Ideas from the 'Serial Killing' philosophy anthology

"...the period [of video games] I wish had gotten some serious attention from the Review is the 1990s: that first decade of first-person shooters, from Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to about Halo (2001), is endlessly interesting, both as an era of relentless formal and technical one-upmanship — as programmers raced one another to work out how to virtually represent three-dimensional space, movement, and interaction — and as a sustained unselfconscious exploration of American gun obsession. It was probably the most important video game genre of its time, and it was entirely about seeing the world down the barrel of a gun — some of the games are works of genius, some are absolute garbage, but the whole period amounts to something that still feels deeply strange and important. But I have no idea what it means."
— "Compulsion, Triumph, Regret, and Unease." Gabriel Winslow-Yost, interviewed by Daniel Drake. New York Review of Books. August 20, 2022.

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"a literary bouquet that is to this day one of the finest extant examples of remix culture, generally attributed to that late medieval genre of writing known as florilegium or 'flower-culling.' ...florilegia were extensive and systematic compilations of extracts from past writings: proverbs, maxims, and stories, sometimes quoted verbatim in mnemonically brief segments, but more often summarized or subject to some alteration with the aim of exemplifying certain topics which, when combined and recombined together, illuminated a central doctrine or idea; thus producing, through a mode of literary splicing, the telescopic effect traditionally associated with targumim texts."
Edia Connole, "The Language of Flowers: Serial Kitsch In Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology. Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley, eds. Schism, 2015. pp. 95-96.

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From the same Serial Killing anthology:

David Roden, in "Aliens Under the Skin," asks: In describing a serial killer as "inhuman," do we make "any more than an exclamation of moral disgust?" Or do we make "some kind of truth claim?" He uses bioethicist Darian Meacham's suggestion of the Phenomenological Species Concept - meaning, we have "empathic awareness" of others, recognizing that they have "mental states analogous to our own." This is "intrinsically motivating and normative," enabling us to "share moral practices" that relate to the very feelings we recognize that others have. But, on the other hand, we can't empathize with serial killers, either, can we? The suggestion that we ought to empathize with serial killers even if they do not empathize with us has the appearance of logic, despite its unfairness. (It is unfair because fairness, by definition, usually implies reciprocity). Sometimes we give to others in ways they cannot give to us, under the rubric of dignity, charity, or social justice, but it isn't immediately obvious that we want to offer any of that to serial killers.

Gary J. Shipley, in "Visceral Incredulity," points out that serial killers are defined in terms of what they've done to their victims, and furthermore they are outside "the moral dialogue" that everyone else shares, so they are "unstable, transitory and impersonal" and seen "as void, as zombielike and personless."

Daniel Colucciello Barber, in "Nonrelation and Metarelation": Metarelation means some kind of resistance against reality. It "involves saying no to the world's definition of construction, as well as to the very construction of the world."

Niall W. R. Scott, "A Creeping Death": When a physical body dies, it experiences "the very precipice of what it is and what it is not at that particular moment." So death is not just physical but psychological. The anticipation of death is "the anticipation of no longer being able to be aware of oneself as a thing." A serial killer seeks to make someone "experience the moment of the light diminishing."

It is asked whether a person's sadism can be attributed to a cultural influence such as "poverty, despair, political and economic impotence and disillusion, a figure of abjection, weakness and brutality shivering with a generalised, aimless and endless rage." Sometimes the killer reveals surprisingly "ordinary" feelings "of pleasure-desire central to the productive and profane world" rather than "an utterly unimaginable excess or a corporeal conduit of excremental forces that leave all structures, laws and grounds in ruins." (Fred Botting, "Bataille's Vampire")

I Wrote More About This Book

To read more, please see "What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About". It's a 3-minute read on Medium.

Start with an idea

"All beliefs are bald ideas," said the French painter and poet 
Francis Picabia. It means that a belief is the starting point of an idea, but it takes a little bit extra to turn a belief into a full-fledged idea.

Do we need ideas? For writing, certainly, and yes, indeed, for life itself. Ideas are like little magnetic building blocks that attract each other and click together. Eventually they make something worth having, doing or being.

We don’t do anything without an idea. So they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say, you desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook — you can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day. And you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole — whatever it is you’re working on — but now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment — that little fish — will bring in more, and they’ll come in and they’ll hook on. And more and more come in, and pretty soon you might have a script — or a chair, or a painting, or an idea for a painting.
- David Lynch

Tapping into a great idea can feel like tapping into a larger version of ourselves, something that connects us to a broader, deeper experience of the world.

In this sense, great ideas are like the stars seen on a moonless night away from the cities of man with their "light pollution." To contemplate the starry sky is to intuit the existence of cosmic law imperceptible to our physical senses, and to intuit this by means of a capacity in our psyche that is almost never activated in the course of what is called our "real life," but which would more aptly be termed "life on the surface of ourselves." Great ideas are each like a great world, a solar world, pouring out invisible life-giving energy into the inner space of the human soul and, like the starry worlds above us, these ideas can never exist alone, but are always inextricably part of a galaxy, or cosmic community, of other great solar worlds of varying magnitude, age and magnificence.
- Jacob Needleman

Ideas can be unstable and dangerous. If not nurtured properly, they can collapse and take down other things with them.

Every idea is a complicated and delicate machine. In order to know how to handle it, it is necessary first of all to possess a great deal of purely theoretical knowledge and, besides that, a large amount of experience and practical training. Unskilled handling of an idea may produce an explosion of the idea; a fire begins, the idea burns and consumes everything round it.
- P. D. Ouspensky

Sources

P. D. Ouspensky. A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the psychological method in its application to problems of science, religion, and art. Translated by R. R. Merton. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997. (Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.) p. 138.

Jacob Needleman. Why Can't We Be Good? New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. p. 142.