When I'm really ready to write about something it just flies out of me. I can't stop the words from spilling onto the page. Writing, I admit, can be like bleeding.
But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the words don't come out. Sometimes I don't really know how to think about what I want to think about. Sometimes I experience a big tangle of problems, and I am incapable of pulling them apart.
Sometimes I just can't think clearly!
That is how I'm feeling right now. I had intended to finish my essay 'Nihilism, Magic, and Amusement' tonight. But the final section is giving me a lot of trouble. I'm sitting here trying to wrap my head around it. But I can't.
What I'm trying to do is explain why we need to reacquaint ourselves with aesthetic and magical forms of experience. I'm trying to explore why it is that nihilistic culture can only be overcome if we can recover those forms of experience.
The task is properly Collingwoodian: It is to recover a unity of mind that was lost with the creation of modern disciplines.
This is something that needs to take place both for individuals and for communities.
I have all these ideas. My head is dense with them. I can feel them weighing on me.
But I can't seem to pull them apart. I can't form a coherent line of thinking about this idea. I can only wrestle with the fog.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Oh! The Naivete! The Youthful Projects!
Naivete is such an interesting word. Much more interesting when pronounced than when written.
I sound like I'm French.
I worry that I am foolishly dividing myself. All of my reading and writing is philosophical.
Yet I tell myself I will go to graduate school for military history. How silly!
Why not continue my research on the aesthetic existence in graduate school? Why not find programs that will accommodate my interests in aesthetics, morality, and politics?
Because that shit is useless! No one cares about philosophy. Let alone philosophy that is attempting to frame political morality in terms of aesthetics!
The aesthetics of political judgement! HA! We laugh at you!
That is just me laughing at myself from another's eyes.
What to do.
I sure don't know.
But I suspect I am naive in my hopes of lauching entirely new lines of research in graduate school.
Or perhaps that is what graduate school is for!
But the question for me is this: How to carry all of my reading and writing on art, culture, and politics into a meaningful study of citizenship and military service in America since 1973?
Perhaps that is the dissertation!
Orit Halpern sure would be helpful. I suspect. I still need to read her stuff.
Bah!
For now I'm just indulging in my own projects. Doing my own reading and writing. Wandering wherever my inclinations take me.
I sound like I'm French.
I worry that I am foolishly dividing myself. All of my reading and writing is philosophical.
Yet I tell myself I will go to graduate school for military history. How silly!
Why not continue my research on the aesthetic existence in graduate school? Why not find programs that will accommodate my interests in aesthetics, morality, and politics?
Because that shit is useless! No one cares about philosophy. Let alone philosophy that is attempting to frame political morality in terms of aesthetics!
The aesthetics of political judgement! HA! We laugh at you!
That is just me laughing at myself from another's eyes.
What to do.
I sure don't know.
But I suspect I am naive in my hopes of lauching entirely new lines of research in graduate school.
Or perhaps that is what graduate school is for!
But the question for me is this: How to carry all of my reading and writing on art, culture, and politics into a meaningful study of citizenship and military service in America since 1973?
Perhaps that is the dissertation!
Orit Halpern sure would be helpful. I suspect. I still need to read her stuff.
Bah!
For now I'm just indulging in my own projects. Doing my own reading and writing. Wandering wherever my inclinations take me.
Aesthetic Morality. The Minimal Division Of Attention. The Maximum Unity Of Mind.
I continue to situate my thinking at the intersection of art, culture, and politics.
I, however, am beginning to associate myself with the issue of morality. 'Moral philosophy' or whatever. Not the most useful category. But an important one.
The idea of morality and moral action is clearly implicated in my thinking, yet I have failed to use the word. But it seems so obvious!
Because the thing I have been most involved with is the definition and cultivation of an attitude. I have tried to elaborate a style of living, a way of being, and I have tried, so far as possible, to embody that attitude.
