Suppose nothing else were “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives–for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world?… In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)… The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do–and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself–then we have to make the experiment of positing causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. “Will,” of course, can affect only “will”–and not “matter” (not “nerves,” for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever “effects” are recognized–and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will. Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it… then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as–will to power. The world viewed from inside… it would be “will to power” and nothing else.
F.W. Nietzsche -from Beyond Good and Evil, s.36, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Category: Uncategorized
A Reply
A bunch of rambling… who knows what it really amounted to. Decided to post it for sheer archival fun:
A reply to those who bash the humanities and social sciences as being worthless degrees:
The problem with this post is that it was probably written by someone who was told what to be and how to think the vast majority of their life. These kind of sentiments reveal a serious ignorance.
This post would have been better titled: 10 Degrees That Are Not In High Demand. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or fulfilling. What degrees are in demand? Ones that emphasize the development of quantitative skills. Why? Because these people know how to give the right answers. But who’s asking the questions? The innovators, the leaders. A well trained man, like a well trained dog, can give the right answer. But only a well educated man can identify and ask the right questions.
This type of thinking is cultivated by studying the humanities and social sciences, and taking courses such as philosophy, history, english, and psychology, to name a few. Each of these areas of study play a vital role in teaching us about the genesis and nature of the human condition. So long as there are humans asking questions and giving answers, I think it is of the utmost importance to study these humans, to uncover their motives, how they work, why they work. This is where real understanding and wisdom lies.
The world is not perfectly rational. On the contrary, it is irrational, just like man. Understanding the human condition, his passions and emotional impulses, will provide answers to the questions that rational thinking has yet to solve.
I am an Economics and Philosophy major. Every major discipline of science can be attributed to philosophy. When you get a PhD, you receive a Doctorate of Philosophy in a given concentration signifying that you have successfully pursued that field of knowledge to its outermost bounds. Philosophy demands the utmost intellect, the most rigorous exercise of acumen. Why do I believe that my philosophy degree is more precious than my economics degree and the quantitative skills that accompany it? Because I would be a mindless zombie without it, a slave to a system that I couldn’t see beyond, and wouldn’t think to escape.
To conclude this brief rant, I want to point out that many of the listed majors provide real indirect value to their degree holder.
In a survey given to over 1000 employers, the following job skills of an applicant were listed from most to least importance:
Communication skills 4.6,
Strong work ethic 4.6,
Teamwork skills 4.5,
Initiative 4.4,
Interpersonal skills 4.4,
Problem-solving skills 4.4,
Analytical skills 4.3
Flexibility/adaptability 4.2
Computer skills 4.1
Technical skills 4.1
Detail-oriented 4.0
Organizational skills 4.0
The majority of these skills have nothing to do with a degree and are mostly innate traits, but the ones that do are cultivated by many of the majors you listed as being worthless.
The ability to articulate ideas clearly and concisely, both in spoken and written word, is typically the highest prized skill. What degrees foster these skills? Any degree that requires a significant amount of reading and writing.
I realize this post was created for the effect of humor, and I’m fine with that, but I couldn’t let this kind of garbage pawn itself off as being even slightly legitimate.
hev
“At some point you gotta consider the eternal. There’s heaven and then there’s hell, and if you don’t believe in heaven, then what are you gonna believe? More importantly, where are you gonna go? There’s hell. Nothingness. You need a standard.”
“hm…” I paused, “I’m not sure that those thoughts cross my mind anymore. I know at one time they did, but not anymore. I mean, I don’t contemplate heaven, or hell. It’s as if someone asked if I was going to Hereyesum. What the heck it that? I have no idea what this place is. Should I consider it, or be afraid of it? Even if someone introduced me to the idea and predicated all the wonderful or horrible things it contained, why would I believe it? On what immediate evidence? It’s a purely stipulated construct. The idea would serve me no utility.”
“I don’t believe that you don’t believe in anything, or no eternal afterlife.” She paused, looking intensely in my eyes. I was stolidly reserved.
“No, I actually don’t. I mean, I believe in things because they are useful to believe in, not because they contain any truth, or I believe them to be anything more than useful. I believe beliefs placate our anxieties, and these anxieties can be real or perceived. That’s about it.”
“So when you die, you believe that’s it. Like, you’re caput, lights out?”
“Yea. That’s right”
She continued staring, eyes fixated, as if she was staring within herself, probing herself with these questions.
A sudden emptiness drifted and settled onto the conversation, a hollowness, an over exposure that revealed a hint of vulnerability. I could see that she wanted to steer the conversation elsewhere. It made her uncomfortable. I was fine with moving our thoughts along to other things; I don’t want to drag anyone into a void they’re not comfortable with.
*
I drank a bottle of wine and ate cheese all night. I conversed, about life, death, growing up, choices, superficial and meaningful things: the whole spectrum of conventional values.
I don’t want to be an animal: but wildness is freedom. Or is it? All is a delusive illusion.
Is it alright to be comfortable? Is anxiety a disease? Can you ever shake it? Would you ever want to shake it? I am tired. I have much to say. night.
Droplets in the Sea
“…for the time being I gave up writing – there is already too much truth in the world – an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed….” -Otto Rank
This is how I often feel. About everything. Sometimes I get comparative and I forget that the driver behind my actions should be purely expressive and therapeutic. There is no absolute truths, no direction to speak of, no purpose for all. I often think that I am speaking or writing over a clamoring chorus of cacophony so that my contribution only adds to the confusion, to the dissonance. So I decide that I’d rather not write. But it needs to come out. It is a compulsion that bubbles up and bursts into a full spectrum of epileptic color. I need to get in the habit of writing again, or thinking consistently, with a purpose that I can arbitrarily delegate to myself and justify through my actions, not because there’s any inherent merit.
So what have I been thinking about lately? Generally speaking, how everything is an illusion. How we are so totally blind to ourselves. It’s wacky just thinking about how inane our belief systems are, our quirks and world views. We justify what we’re comfortable with. Humans attract more of the same. I heard on an NPR segment these academics call it an ‘echo-chamber’, or an ‘identity silo’, if I’m not mistaken. The speakers were discussing information systems like Google or Facebook that have algorithms that feed us more of what we like by accessing our browsing or interaction history. It all operates off of confirmation bias. The vast majority of people do not deliberately seek out information that conflicts with our world view or philosophy. In fact, many people get agitated when they are exposed to systems of thought with which they disagree. Instead they find information that confirms and reinforces an insular world view or belief system. This creates a concurrent resonance so that information going out is confirmed by information going in. It is a reverberation that amplifies beliefs. The result is a severely skewed picture of the world. The threat is radicalism.
Anyway. We all do this. People are not prone to novelty or newness or anything foreign or unknown that may threaten or unravel our nice picture of the world. People like the path of least resistance, comfort and ease.
