Tag: study

The Boss

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You can’t study philosophy without dipping your toes into a little morality, or shall we say moralaki. Likely it’ll end up being a lot of morality but the Greek diminutive will make easing in a little less intense. Perhaps ‘The Boss‘ is not the ideal title either; sticking with the Greek theme the boss of western philosophy would likely be Plato or his invention Socrates were a poll ever conducted, and even from a contemporary stance it may not be the man in the picture either, but while reading him now it feels there could only ever be one god of philosophy and it must be Nietzsche. Yet to describe him as such would suggest totally missing the point of his ideas, and while Übermensch – a higher person – would make more sense he never saw himself as one of his own creations, which leaves us with some kind of depressed and insane rock star. Let’s just say he’s a big deal around these parts. So module two, Nietzsche and more precisely his Genealogy of Morality.

It’s early days and I’m just getting my head around some of his concepts. Seemingly he’s not a massive fan of Judeo-Christian morality. It gives power to the slave morality by putting a flawed value on weak concepts likes meekness. He believed this type of morality had a detrimental effect upon the advancement of the the higher person as it thwarted the development of human excellence. Too much focus was put on uplifting the weak herd at the expense of the potential of the higher person. In a sense the need to live by the rules of a morality which pushed empathy, selflessness and equality risked the higher person not fulfilling their potential, as they were forced to reign in their natural instincts. Think of some people who we class as great people, innovative genius’ perhaps, and without a doubt there will be an aspect of them and their single minded drive that falls foul of our sense of the good. Nietzsche’s point is seemingly that we shouldn’t force them to live by our own moral code, this universal moral code of good and evil, because people are quite clearly not universally the same. On the surface it is pretty clear to see why people dislike his non-egalitarian beliefs but it’s not a stretch to say there is an argument to be had for it. How much will become clear as I go through the module.

The influence of the great thinkers throughout history can only really become clear when you see which ideals of theirs have become commonplace within our general thinking. How many times have people reassuringly told themselves or others that if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger, well Nietzsche came up with that. He believed in the importance of the journey, especially if it involved a little suffering, and undoubtable saw little value in just being given the answer without having to work on it. Much of his life revolved around suffering, at the age of four he watched his Lutheran pastor father die from a devastating brain disease, and it was in these moments of suffering throughout his life he did much of his best work. It can’t be a coincidence that considering his own experience he believed moralities that held suffering to be a bad thing, to be so deeply flawed. Suffering for Nietzsche was a good and he put it to the test enough times.

He said without doubt his work would be misused in the future and seemingly the Nazi’s proved him right. They had a little help from his sister who edited and published some of his notebooks after his death to make him look as equally anti-Semitic and nationalistic as she was. While she may have been an old lady at the time she was a total Adolf fan-girl and he was more than happy to warp Nietzsche’s words to justify some Aryan master race bullshit. The truth was that Nietzsche hated nationalism as much as religion, yet spent the first half of the twentieth century mis-represented as a Nazi. Yet that’s the issue, as I said earlier he is very much open to interpretation to the point one esteemed Nietzsche expert will say he was anti-Semitic and other that he wasn’t. Who am I to know really after a few papers and a couple of podcasts.

Nietzsche spent the last eleven years of his life completely insane and died in 1900. In the late 1880’s just before being committed he wrote much of his best work. He wrote ferociously at this point almost as if he knew what was coming and just wanted to get his words and ideas out before it was too late. It isn’t a stretch to suggest there is a fine line between genius and crazy and seemingly Nietzsche lost that battle. He seems interesting though and while I have already made far more notes that this little introductory ramble would suggest, I look forward to attempting to really form an opinion on him as right now I’m likely just to be repeating the words of others if I try to make sense of the man. I’ll come back next time with something a little more detailed and philosophical, or at least an attempt at such.

The Emotions

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The emotions eh, who’d have them. Well most people actually. The suffering and torment of cognitive and physiological reactions that make no sense to us what so ever. More learned people than I am believe similar to me and equally more learned people think differently to me. When something makes little sense trying to form your own argument while being aware of such varied and different ideas simply makes the head spin further. Yet this is philosophy, finding a (temporary) point when you think you get it and being able to bask in your own glorious comprehension gives the self doubt it’s own value and makes it all worth it. And doubt I did, and momentarily bask a little too but only a little of course.

The module is now complete and while there was a lack of posts in here on my progress, or as a means to achieve progress, it feels right before moving on to the next module to cover a little of what I think I learnt. I won’t necessarily give an overview of the Philosophy of Emotions as that is too much of a task and there is not enough space or I suspect appetite for it, mine mainly, but will go over the question I answered for the assignment.

‘Being horrified by the events of the Rwandan genocide or Jewish holocaust justifies you in believing that those events were horrendous atrocities.’ Discuss.

