Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category
On feeling and serenity
I have to write this right now before the armour comes back. When I speak to someone, however much I feel I can trust them, about things that I would otherwise only write on here, the armour chokes off my words before I can get them out and it sanitises them and it detachs me in a dishonest and inaccurate way. It’s here too, only lessar: it wanted me to put ‘feel I’ after the first word of this post. Wherever I try to form sentences, be it for writing/typing or speaking, it comes up around me and messes them up. Well, right now I’m not wearing it and I am going to take advantage of this brief interlude. This afternoon I read the better part of my favourite book again and I listened to some songs. I linked some thoughts from a couple of days together. And then I was just very very sad for longer than I’ve ever been sad for for as long as I can remember. Not a worried, panicky sadness from the crushing burden of my academic issues at the moment, which has been so frequently a companion for me recently, but a real and undirected sadness. At least that’s what it became after the direction the book gave it originally (below) faded. Then there was hope. My tutor-come-psychotherapist says I have some sadness to feel. So maybe I’m getting somewhere. I’m going to write about this afternoon’s sadness, and I’m going to write a bit about the earlier thoughts.
The book was more beautiful than I ever remembered it to be. Not anything about the book itself, or perhaps even the story much. The prose is pretty straightforward. There’s a good poem about halfway through, and some of the conversations made me smile but it’s generally quite average and there are even facets of the story that I don’t think contribute very much at all, as I’ve said before, such as the stuff about Bill and Charlie’s intelligence. The characters themselves, aside from Charlie, aren’t especially endearing, and they’re not hugely inspirational – or, not in a way that stands out compared to the significant thing I’m about to mention. It’s nice how they live their youths out in the early nineties and how much better off they seem to be without our apathy and our technology, but again, I take in all this stuff in a different way to how I take in what made this book more beautiful for me this afternoon than it has ever been before. The upcoming sentence takes more resolve to type than anything else that takes resolve that I could do at the moment. I’d sooner ask out a hypothetical ‘perfect’ girl than write this (hope that makes my point but it doesn’t sound right to me). What makes the book so beautiful is the relationships between the characters and the network of experience-sharing they form; heck, let’s go all out: their love for each other. Maybe that’s not specific enough. Their closeness, perhaps. I feel like I haven’t used enough words for something as big as this but perhaps ‘love’ is sufficient after all.
The elements (the characters) don’t matter up to isomorphism and you find that Maths is more about the maps/functions between the objects rather than the objects themselves. A nice Maths joke to relieve the tension I just amassed in myself with that. I appreciate that it’s going to be hard for your average reader to get why what I just wrote was such a big deal for me. It won’t be for certain others. I might be the type to be conceited but any family member reading this will have the biggest ever ‘I told you so’ ready to serve up to me. Well, I’ll figure that bit out later because I don’t think my conception is quite in line with yours just yet; I’ve not given in entirely. But this is not relevant right now and I need to go on and keep writing.
As I was realising the above account of why I was getting so much from the book this afternoon, I was also getting pretty close to the end. Which makes sense, given what happens towards (but not at) the end. I started moving around the room. I sat in the two chairs. I kneeled on the window seat. I read the epilogue leaning against the wardrobe, but nowhere was right. After I closed the book I went and kneeled on the edge of the bed and covered my eyes up and got angry at people in the street and the rest of the flat breaking into my solitude with their everyday noises. For some reason I was okay like that. So then I did my usual thing and started writing this post in my head, as I went through my thoughts. Here’s the specific sadness. I do not feel like I am or have ever been close to anyone in the way that Charlie, Patrick and Sam are close. And (ulp — here comes another deeply difficult to write sentence) I want it so much whence I felt so sad. Again, this is not the crushing weight of circumstance but the melancholy of some strange kind of solipsism. This needs some explaining. I do not want to hurt anyone. I have a few very close friends, but I don’t have what Charlie has. I don’t know. I feel the need to excuse myself because of what I just wrote because I don’t see how it is true but it feels like it is. In Oxford it’s a worse situation perhaps. I know an awful lot of people and am well-liked, but manage to somehow keep myself from ever getting anywhere near any of them. And while my respect for my family members grows more and more as time goes on, and I love them and appreciate their support with things, we are not and don’t see how we could ever be close.
Maybe I’m completely unable to put things into perspective because I’ve not had the right experiences to match up with the amount of growing up I’ve done so far. Maybe I’m feeling lonely in a way that only romantic/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-to-distinguish-from-friendship relationships can fulfill. I have no idea; these are just possibilities that occur to me.
