• Tag Archives philosophy

  • Leaving Denver

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                          Waxing Cold Moon

    The decompression has begun.  My suitcase awaits only my dopp kit to be ready to go.  A shower, final packing and I’ll be ready.  Ready, that is, to drop off the rental car before noon then spend three hours at the Denver Airport before my 3:00 pm flight back to the Twin Cities.  When I arrrive around 5:45, I’ll still have one more leg to go:  Super Shuttle, in a ride on which I will be the last one delivered home.  All in all it will probably be between 7 and 8 hours before I get home after leaving the hotel.

    I’m reading a book called Stealing the Mona Lisa, discussing it comes next, at a gathering of docents, dining at the Namaste Restaurant.  I would describe it as a difficult book, written by a psychoanalyst for whom style seems an afterthought and clarity a bother.  Having said that though, it is a profound book, digging deep into the meaning of art and, surprisingly, into the meaning of art’s absence.

    Why I mention it this morning is an aha from the section I read over breakfast.  In describing psychoanalytical attitudes toward drives the author, Darian Leader, makes clear that sublimation is NOT a replacement for the act of sex, fucking as he so baldly puts it, rather it is an expression of the individuals need to fulfill the same desire as sex fulfills, that is, in Freudian terms, a return to the pleasure of direct bodily manipulation, pleasures lost as we adapt to cultural definitions of who and what we are.

    Also, and most interesting to me, for Lacan, drives are an attempt to get to the state Freud describes as pleasuring the body, but Lacan describes as The Thing, a vast emptiness that exists just outside our capacity to reach.  Therefore our drives are attempts not to fill this emptiness, but to reach it, to find it, to discover what was lost when we became creatures of culture.

    Lacan’s emphasis on emptiness as the defining state for our humanness, and as a state forever beyond our reach, yet felt and desired in every moment, struck me as a link to both existentialism on the one hand and Taoism on the other.

    In existentialism we admit the reality of this emptiness, admit it’s definition of life as meaningless, then proceed to construct our life both in spite of and because of this emptiness.

    In Taoism, we recognize the creation of the universe to have come from emptiness, the Tao, and we also recognize it as a vivifying impulse behind each moment.  It may be that Lacan’s more tortured and dark view of emptiness as The Thing exactly misses Taoism’s great point about emptiness as the very reason for a door, a cup, a vase.

    There is, too, one other important thread that I don’t find so far in the book and that the is the realm of rationalist philosophy.  In this idea we construct our reality through sensory data, but our sensory data is not reality in the same way that a map is not the territory.  This means, according to Kant, that we can never know reality, the ding an siche, the thing-in-itself.  Sounds pretty Lacanian to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Logicomix

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                           Waning Wolf Moon

    Sigh.  The Vikings.  Going to the Cardinals for a big game has proved unhappy for us.  Again.  I don’t even know the final score because I turned it off with 6 minutes to go.  Not a pretty sight.

    Logicomix is a great read.  If you love philosophy and logic.  Which I do.  I had forgotten my passionate affair with logic until reading this graphic novel.  In my freshman year of college I took Symbolic Logic from Professor Larry Hackestaffe, most famous for wandering the main yard of Wabash College with a six-pack of Budweiser fastened to his belt through one of the plastic can holders.

    This was logic in the formal sense with proofs and theorems, logical symbols and head breaking chains of reasoning.  This was my second semester in college.  The first had been tough because German and I did not see eye to eye and I dropped it to avoid failing.  After my valedictory year at Alexandria-Monroe High School, that defeat stung.  The grammar and writing guy was also not impressed with my work, giving me a C for the first term.

    Symbolic Logic came along because philosophy was what had been missing in my life up till then, intellectual rigor, unafraid, thought seeking understanding at the most basic, essential levels, colorful characters like Heraclitus, Socrates, Aristotle, William of Occam bursting upon the stage, contradicting each other, going one step further or pulling others one step back.  God, it was exciting.  That was the first semester at Wabash, the same semester as Freshman English and German.

    In history and philosophy I did outstanding work, so I dove into them the next semester with a second course in the history of philosophy and the course in Symbolic Logic.  It was hell at first.  The kind of intellectual rigor required for logical reasoning can bring on headaches.  The night before the mid-term I stayed in the library past midnight, my book open, pencil working out proofs, scratching out false starts, feeling dismayed.  It was German all over again.  I didn’t get it, wouldn’t get it.  This was impossible stuff.

    I do not remember the problem, but I do remember the moment when, like a lightning bolt, it came to me.  Like Moses parting the Red Sea, the path to logical clarity opened up.   I did very well in that course and learned something about persisting in an academic area that at first seemed impenetrable.  Intuition was a part of my learning style.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities Minnesota 📎and tagged

  • Estranged

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                   Waxing Blood Moon

    Tomato picking and compost bin rebuilding, the bulk of the morning.  To keep our young pups from celebrating life by knocking down the straw bales out of which I designed this compost bin a wire fence now encircles the bales, with an other, shorter wire fencing material for a gate.

