. It's sort of like you see everything for the first time, and it looks strange.
However, when you see a new object normally you can relate it to things you already know, in the sense of "Oh, that looks a bit like this other thing I know". You don't have that luxury when this happens to you, because everything is like you see it for the first time ever.
Rarely ever at all anymore, these days, unless I'm hungover/ dehydrated.
acid
Gestaltzerfall?
Yeah senpai sounds like you're high
Some kind of derecognition?
That happened to me, and with a chair too. It actually happened while reading Nausea.
Jamais Vu: A sense of unfamiliarity with, or of never having experienced or seen before, something that should be familiar.
This happens to me almost daily, particularly when looking at my cat or other humans. I just start thinking about how strange this little creature is that I have living with me, with a tiny peabrain and small feet and stomach, how different she is from me yet we exist in harmony. I also have similar experiences to the user that mentioned getting weirded out by seeing people walk. When it hits the hardest, however, is when I'm just standing around, smoking a cigarette outside of class or something, and I get overwhelmed by my presence at that particular spot. Like, "what am I doing here? If I wasn't here no one would know any better."
It makes me feel retarded, desu. Like babby's first existential crisis, yet I've gone through a philosophy major and was an edgy teen and have gone through a more typical existential crisis years ago.
I also get urges to throw my cat off the balcony, stab my live-in girlfriend, spew insults at professors, and have to suppress the urge despite loving all of these beings and rationally wishing no harm on them. This is a pretty recent occurrence, coming up in the past year or so and it makes me feel legitimately crazy.
>that feel when you suddenly realise you are you and you have been on "automatic" mode the whole day
What the fug I have never meditated or did weed why does this happen?
This reminded me of Cortázar's instructions for climbing a staircase, the 'extrañamiento' as in viewing the world as if it was your first time seeing it
>I also get urges to throw my cat off the balcony, stab my live-in girlfriend, spew insults at professors, and have to suppress the urge despite loving all of these beings and rationally wishing no harm on them.
Talk to someone about this.
Unless it's just strange OCD-lite kind of thoughts that you handwave away with a bit of annoyance. I get those with sexual things. E.g. when interacting with a female relative who is particularly non-sexual to me (mother, aunt, grandmother), I'll get very blurry weird sexual images in the back of my head which I simply ignore and it doesn't really affect me in any way. It's like a strange background noise. Doesn't happen when I actually feel attracted to a woman.
I figure it's something of a similar nature to Tourette's Syndrome.
Not sure since when I have it. But it's always been so slight I always just ignored it. I'm generally a little fucked up when it comes to sexual thoughts because I began watching porn as a little kid. I'm just happy I don't have any violent fetishes.
I'd say it's more along the lines of what you're describing (minor annoyances that I brush away), but I also have that same weird sexualizing femal family members thing. I think part of it is due to going on bestgore and shit like that when I was younger. I used to be desensitized to all that stuff, now when I watch a movie or read a book containing insanity-fueled violence I get really uncomfortable.
How do I talk to someone when I am poor and have no insurance? Part of my reluctance to do this is a forced denial of thinking that I'm going crazy, I've always been a very peaceful guy and I'm trying to convince myself that these are merely little mental problems I need to solve myself...
Giving in: Nietzsche's experience with the horse. This feel redolent in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Education. Perhaps I'll re-read Shandy this summer..
Damn. Mistook the Sterne title for Flaubert's!
>I also get urges to throw my cat off the balcony
Kek. Don't worry though, as long as you don't do it. I was talking to a bunch of friends last time about this and most of them had somewhat similar thoughts.
One of them told me he always thought of breaking every dish in his house, another about hitting everyone with his car.
You aren't crazy.
I was gonna say, Sterne's Sentimental Education? Did you mean to provide a different title by Sterne, or did you just get the authors mixed up?
And can you expand on the Nietzsche's horse experience?
Oh well, good luck living in a third world country. Here in Germany everyone and their dog is insured by law.
Like the other user says though, probably a lot of people have strange little OCD-like thoughts such as these. If you can't preemptively get a professional opinion then the best thing is probably to meh it away and find a new hobby or new friends or something that keep your mind busy with positive things.
i get this quite often, i can even do it at command. Its like a moment where shapes doesn't make any sense and the everyday object becomes bizarre and really fucking weird
OP here, yeah I get the same. Kind of that feeling like when you're sitting on a cliff and think: "I could just push off, a slight little push, and I'd fall to my death". Or you could just stab someone. You're life would be fucked forever, but it's a possibility.