Seems pretty straightforward I hear you say but what if you were to reframe the question using kittens instead as the object. It doesn’t seem quite so justified then, they’re only kittens and kittens are cute, genocide is quite clearly not. Ultimately the question is one of whether our emotions can justify our beliefs. For better or worse I argued not. They may influence our beliefs and help us to understand our beliefs, or help us understand whether our beliefs need deeper contemplation, but they’re on the whole too unreliable to justify what we believe about something. We form our beliefs, I argued, through a continually evolving conscious and unconscious process of reflection. Arguably this would be a form of conditioning, but it also comes down to experience and knowledge amongst other things. As our emotional intelligence and maturity increases, if it does, then we can trust our emotions more. Paradoxically, and this is a new thought, the more they were to increase surely the less likely we would be to trust our emotions as we became more aware of their unreliability and the importance of reasoned reflection. Our ability to use reason is important, and while our reasoning may be flawed for whatever reason it is still integral for the formation of our beliefs. Ultimately I believe kittens to be adorable and genocide horrendous because having learnt about them, what they are as conceptual objects, as well as the conceptual attributes of adorability and horrific, my reasoning relates each object with their corresponding attributing value.

There’s likely more but seeing as I’m not emotionally strong enough to torture myself by reading though my rushed and muddled assignment, whatever other points I made have seemingly drifted off into the ether. Having taken an eternity to get my head around the topic, there wasn’t a great deal of time to complete the essay and while I haven’t got the mark back yet, I’m not one for thinking and telling everyone I’ve done poorly while getting a good result. The most frustrating thing, although it’s also a real positive, is that I know I can do better and don’t believe I did myself justice. We use this and make sure we do better the next time but at the very least appreciate the fact it wasn’t as an unconquerable field of philosophic thought as it felt. In a perverse kind of way, I think I actually kind of enjoyed it in the end. Or at the very least had some kind of an emotional reaction that helped me form such a belief, or perhaps I will after a little more reflection.

BR#5 – Frankenstein

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From time to time as adults we throw a little classic in to our reading. The kind of story that spawned others and has passed the test of time. The kind you could have studied at school. That last one in a way makes it sound unappealing considering we don’t always look back on the book we studied at school fondly. Frankenstein though isn’t one of them, it’s one of the ones you wish you had studied at school. It has so many of those moments you could see yourself analysing in a class, it has layers. It is also very simple and obvious. A main uncomplicated but unbelievable story. Take it at face value and that’s it.

The writing feels like it could be updated although it shouldn’t ever happen. When things are translated they are also updated in language and in a subtle way style. A book written in English will forever be ageing. I would love to know how Tolstoy sounds to a Russian than he is in the latest translation I read. In that sense I can tell it was written in the early nineteenth century. While that’s not a problem it will be one day.

Shelley approaches all sorts of ideas and concepts throughout the book. They are too numerous to go into detail in just five hundred words but she discusses justice, the role of god, she approaches ideas of personhood and what is is to be a person, our understanding of ethics, even existentialism but this was long before it had become an ism. This is an entire philosophy course for a year covered. There are many essays written on it. I imagine it’s a common understanding too that there is the potential schizophrenia angle which relates in a way to ideas of duality in the book. They need each other, the monster never tries to hurt him and when he dies the monster goes off to die too. Did Frankenstein give a part of himself in the creation of the monster. In a way the monster shows more of what we call humanity than Viktor Frankenstein who in the end becomes a monster himself in a sad way. In a contemporary sense we could think of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The monster has not only an ability to learn but has self-consciousness, the ultimate stage of creating free thinking robots. I could go on and on.

Quite interestingly the book has nearly as interesting a back story. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the revolutionary thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Shelley. In the ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816 when they were visiting the exiled and infamous poet and writer amongst many things, Lord Byron in Switzerland, the weather forced them to stay indoors and Byron came up with the idea they all wrote horror stories. In a dream over the next few nights the story of Frankenstein and his monster came to Mary Shelley.

Along with all this and not to be forgotten it’s actually quite a good story. You don’t just read it to learn and look smart, you read it to enjoy. I assume they teach it in schools still and if they don’t can’t think why. It’s so full of everything it would be a waste. I ended it really feeling happy that I had just read a good book. We all should, we may just learn a little eloquence and humanity from a monster.

An Unknown Transition Into The Unknown

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I’m not someone who feels the need to play music all the time. I enjoy silence. I enjoy podcasts. I enjoy music. But a balance between them is vital, as is my mood on their regularity. I have been listening to some music for the last half hour while I was online and avoiding writing this. When I see people listening to music and being able to study, read or write, basically concentrate, I have often wished this was something I was capable of. The words coming on this page would be inspired by the sounds around me but I can’t focus and not even one word follows.

