I just honestly can't tell whether Dali is ironically trolling, or unwittingly trolling and totally earnest... The latter seems more and more likely.
I work on philosophy of emotions sometimes (in relation to my work on causal explanations) and there's something to be said about the fact that Dali seems to see the world a certain way, and can't be made to see it differently unless we could change some feature of it for him... it could be his emotional reaction to certain events, or it could be the association of negative outcomes with entire races or sorts of people, but it takes a lot of work to sort out the mess of beliefs and feelings a particular person in Dali's position actually has.
E.g.,
Spinoza wrote:XLVI. If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone, of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause, under the general category of the class or nation: the man will feel love or hatred, not only to the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs.
>>>>>Proof—This is evident from III. xvi.
^ The proof:
Spinoza wrote:XVI. Simply from the fact that we conceive, that a given object has some point of resemblance with another object which is wont to affect the mind pleasurably or painfully, although the point of resemblance be not the efficient cause of the said emotions, we shall still regard the first-named object with love or hate.
>>>>>Proof—The point of resemblance was in the object (by hypothesis), when we regarded it with pleasure or pain, thus (III. xiv.), when the mind is affected by the image thereof, it will straightway be affected by one or the other emotion, and consequently the thing, which we perceive to have the same point of resemblance, will be accidentally (III. xv.) a cause of pleasure or pain. Thus (by the foregoing Corollary), although the point in which the two objects resemble one another be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we shall still regard the first-named object with love or hate. Q.E.D.
The problem for someone like Dali is that he has associated pain with a feature of an entire set of humans that is not in any way causally implicated in the production of the pain he actually experienced.
Frustration is like this. Some people get so frustrated with their computers or other gadgets that they scream at them or throw/break them, in spite of the fact that the source of the problem wasn't the gadget but the person failing to understand the situation in the first place. I believe Dali's experience of the world is just that.
good call. the guy has serious issues.