You _could_ just do that. There's nothing stopping you. And it's absolutely terrifying.
When I'm walking down the street, that random guy could stab me in the neck and my life would be over. It's so fragile, and yet I delude myself into thinking it's more robust than it actually is. It could end at any moment.
Absolute freedom combined with the "veil" lifting from time to time is terrifying.
>When I'm walking down the street, that random guy could stab me in the neck and my life would be over. It's so fragile, and yet I delude myself into thinking it's more robust than it actually is. It could end at any moment.
I actually tried to kill myself by slitting my throat and to my surprise I was still alive after losing about a liter of blood.
Conversely, it can be more robust than you'd be led to believe when you sit in your basement all day every day for years. Comes out the human body is capable of receiving quite a beating.
Its because the chair has no being in itself, and neither does the unity preceding what you recognize as the chair.So when you unrecognize the chair you can make a new mental selection of what 'belongs together'.
But its all your mind keeping it together.
sounds like ocd my dudebro
Yeah, that's a good description of it. And the absolute freedom is similar to it in the way that it happens when you "unrecognize" what you're supposed to do, e.g. not randomly murder everyone, preserve your own life, etc.
Someone could be aiming a sniper rifle at you right now.
He could pull the trigger and end your life without you ever realizing it.
This
How are chairs strange as fuck "in reality"?
Albert Camus writes about this in his philosophy of absurdism. You experience a momentary lifting of the veil where you realize how absurd the things you take for granted are and how disjointed presumably causal relationships can be. He argues that you can either take this awareness and run with it or do your best to hide from it and go back to living your life the way it was before you had this awareness, though the second option usually leads to some form of existential angst. Lovecraft's horror is similar in this theme though he uses space monsters as the awakening element rather than the basic shit that can set it off at any moment.
Go read Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus
www2.hawaii.edu
Yes, it fells very bizarre - but often fun, I find - to contemplate the familiar order of life as if we suddenly had the eyes of a non-human outsider. I started experiencing this more profoundly after it really sunk into my mind that humans are a species of ape - looking at my friends at parties, at swarms of people in department stores, at my own acts of gracefulness and obliviousness, and at my own body reflected in mirrors and moving past windows - and I began to more frequently observe the world as if it were an exhibit in some cosmic zoo.
I still have to remind myself, though, that I can't escape my own point of view as a human mind, as if I could conceive of some absolutely objective perspective that wasn't implicitly anthropomorphized. Each of us is merely a human who can try (and fail) to conceive of how a non-human might contemplate humans.
Two recurring themes of Schopenhauer's thought especially come to mind in relation to this. An example of the first theme - the general bafflingness of existence - is in the opening pages of "Man's Need for Metaphysics," which begins here on page 160: books.google.com
An example of the second theme - directing this kind of contemplation at the organ correlated with the very consciousness that's doing the contemplating - comes from page 273:
> In fact, we are justified in asserting that the whole of the objective world, so boundless in space, so infinite in time, so unfathomable in its perfection, is really only a certain movement or affection of the pulpy mass in the skull. We then ask in astonishment what this brain is, whose function produces such a phenomenon of all phenomena. What is this matter that can be refined and potentiated to such a pulpy mass, that the stimulation of a few of its particles becomes the conditional supporter of the existence of an objective world? The dread of such questions drove men to the hypothesis of the simple substance of an immaterial soul, which merely dwelt in the brain. We say fearlessly that this pulpy mass, like every vegetable or animal part, is also an organic structure, like all its humbler relations in the inferior dwelling-place of our irrational brothers' heads, down to the humblest that scarcely apprehends. Nevertheless, that organic pulpy mass is nature's final product, which presupposes all the rest.
Shaking off the Phenomenal world is an integral part of knowing one's self.
OP if you've never smoked salvia you should consider it because that is exactly the feeling taken to a ludicrous extreme.
This made me start drawing my hands because I was fascinated at how i could make them flow from shape to shape.
I disagree with Schopenhauer that it's only the brain - the pulpy mass. It's the entire human body and the brain interprets this reality through the body. Without the body there's nothing.
semantic satiation,
except physical satiation
On an off-topic note, has anyone ever experienced some sort of hyperrealization just through thinking of a scenario?
Like, I picture grabbing a knife and stabbing myself with it, or jumping off a building, and I swear it feels so real that I get a near panic attack
Is this somehow a new reality creating itself where I actually kill myself? Are we creating new worlds just by thinking them up?
