One of the harsh facts of modern inquiry is the professionalization of the academy. Teachers must become more and more specialized in order to publish or perish and students are increasingly inclined to see their education as one commodity amongst many. And what has this produced? A world of specialists and certificate holders, many of whom have little inclination to encompass a broader sweep of human knowledge or the genealogy of such. The question of where our knowledge originated, and where it seems to be taking us is as little valued today as it is understood. All the while, ideas are used wholesale: for political advancement, for monetary gain, for terror, for destruction. What I regret is that we forget that every idea, which is a habit of thought, was ushered along by a person, and may represent, if we could only spend enough time with it, the one instance of enlightenment that each of us may bring into the world with our fears, our hopes, sufferings and joys. And what a thinking animal is these days seems to concern very few. So people, and their ideas, are shot en masse. And yet each idea has a history like a person: unique, significant, in every way important and remarkable to me. If it were not so, then it would no longer make sense to think or to love.
Archive for April, 2013
Posted in Philosophy on April 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Philosophy on April 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »
How long has it been since we first discovered our biochemical nature? And still the dogma of human exceptionalism continues….
Posted in Philosophy on April 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »
The question I’m coping with is the question that motivated the existentialists: how do we learn to live with loneliness. Being cut off from any noumenal (helpful) reality, how do we live with just ourselves? For example, love, for me, is a noumenon: a beautiful concept of the imagination that can never be directly experienced. How does one live with that?
Posted in Poetry on April 2, 2013| 1 Comment »
Does the experience you are having now
cancel any of those you had before? If no,
then why would you give your thoughts
more contempt than any other part of any other littany?
We humans think thinking is the essence of all,
where we extract such merit that power may bestow,
disdain for endemic villainy.
Yet it seems to me that a kingdom of ends lies not
in any commendable lies.
But in hope which is the house of fire
over a lonely ocean
of quickly thinning ice.
Posted in Philosophy on April 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »
It seems to me that one of the most invalidating experiences of everyday life is the question “how are you?” Because for many of us, if we were to answer the question truthfully, we would be instantly incarcerated for harboring evil desires. At least 50% of the human populace has thoughts that would scare the tar out of the average citizen. This is why when I greet someone, I believe the most compassionate thing I can say to them is simply “hey…whaddup…?” The unanswered question for me these days is…whatever happened to hope? Where does it live. What… is it doing.
Posted in Poetry on April 1, 2013| 1 Comment »
Days of light
As a photographer I have learned to gauge life
in aperture openings and shutter fractions.
8 hours used to run by like silence in the darkroom
before I bought a digital camera.
I played the Cuban music so loud other patrons complained.
But I needed that in order to usher the prints through their development,
referencing the desire which conceived them in the first place.
When I return to a photographed place I am often surprised
by the fact that it exists at all.
In my 2 dimensions it takes on the quality of a tale,
all ends connected to all other ends.
Of course the temptation in art these days is
to relate everything
to everything else, as if the sub-conscious anchor
had already been dropped before I got there.
It’s not a new idea.
Metaphorically speaking the unconscious is nothing
but another combination of f-stops.
A sad journey of light from thing
to film.
Easter Riffing
Posted in Philosophy on April 1, 2013| 3 Comments »
In this time of faith, the concept of god is discussed quite frequently. But discussing god often involves us in intellectual contradiction. For example it is difficult to understand why an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god would allow the slaughter of innocent babies. And yet it happens every day. It is difficult to understand why god allows the compassionate, loving and the kind among us to die and preserves the brutal, the violent and the hateful. We are told that god works in mysterious ways. That he gave humanity free will. That we will never understand his ways. The contradiction is already apparent: we affirm the mystery and the certainty. The mystery of evil and the certainty that we are given free will.
Of course, many will say that it is at just such a point of contradiction that faith has to take over from reason.
But let’s not leap to faith just yet, so that we may see if reason can take us a bit further.
Immanuel Kant proposed a solution to the problem. Kant said that our idea of god is an idea of an absolutely necessary and free being whose actions inevitably manifest its intention, unaffected by the contingencies of material existence. Moreover, he said that such a concept is bound up with our ideas about moral agency which in turn motivates our understanding of good and evil, crime, punishment and merit (as opposed to mere prudence). In short, in order to conceive our own freedom, Kant said we need to think the existence of some sort of cosmically ultimate and necessary type of freedom, and we call this god. And the contradictions that we experience in our discussions of god are a natural consequence of conceptualizing something that can never be had in actual experience. Because no one ever experiences absolute freedom from contingency. Our actions are always subject to external influences of some kind or other. So the idea of god is like the idea of all circles or all natural numbers – a useful notion to poeticize our understanding of life. And, we don’t seem to be able to live without it. But that does not mean that it is actually out there in the world. That which our reason finds unavoidable is not thereby guaranteed existence. Necessity does not imply reality any more than speaking implies knowing.
metonymy4u 