All belief system’s are lies (‘Myth’ is a nicer word). Mine as much as any one else’s. But why I think mine has more legitimacy lies in the fact that it has no legitimacy. (Legitimacy is an ethical claim, not a quantitative or measurable claim. My belief system would not produce a successful priest, or lawyer. Perhaps, only a good citizen of the world, or philosopher. Perhaps it’s only good for me, Michael.) My beliefs are arbitrary. Most people would never dream of throwing their beliefs to the wind and calling them arbitrary. Why? Because our belief systems offer us techniques for dealing with the world, with other people, with ourselves, with mortality. Beliefs make everything sweet and sanguine. “The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.” But the longer we hold onto a single belief and fail to venture into new perspectives of the world, the longer we are exposed to sheer ignorance, and the harder it is to escape.
Yea. Beliefs. Character. What the hell is character? It is a defense mechanism. Like all of our ideas that provide us with an orientation when confronting the world. If we fail to maintain character, we fail. Our shortcomings are exposed, our wretched limitations lay open for us and the world to see. Inconsistencies in a world where people depend on consistencies, on ideals and values that endure beyond temporal constraints and natural rotting.
Yea. Beliefs are limitations. We spend our entire lives building these vast belief systems that serve one function: to limit us. They limit us to the overwhelming possibility that has confronted us since our birth. What in the hell is this place called earth, mom, food, hot, pain, god, lies, trust, etc? These ad hoc, explosions in our face, these phenomenon that we didn’t choose but were thrust upon us. The sheer ridiculousness of entering a world overflowing with sensations and ideas.
The moment we exit the womb we begin to limit, to delineate the contours and trace out boundaries of experience, cutting off and segmenting this ocean of possibilities into more manageable pieces for consumption. We ‘rationalize’ this world by limiting it. By censoring it. By condensing it. By symbolizing it. Ugh. It’s all a myth. We are afraid of possibility, of potential. If we weren’t, we’d be something else, we’d be continually born anew.
So much to think about.
So my current situation. I need to get active. Analysis paralysis. A general listlessness about life has settled on my mind. It’s pathetic.
I ran today. I will run tomorrow, and lift. I am spending the remainder of my summer restricting my caloric intake and subjecting my body to intense physical stress. I’m well aware that the mind is connected with the body, the heart, the soul, whatever. A sound body is a sound mind.
I will read more. I say, more than six hours a day. Very doable. A book a week.
I don’t understand people who live on a superficial plane of existence. There are multiple layers that we wear. There’s the superficial layers filled with linguistic clichés and verbiage that allow us to navigate through interpersonal interaction. Then there is a layer that yields our beliefs, our defense mechanisms, our reflections and questions. The final layer is a recognition of our fear, our denial of our inadequacy, our frailty, our inevitable death that will arrive no matter how much we make, what we know or achieve or believe. That is the breaking point for most people, when serious changes and restructuring occurs in their mind. When the other layers have failed, this layer takes control.
Anywho. I don’t get superficiality. I’m great at it, at bullshitting. Most people exist in this layer. Banter. That’s all it is. Useless noise that gets us what we want, a reaction out of people, out of our world. But most people don’t move beyond it. Ever. They exist there. Their mind is so pathetically shallow. That’s why we have Television and the internet and games and amusement. It placates our superficiality. If we actually had to think about life, about our beliefs and actions and deliberations and consequences, most people would unravel or lose themselves.
I watch these people rush to watch their favorite television shows. Their TV. They don’t read. They listen to their music. They read their fantasy novels. They indulge in religious services or shopping sprees. All superficial techniques for avoiding the self.
It’s insane. They don’t write. They don’t read. They don’t converse about meaningful projects. About feelings, about dreams, desires, goals. Knowledge and creativity isn’t prized like it used to be. It’s all about amusement, or power.
So. The human condition has been swiped aside. The humanities departments across the country bear signs of the recent insignificance that plagues them in the face of power. What thrives? Engineering, business, law, science. Disciplines that allow us to master others, master our world. Why do they have the greatest growth? Because they allow for the accumulation and application of power.
Everything comes down the this will to power. I need to think more on it and write more later.
Language. Ideas are public goods. There is no private language, just as there is no private ideas. If it is an idea, it must be accepted and shared by the community, otherwise it will fail to flourish, and die. Ideas are public. You cannot escape the conversational constraints dictated by the public arena. Artists do this though, or attempt to. They create feelings and ideas where there was none previously.
My language traps me. I cannot think beyond it, I cannot communicate about it except with the language I have been afforded by my culture. That is why reading is so amazing. It allows me to transcend my limited abilities so that I can articulate and convey ideas to a broader audience.
/end rant.
<Bed time>
Artistic Essence
“This very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance….But both [artist and enjoyer], in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling. “
–Otto Rank, Art and Artist, 1932, p. 109-110.
Projection
“The richer–that is, the more varied and complete–the individual’s emotional life, the less is he driven to projection, and the more will he incline to identification. His outlet and satisfaction comes in identifying himself with the emotions of the other. On the other hand, the narrower and more restricted the individual’s emotional life, the more intense will be his fewer emotions, the less will he be inclined to, and capable of, identification–the lack of which he has to compensate for by projection. Projection thus proves to be a compensatory mechanism that adjusts for an inner lack. Identification, on the other hand, is an expression of abundance, of the desire for union, for alliance, for sharing. “
– Otto Rank, “Love, Guilt and the Denial of Feelings,” 1927, American Lectures, 160
This quote embodies my philosophy, my intentions, my behavior and aims when I interact with others. Love. Union. Emotional variegation.
Identify with others. Rather than forcefully projecting yourself onto the world and others, learn to subjugate the ego and merge with another. This is why I stress the importance of philosophy in teaching the value of understanding and comprehension, all of which facilitates a sympathy to ideas and people.
Lifestyle
Even though they’re my aunt and uncle, it’s still interesting living with another family. You get an intimate glimpse of a lifestyle you’d never otherwise encounter. I tend to analyze these things.
Anyway. This summer has been unusual. Worcester isn’t exactly the most exciting place in the world. Quite the contrary. It’s a bit drab. And considering it’s the second largest city in New England, rivaling Providence, you’d expect some variety in entertainment and social and cultural outlets. Not the case. I’m lenient though. There are thirteen colleges in the city, and it’s summer, so I can’t be too hard on the place. There isn’t very many people my age to be seen. You know where they go? Boston. And that’s where I should be on the weekends.
So what have I been doing with my time? Reading. Mostly vegetating. Hanging out with my seven year old cousin. Tip-toeing around my thirteen year old cousin who’s been sick and recovering from surgery due to appendicitis. You mustn’t upset temperamental sick people. So yea. My aunt is great. She’s got an awful lot of free time. Her job, I suppose, is being a house mom, working out, giving a few Pilates classes here and there in her gym/studio, and cutting or coloring hair in her salon. So she stays busy, but it’s mostly busy work, in my opinion. Now that it’s summer my uncle plays golf most of his days, so he’s generally in a good mood. ‘Business’ is what they call it, or ‘networking’. I’d love to get into that business. Or would I?
