Why did the chicken cross the road ?

There's a lot on the net dealing with this topic, and it's all the same fucking thing, recopied ad infinitum on pointless websites run by witless idiots from what appears to be the same 1980ish Usenet source.

Let us then put to shame the theory that no intellect capable of any sort of useful production has been known to the world in thirty years by putting on public display the sad fact that there's actually just one. Mine.

Without further ado, I give you the philosophy of chickens crossing roads :

Heraclitean : Chickens are found interminably, indefinitely moving, left, right, up, down, circularily, linearily and along spirals. As a necessary result of this endless moving about, sooner or later each chicken will cross all roads. If you are interested, I also have a proof that no chicken can cross the same road twice.

Zenon of Elea-ean : To cross the whole road, the chicken first had to cross the road half way. To cross the road halfway, however, the chicken first had to cross the road half way of the half way, which is to say a quarter of the way. To cross that quarter of the way, the chicken still had to cross the first eighth of the way first, and so following through division infinitely. An infinity of distances can only be traversed in an infinity of intervals, and consequently no chicken has yet crossed any road, nor will within finite time. Morever, the chicken supposed to be crossing roads and the chicken sitting on the side both occupy the same space, and therefore necessarily are found both in the same state.

Epicurean : Crossing the road, the chicken doubtlessly felt great joy. Through the crossing it showed us that it freed itself of the overwhelming fear of death, of bodily suffering and the turmoil of the soul. That chicken is the wisest of all chickens which crosses the road.

Aristotelian : In the reality correspondent to the statement we can identify four fundamental causes : causa materialis, of the matter uniting chicken and the road ; causa formalis, of the form distinguishing chicken from road ; causa finalis, of the purpose of chicken and the purpose of road ; and finally causa efficiens, which in the end impels the chicken to cross the road and the road to be crossed by chickens. Nevertheless, none of these show why any certain chicken would cross any definite road. We can nevertheless say that the chicken contained the potentiality of crossing roads, and when this potentiality encountered in act the potentiality of the road to be crossed by chickens the chicken crossed the road. Nevertheless, act being anterior to potential, it follows that the chicken made the road so as to be crossed by it.

Baruchian : A determined chicken crossing the road is necessarily determined by God. Were the chicken not determined by God, it could not determine itself, not even enough so as to cross a road. Were this chicken blessed with intellect and the quality of seeing matters sub specie aeternitatis, it would have discovered itself to be naught more than a modus of the one Substance, immuable and eternal that is properly called God. It is therefore proper to say God crossed the road, sive gallina.

[Des]Cartesian : It is probable the chicken erred had it crossed the road. The chickenly intellect being more strictly limited than any chicken's will, it was easy for the latter to overpower the former and from this prepotence error was borne -- for its freedom, manifested in the act of crossing the road, was not preceded by knowledge through divine grace. It is therefore entirely conceivable a chicken crossing the road is godless by that crossing.

Leibnizian : The Supreme Monad pre-established through Universal Harmony that the chicken-monad shall cross the road-monad, without the two thereby realising any exchange of their true natures. As the event took place, it was impossible for it to not occur. Even were the chicken run over by a cart, the unexpected completion of the crossing of the road would have been equally well, as part of the best of all possible worlds which is the extant.

Kantian : The concept of chicken and the concept of road are empirical separate concepts. To know whether the chicken generally crossed the road in the general, the concept of a chicken is not sufficient, seeing how its analytical decomposition does not yield any crossings of any roads. "The chicken crossed the road" is a sintetic a posteriori judgement ; were the crossing of roads part of the concept of a chicken, we'd have been instead dealing with an analytical a priori judgement, pure if the two concepts hadn't occured to intellect through experience. Unfortunately, as I have never encountered a chicken crossing the road myself, as people in Konigsberg long took to adjusting their watches by my walks and as a result taking all roosters to the pot and further down the road finding themselves without chickens for lack of roosters to perpetuate their kind, which is to say as I've never had the opportunity to apply the pure categories of my intellect to the sensible givens of chickens and roads, I can't even surmise why a chicken in general would cross an arbitrary road in particular.

