Corn, Turnip, Asparagus

Well, finally got the internet installed in my apartment. Gave me something to do for the four days of constant rain that we received. Though, I did brave the elements on Sunday for a conference on Merleau-Ponty. Was an awesome conference, with many insights onto M-P, especially on passages from his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. Had about 9 PhDs giving papers, from Boston College to Harvard to University of Freiburg. So, all in all, well worth venturing into the rain. On a sidenote, via one of the papers (given by John Sallis) I was introduced to the art of Paul Klee. I would encourage everyone to check out some of his artwork, it's very good to say the least.

I have also been trying to get my paper for my Philosophy of Imagination class underway, as I have all of these ideas bouncing around in my head and I need to write them down before they bounce out of an ear and escape into the ether. I did manage to write a few lines the other night, thus beginning the path that I think the introduction will fall, and thus creating the road that the entire paper will traverse. I am working on writing the paper on Cain's legacy via the revolutionary use of his imagination, and use the Cain and Abel murder story as the beginning of ethics qua imaginary ethics, or primordial ethics. I begin with a quote from Nietzsche his Gay Science:

“ Good and evil are the prejudices of God” - said the snake.

To enter into the realm of the moral, to discuss good and evil in light of a past event, or the possibility of a future consequence, to conjecture on the implication of a particular action in a particular time and in a particular context, is to enter into the realm of the ethical and the historical: both ethics and history find their foundation in the imaginative, in man's central position in the midst of imagined omni-possibility, in the necessity for man to simultaneously live and create. For this is the fate of man as seen through the foci of imagination: our doom is to create our future. We can become immortal in what makes us ultimately human: the fact that we exist historically allows our actions to become our immortal scions and through action and consequence we attain an immortality that is separate from the mere notion of immortality as not dying.


Again, this is just some ideas that I have, and I wrote this more stream-of-consciousness than actually planned and carefully constructed. It is of course, subject to change, but I think that it's a good beginning, or at least fertile ground upon which to plant a good beginning.

More as it develops.

--Philip

Holy Rattlesnakes

Well, so much, and so little has happened since my last post. I have since: contracted and gotten over a cold, become addicted to the US version of The Office, found a Blockbuster (about 4 miles away) and started exercising (jogging a couple miles a day).

First things first. The average temperature here has been around 55 degrees in the last week; it reached the highest at 70 degrees and lowest at 42. Needless to say, my Texas immune system hasn't adapted to this kind of climate so I got a minor head cold. But, 4 days of rest and lots of fluids have nixed that cold. I am also signed up to get a flu shot, and encourage everyone else to do the same, as my experience with the flu last February was terrible.

The original version of The Office, starring Ricky Gervais, is a classic; but. in being a classic it is untouchable in its place in history, and yet is worthy of homage in the greatest form of flattery: imitation. Now, the US version of The Office has similar components, and yet is an entirely different beast. I think that I may be one of the last people on the earth to have watched the US version, but I just started last Thursday or so. I have since made it through the first 3 seasons, and half of the fourth season. It's a wonderful show, and while it lacks in the utter despondency in the "boss" character, it makes up for it in the depth of the supporting characters, and the contradictions that are posited in the main cast. Jim is ultimately the most likable person ever, and yet has an almost non-existent social life outside of his job; Michael is one of the most inept, self-unaware, irresponsible people and yet he has managed to attain his position of Regional Manager and be the most successful salesman ever for Dunder-Mifflin. Pam obviously has talent in her art and a measure of drive, as she has a college degree and is fully aware that she could do better, yet she is fully comfortable keeping the lowest position at her place of work. And Dwight, he is overtly a fascist, a nerd, and openly takes survival of the fittest literally, yet he hero-worships the 'least fit' Michael, and the biggest problem that he encounters is an emotional problem, and though he tries to stay aloof, he yearns to share his problems with others, and yet creates a facade in order to maintain his facade that he created by allowing for the first facade...Anyways, the UK show vs. the US show is like Fight Club the book vs. Fight Club the movie: the original is seminal and classic, and yet the re-make takes the spirit of the original and re-creates a vision that stands on its own. On a side note, I think it's interesting that both B.J. Novak (Ryan Howard the temp) and John Krasinski (Jim Halpert) were both born and raised in Newton, MA, the city where I currently live.

I rented EXistenZ this week, and it was definitely worth seeing: it operates on several levels, but ultimately asks many questions about reality, existence, and our perception of both. So, go rent it! or download it!

I think that I've talked about how it is just more expensive to live here in Boston than in Texas, and I finally got a concrete example that I think all will be able to relate to: frozen pizzas. If memory serves me correctly Tony's Pizzas (not Totino's) cost around 1.49 in Kroger's in Texas; well those same pizzas cost 3.19 at Shaw's in Massachusetts; California Kitchen Pizzas cost around 5.00 in Texas, and about 7.99 here in Mass. So yeah, that seems to be about the relative shift for the cost of things here. I would have done beer, but they don't sell the same beer here as in Texas.

Oh, and I am finally getting my internets installed this Sunday, so expect more frequent posts! Or dread them, or ignore them, whichever you already do. I will still write them.

Odd...

Kind of busy at the moment, but I thought I would make a quick post about an odd occurrence that I witnessed this morning. I was leaving the restroom in the library this morning when this guy bursts through the door and then proceeds to look in every stall. Needless to say, there was no one in any of the stalls or I think that this would have been even stranger. Anyways, he looks in all the stalls, looks at me, chuckles to himself, then takes a drink out of one of the sink faucets. Then he just walks out. I mean, what the hell is going on? Anyhow, that was it, but I thought that that was enough.