Further, I have identified this attitude primarily with aesthetics. By choosing aesthetics as the basis of morality, I was picking up a line of thought that Foucault initiated at the end of his life. "Recent liberation movements," he said in 1983, "suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on" (Foucault Reader, 343). Foucault believed that a new ethics could be found if we were willing to engage in historical study. In particular, Foucault believed that the ancient Greek notion of the 'aesthetics of existence', in which life itself is conceptualized as a work of art meant to be actively created, could be a useful starting point for modern ethics: "Among the cultural inventions of mankind," he argued, "there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot be exactly reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now–and to change it" (Ibid., 349 - 350). For Foucault, the Greek aesthetics of existence was this starting point. It was a technique that we could repeat so as to arrive at something new for ourselves. Morality was somehow to be found in the belief that "everyone's life could become a work of art...." (Ibid.,). Morality, for Foucault, then, had to be found outside of the dominant scientific discourse of our day. And the Greek notion of aesthetics as the basis of morality was his starting point for the elaboration of a new ethics.
This is the idea that I have been most occupied with for the last year and a half. The question of how to constitute a new form of morality. One that finds its primary reference in aesthetics. One that is politically relevant. One that escapes the pressures put on us by modern forms of thought and morality.
My recent inclination towards the language of morality is also influenced by two other factors. First being my new essay that I'm working on, 'Nihilism, Magic, And Amusement', and the fact that I just received a copy of Alasdair MacIntyre's well known book After Virtue: A Study In Moral Theory. John Gray works with MacIntyre in Enlightenment's Wake, claiming that he properly identifies our problem as the collapse of the Enlightenment project. Both Gray and MacIntyre argue that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself, failing to provide any basis for individual or political morality. MacIntyre's conclusion is quite radical: "Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act – and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance" (After Virtue, xviii). Although he references Marxism, his claim reaches far beyond it, aiming at the core of modern Western morality.
This is also Gray's conclusion: Modern attempts to rationally ground morality have failed. The modern project, the project of the Enlightenment, has left us in a state of cultural nihilism. We need a new way to conceptualize morality, we need fresh thought on the moral and political issues our society face. Gray believes that 'humiliated modes of thought found in poetry and mysticism' may be the answer. Foucault believes aesthetics is the answer. Schiller seems to believe that aesthetics is the antidote. Collingwood does too.
My conception of aesthetic morality, the aesthetic existence, is therefore in response to a real cultural-political situation: the state of nihilism brought on by the collapse of the Enlightenment project.
We thus have the situation and the response. We have cultural and political nihilism, and we have aesthetic morality. How impossible it seems, though, that we can ground morality in aesthetics. We seem too far gone. But I gotta try.
When I first began this writing I intended to explore two very different ideas. But then I got wrapped up in the language of morality. But I'd like to discuss those now.
I just want to briefly highlight two of the things that the aesthetic existence strives for, as I see it. The first is what I am calling 'the minimal division of attention'. The second is 'the maximum unity of mind'.
The minimal division of attention is a phrase that is supposed to communicate the goal of mindfulness, which is essential to the idea of aesthetic morality. Both Buddhism and aesthetics place a lot of emphasis on the role of consciousness. In both, consciousness primarily means awareness. And awareness is a tool that is to be purposefully used and managed.
Think about the way we use our attention. We can direct it somewhere, we can purposefully focus on something. Or sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes I'm at work and I'm doing something, then I hear something, someone says something to me, and my attention becomes divided. I continue doing what I'm doing, I still make the latte, but my attention is divided, and I'm paying attention to a conversation or a person instead of devoting my attention to the drink at hand. As a result, I may not even remember making the drink. I might make it wrong. Something may have gone wrong. All of this because my attention was divided.
An important thing to strive for, therefore, is the minimal division of attention. It is impossible to have an entirely focused attention. I will always be thinking about other things. There will always be some concern in the back of my mind. Some thought of the past or future dividing my attention. But it is a useful ideal to strive for the minimal division of attention. Focus as much as possible on the tasks at hand. Aesthetic morality strives for this kind of focus of attention, this kind of mindfulness.