My boss generally works less than ten hours a week. He’s self made, doesn’t owe a dime to anyone, and has plenty of residual income that allows him to travel or spend money on a whim. A house here, vacation there, more boats, new cars, a pool and new landscaping, remodeling… it’s all fair game and he’s a fanatic about it. So I work with his other three partners who specialize in actually managing the wealth of their clients. I’m learning a good deal from them, but they aren’t exactly the managerial type. They mostly watch stock tickers, make phone calls to clients about how their investments are doing, or receive phone calls from anxious investors who get squeamish every time they see the market hiccup.
Po
Stars are meant to be admired
from afar.
Get too close
and they lose their luster.
The magic dissipates
as the warm glow turns
into raging fire
with serpentine tentacles that reach out
and burn.
No, stand back.
Far, far away.
Let the beauty reach out to you.
Ran
‘Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.’
— Henry Brooks Adams
Your life is a lie. All is a myth. There is no matter of fact that lies beyond the assaulting grip of dispute. Everything can be contended.
I’ve been feeling great lately. Have a great story to tell. I need to begin blogging again. Starting… right now. Every day I’ll spew something about my day, about my thoughts, recent conversations, stuff I learned at work, etc.
But back to my original thought. All is a lie. A myth. We create these myths through out desires. We justify these myths, these upending urges that swell and burst into action, through irrational beliefs. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to rationalize these beliefs. Oh no.
What I’ve realized is that people are bat shit insane. I nod most of the time. They ask me what I believe, wouldn’t you know it, I say “what works.” They usually ask me to come again, to clarify. I say, I don’t believe anything. I just adopt beliefs that work within a given context to get me what I want or bring me where I want to go. These beliefs account for a multitude of emotional, social, and relational factors.
I am a skeptic. I believe in the ego, the I, the ‘consciousness’ and that’s about it. I believe this ego manifests desires and that it justifies its actions according to these desires, whether it is the desire the self-preserve, or look pretty, or get in shape, or be smart, or whatever.
I am a skeptic, I repeat: I doubt. I insert wedges of doubt behind every thought so that I may unhinge my biases, my habituations, my prejudices. I am a skeptic. I believe that knowing nothing is the best route to knowing more. When you have your mind made up, you have failed yourself. Always leave room for doubt. Even test the reasonableness of your methods for doubting. Doubt everything. Leave no stone unturned. We live in a web, a sticky web: a context where thoughts in the now are found at the center, where the periphery extends into the far reaches of the past. Let us probe. Let us look for where these webs unravel, let’s unravel these webs of beliefs and string together something totally new and magical. Something original and wholly mine.
I like my job.
This world is about power.
Everyone is blind. Blind to themselves.
I need to spend time fully typing out all my thoughts.
Money is power. Power is money. They are synonymous. They buy influence, satisfaction, discontent, life, death, whatever you can dream up. But money and power doesn’t give you answers. That is left for wisdom, something that supersedes and transcends both. I desire to have money, power, and wisdom. Eh.
Sage advice: Buy gold. The dollar is losing its value. The fed stopped quantitative easing/printing money. Deflation will be sure to ensue, briefly. So they’ll start again. Interest rates are at zero percent. Major trade deficits loom. The economy will be volatile the next few months. Buy mining company shares, like Newmont. And Microsoft, because it’s a severely undervalued stock right now. So help me god.
Anywho.
I need to go to bed.
Most people think they think big. But their idea of big is awfully small.
Update
I have so much to say. I needed to take a break, relieve my mind of the pressures of thinking. I think to much. Or actually, I feel too much. My thoughts always get me feeling, I get too invested. The next thing I know I find myself having these existential crisises where I get all skeptical and nihilistic about everything. I begin telling myself that no thought is better than any thought, that I can escape judgement if I refrain from ever having an opinion, from ever making a claim about the world or myself. But all that ultimately leads to inaction, and inaction leads to death. I begin to whither inside and outside. It’s a terrible consequence of letting your thoughts hijack your feelings. Such is life.
So I have a tremendous amount on my mind. I began my internship a week ago. That’s been great. Interesting, but great. The guy I work for…
Thoughts….
Actions Speak Loudly
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Random Thoughts
Art. Every person is a self creation. There is no external reality or essence grounding reflection, save the conversational constraints inherited from peer predecessors.
I do believe there are particulars in our environment. These objects do in fact exist, but we simply index them through linguistic tokens and symbols. There is no inherency within objects that necessitates one representation over another, and any perceived inherency is simply necessitated by context.
I’ve been reading quite a bit of pragmatism lately, specifically neopragmatism. Richard Rorty is responsible for creating this radical school of thought, and I have to say it strikes me as sounder than anything else I’ve read. I’ve also been reading a great deal of Paul Feyerabend. Both of these philosophers are seen as relativists by many, but I think that’s incorrect.
Remember
Your ideas own you.
Beliefs: Religion & War
If you can sell a religion, you can sell a war.
Conflict (war/disagreement) is a product of uncompromising beliefs and the drive for self preservation. People maintain beliefs that serve as a utility for self preservation (however they define it). Problem is, most beliefs are inherited unquestionably. Religion is just one belief system that masquerades as being immutably true (One may say Science is another). So long as people see things as being absolutely true and false rather than contextually contingent on social norms and subjective interests, we’re gonna have trouble avoiding conflict and arriving at agreements that jive with our experience. There is no transcendent ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. There’s only what’s best for ‘me’ or ‘us’. It all serves some interest. It just depends on whose. That’s why dialog is so important.
Thoughts: Perspective
“Does the sun rise?” This question seems intuitive. It’d be hard to imagine too many people who’d argue the matter of fact. “Of course the sun rises! Just wake up at dawn and watch it yourself!” they might exclaim. But is this a matter of fact? Suppose we juxtapose this question with “Does the earth revolve around its axis?” When seen in this light the matter of perspective begins to emerge. We can accept that the sun doesn’t rise, rather it is the earth that rotates. But does this challenge the matter of fact? It is all perspective and experience.
Truth is much like this.
Heads
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Derby
Today I went to the Kentucky Derby. My friends convinced me last night around four in the morning that the Kentucky Derby would be the best thing I could spend forty dollars on that Saturday. Granted, I didn’t exactly have forty dollars. With rent due last monday, and my rent check waiting to be cashed, I wasn’t exactly in the position to be throwing around forty dollars to get completely inebriated for what turned out to be two actual hours in the center field, completely wasted.
I’m watching law and order right now with my room mate.
So this afternoon. The three other guys in the vehicle slept while I was huddled in the back seat reading Harpers magazine, enjoying short pieces on the fading architecture of the gilded age and Emerson’s literary career as an eighteenth century transcendental essayist and journalist. When we arrived in Louisville we trolled around for a parking lot within walking distance. We decided to post up in a dilapidated parking lot full of graffiti and gravel. There were cars swarming around with signs taped to their windows that read “Shuttle”. It was comical really. Cracked out Kentucky folk trying to give drunk people rides less than a mile away. I’m sure they make a penny or two.