Depersonalization
The word "must". It's a really weird word when you say it a lot. A musty word.
Alienation, dissociation
I have this with the human body. Seems pretty normal right? Two legs, hips, torso, two arms and a head on top. But, wait, what's that? A snakelike shlong with two miniature balls next to it in between the legs. And everyone just lives a normal life not mentioning this?
well two legs, hips, torso, two arms and a head on top is just as bizarre as a snakelike shlong with two miniature balls next to it between the legs
Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy- that short work came to mind (although the Flaubert title trumped the actual while typing) though read some time ago. Don't know why (meant to check it, but didn't) which is why I wrote 'redolent'. Trusted my impulse, but could be mistaken. Many books have intervened since reading it.
The onset of Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin occured while he observed a horse being whipped. His interposing by throwing his arms around the horse's neck as if to save it seems sane enough, even admirably brave, by contemporary standards, but it indicated a 'loss of grip' given the standards of the world in which he lived. This 'horse episode' is supposed to be the ground zero of his mental collapse.
> I disagree with Schopenhauer that it's only the brain - the pulpy mass. It's the entire human body and the brain interprets this reality through the body. Without the body there's nothing.
Of course - and though you'd have no way of knowing it from the excerpt, he elsewhere acknowledges in detail the contributions that the whole body makes to our conscious experience.
What's unique about the human brain, he believed, was that its proportional size allowed humans to be rationally reflective about their very own bodies and spatiotemporal experience, and that since such reflection allows humanity to recognize the worthlessness of all existence - and thus allows humanity to be repulsed from life, the world, and the willing that's at the core of all of it - there would be no stage of natural phenomena higher than humanity, no reason for nature to evolve beyond the bare minimum of consciousness required for renunciation.
Have you done psychadelics by chance?
I've experienced this, but not with inanimate objects. It happened while I was looking at myself in a mirror and when I was caressing my dog. In these cases I asked myself why my dog and I have the physical forms I saw, and I couldn't come up with an answer, yet I knew an answer exists.
you get this on lsd all the time, i remember looking at a fire hydrant once while i was tripping balls like "yooo what the fuck IS that thing?!"
Damn, I've read that user's post about his cat. Pretty much the same experience I had with my dog.
Uncanniness? At any rate, read Nausea.
That's naive. The idea that this is the final stage of evolution just because we're aware, and that there couldn't be anything more damning to a species than it's hatred of itself in light of the crushing overbearance of existence, is narrow-minded. Evolution doesn't function on reason, it just does.
the schlong is the most primitive and unevolved part of the body, makes sense
the answer is evolution
Christ's sake, you litcucks are annoying as fuck
This is as stupid as claiming that OP's example of chair doesn't make sense because a chair is what it is due to industrial design. While correct, you're missing the point.
Apareidolia is the term I'd ascribe to it OP - anti-pattern-seeking behavior
>Evolution doesn't function on reason, it just does.
But reason, the human thought process, does function on the same laws of physics as evolution.
Can you even into analogy? Industrial design is not a process over millions of years
We have these forms because of a process of millions of years. The reason it seems absurd to us is because there Is no possible way to experience millions of years within our limited perception, so our mind seems like it's playing a trick on us when we perceive a discrete moment in time without any of its context.
Sartrean perspective?
No that's when your eyes don't line up LMAO
That sometimes happens to me with words. I say a word like "Hello" and start thinking about how weird it is.
Can everyone in this thread please add me on Facebook? You all sound SO awesome and self-aware you must all be SO interesting, always puzzling out the TRUE meaning of chairs and words and other objects! Truly a transcendental thread, well-done all you fine gentlemen!
You are arguing against your own point. Even though we can easily oversee the process of making -for example- a chair, it can still at times seem absurd to us. This means it does not seem absurd in virtue of its temporal nature but due to its pure being. This in turn means that the human form can seem absurd to us on a non-temporal level as well. We are taking a metaphysical view in these cases which can be atemporal.
i dont want to read the whole thread, is there some german word for this?
sort of like schop's aesthetics and also naive autism
>Can you even into analogy?
Can you? Industrial design is analogous to evolution because it's the material cause of the subject in question. Time is irrelevant in this analogy.
When the people in this thread see X and think about how absurd X is, they're wondering about its formal cause. You seem one of those naive teenagers who just learned how to refute young earth creationists objections to evolution and want to show off this knowledge in every possible situation.