The second thing that aesthetic morality strives for is the maximum unity of mind. One byproduct of the modern spirit of enquiry is the intense segregation of forms of knowledge. As Collingwood says, with the advent of modern thinking "no man can serve two masters; he must give his whole soul to art, or to religion, or to philosophy, and in choosing his friends he chooses at the same time his enemies" (Speculum Mentis, 33). Modern disciplining of knowledge does not just divide knowledge abstractly, it divides our minds and hearts. Moreover, this disciplining does not emerge merely from the sciences, but is implicated in modern forms of government. Schiller argues that the "more precisely speculation made necessary a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the more intricate machinery of States made necessary a more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations, the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance" (On The Aesthetic Education Of Man, 39). We are thus divided in both our intellectual and political lives. We can no longer exist with the unity of mind that existed before the advent of modern forms of thought and government. The Enlightenment project's goal of rationally organizing society's has destroyed our ritualistic ways of life, leaving us in a state of nihilism, and personal and communal division.
Unity of mind is thus an important thing. It matters how comfortably we can corral our experiences into a coherent sense of self and community. And the aesthetic existence strives for this unity of mind. The aesthetic existence is one in which choices "reflect an individual's authentic sense of reality, not the holding of a certain course in accordance with markings on a moral compass constructed by others" (Sumida, 1997, xvi). The aesthetic existence strives for a unity of mind. Collingwood puts all of this quite succinctly: “What is wrong with us is precisely the detachment of these forms of experience–art, religion, and the rest–from one another; and our cure can only be their reunion in a complete and undivided life. Our task is to seek for that life, to build up the conception of an activity which is at once art, and religion, and science, and the rest” (Speculum Mentis, 36).
The task of seeking the unity of mind is a difficult one. And clearly it cannot be expressed merely by an aesthetic existence. Because it must also be a religious, scientific, historical, and philosophical life. But, frankly, science, history, and philosophy sit quite easily in my mind. The task, then, is the recovery of religious-aesthetic forms of experience. For only by reintroducing those forms of experience can we integrate them with our scientific, historical, and philosophical modes of thought.
The aesthetic existence thus seeks mindfulness (the minimal division of attention) and a total sense of reality (the maximum unity of mind).
This was a weird writing session. Took a bit and took some weird turns.
But this is where I'm situating myself these days. I am trying to overcome the era's cultural nihilism by trying to define an attitude that strives for the focusing of attention and the unity of mind. And I believe that this attitude deserves the label 'aesthetic'.
Don't be distracted! Don't be divided!
Pay attention and feel unified!
I, however, am beginning to associate myself with the issue of morality. 'Moral philosophy' or whatever. Not the most useful category. But an important one.
The idea of morality and moral action is clearly implicated in my thinking, yet I have failed to use the word. But it seems so obvious!
Because the thing I have been most involved with is the definition and cultivation of an attitude. I have tried to elaborate a style of living, a way of being, and I have tried, so far as possible, to embody that attitude.
Further, I have identified this attitude primarily with aesthetics. By choosing aesthetics as the basis of morality, I was picking up a line of thought that Foucault initiated at the end of his life. "Recent liberation movements," he said in 1983, "suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on" (Foucault Reader, 343). Foucault believed that a new ethics could be found if we were willing to engage in historical study. In particular, Foucault believed that the ancient Greek notion of the 'aesthetics of existence', in which life itself is conceptualized as a work of art meant to be actively created, could be a useful starting point for modern ethics: "Among the cultural inventions of mankind," he argued, "there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot be exactly reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now–and to change it" (Ibid., 349 - 350). For Foucault, the Greek aesthetics of existence was this starting point. It was a technique that we could repeat so as to arrive at something new for ourselves. Morality was somehow to be found in the belief that "everyone's life could become a work of art...." (Ibid.,). Morality, for Foucault, then, had to be found outside of the dominant scientific discourse of our day. And the Greek notion of aesthetics as the basis of morality was his starting point for the elaboration of a new ethics.
This is the idea that I have been most occupied with for the last year and a half. The question of how to constitute a new form of morality. One that finds its primary reference in aesthetics. One that is politically relevant. One that escapes the pressures put on us by modern forms of thought and morality.