We brought mint juleps with us, picked up beer at the gas station, and had packets upon packets of liqueur for sneaking into the center field. We drank until we were belligerent, jolly, and jocular. Laughing, joking, debating. Eventually we walked to the derby, which by the way, was an absolute shit show. The roads were blocked off, vendors were lined up along the street. It was madness. It was amazing.
We lined our pockets with bud lights, stuffing them in every pocket we could comfortably manage, then walked. My friend left his phone in his jacket which later posed a severe problem for communication. So we rolled up to the event, and like every good event, street evangelists were trying to lead us to heaven. We talked to them for about thirty or forty five minutes until we realized that it wasn’t so fun, and all my philosophy, logic, and logical fallicies did little more than to make them silent, rather than admit that it’s all a crock that could be stipulated. Faith is stipulation. I do it. You do it. Let’s all agree that no one’s stipulation is better than anyone else’s. Anyway. We ended up buying tickets and walking in and the mayhem continued. I could barely see straight, but the smile on my face was gaping with amusement. The ostentatious hats and polo’s of variegating colors blinded me with enthusiasm.
I lost most of my friends but I stuck with one. We walked around, completely trashed, talking to people, bumming cigarettes, cheering as the horses racing down the dirt tracks. Eventually we found a good looking girl who was interested. She was tall, sorta amazonian looking, and she was wearing an afro wig with a pair of large glasses that looked insectual. And by insectual, I mean sexual, because despite her enlarged features, she was pretty attractive. But, she wasn’t giving me the attention I was looking for, and quite honestly, I wanted to hang out with my bros, so I slowly detached myself. My friend on the other hand, being completely and utterly wasted out of his mind, was particularly smitten by this feline. He had his sights set on this girl and despite my best efforts to sway him in other directions, we kept finding ourselves in her presence. She led us around hand in hand. I wasn’t exactly feeling the situation so I made myself lost amongst the crowd. Not exactly a good idea because my friend didn’t have his phone. That began the search.
I called the boys repeatedly but couldn’t find them. Eventually I find a bro sitting on a retaining wall. We sat there, eventually finding another of our lost friends, and later another. After about two hours later we gave up waiting for our friend to come to us and walked around looking for him. That was an unsuccessful search mission.
When the masses dissipated and the crowds were done piling out we decided to expand the search beyond our designated stoop. We walked around aimlessly, screaming his name, telling officers that our friend may be dead, and that if he’s lying in a ditch, not to worry because his name is Crad. The infield was a ravaged mess. I did happen to reacquaint myself with a girl I met earlier that night. Her name was “Lyric” and she was from Daytona. We bonded over Florida. Briefly. I kept telling her how beautiful she was, becuase honestly, she was a gorgeous looking girl. She had her eyes set on me and walked up to me and was showing attention, so I returned the favor and coninued flirting. Eventually I asked for her number and secured that. Lyric Fernandez she said. Beautiful, South American. She worked as a managerial representative contracted by companies to do promotional events. Model? I said. No. I have brains. I was like, oh hey. Sassy.
This is what I know about girls. They love persistence. They can say no all they want, but the bottom line is, if you’re smiling, and if they secretly find themselves attracted to you, what they say means nothing. They want you to give them attention. They fawn for attention. True story. I mean, I can’t blame them either. Earlier in the night I was borderline acosting her asking for free cigarettes. About an hour later I got my wish. And fifteen minutes later, her number.
Let It All Go.
A Stream of Poetry:
So this is how it feels to to not give a shit. To let it all go. To throw a semester’s worth of work to the wind. This is a peculiar feeling, not exactly uplifting, but liberating. The anxiety is still there, and I don’t know if that’s something that will ever leave, fail or not. It perpetually manifests: success is holding it together, failure is watching it fall apart. Either way it eats at your consciousness. I’m so sleep deprived now. So so sleep deprived. What’s it been, three days? Four days? I’m so tired that I missed my final today. Of the only two exams I had, I switched their times around completely so that I didn’t even realize the mistake until I was standing in the middle of the empty room asking myself why none of my exams that day were in the rooms they were assigned to. It struck me eerily, like a foreboding prehension that I hardly wanted to accept. I nevertheless returned to the room I stood in earlier that day asking the same question to see if the prehension was correct, and it was. There were my little fellow philosophy peers amongst the filed rows of chairs, splattered around the room in no coherent fashion, waiting eagerly and anxiously for the exam to begin so they could be done with it.
So this is what it feels like to fail, to look your professor in the eye and explain that your all around lack of presence, in assignments and in the classroom, is a result of ‘mental problems’, and trying to live with yourself after it escapes your mouth. The pathetic words that echo back ‘excuses, excuses!’ and ‘how weak, how pathetic!’ and all the other jeering onslaughts of self abuse. So I finished one exam. I deserve a badge of effort, effort for not killing myself. So I slurp my beer, trying to drown the incessant thoughts rapping, rapping, rapping at the back of my eyes, those damn images. They never leave. No. The festering thoughts linger like the mucous in your mouth, always present and never a problem until there’s too much or too little. Either way, there’s entirely too much now, so I need to wash’em away, wash’em away with booze. Good’ol booze. The body killer, the liver lacerator, the mind melter: booze. The shit that makes you dull and happy and careless all at the same time. It makes you feel alright, makes you feel damn good. And damn good means feeling damn less, especially when you’re battling mental fatigue and those little insults begin worming into the cavities of self esteem. That’s when you know you’re in big trouble. When your esteem is in jeopardy.
So I recline in my bed, head and torso propped up with a few pillows, laptop on the stomach, sprawled out in boxers, pounding beer. And writing. Writing. Let that god damn itch work its way onto paper, into words. Get it out. Let it escape god damnit. I want nothing of it. Take my body, it’s nothing. Have it in its half naked drunken state. Its too tired and useless for me. So take it.
The therapist. Oh that man. That egomaniac man who’s as jolly as he is self absorbed.
Tell me about my problems, dear sir. I said I was feeling depressed. He said this was a result of narcissism. I said the anxiety was bubbling over. He said I was justifying my state through circumstances, a typical move he hears all the time. I say I don’t need drugs. He says I should get on them cause whatever I’m doing isn’t working. I say I need to change my environment. He says… See: narcissism.
Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s supposedly a hipster beer, whatever that means. It’s a god damn good beer. Best cheap beer you can buy. 6% alcohol content. American (not that I give a shit). And it doesn’t taste like absolute shit. I actually enjoy drinking it, and would almost prefer it to any beer. Except, not really. I’m waiting for the sedation to kick in. The god damn ethonol, it’s pumping through my veins, through my cerebrum. I can feel it. It’s mind numbing. It’s euphoric, like a dose of ecstasy in a spat of dew, I like it and it rejuvenates, but only briefly before it begins working its anesthetic magic on my mind. God damnit its nice. Alcohol, my illustrious lover of long lappings. Lappings that span many a night. Me and her. The alcohol and my brain. Fucking and sucking until they’re exhausted and elated and dumb and happy all at the same time.