Rousseauian : I saw the chicken cross the road, and across the road I saw a virgin forest. Through the symbolic crossing the domesticated chicken returned to its true chickenly nature, which is not social, in the coop, but rather the primitive state of the sylvester chicken, that has in its breast but two strings -- the call of the principle of its self preservation and the twang of repulsion towards the scalding and the plucking of other chickens. Therefore the act of the chicken crossing the road signified a contestment of the contract extant between chickendom and society in general, a contract through which they renounced too much of the self in exchange for too little in the way of roost real estate and guaranteed daily meals.

Schopenhauerian : That chicken which you say has crossed the road is naught but instrument of the eternal Will. Activity, movement, the crossing of a road are all and in their totality products of Will. The very material body of the chicken, plump and juicy as it may be, is naught but Will exteriorized. In crossing the road, blind Will employed chicken to perpetuate itself. The chicken could never kill within itself this Will because the chicken is immoral, and naturally incapable of abstaining from constant pecking at the dirt ; and besides I've never seen a chicken engaging in aesthetic contemplation. The ox, however, could do such a thing. It is entirely possible that at those times when it stares in the distance, the ox may be indeed attempting to kill within itself the universal Will through aesthetic contemplation.

Nietzschean : If indeed a common chicken were to cross the road, we'd have before our eyes the Superchick, a chicken with a truly grandiose will. Unlike the other, common chickens, the Superchick only respects that which is proper to it. The Superchick only glorifies its own self, and its morality is placed beyond good and evil, those values of the coop invented in their current dropping form out of sheer resentment by her weaker siblings, with the transparent aim of keeping Superchick under control. Through crossing the road, the Superchick earned its freedom entire, recovered its self-respect, and its full conscience of the self, renouncing mutilation, subjugation and generally being hemmed in. It was probably the first chicken to cluck "the master died".

Laplacean : Were I possessed of intelligence sufficiently encompassing as to contain all the various forces acting in nature, I could answer not only as to why and when and wherefore this chicken crossed that road, but also how and where and in what conditions would any other chicken cross any other road. Were I possessed of sufficient force at my own discretion I could impel any chicken to cross any road, and even all of them at the same time. I could do anything, including permanently preventing idiots from asking stupid questions.

Hegelian : The chicken is the foremost manifestation of Spirit in History. When I saw it from my window crossing victoriously the road, I was suddenly overcome by a sublime fascination. It seemed to me as if the whole force and grandeur of the Universe concentrated itself in that center of the world that was Mme. Brukhart's last remaining chicken crossing the Pfahlplatzchen. Crossing the road, the chicken objectified Itself completely. This event constituted the end of history : the self-knowledge of the chicken became absolute conscience, and Niethammer lost all his business papers at sea.

Ficthean : The act of the Chicken crossing the road is not a property of existence, nor a consequence of it, but rather the very existence of the Chicken is the accident and the effect of its road crossing. The Chicken stands in stark opposition to the Non-Chicken. The Chicken and the Non-Chicken do not exist separately, but both together constitute the Pure Chicken, as a manifestation of all that is. The road is merely a spatial determination of the Non-Chicken.

Berkeleyan : The chicken and the road are mere projections of my mind, and I in turn am naught but an idea in the Divine Picklejar. There can be no demonstration had of whether chickens cross the roads, because there will never be any proof that either chickens or their roads exist anywhere other than in my own mind. That's all there is -- and should I perish, that chicken inquis and the road traversed will be extinguished back into the Jar with me.

Marxist : The chicken was capitalist and individualist. Crossing the road, it abandoned the protective interior of the collective coop and set towards bourgeois ideals. Across the road it will sell its own eggs as common merchandise, but will never receive in any exchange the actual equivalent of its own eggs, thereby losing control over the very byproducts of its existence. In the end, the chicken will become alienated from itself, and the eggs it produces will become the patrimony of the owners, who will thus expand their notional capital by imposing their domination on the chicken through oppression.