My recent inclination towards the language of morality is also influenced by two other factors. First being my new essay that I'm working on, 'Nihilism, Magic, And Amusement', and the fact that I just received a copy of Alasdair MacIntyre's well known book After Virtue: A Study In Moral Theory. John Gray works with MacIntyre in Enlightenment's Wake, claiming that he properly identifies our problem as the collapse of the Enlightenment project. Both Gray and MacIntyre argue that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself, failing to provide any basis for individual or political morality. MacIntyre's conclusion is quite radical: "Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act – and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance" (After Virtue, xviii). Although he references Marxism, his claim reaches far beyond it, aiming at the core of modern Western morality.
This is also Gray's conclusion: Modern attempts to rationally ground morality have failed. The modern project, the project of the Enlightenment, has left us in a state of cultural nihilism. We need a new way to conceptualize morality, we need fresh thought on the moral and political issues our society face. Gray believes that 'humiliated modes of thought found in poetry and mysticism' may be the answer. Foucault believes aesthetics is the answer. Schiller seems to believe that aesthetics is the antidote. Collingwood does too.
My conception of aesthetic morality, the aesthetic existence, is therefore in response to a real cultural-political situation: the state of nihilism brought on by the collapse of the Enlightenment project.
We thus have the situation and the response. We have cultural and political nihilism, and we have aesthetic morality. How impossible it seems, though, that we can ground morality in aesthetics. We seem too far gone. But I gotta try.
When I first began this writing I intended to explore two very different ideas. But then I got wrapped up in the language of morality. But I'd like to discuss those now.
I just want to briefly highlight two of the things that the aesthetic existence strives for, as I see it. The first is what I am calling 'the minimal division of attention'. The second is 'the maximum unity of mind'.
The minimal division of attention is a phrase that is supposed to communicate the goal of mindfulness, which is essential to the idea of aesthetic morality. Both Buddhism and aesthetics place a lot of emphasis on the role of consciousness. In both, consciousness primarily means awareness. And awareness is a tool that is to be purposefully used and managed.
Think about the way we use our attention. We can direct it somewhere, we can purposefully focus on something. Or sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes I'm at work and I'm doing something, then I hear something, someone says something to me, and my attention becomes divided. I continue doing what I'm doing, I still make the latte, but my attention is divided, and I'm paying attention to a conversation or a person instead of devoting my attention to the drink at hand. As a result, I may not even remember making the drink. I might make it wrong. Something may have gone wrong. All of this because my attention was divided.
An important thing to strive for, therefore, is the minimal division of attention. It is impossible to have an entirely focused attention. I will always be thinking about other things. There will always be some concern in the back of my mind. Some thought of the past or future dividing my attention. But it is a useful ideal to strive for the minimal division of attention. Focus as much as possible on the tasks at hand. Aesthetic morality strives for this kind of focus of attention, this kind of mindfulness.
The second thing that aesthetic morality strives for is the maximum unity of mind. One byproduct of the modern spirit of enquiry is the intense segregation of forms of knowledge. As Collingwood says, with the advent of modern thinking "no man can serve two masters; he must give his whole soul to art, or to religion, or to philosophy, and in choosing his friends he chooses at the same time his enemies" (Speculum Mentis, 33). Modern disciplining of knowledge does not just divide knowledge abstractly, it divides our minds and hearts. Moreover, this disciplining does not emerge merely from the sciences, but is implicated in modern forms of government. Schiller argues that the "more precisely speculation made necessary a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the more intricate machinery of States made necessary a more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations, the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance" (On The Aesthetic Education Of Man, 39). We are thus divided in both our intellectual and political lives. We can no longer exist with the unity of mind that existed before the advent of modern forms of thought and government. The Enlightenment project's goal of rationally organizing society's has destroyed our ritualistic ways of life, leaving us in a state of nihilism, and personal and communal division.