I haven’t gotten this much rawness out in a long time. Maybe it’s the fatigue, the sheer exhaustion that raped my inhibitions into a timid, meek, pathetic excuse for a censor. Either way. It’s nice. fuck you.
So upon leaving the exam I drove directly to the closest beer store and picked up a twelve pack. Minutes later I stripped my clothes off and began drinking, in my bed, with massive gulps, like the alcohol contained oxygen for my soul.
To my fellow zombies peering into web space: Stare at those images, yea, stare at them for hours, obsess over them, tell yourself you aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t good enough, then throw up, throw up the nausea that plagues your past time, your internet past time that thrusts and throbs itself over these images of warped wonder. The perfection doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t keep us from imagining it does.
Love it
For breakfast. All day every day baby. Love it. Today I slept all day long. I dreamt powerful dreams, dreams about old lovers. Agonizing dreams about losing them, trying to get them back, wishing there was a way we could work it out.
The dream was funny. It involved a variety of social media devices. Like Facebook and MySpace and what not. I talked to my ex girl friends mom on the phone. She told me to contact her, to ask how she’s doing, to show that I care. I also consulted one of my best high school friends. His advice was relieving. He told me that I should get in touch with her, but if she doesn’t respond, not to worry because in a few months, or as soon as I find another girl, she’ll be nothing to me. It just doesn’t matter. I explained how my feelings get involved quickly. We could relate to each other.
In my dream, I was constantly looking heartbroken, constantly checking various locations and social media to monitor her life apart from mine. It was pathetic really, but it felt good. Sickly good.
No matter. Even now I’m resentful. Why did she break up with me? Why hasn’t she showed any interest in me? Why one day was she crying, telling me how much she loved me, how afraid she was that I’d break my heart, and the next day she’s completely emotionally dead to me. No interest in my life. No interest or remorse or regret. No text or phone calls.
I remember at one point in our relationship she was concerned when I met up with her for a formal dinner with her sorority. I was emotionally distant, not feeling exactly up to the challenge of being Mr. Right to her, and she panicked. She thought my feelings would change and that I was done with her. That wasn’t case, of course, but it struck me as odd. Why would she think that I’d be capable of losing all my feelings for her in a single day? Over night? Has someone done that to her? It turns out someone has done that to her. No matter. I always think that our opinion about other people is less indicative of other people’s character than it is about our character.
One day, all about me, the next, nothing. What did I do? What the hell happened? I need to stop thinking of it to be honest.
The past two weeks have been atrocious. There are four of my six classes that I have Incomplete grades in. I missed one final. I haven’t written three 10 page essays. It’s messy. It’s sad. I’m sitting here and my friend Conrad got all A’s and one A-, meanwhile I failed one class, and all the other classes I have Incomplete grades in. I need to write these essays in the next three weeks. I’ve been sleeping all day every day, my work habits, my overall responsibility as a person has been at an all time low. Any who.
I haven’t even completed my work application for this summer. I need to do that. I attribute that to the stress of school, of deadlines, of feeling like a piece of shit because my girlfriend, whom I pretty much lost interest in anyway, completely rejected me before I could even blink. I mean, I tried the whole emotional routine, crying and getting choked up, and it worked, but not really. She was moved of course, but not swayed. She left that night, we kissed one last kiss, and she drove off. I told her to leave whenever she wanted because I wasn’t going to be the one telling her to leave. She was the one breaking it off with me. Anyway. It’s not exactly the most uplifting memory. I think she’s an insensitive little cunt, but whatever. I actually thought she was a good girl, and she probably is in all her boring unhygienic ways. Yes. I’m getting a little messy. A little cruel. She’s unhygienic. Messy. Not exactly clean. That was the number one turn off since the beginning, but I told myself to overlook it, that I just wanted a girl to be intimate with, to fuck. Fuck.
There are two reasons to get a girl friend. One is emotional needs. The other is physiological needs, or sexual needs. Lets not shit our selves; it’s possible to separate these needs. Some people get them mixed up and confused, like you really can’t separate the emotional intimacy from sex. But I call bullshit, and if you have sex with enough women, it comes as second nature. You’re friends can fill the intimate needs. Women, well they’re good for the sexual, and that’s about it, because relying on them for any other need is a fucking risk. They’re flaky and emotionally unpredictable.
I got to remember to remind myself that familiarity breeds contempt. I will never, ever tell a girl about my past ever again. I realize that it is entirely unnecessary.
Cinco
Today. Today today. Finals are over. Thank god. I’m feelin free. Free to get wasted.
What to think. Today is cinco de Mayo. I find it funny to think that people need these holidays as an excuse to drink. No body really celebrates this holiday. For christ sake, half the american population is racist as hell, yet when it comes to drinking we’re hand in hand, united as one. What a day to drown our differences.
My room mates are blubbering idiots. One is a juvenile infant. Actually they both are. Only, one is emotionally retarded, while the other is mentally retarded. So he’s got this website he’s working on. His dad has money. He drives two cars around. Ones a bmw five series, the other’s a renovated range rover. He graduated a semester behind his class because he was too caught up in fraternity scene to notice he was fifteen credits behind. So he stayed an extra semester, still in the frat, to continue with his partying. The past semester he’s had a part time job at TVA, the tennessee power company. He claims he doesn’t do shit all day. He goes out drinking into the night, comes home at 3 in the morning, wakes up at 10, goes to work until three or four-ish, watches TV for a few hours, or surfs the net on his ipad, then he goes out drinking. I forgot to mention, mostly cause it’s hardly worth mentioning, but it’s funny so I’ll say it: he’s got his heart set on being on entrepreneur. While it’s an admirable goal, the guy hasn’t a clue about responsibility, hard work, discipline. Maybe he’s got home ingenuity, but most of that is ripped off other people he finds on the web for inspiration. So this website he wants to make is gonna make him millions, he says. That way, all those girls that he’s never hooked up with will ‘want his balls’ when they see all his money. He’s approached investors who’ve told him that he’s an idiot, to show a product first, or some kind of progress. That they won’t invest the 50 million he wants until there’s something to look at. Did I mention he hasn’t a clue how to program? So his website is called “plan jar”. He’s told some young computer geeks that he would make them rich, this way he can capitalize on their talent while they build him a site. Anyway. I suppose I might be a little hard on the guy. Either way, he’s a child. An emotionally retarded child. Always talking about these girls he met, and they wanted his dick so bad, but the stories are always predictable. they didn’t go home with him, and he didn’t get laid, and he’s alright with that. It’s comical really.
As for my other roommate. He’s a swell guy. Pretty sure he’s full blown autistic. Can barely hold a conversation with him. Actually, he doesn’t talk really, except to bash our muslim president, or regurgitate some other unoriginal racial slurs. He’s a die hard catholic, a republican, a true american. His daddy’s in the commercial real estate business, so he’s got some money, and he’s always ready to tell people, especially those who don’t have it. Know what I hate, he says. I hate poor people. Poor people are pathetic. I just think to myself… really? Really you dumb piece of shit? What did you ever work for that wasn’t handed to you? What opportunities did you jump on that were actually your ideas? Anyway. He’s got a smokin’ penchant for cocaine, another opinion he’s apt to proclaim. Not the sharpest tool.