    The day started chilly, but has warmed up to 69.  It’s one of those fall days when the Andover H.S. Marching Band can be heard carrying pompoms and the thud of padded football players in its wake.  As this sound comes across the fields of vegetables and the cul de sacs between our home the football field, I become at once both younger and older, thrust back to Alexandria High School and Friday night football while by necessity comparing that time with the present.  It’s not an unpleasant feeling, just a bit strange.

    Caught episode 1 of a Harvard class on Justice taught by Michael Sandel.  It’s well worth the time.  Sandel’s teaching style combines the Socratic/law school method of hypotheticals with analysis of responses.  The engagement of the students makes it obvious Sandel is a teacher as well as a philosopher.  I only want to comment on one, striking observation he made about philosophy.  “Philosophy,” he said, “is not about something you don’t know; it is about making you look at what you know from the perspective of a stranger.  Philosophy creates an estrangement from our own experience.”  This is so true, as is his follow-on comment that once you gain this insight you cannot go back to the naive state.

    Every hour of every day I see my self and the world through the lens of philosophical analysis, the lens fitted over an anthropological  camera body.  The two together make the world a strange and exotic experience at every turn.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Humanities Memories 📎and tagged

  • The History of Ideas

    Posted on by Charles 2 Comments

    75  bar falls 29.90  0mph ESE dew-point 60 sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The mayfly lives only one day.  And sometimes it rains.    George Carlin, RIP

    Freud, Marx and Hegel expelled from school.  The article to which the first sentence here links refers to the strange disappearance from the college curriculum of these three seminal thinkers in psychology, economy and philosophy.

    Here’s an e-mail I sent to its author:

    Hello, Mr. Jacoby,

    In 1965 I began the study of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, moved onto Plato and Aristotle, and then on toward the present.  The early study of philosophy excited me so much I chose it as my major.  The methodology, the history of ideas, has remained with me as the most important intellectual tool I have.  When I switched schools, I entered a school dominated by logical positivists.  The most important and interesting questions of philosophy, questions which mattered to individuals and to public discourse did not matter to this department.  I left philosophy behind, sad that it refused to engage matters of ontology, values and beauty. 

    I write to you because I felt then what the gist of your Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests is a contemporary problem.  It is a problem with its roots, I believe, in the logical positivist and linguistic analysis movements which tried to align philosophy with the scientific method.  There would have been nothing wrong with this as an adjunct discipline, but the arrogant dismissal of metaphysics, for example, for reliance on what I would call a shallow epistemology gutted philosophy of its humanist core.

    This same attempt to bring economics and psychology into the scientific realm, and sociology too for that matter, has identical problems.  The quantifiable in these disciplines is fine and produces important insights, but, again, the core of these disciplines, with the possible exception of economics, is humanistic, not scientific. 

    Your article reminded me of those long ago days when I moved on to anthropology.  The dismissal of historical perspective leaves us with the need to reinvent all those old arguments and to approach their resolution without the aid of some of humankinds most creative thinkers.  Too bad.

    As I grow older, history looms ever higher and higher in my intellectual pursuits.   As I said in the e-mail to Mr. Jacoby, the history of ideas, learned during classwork for my philosophy major, has informed everything  I do.  I gravitate naturally at this stage of my life toward the historical record.  Where did that word originate?  How has it been modified over time?  Where did this artistic movement come from and what questions did it try to answer?  What are the roots of the so-called New Age thinking?  Why are not its current proponents interested in its intellectual history?  What is the source of liberal and conservative political thought and how does their history help us modify them to fit present needs?  Why is the issue of climate change such a problematic one?  What in the history of humanities relationship to the natural order created such a situation?

    These are the questions that get me up in the morning, that drive my decision making about what to do with my time and how to direct my own work.

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Memories Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Sweet, Honest, Funny, Heartbreaking

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    65  bar steady 29.75  2mph NW dew-point 62  Summer night

    First Quarter of the Thunder Moon

    Peanut butter.  Never thought of it as a problem food, but it seems to have entered that category for me.  Makes my tummy hurt.  Darn it.

    The slippery slope of cell phone life.  Tonight I entered the phone numbers of all the Woolly Mammoths into my cell phone.  They are the first non-family numbers.  Each day I draw closer and closer to becoming a cell phone user.  Since it has not yet become the electronic leash I did not want, I don’t mind, but I have this sneaking suspicion that as it becomes more of a common place in my life, it will move in that direction.

    Watched Stranger Than Fiction over the last two days.  This is a trippy movie.  It is meta-fiction, a story about fiction intruding on reality and fiction in turn altering reality.  If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean.  Like Existenz, which I mentioned a couple of days ago, it plays with epistemology and, in a strange (trippy) way with ontology.  The Truman Show, even the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Vanilla sky dance on the same floor.  Will Ferrel was brilliant, I thought he gave an Oscar worthy performance, sweet, honest, funny, heartbreaking.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld 📎and tagged