Unity of mind is thus an important thing. It matters how comfortably we can corral our experiences into a coherent sense of self and community. And the aesthetic existence strives for this unity of mind. The aesthetic existence is one in which choices "reflect an individual's authentic sense of reality, not the holding of a certain course in accordance with markings on a moral compass constructed by others" (Sumida, 1997, xvi). The aesthetic existence strives for a unity of mind. Collingwood puts all of this quite succinctly: “What is wrong with us is precisely the detachment of these forms of experience–art, religion, and the rest–from one another; and our cure can only be their reunion in a complete and undivided life. Our task is to seek for that life, to build up the conception of an activity which is at once art, and religion, and science, and the rest” (Speculum Mentis, 36).
The task of seeking the unity of mind is a difficult one. And clearly it cannot be expressed merely by an aesthetic existence. Because it must also be a religious, scientific, historical, and philosophical life. But, frankly, science, history, and philosophy sit quite easily in my mind. The task, then, is the recovery of religious-aesthetic forms of experience. For only by reintroducing those forms of experience can we integrate them with our scientific, historical, and philosophical modes of thought.
The aesthetic existence thus seeks mindfulness (the minimal division of attention) and a total sense of reality (the maximum unity of mind).
This was a weird writing session. Took a bit and took some weird turns.
But this is where I'm situating myself these days. I am trying to overcome the era's cultural nihilism by trying to define an attitude that strives for the focusing of attention and the unity of mind. And I believe that this attitude deserves the label 'aesthetic'.
Don't be distracted! Don't be divided!
Pay attention and feel unified!
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Friedrich Schiller
I now feel committed to reading Friedrich Schiller's On The Aesthetic Education Of Man. At first I was really confused by it. I didn't know whether I should turn to another book or keep going.
When I felt that way I had only read the 20 page translator's introduction. Now I've read ten pages of the actual text and I feel committed to reading it.
The translator claims that Schiller was one of only three people to take seriously the claim that aesthetics is the proper basis of all civilized education. The other two being Plato and Herbert Read, the author of 1943's Education through Art, which I have never heard of.
But this question of art and life, art and education, has been troubling me for a while now.
It appears that Schiller we be arguing that aesthetics is the only discipline that can mitigate Man's difficult position between emotions and reason.
Schiller was responding to the development of the French revolution. He was writing in 1975, after the beginning of the reign of terror. A chief concern of that time would have been to explain how a revolution supposedly founded on rational principles could have resulted in so much violence. Why were rational principles failing to conduct the actual conduct of life? Why were ideas failing to exert their power on the material world?
Schiller's book seems ready to tackle these questions. How exciting!
I, too, wonder about the relationship between rational thought and emotional reality. I wonder how we can really bring ideas to bear on reality. I wonder how we can learn to trust our emotions, to trust our habits, how we can rationally form our habits. I suspect Schiller might be working towards a similar synthesis of rational thought and practical action. "The important thing," he argues, "is to dissociate caprice from the physical and freedom from the moral character; to make the first conformable with law, the second dependent on impression; to remove the former somewhat further from matter in order bring the latter somewhat nearer to it–so as to create a third character which, related to these other two, might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law, and, without impending the development of the moral character, might serve rather as a sensible pledge of a morality as yet unseen" (30).
This passage left me befuddled today.
It has been a while since I've tried to dive into a philosopher so removed from my own time. I read a lot of Collingwood and Foucault, who died in 1943 and 1984, respectively. I also like to read modern philosophers, people like Zizek or John Gray. Or others. But someone writing in 1795 is doing something so different from me.
Further, Schiller's style presents a boat load of questions. He was not a professional philosopher. The translator says that his contemporaries didn't know whether to call him the poet who wrote philosophy or the philosopher who wrote poetry. How interesting and difficult. I love skirting this line between aesthetics and philosophy. Really good to do. Really great that Collingwood calls philosophy a 'poem of the intellect'. I think this line is real, and I like it.
One interesting thing, however, is that Schiller refers to the ancient Greeks and their ability to think a total, unified manner. He felt that his time, on the contrary, had experienced a disciplining in which forms of knowledge had been specialized and separated from one another. "At that time, in the lovely awakening of the intellectual powers," he writes of the Greeks, "the senses and the mind had still no strictly separate individualities, for no dissension had yet constrained them to make hostile partition with each other and determine their boundaries" (38). How could someone glorify the Greek 'unity of mind' unless they felt their own age to possess major 'hostile partitions' and boundaries.