Today is cinco de mayo. I know the routine, all too familiar. Drink margarita’s, corona, teqilla shots, or any other alcohol the mexicans export over here. Take over a tex mex bar. Get decently shit faced, and when i say decently, i mean shit you pants shit faced. Find a female who’s equally inebriated, do your best to reach a mutual decision to have irresponsible sex, wake up mid afternoon, tell her to leave. Actually, that’s not how I do it. Everything up until there is halfway accurate until telling her to leave. I just ask her, politely, if she has anyone that can pick her up, or if she’d like me to drive.
Ah, yes. The college life. I’m not sure if I’m done with it yet or not. Being irresponsible, that is. At what point in my life did I forget that I can’t fuck up anymore? That I’ve done it all before, had all the sex, indulged all the irreproachable things in life that are fun, for a night. Especially when you want to forget about the monotony of life’s routine.
bin Laden
(Overhearing someone say that Osama’s death will save the lives of innocent people): Last time I checked his death and these wars had nothing to do with preventing innocent deaths, otherwise we’d be doing things a little differently.
What it does have to with is preserving American ideals, such as freedom. And as far as America is concerned, innocent or not, there is no limit to the lives we’ll sacrifice for those ideals.
We should reflect on whether the American ideals we’re preserving are universal enough to extend to other people of the world; if they are, what would we be doing differently? if they aren’t, well, I think we’re doing everything accordingly.
But I have to ask myself if the inequality bred by this double standard jeopardizes the legitimacy of the very ideals we’re trying to preserve?
Additionally, Osama’s death is more symbolic than practical. His death has no affect on the insidious tentacles of Al Queda’s vast network; cutting a head off a hydra is no immediate cause for celebration. If anything, we just made him a martyr, and fueled their enthusiasm and hate. hm..
Diverge
Random thoughts:
Convergent and divergent thinking.
Convergent thinking is analytical thinking. It is the ability to converge on a correct answer. It operates according to preestablished parameters. It is categorical, definitional, and classificatory. When a question is asked, convergent thinking knows the appropriate answer. This type of thinking is found in standardized tests.
Divergent thinking is creative thinking. It is the ability to generate novel ideas by exploring many possible solutions. Divergent thinking is spontaneous and free-flowing, generating a multitude of ideas through an emergent cognitive fashion.
A metaphor:
The world gives you a room. Using convergent thinking, people accept this room and it’s contents as the summation of life. They live their lives within this room, spending their time manipulating the contents within the room, and never think of a world beyond it’s walls. The people who accept the room given to them never wonder of another room.
Divergent thinkers know that there are multiple rooms. They know that not only are there other rooms, but we create these rooms. They know that any given room not only contains a door in which we can leave the room, but that this door is unlocked as long as we have the courage to approach it and venture beyond the familiar walls. The creative people are courageous and curious. They venture into the unknown world beyond a room and are able to see a room among many rooms. They are no longer concerned with manipulating the contents of a given room as much as they are concerned with comparing different rooms amongst each other or creating entirely new rooms.
To escape a room, to utilize creativity and divergent thinking, one must utilize the traits of nonconformity, curiosity, willingness to take risks, and persistence.
The room is a metaphor for any ideology, conceptual understanding, framework or world-view. These are not representational facsimiles of reality, but a lens that allows us to organize and capture experience in a productive way according to specific ends and purposes.
Brief Thoughts: Happiness
To those who say, “I’m on the pursuit of happiness.” I ruefully reply, “Happiness is never found; it is created, within you.”
I don’t even think it’s found within a person. It is always there. Happiness, like any feeling, is a choice. Some choices may be alien or uncomfortable, but we always have a choice, especially with something as fundamental as our thoughts.
I like to think of our thoughts as fodder and kindling. Some thoughts add to the flame within us, causing it to grow hotter and burn brighter. Other thoughts stifle this flame, causing it to whither and grow cold. Certain thoughts warm our insides, and the longer they burn, the longer we feel their warmth. Even in the face of life’s most brutal elements, where the coldest and harshest moments of life reside, we have all the necessary kindling within us to weather the storm. As humans, we generate life, feelings, entire worlds with our minds. Looking for and pursuing such things as happiness, as if they are not already in our possession, will only leave the flame within us unattended. We can’t rely on the chance of circumstance to animate our flame.
We bring happiness to the world. It is not something to be mined from the world. The world is nothing without an eye to perceive it, just as a home is nothing without inhabitants or a gift is nothing without someone to receive it. We bring our mind to the world, our eye to nature, and give it life. We rouse and rally and wake the world with a perceiving eye as much as the world rouses and rallies and wakes the perceiving mind. Anyway.
Hamartia
Writing is like breathing: I exhale so that I may inhale. When I do not write I find that I am not fully living. The concoctions of thought, the skeletal remains of lurid fantasies, need to be exhumed. Conversing is good and all, but at the end of a long conversation, I find no evidence that these spirits have been properly exorcised. It’s not like I can see the conversation and know for certain how I felt when I said the words and had the feelings. I may be a bit happier, maybe more relaxed or passionate or enthusiastic, but there’s no reason why that’s the case. The fact is: I need to write. I just need to think through my fingers, through my body. I need to feel the velleity of inspiration coursing through my veins, through my mind. Art is nice, but writing takes the abstract and makes it concrete and comprehensible. I feel like very little is lost in translation, whereas in art, it’s about as interpretive as you can get. Who knows, maybe writing is just as hermeneutic. Maybe art is a purer, more universal language that transcends the idiomatic nuances of the written word. Or maybe not. I like to think that the poignancy of ideas is best captured through writing. So…
Anyway. I began writing another novel. I decided that I’ll try a third person narrative. I’ve never written an extended story in the third person, and I realized that 99% of the stories and essays I’ve ever penned have been in the first person. The majority of philosophy essays are first person. I journal in the first person. Whenever I express my thoughts it’s done subjectively. It’s not like I’ve really had to write in the third person. I figure I should give it a try and wield the power of an omniscient narrator. It might be liberating.
The past two day’s I’ve been writing up a plot and developing the characters, writing close to three thousand words. The novel will be about love, essentially. Loving others and loving yourself. I know, it’s sappy, maybe overused, but I don’t care. I’m not tryin to publish a number one best seller. I’m just trying to write. I’ve written pretty much every day for the past eleven or twelve years, whether it’s in a hand written paper journal or a blog entry, so I decided that, since I’m writing, may as well start writing stories. At least that way I can hone my story telling abilities. And, I’m not sure writing for my sake will do much good unless other people read it, and people generally don’t really read thoughts and journals unless you’re someone with a notable reputation, or saying something of significant importance. So write I shall, and stories they shall be.