Husserlian : The apodictic evidence of road or chicken are mere chimerae. I aimed to consciously refer the chicken, because my mind is always obsessed with being the conscience of something, even of an ordinary chicken, that refuses to give itself to me fully, but only offers up fragments of itself, through incomplete perspective. Therefore should I catch one day a chicken I will put it in quotes and burrow myself into deep intuitive contemplation of chicken plucked of all that wasn't essentially it. Thus I will obtain the noematic core of chicken, that something keeping a chicken chicken irrespective of whether it should cross the road or not, whether it lays feathers or has eggs or any other accident. That is what matters. Why would some chicken like all others cross some road or other is not within my interests.

Heideggerian : The essence of the chicken is non-chickly. Deeper than the inquiry as to a chicken crossing the road is the questioning of the chicken's origin. The antique world denoted through "gallinacea" (g-alius-niqui) the extracting-from-the-state-of-disallignment-with-the-self. If we were to analyze existentially the chickenly Dasein we will arrive at the deep meaning, occulted over the passage of time and through consecutive reinterpretation, of the factual-road-crossing. Under the burden of terrible Angst, the chicken crossed the road to place itself into the clearing of Existence, where solace occurs, which is to say the resolution of the gallinacean state.

Popperian : The chicken was a victim of a totalitarian regime, defined through its imposition of an improper dichotomy between the doable and the undoable upon the unwilling subject of the chicken. By witnessing the chicken crossing the road we have in fact witnessed the birth of an open society.

Camusian : The chicken crosses the road kicking around a little pebble, then proceeds in the same manner backards. In fact, the chicken's been doing this for millennia, probably because it had the audacity to cross the injunctions of the gods. The road itself is not a rational road. At every moment of its effortful existence, the chicken in fact confronts the chasm of absurdity. And yet, in spite of the irrationality of its activity, and the general dearth of sense and meaning, the chicken can not run itself into a bus, because that act would reify the pebble overcoming it. We must therefore think the chicken happy.

Levinasian : Seeing the rooster on the other side of the road, the chicken considered the problem of Alterity. The nature of the rooster is disjunct from the nature of the object-world, which can be interiorized through understanding. Were the chicken not to cross (transcend) the road, the chicken would have missed the significance of the Other in its character of an Altogether Different. It intuited that the relation between it and rooster is accessible foremost through presence and only secondarily through cluckanguage. On the other side of the road, the chicken enshrined a face-to-face rapport with the rooster. The chicken understood that the Self, both its own and the rooster's, is ineffable because it is par excellence clucking, whereas the other, due to its differing character, can never be possessed.

Foucaultian : The chicken felt the need to exit the system, probably due to the system's manifest intolerance to the chicken's latent homosexual tendencies. Depersonalized, de-subjectified and anonymous, the chicken understood that all the values organising life in the coop were myths, self-generated from within the socially, historically and culturally conditioned epistheme by the leaders of the coop in question. Seeing that chickens were no longer plucked or scalded in the public space, it lived for a moment the illusion of freedom. Had it understood that neither the power nor the manifestation of the power of the elite ever disappeared, but merely became invisible, diffuse and fragmentary, maybe it would not have crossed the road. In any case, it will be sought, caught, brought back, punished and surveilled. Were the conclusion be reached that it can not be re-habilitated, it will be sacrificed through purely economic means.

Freudian : During its childhood, the chicken was sexually abused by the father-rooster, through assisting to a dramatic scene where the mother hen sexually interracted with him, or perhaps through his mere presence. Repressed into the subconscious, that seminal event became a subconscious driver which, manifesting itself to the ego in the shape of an irrepressible desire, led the chicken to crossing the road. The curative approach is to hypnotize the chicken, and through psychanalysis render the trauma back to the conscious plane. This way, the chicken will never again cross the road, or at the very least if crossing the road it will be aware of the reason.

Wittgenstein : Could you shut the fuck up already ?