Oh and yet how many partitions and boundaries I fear in my own thinking! Oh how much I fear the intellectual specialization of our age!
Oh how I wonder about how aesthetics matter to this age.
The parts of Schiller I quoted, especially the first one, are super confusing to me. I quoted the first one because it was such a difficult thing for me to process today.
I suspect a lot is going to come out of Schiller.
But frankly I've been a bit intimidated by it. I'm going to have to spend some serious time with this guy. This book is only like 120 pages! Why does it seem so daunting? Because in reading 15 pages of it I already feel overwhelmed with the implications on every page. Either that or I don't understand an entire page.
I think something quite serious is going on in Schiller. I now feel committed to pursuing him to the end of On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
When I felt that way I had only read the 20 page translator's introduction. Now I've read ten pages of the actual text and I feel committed to reading it.
The translator claims that Schiller was one of only three people to take seriously the claim that aesthetics is the proper basis of all civilized education. The other two being Plato and Herbert Read, the author of 1943's Education through Art, which I have never heard of.
But this question of art and life, art and education, has been troubling me for a while now.
It appears that Schiller we be arguing that aesthetics is the only discipline that can mitigate Man's difficult position between emotions and reason.
Schiller was responding to the development of the French revolution. He was writing in 1975, after the beginning of the reign of terror. A chief concern of that time would have been to explain how a revolution supposedly founded on rational principles could have resulted in so much violence. Why were rational principles failing to conduct the actual conduct of life? Why were ideas failing to exert their power on the material world?
Schiller's book seems ready to tackle these questions. How exciting!
I, too, wonder about the relationship between rational thought and emotional reality. I wonder how we can really bring ideas to bear on reality. I wonder how we can learn to trust our emotions, to trust our habits, how we can rationally form our habits. I suspect Schiller might be working towards a similar synthesis of rational thought and practical action. "The important thing," he argues, "is to dissociate caprice from the physical and freedom from the moral character; to make the first conformable with law, the second dependent on impression; to remove the former somewhat further from matter in order bring the latter somewhat nearer to it–so as to create a third character which, related to these other two, might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law, and, without impending the development of the moral character, might serve rather as a sensible pledge of a morality as yet unseen" (30).
This passage left me befuddled today.
It has been a while since I've tried to dive into a philosopher so removed from my own time. I read a lot of Collingwood and Foucault, who died in 1943 and 1984, respectively. I also like to read modern philosophers, people like Zizek or John Gray. Or others. But someone writing in 1795 is doing something so different from me.
Further, Schiller's style presents a boat load of questions. He was not a professional philosopher. The translator says that his contemporaries didn't know whether to call him the poet who wrote philosophy or the philosopher who wrote poetry. How interesting and difficult. I love skirting this line between aesthetics and philosophy. Really good to do. Really great that Collingwood calls philosophy a 'poem of the intellect'. I think this line is real, and I like it.
One interesting thing, however, is that Schiller refers to the ancient Greeks and their ability to think a total, unified manner. He felt that his time, on the contrary, had experienced a disciplining in which forms of knowledge had been specialized and separated from one another. "At that time, in the lovely awakening of the intellectual powers," he writes of the Greeks, "the senses and the mind had still no strictly separate individualities, for no dissension had yet constrained them to make hostile partition with each other and determine their boundaries" (38). How could someone glorify the Greek 'unity of mind' unless they felt their own age to possess major 'hostile partitions' and boundaries.
Oh and yet how many partitions and boundaries I fear in my own thinking! Oh how much I fear the intellectual specialization of our age!
Oh how I wonder about how aesthetics matter to this age.
The parts of Schiller I quoted, especially the first one, are super confusing to me. I quoted the first one because it was such a difficult thing for me to process today.
I suspect a lot is going to come out of Schiller.