So anyway, the plot. The plot is different, but I decided to write about something relevant in our culture today. Specifically, on the theme of homosexuality and fitting in. There’s been a lot of news regarding the bullying and suicides of kids that have identified themselves as homosexual. While I don’t have that much background in that world, I figure at the very least it’d be a learning experience and provide me an additional perspective.
To give the briefest plot ever: “A do-good boy meets his free spirited best friend and falls in love with a girl who seems to have life figured out. He gets rejected by the girl and copes through rebellion which, through a radical summer of experimentation, leads him to discover his true self and sexuality. Initially free and inspired by these revelations, he finds himself feeling trapped and ashamed upon returning to school. As a result he turns inward toward his new inner life and begins writing about these new feelings. Upon finishing his masterpiece he finds that his life has fallen into ruins and he decides to kill himself, but moments before he goes through with it, he has a life changing experience.” Still working out the turns and other details, but that’s essentially it. We’ll see. Woot.
Need to write about thirty pages in two days. Gotta love finals.
Rain Away.
Street lights flicker onto long stretches of empty pavement and the wind whips at my hair.
Then it arrives. A roar. A crash and crack. The tempest is here. It descends like a tantric tantrum, furious and flailing, full of ecstasy and rage. I decide to run. Where doesn’t exactly matter, just so long as it’s far, far away, someplace calm and warm and safe.
Then they arrive. In legion. In the thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Miniature missiles hurling toward me en mass. I look for an escape but there is no out. My only option is to embrace the inevitable. The next moment I’m chugging through beatings of horizontal rain. The lactic acid is eats away at my consciousness, the pain mounts and intensifies with every stride, but I continue. I need to get home. Never mind the persistent pelting, I tell myself to fight on, to pump those god damn my legs through the pain, through the maelstrom of glistening globules stinging my face.
But I have no idea where I’m going. Does it even matter?
I survey the surroundings for some saving refuge but I’m alone, alone with an empty landscape. I know my only out.
On Selfishness, Values, Creativity, Death
There is no selfless act. Though you die for values and ideals, they are nonetheless yours and yours alone, subjective and independent of external facts and realities. Insofar as self-preservation is the prerogative of all life, the preservation of ideals and values is the prerogative of the human consciousness.
But what of love? some may say. Love is a selfish conception. If it is not predicated as a pleasure or passion, it is predicated as a subjective concept projected onto the world to characterize a type of relationship. To die for another is to die for your ideals and values, not the subjective values of others. The act of dying for another or another’s values is embedded with subjective valuations. Camus said that what man believes to be true must determine his action.
Echoing Nietzsche in his essay On Truth and Lies in the Non-moral Sense, truth is a metaphorical representation that is coined from an originally subjective perception of experience and passed on as an objective fact of experience. Though it may be passed on as objective, its application in life through experience is nonetheless a subjective assertion. Insofar as we exist before we perceive the world, all that is conceivable and doable is a sui generis selfish act, whether it’s to preserve the well being of the body or preserve the conceptions of the mind.
But what of martyrs or saints? others will say. Are not these selfless acts of death or denial? I would reply that they are no more selfless than suicide or any other act that preserves a subjectively possessed belief or ideal.
The only selfless acts are those selfish deeds which indirectly and consequently improve upon the lives of others so that they must do the same when taken to denouement. That is, selfless acts are no more selfish than any other act, only that their corollary influences others to perform actions which empower others to empower others.
In this way one may pursue the ideal of freedom selfishly but in doing so he not only apprehends freedom personally, but apprehends this freedom for others as well. Likewise it is with equality, so that by cherishing equality for selfish motives he secures equality for all. What must be preserved in these acts is an inherent method of propagating the power of others to do the same.
Creativity must not be confused as being exclusively devoted to the arts. Creativity is the ability to stipulate something from nothing, to instantiate new conceptions according to new or existing demands. The constructive value to life inherent in creativity also contains an equally threatening detriment to life. By their very nature new and original conceptions destroy uniformity, disrupt equilibrium and threaten the familiar. The foreign and alien, the new and novel, have no place in circular systems. Circular systems arise from habits formalized as convention, routine, pattern, method and the like. They allow predictability and consistency and uniformity. Their adoption requires a suspension of familiarity so that a leap of faith is required for their assimilation. In many cases the familiar must not only be amended, but totally destroyed and annihilated to sufficiently accommodate change. In this way change requires adaptation, an alteration of existing units and relations within a system.
These systems may represent cultural practices, or histories, or traditions or rationale. One must not rely on the past to sufficiently guide and navigate the future. So long as there is time, there is change, and all change must be embraced accordingly. Negating the existence of changes is the source of all problems. If life is an activity characterized by growth, problems are a natural phenomenon and must be welcomed as such. But what is growth if it is not life? And what is life if not a continual pursuit of preservation? To preserve the past is to celebrate death; but this is precisely the natural character of humans. Nietzsche said “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.” As with all things living, it is human nature to preserve the self, to struggle to exist, but the rarity arises in man’s specialized ability to preserve. This ability resides in the act of perpetuating equilibrium through adaptation, through the creative employment of reason and imagination to adjust to changes. Non-living matter can be said to be in the greatest equilibrium of all.
But this is where man diverges from other life. It is not enough to maintain equilibrium. Man contains a will to create equilibrium where there is not, to dominate his surroundings in an effort to project an ultimate equilibrium that renders a congruency between the inner life of the self and his environment. This is why Nietzsche dismissed the Darwinian notions of struggle for existence in favor of the will to power which more accurately reflects the nature of man. Evidence of the will to power becomes obvious when we turn to the modern day manifestations of man and witness artificial disequilibrium instantiated as civilization and technologies. Going far beyond all the past pursuits of life that merely sought to preserve corporeal existence, man has successfully learned to preserve the inner self. He has fully exercised his freedom to impress his inner world onto the outer world, to fashion it according to his liking.
Leaders are creators who operate to conjure and implement new realities and visions that accommodate real or perceived changes. While leaders can be oppressive in this way, they can be, more importantly, liberators who sow new realities and ideas that empower others. The difference lies in the values contained in the given vision and whether or not these values empower others to empower themselves to empower others.
Assert Your Inner World
“There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.” -Hermann Hesse
To be is to be perceived. Perception is not a quality of the world, but of our mind.
Hesse is referring to the creative imagination, our ability to stipulate and synthesize original thoughts, or in this case concepts, to render new and original experience.
Concepts are not found in experience; we apply them to experience.
In short: When these words are perceived, concepts of understanding (categories, classifications, definitions) are brought a priori to experience in order to render it intelligibly. These a priori concepts of understanding mediate between subjective judgments of perception (derived from a posteriori sensations and a priori pure intuitions) to yield objective judgments of experience. You do not have direct access to external reality. Think of a priori concepts of understanding as the ‘interpretative lens’ or ‘conceptual structure’ used to intelligibly render and organize and categorize experience. The a priori concepts of understanding being applied determine the objective concepts of experience, and anything objective can be freely disputed by asserting alternatives.