Anyways, back to our respective days. I will have a more voluminous post next time dealing with irony, or at least the etymological connotations of irony (I am hoping that I can turn the idea of wonder and Socratic irony into my term paper for my Plato class).

Imagining Being

Well, the weekend is just about over and it's been pretty good. I enjoy Virginia: seeing my family, being part of my grandfather's wedding, drinking Yuengling, driving on wide roads, watching cable TV...yeah it's been good, but the drive sucks, and unfortunately, I have to make that same drive again in about 8 hours. Pictures of the weekend, family bonding, my month-old niece, and the wedding will follow soon.

I'm a bit too tired and drunk right now to really write anything, but needless to say I have been thinking a lot about context and relation. In philosophy grad school one has to kind of, well, have a philosophy. I know what mine is, and it is mostly still just a feeling, or the thought of a thought, but soon I will have it encapsulated into a cogent statement. Needless to say it deals with ideas of primordial ethics, frameworks, urges, localized reality, postmodernity, and cell phones. So, stay tuned and I hope to soon have something either written or at least defined in regards to my own personal philosophy. But as a springboard: I believe that all philosophy is based on ethics and begins with ethics. So, think about that, or comment on that, or ignore that, but in some way let that at least affect your life for a little while.

Also, I am pretty sure that I am going to write my paper in my Philosophy of Imagination class on the Cain and Abel story. I am not going into the whole of Kearney's exposition on imagination or his exigesis on the Hebraic imagination, but my thesis deals with the link between the imagination, alibis, and creativity. It will surely be posted, but not for a few months, you know, when it's written.

Well, I'm going to bed: need to rest before I traverse most of the East coast via highway. Goodnight, good luck, and I hope that your dreams are reflective of the creativity of your imagination and the essence of your being.

Weather

Well, if the leaves changing and the landscapes weren't enough, I finally got the definitive indication that I am in a new meteorological climate: I could see my breath this morning while walking to school! Sure, we got rain the day before yesterday, but this colder weather only came in last night, and doesn't seem to be a function of the rain. Thankfully, I will be getting all of my weather clothes this weekend from Virginia.

I am driving to Virginia for my grandfather's wedding on Sunday. I am really glad to be a part of his wedding, but I must admit that I am not looking forward to 9+ hour drive tonight, and then again next Monday. But, I will get to see my parents and brothers, and extended family that I haven't seen in years. And if I remember, I will take pictures and post them as this will be a rare occurrence in which I will be in a suit (as well as my brothers). So, if any of you get random calls tonight or in the next few days, it's me trying to stay awake while driving 95 south for 550 miles.

On a scholastic note: I got my first problem set back in my Symbolic Logic class, and I made a 96 on it, but I am really not liking this whole formal language business. I tend to start thinking things over, but usually end up overthinking those things. So, a 30 minute exercise took me almost two hours. And I know that the purpose of this class is to differentiate valid arguments from invalid arguments, and the best way to facilitate that is to turn the sentences into equations so that it isn't the meaning that is in question, but the form of the argument. One could then extrapolate these rules to other arguments and better decide an argument's validity. What I have a problem with is this need to purge meaning from a statement and turn it into a variable. While it is always possible to re-translate the variable back into the statement, I don't like this. Part of the adventure of dealing with others is language: implications, subtleties, indicators. These attributes are all lost once converted to symbols. I also think that this is a very weak (semantically) enterprise. One must translate the variable back into the statement, and then analyze the statement to discover the meaning of the word: it's the translation of a translation. If there was one unified language in which all words had one meaning (a la Tower of Babel) then I would have less of a problem of this. To take it even further: English evolved primarily from French and German, both of which were formed from dialects of two other parent languages. There are thousands of years of meaning inherent in any statement and yet logicians would have this reduced to "x." It is a fact that in Philosophy one must have cogent, valid arguments in order to clearly communicate, but does this necessitate a formulaic rendering and logical judgment call? I don't think that it does. Now, I hope that all of my conclusions are based on valid and sound premises, but it seems that if one starts thinking in terms of ONLY thinking logical terms, what happens to epiphany, creativity, error? I know that this argument could easily be torn down, but I don't care, this is how I feel and no logical equation can impart emotion or context. It seems to me that we are prompted to say things based on our personal context, and formalizing the verbal offspring of that context withdraws one from that context, distracts from that context, and makes all arguments fall into two categories: valid or invalid. It is argued that one just needs to translate the variables back into their sentential forms and one has the original argument. And one could also argue that in fact, sentences, words, letters are variables in themselves, pointing to accepted sounds or meanings, but I think that that path leads to a nihilistic, or relativistic view of language and meaning. What I am talking about is the notion of something being "lost in translation." Other than there not always being a semantically equivalent translation from one natural language to another, I think that through the formal process of translating one loses the aforementioned context, and the more that one translates and re-translates the more watered-down the original thought becomes until it is either gibberish, or devoid of any usable content (semantic, emotional, or otherwise).*

So I will continue to take this class, as I have to have the Logic credit, but I won't like it!

Anyhow, I hope you have a wonderful day and that something meaningful happens to you.




*This is not so much an attack on Symbolic Logic as it seems, rather that is just my point of departure to talk about the act of translating as creating an a-contextual version of language.

The Move

I know that I don't have the most extensive audience, but I figured that I would start writing my thoughts here so that I can post to both Facebook and Myspace. Maybe it's vain to think that even more people want to read my ramblings, but I don't mind being vain. Thus, it begins.