"When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating"
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Flynt’s line takes a classic philosophical grenade - the liar paradox - and throws it into the room with the matter-of-fact impatience of an artist who’s watched avant-garde posturing calcify into dogma. “All statements are false” isn’t just wrong; it’s performative sabotage. If the sentence is true, it immediately condemns itself as false. If it’s false, then at least some statements are true, and the speaker’s grand negation collapses into incoherence. Flynt’s “obvious problem” is doing work here: he’s puncturing the mystique of radical skepticism by treating it as a basic error, not a profound insight.
The intent feels less like a classroom lesson in logic than a jab at a certain cultural pose: the habit of declaring everything ideology, everything language-game, everything corrupted, then smuggling in one’s own certainty as an exception. The subtext is anti-pretension. Totalizing claims often masquerade as intellectual bravery, but they’re frequently a way to dodge accountability; if all statements are false, you never have to defend yours.
Context matters because Flynt sits in that 1960s/70s ecosystem where art, philosophy, and provocation traded clothes. When conceptual gestures flirt with nihilism, this kind of sentence becomes a cheap thrill: destroy meaning, feel superior. Flynt’s point is that the thrill is structurally unstable. You can’t demolish the possibility of truth without borrowing truth to light the fuse.
The intent feels less like a classroom lesson in logic than a jab at a certain cultural pose: the habit of declaring everything ideology, everything language-game, everything corrupted, then smuggling in one’s own certainty as an exception. The subtext is anti-pretension. Totalizing claims often masquerade as intellectual bravery, but they’re frequently a way to dodge accountability; if all statements are false, you never have to defend yours.
Context matters because Flynt sits in that 1960s/70s ecosystem where art, philosophy, and provocation traded clothes. When conceptual gestures flirt with nihilism, this kind of sentence becomes a cheap thrill: destroy meaning, feel superior. Flynt’s point is that the thrill is structurally unstable. You can’t demolish the possibility of truth without borrowing truth to light the fuse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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