But frankly I've been a bit intimidated by it. I'm going to have to spend some serious time with this guy. This book is only like 120 pages! Why does it seem so daunting? Because in reading 15 pages of it I already feel overwhelmed with the implications on every page. Either that or I don't understand an entire page.
I think something quite serious is going on in Schiller. I now feel committed to pursuing him to the end of On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Bah! February!
Just working, guys!
Still trying to get going on some kind of book! But unsure whether to dive into Schiller or whether to turn elsewhere! ADOY!
Still working on this essay 'Nihilism, Magic, and Amusement'. About 15 pages in. About 1/3 of the way into the fourth section.
ABUR!
Eager to keep going!
I keep working.
I ask people how things are going.
Sometimes they say 'oh things are going!'.
LOL! LIFE SURE IS HECTIC EH BRO?!
I often say 'Oh I know it turns out it never stops.'
Someday I'll stop writing on this blog.
But for now it is still going.
Things are going in most parts of my life.
Still trying to get going on some kind of book! But unsure whether to dive into Schiller or whether to turn elsewhere! ADOY!
Still working on this essay 'Nihilism, Magic, and Amusement'. About 15 pages in. About 1/3 of the way into the fourth section.
ABUR!
Eager to keep going!
I keep working.
I ask people how things are going.
Sometimes they say 'oh things are going!'.
LOL! LIFE SURE IS HECTIC EH BRO?!
I often say 'Oh I know it turns out it never stops.'
Someday I'll stop writing on this blog.
But for now it is still going.
Things are going in most parts of my life.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Ohhhhhh
Tomorrow is my day off work and I'm very excited.
I haven't had a day off in about a week and so I'm fixin to get some relaxing done.
The only problem is that I'm also eager to get some work and socializing done.
But I'm just so tired.
I was very tired today when I got off work. I took a nap.
I wanted to read but was too tired.
I bought some pants though! Yay!
I need to rest.
I haven't had a day off in about a week and so I'm fixin to get some relaxing done.
The only problem is that I'm also eager to get some work and socializing done.
But I'm just so tired.
I was very tired today when I got off work. I took a nap.
I wanted to read but was too tired.
I bought some pants though! Yay!
I need to rest.
Monday, January 30, 2012
A New Essay
So for the last week I've been working on a new essay. I'm pretty excited about it.
I'm returning to something I've written about many times before. Nihilism.
The title of the essay is 'Nihilism, Magic, and Amusement'.
It involves five sections, five questions, and five answers
Q= Question
A= Answer
Q1: What precisely is nihilism?
A1: Nihilism is the state of a culture that has run into a dead end. Nihilism is the condition of a culture that has destroyed its sources of emotional renewal, leaving it without means to reinvigorate its individuals and communities.
Q2: What is the relationship between nihilism and the western tradition of rational thought?
A2: Our tradition of rational thought (i.e. our logocentrism) has destroyed our faith in traditional ways of living by analyzing them to death. We have inquired so intensely into forms of social organization, and have discovered no rational basis for those forms of organization, that we have left ourselves with no emotionally healthy forms of organization. Logocentrism has destroyed our capacity for communal living.
Q3: What has truly been lost in the conversion to nihilism?
A3: We have lost our capacity for magical experience. That is to say that we no longer have rituals that serve as ways of focusing the emotions of communities.
Q4: What has come to replace magical rituals?
A4: Amusement, that is, forms of representation that are merely enjoyable in their own right, have come to replace magical, communal, and emotionally beneficial rituals. We simply amuse ourselves, we drink, we do drugs, we watch meaningless TV, we amuse ourselves because our communities have collapsed.
Q5: What are we to do with the way that amusement dominates our culture due to our lack of magical rituals?
A5: We must find a way to reinvigorate aesthetic and magical forms of experience. We must find ways to be expressive, we must find ways of organizing and focusing the emotions of our communities. We must reconstitute aesthetic-mystical forms of experience. For it is the only antidote to our technological-logocentric nihilism.
This is the flow of my essay. I have written the first three sections. The final two await.
This fits into my plans for the future in two ways.
