Can't Blog.

I can't seem to write on here lately.

I'm working really hard on getting my graduate school personal statement rewritten.

It is really taking it out of me mentally.

I find it exhausting.

I miss the thinking and writing that I've been doing for the last few years.

I love asking, Am I living an artistic life? Am I creating a beautiful existence?

And I stumble upon all kinds of answers.

Most recently I have been thinking about how excellent it is that Schiller defines beauty as a composite concept: something that describes a harmonious unity of morality, emotions, intellect, and so on.

I thought about how the contemplation of beauty is so important because what it really is the silent appreciation of all of those different factors.

Human perception is incredibly loaded. We don't just perceive things in simple ways. We perceive things as expressing thoughts, expressing emotions, expressing morality, expressing insights. There is so much going on in even the simplest glance at an object.

I have also been thinking about the way that thought and emotion are mutually intensifying: as we think more clearly or differently about things we create new emotions for ourselves. Our intellect colors our emotions, and our emotions color our intellect. They support and intensify one another to give rise to this intense artistic experience.

This is why Collingwood defines art as the imaginative expression of emotions yet locates Man's aesthetic capability in thought. Man is not artistic because he is an emotional being, but because he is a thinking being. It is the existence of thought that makes possible the complex and rich emotions that Man then expresses in art.

Oh to live an artistic, expressive life.

Oh to build this fire within myself.

Oh to capture it in an expressible object.

Oh to set the fire free again.

Oh to let it consume my life once more.

Flaming streets flaming tress flaming hearts flaming minds.

Yet I cannot pursue these questions right now.

I must direct my attention to other questions.

The question I have for my graduate work is this: Why is democracy failing in America?

I intend to answer this question historically by asking: What were the institutional relationships that made democracy possible in the first place? What is this historical linking of citizenship, military service, and democratic participation? Does the failing of democracy in America have anything to do with the fact that we have successfully disentangled democratic participation and military service? Is it significant for democracy that now we just pay people to fight our wars? What has this decoupling of military service and the electorate done to democracy?

How are we to be sure that the government will act in the people's interests if the military is now a economically driven tool? If the people were the ones carrying out the States business, and not just a group of employees, would the States actions not more carefully reflect the peoples best interests?

Would the reinstitution of mandatory State service not be a viable form of choice architecture that may help reinvigorate the democratic spirit in America?

Is this country too far gone, too wrapped up in money?

Who knows.

But this is what I'm trying to do with myself these days.

I have no time for the questions that have been occupying me for the past 3 years.

It is time I ask the questions that I know I need to ask.

These, so far, are the most important questions that I can muster about my age.