A Simple (Perhaps Inconsequential) Claim

I hope to try and write an essay soon.

The claim is simple: We will make better decisions if we use our mental energy to understand than if we use it to plan.

What exactly this means, I'm not sure.

Why exactly it is important, I'm not sure.

The starting point, however, is Heidegger and John Gray.

Both of them believed that Modern European/Western culture had been overrun by the scientific impetus to dominate and control nature, and that this scientific drive had essentially hollowed out Western culture, destroying its foundations.

My notes.

I share them with you:

10/31 - 11:23 am

- Felt narrative vs. Thought narrative

- Mindfulness essay about the role of consciousness

- The task is to use consciousness properly. That is, to understand and not to plan.

- Said narrative is more planned, more willfully willed, demands to be created. While felt narrative demands only to be understood.

2:05 pm

Thesis is simple: Good decisions come from accurate understanding, no good plans.

- Just as Dwelling precedes Building, so to understanding precedes planning.

- This finds its expression in Collingwood's philosophy. History 'understands' while science seeks to dominate.

- We free ourselves from a feeling by narrating it accurately.

-  This goes against what Heidegger calls out as Western thought's tendency to understate the thing - The overstatement of subjectivity and the skepticism towards reality.

- Support for all this comes from art, from zen, from history. From Collingwood, from Heidegger.

- The whole thing can be situated with John Gray and Heidegger's concerns about science, technology, and nihilism.

- History, Art, and Zen all orient themselves towards another way of thinking, another way of willing.

- This writing is about getting closer to that other way of thinking.

End notes.

I will begin trying to tease all of this out.

What kinds of statements must it involve?

Clearly it must involve claims about modern misconceptions about mind: IE I must try to show that mind does not make rational decisions, but that we have such faith in rationality because of our political-cultural inheritance (The Enlightenment, etc). I will have to discuss the need to pull ourselves out of these misguided ways of thinking.

What I'll essentially have to do is begin with Heidegger and Gray, justify their claims that we are living in a time in which Western culture's misguided attitude is ruining itself, and then propose Collingwood's 'historical morality' as a way out.

In June I intended to write an essay on historical morality and I never got to it because I stressed myself out by not wanting to apply to graduate school.

Perhaps I can now return to that work. I have a bit more reading to draw on since then, thankfully.

I miss essay writing.