I believe Hesse is asserting that the mind, being independent and a priori of experience, can choose to create and stipulate its own conceptual interpretative system for rendering experience from reality. So that ‘when we change the way we look at the world, the world we look at changes.’
He is saying that people fail to question the concepts or ‘mental images’ dogmatically dictated outside them, viz. by society via convention, culture, routine, etc., and assert the freedom of their creative mind. When these patterns are broken new worlds will emerge.
New
I don’t like reading the news. It depresses me.
I need to make some changes in my life. Over the course of the past few months I’ve gotten in the bad habit of thinking about nothing. What this does is prevent me from doing. Doing a lot. Being a lot. Thinking is pretty nice and all, but only when there are problems. Thinking about things that don’t require fixing is just a waste of time. In my opinion. As I type these words. Ironical as hell.
So over the past few weeks I’ve been indulging in thoughts and behaviors that are regressive. Regressive because I’ve lost more than I’ve gained with them. They have brought me absolutely no where. Except backwards. Action. Action. Action. Life is action.
Who do I want to be? A great student. Someone who studies his material. What does that mean? Read a lot. Just know it. Don’t obsess over it. Sometimes this is hard when you study philosophy. It’s not like other facts that you can toss to the side because they don’t apply to every context. Philosophy really does apply to every context and it’s hard to stop yourself from constantly seeing these connections.
It’s beautiful out today. Like, unbelievable.
Redundancy
So I’ve realized a pathological redundancy to my relationships. Everything’s great the first two months, love, happiness, joy. Thoughts of marriage. Then something happens. Something goes off in my mind and I retreat inward. It becomes more about myself. Less about them. I let them put the effort in and I somehow think they’ll continue putting the effort in. So about a month later I’m emotionally detached and they’re totally frustrated. They do rash things, they have needs. I don’t respond. We break up. They’re emotional. I’m not. Then one of two things happen. Either I accept the break up, or I realize I just lost something absolutely amazing. In the first scenario I’m emotionally removed to the point where I am just a cold indifferent stranger. Not sensitive, not caring. Just distant. And it doesn’t matter. I’ve moved on. It may hurt a little, but I recover. In the second scenario, I realize I’m losing someone I value. I realize that I actually did love this person, that I need to take corrective action. I don’t think I’ve ever recovered a relationship beyond this point. Once the girl has felt the rejection, the cold distance, there’s usually no coming back. Truth is, it’s rare if I ever truly want it to come back.
But what would I have to do to win her back? To show her that I’m done giving up. That I want her and I wanna work for it. What on earth do I need to do? It might be a problem that that’s even a question. I should be running after them, no? What would that look like?
So I love her. Why do I pull away? God. It’s happened like this for how long? How many relationships? It’s predictable. I can say there are differences in every relationship, but there aren’t. Sure there are commonalities, but the fact is when I see potential in getting hurt or vulnerable, I just fold inward. It’s sad, I think. I’m not even sure that’s it. I just don’t know what else to think.
It crushes me to think that I haven’t been emotionally available for her. That I’ve been in my own world, that she’s somehow become a chore, a second responsibility. I hate myself for it. And it’s not them. It’s me. Something happens in me. A shift in attitude, in esteem. It prevents me from feeling. It kills me to think that they’ve been with me, and I haven’t been there for them. Agh. It hurts just thinking about it. So many relationships. I have had it. I am done. No more being a coward. So is that it?
No. In the end I don’t think it has anything to do with being a coward. I think it has something more to do with being free and passionate, and relationships seem to depreciate that wild life. They function to steal away a piece of my freedom, a piece of my inner world, and I can never let that happen.
Candidus
Ah. To be happy. I can be happy. I am happy. But the dumb are happy. It doesn’t take guts to be happy. It takes guts to be sad. To endure hardship and suffering. Sure, happy is pleasurable. But imagine, just imagine a life that was entirely happy. I like to think that such a life would be terribly boring. Terribly nauseating. Like eating sugar at every meal, you’d get sick of it. Most people think that suffering is a curse. I tend to disagree, quite vehemently too. Suffering and sadness are blessings. They harden and humble a man. They make him more appreciative, more aware. And while they might callous soft skin, they deepen the capacity to care and contemplate, to hold more in.
To be happy: the dumb are happy. That is what I observe. Any blubbering idiot can be happy. But to be sad? This requires courage, but not just courage, it requires sacrifice. Sacrifice of the pleasures that preponder the mind night and day.
Amusing. I resent those who keep themselves constantly amused. Do you know what the word amuse stands for? It is a suspension of thought: ‘a’-‘muse’. As in, ‘no muse’. As in, to divert attention, inspiration or thought. The french came up with that one. It’s quite clever.
So we have a society that prides itself on amusement. It is a virtue to be amused.
Suffering and sadness create depth. I can always spot the deep thinkers. They’re the sensitive type, but you’d never know it by looking at them. They keep it in. Some people have the good fortune of being born sensitive. In these cases suffering and sadness are thrust upon them. For everyone else, well, they need to wait to misfortune. And some never have the fortune of misfortune.
But the suffering and sadness doesn’t just make people deep and contemplative. No. It makes them bold. Bold to be themselves. To be happy. To embrace it all. They know no boundaries. For them, fear has been found. They fear nothing. They understand that to fear suffering is to already suffer from what you fear. They realize that it is all apart of the play. For everyone else, they avoid pain. They avoid hardship, suffering. Their lives are a despairing denial. They seek comfort and in this comfort they water down their potential.
Some people run. They run from vulnerability. They run from pain. They run from every really experiencing joy. Let them run. They run only from themselves, and then they never know themselves. For them life is a sheet of paper containing wondrous lines and colors, but no depth.
Yes. The man who has suffered greatly finds himself at home even in the most terrifying worlds, worlds which most no nothing about. Ah yes. To be happy. You fool. Life is not always happy. You have bought the lie, swallowed the pill, forfeited your life.
Life is suffering. To embrace suffering is to embrace life. To avoid suffering is the strongest sentiment of death. When life hurts, know that you are alive.
Let us embrace the balance. Let us embrace the crests and troughs. The balance lies in the synthesis, the contrasts created by the peaks and valleys. To reside in the middle is lifeless. While the moments spent there are brief and good, a life in the middle, or at one extreme or the other, is a predictable flat line. Let’s find balance while undulating across the extremes. This way we can mark our progress by degree.
I believe that some people are born wild, while others are born domesticated. Some born free, others born slaves.
With a large intelligence and a deep heart comes the inevitability of pain and sadness. Great men, I think, must have great sadness.
Oh you disagree do you? What great achievement was ever won without the perspiration of pain? One must embody the discipline of driving through suffering and sadness?
I am happy. But I choose my moments. I prefer to be conscious, to have a pulse, rather than be happy. So this may be why I am always thinking. It is an involuntary response to being fully alive.
William Dare 