First, the next book I plan to read is Friedrich Schiller's On The Aesthetic Education Of Man. As far as I understand, Schiller proposes that aesthetics is the only proper basis of education. I find this highly compelling. I suspect his book will have much to offer me.
Second, I believe this project will help me understand how the AZI project is related to nihilism. For more than a year I have been committed to developing the idea of an 'aesthetic existence'. I have attempted to create an experience for myself that is compassionate, gentle, and above all, expressive. This, I believe, is what an aesthetic existence would be: a mode of being that emphasizes being expressive within highly confined historical circumstances. That is to say, I wish to use the conventions of my time to express myself as intensely as possible. Even if I am merely selling donuts and coffee. I may be your coffee robot, but I am a beast. A force of expression that you will never reckon with.
This task of becoming more expressive, more aesthetic, is a direct response to nihilism. Because nihilism, as a cultural state, is about logocentrism, rational criteria, and not about uncertain expressiveness. The aesthetic existence, therefore, is a way of trying to embody the antidote to our cultural nihilism.
I'm angry. And I'm trying to express myself out of that anger.
I hope to turn my anger into a cure.
I am nihilism. I am the cure.
I'm returning to something I've written about many times before. Nihilism.
The title of the essay is 'Nihilism, Magic, and Amusement'.
It involves five sections, five questions, and five answers
Q= Question
A= Answer
Q1: What precisely is nihilism?
A1: Nihilism is the state of a culture that has run into a dead end. Nihilism is the condition of a culture that has destroyed its sources of emotional renewal, leaving it without means to reinvigorate its individuals and communities.
Q2: What is the relationship between nihilism and the western tradition of rational thought?
A2: Our tradition of rational thought (i.e. our logocentrism) has destroyed our faith in traditional ways of living by analyzing them to death. We have inquired so intensely into forms of social organization, and have discovered no rational basis for those forms of organization, that we have left ourselves with no emotionally healthy forms of organization. Logocentrism has destroyed our capacity for communal living.
Q3: What has truly been lost in the conversion to nihilism?
A3: We have lost our capacity for magical experience. That is to say that we no longer have rituals that serve as ways of focusing the emotions of communities.
Q4: What has come to replace magical rituals?
A4: Amusement, that is, forms of representation that are merely enjoyable in their own right, have come to replace magical, communal, and emotionally beneficial rituals. We simply amuse ourselves, we drink, we do drugs, we watch meaningless TV, we amuse ourselves because our communities have collapsed.
Q5: What are we to do with the way that amusement dominates our culture due to our lack of magical rituals?
A5: We must find a way to reinvigorate aesthetic and magical forms of experience. We must find ways to be expressive, we must find ways of organizing and focusing the emotions of our communities. We must reconstitute aesthetic-mystical forms of experience. For it is the only antidote to our technological-logocentric nihilism.
This is the flow of my essay. I have written the first three sections. The final two await.
This fits into my plans for the future in two ways.
First, the next book I plan to read is Friedrich Schiller's On The Aesthetic Education Of Man. As far as I understand, Schiller proposes that aesthetics is the only proper basis of education. I find this highly compelling. I suspect his book will have much to offer me.
Second, I believe this project will help me understand how the AZI project is related to nihilism. For more than a year I have been committed to developing the idea of an 'aesthetic existence'. I have attempted to create an experience for myself that is compassionate, gentle, and above all, expressive. This, I believe, is what an aesthetic existence would be: a mode of being that emphasizes being expressive within highly confined historical circumstances. That is to say, I wish to use the conventions of my time to express myself as intensely as possible. Even if I am merely selling donuts and coffee. I may be your coffee robot, but I am a beast. A force of expression that you will never reckon with.
This task of becoming more expressive, more aesthetic, is a direct response to nihilism. Because nihilism, as a cultural state, is about logocentrism, rational criteria, and not about uncertain expressiveness. The aesthetic existence, therefore, is a way of trying to embody the antidote to our cultural nihilism.
I'm angry. And I'm trying to express myself out of that anger.
I hope to turn my anger into a cure.
I am nihilism. I am the cure.
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