I was listening to some dub and desiring a party or a festival. These last few years have been an interesting transition in life. Everyone goes though different chapters in their lives, even if they marry at 18, never divorce, never leave their home town and keep the same job, there will still be chapters within this. Mine have been slightly more adventurous and I can recognise periods when I wanted nothing but travel and others when I felt a need to rest for example. It took about five years from my first desires for rest to get to were I am now but life is all so extreme that I’m still longing for adventure equally alongside some kind of ‘normal’ existence. ‘Normal’ is a strange and inexplicable concept, which is why I won’t even try explaining what I mean by it and I know my version of it will still be a long way from the man with many chapters in the same town above. But fuck, right now having listened to a little music and recollected a few memories, there is a part of me that wants to put down the ‘normal’ so much and pick up the alternate once more.

I have also come to appreciate this life though recently and value the people living it far more than I ever did at the height of being a prick in my more adventurous moments. I’ve come to realise there is as much value in this existence as one lived with daily excitement and variety, it’s different value but it’s still value regardless, as it too is exciting and varied regardless. That doesn’t stop me wanting to drop it all and jump on a boat heading somewhere wild and exotic though but I doubt that will ever leave me. Equally this current existence is an extreme in the other direction as I know the ideal will be somewhere in the middle. I only meant to come here for a few months to help a mate out and it’s been nearly six months. He’s taking great pleasure in reminding me a few more months and I’ll have broken my longest job record. With this pizza takeaway now being a thing and coronavirus being an even bigger thing it seems I may still be sitting in this same seat in four months trying to understand what the drink in my hand represents.

Is this now life? Well it’s the current version and I’m starting to learn enough from it that interesting things happen when we roll with whatever comes up. In a way that’s a freedom more real than any enforced search for a liberty that ultimately becomes constrictive. There are always things out of our control which make us jump between paths, enduring the grey transitional space between, but once we’re actually on it; life never really seems all that bad. Quite often the opposite. It has become clear to me recently that we’re owed nothing, their is no destiny, that desires will never happen if we wait for them to and ideas of fairness miss the harsh unknown nature of life. It is an irrational and absurd world. Nothing bad has happened but seemingly I’ve managed to understand the knowledge I previously had and it all seems to make a little more sense. This is why discipline is necessary. Why being able to focus the energy to achieve the goal is the only way we can really get things done. Why I’m curious, excited and unsure about what comes next. It’s a little unknown. But then everything always has been.

Different Shades Of Grey

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It is interesting what methods people use to work or be creative. I remember I used to know someone who when studying preferred to be in busy noisy areas as it allowed her to concentrate; so the cafe section of the library over the quiet floor. I’ve often known people to play music while they study as it seems to help them focus and there are numerous studies backing this up. I have tried with classical music, which is usually the style of choice in these research, and found that of all types of sounds I could listen to it is probably the one that helps the most. It has something to do with the affect it has on your brain or something like that, the internet could probably inform me accurately but I am lazy to check. Certain music though I can’t study or write with and that is when I can hear words because I find them distracting as I follow along. In reality though I’m a silence man. I wonder what it is that leads one person to favour one way over another. I can only imagine it has something to do with upbringing and the environment you grew up studying in. My inability to study and use any possible excuse to be distracted probably led me to my silent necessities and I imagine someone who grew up in a noisy domestic environment but still studied around this probably searches this out.

That is the setting though but what about using certain things to assist us. I’ve met many a sophisticated wanker who loves the affect a glass of red wine has alongside a good book or while scribbling down words. He takes a sip out of his cup of red wine before continuing. Certainly though too much alcohol only hinders this process but I remember reading something a few years back that suggested the best combination was to have an alcoholic drink to relax the mind subsequently allowing it to be more creative and then a cup of coffee to give it the energy and focus required to implement the creativity. It’s not impossible to see some validity in this. I sometimes enjoy a little smoke and then attempt to write down some thoughts, but I could never study this way as the mind is all over the place. Equally if I am attempting to write something that I don’t want to be illegible nonsense despite appearing to be wisdom at the time then I really couldn’t smoke. I could though play the guitar as I just like to mess around on that and do it for the pleasure in the moment not with the intention of attempting to create anything for anyone else. I don’t though feel the desire to pick it up when sober so definitely smoking helps this.

It’s just interesting because everybody is so different and requires such different surroundings to achieve the same end result. We are also so varied in the way differing things affect us and how we manage to respond to them in regards alternate versions of output. Maybe I should have a smoke one day and try writing something on here, that could be an interesting addition, it may also be pretty obvious but also magically creative. It is just fascinating to see how different everyone is and depressing to see how we try and force everyone into boxes or group them all into either black or white. Education has a lot to do with this and it’s always very interesting to meet people who have been through alternative types of schooling because they have such different ways of resolving issues that arise. Time has many answers, hopefully we someday stumble upon the one which allows us to discover whichever shade of grey we are in between.