As I mentioned before this faded after a little while and I was just sad, and the hope I mentioned earlier started to rise when previous hypotheses from that tutor reoccured to me. And that’s all there is say because it’s really that simple to me. Or it’s not — because nothing is — and I don’t know myself well enough to explain it any further. And the couple that everyone else thinks are shallow and angry and I think have rather more to them when you get to know them are shouting and complaining about stuff in the kitchen and I’m struggling to concentrate. So I’ll go on. It is about this point that I realised that I needed to write right now before I lost what might just be me losing my grip on something one should not lose one’s grip on, but something that might also be something more significant. So I closed the curtains, turned the light off, locked the door, had a glass of water and started to type.
I haven’t long left before the armour’ll be back and I’ll start making excuses. Some of them will be real or legitimate and not really excuses at all but some of them won’t be like that and the worst thing is that I won’t be able to tell the difference. So as I said I would I’ll do the thoughts I’ve been having, now I’ve done the feelings. Back on familiar territory, you’ll forgive me if I lose the thing I might have had when writing the above if indeed I had something. This stuff is where the title for this post comes from. This messy, disjointed post with long running sentences that I would usually edit to death before hitting ‘Publish’; not today.
The first thing is of the relativity of feeling and of how the people around me in Balliol have an absolute view instead, and how I think this has infected me to the extreme and harmed me and all those others around me. I do not mean to imply that this is something unique to Balliol at all, but this is the first place I’ve personally been in that has made me see it clearly. Towards the end of the book, Charlie tells us how he won’t tell his children that some people are starving when they won’t eat their greens; he tells us how he his sister, about to start university, visits him in hospital to express how foolish she feels for being worried about starting university when his situation is that much worse, and Charlie doesn’t think she should feel foolish at all. Yes, there is a point when we must pull ourselves together and get on with things, and it is good when those around us who care for us are honest, and point out when we need to snap out of it. But the modern world microcosmed in Balliol, takes this from honesty to stony coldness. Excitement or enthusiasm is not only not cool, it has very little worth at all. Not everyone thinks this, but there are elements who do (I do have a particular Balliolite or two in mind; maybe others can guess who), and it infects me. We are not allowed to feel anything but mirth. Seriousness is forbidden, torn down by banal student humour. And I bring it home with me and deride friends who are only a tiny bit younger than me in the same my enthusiasm and seriousness can get derided here. As an aside — I reckon that this probably has a lot to do with fact that people in Balliol are so utterly useless at relationships. They’re so deeply afraid of being honest with each other. It upsets me to watch them make such a mess of things over and over.
I haven’t done a very good job there and this is a subject on which I would like to expand upon and elucidate more clearly in the future. The addition that has come from today’s thinking is that feelings are relative. If we attempt to consider seriousness or other types of feeling out of context in an absolute manner then we’re only going to end up throwing it all out. Maybe, then, there is a place for privacy with one’s thoughts; maybe I am wrong in my policy of being willing to put pretty much anything up on here. We must watch ourselves. It is too easy to forget this. We must consider others and their reactions to things more carefully. Very, very little is worth throwing out or deriding. Perhaps I am too judgemental after all.
One final thought that, as I say, I’ve had recently and have had reinforced and enriched from my reading this afternoon and evening. All Charlie wants is for life to be enough. And I have a new word for this, based on how I was feeling around midday yesterday in the sun: he wants serenity. Yesterday I had serenity when a figure I see as having authority cleared my name of some stuff that has dogged me and I felt that I could be okay with everything. This deserves writing about properly, something I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and I will soon enough. But the trick is to not live off temporary boosts of serenity from external sources. The trick is to get it out of ourselves somehow. I’m starting to really appreciate stock phrases like “be happy with yourself” in this new light, and as I say it’s a series of thoughts that I will come back to.
I think that’s all I’m going to be able to get past the defenses. I’m feeling more and more normal. Better quit while I’m ahead. I’ve just spend roughly six hours in self-indulgent (bwahahaa it’s back, here I go!) reading and writing. Now I have reading and essays and problem sheets that, as per usual, I’m not really in a position to do much with, but that’s the same as ever, so I don’t want this seeming like an overtly negative end to this post. Just reading it all through. Bitty and childish and whatever. But I wrote it so I’m posting it, bah.
The philosophic life vs. Philosophy
Got quite a bit of Plato to read this vacation; sadly only some of it is related to my degree, and even that only in potentiality. A lot of his writing argues for the life of the philosopher being that best for men; we see this in the Republic where the philosophers are put in charge. I’m thinking: why is this image so removed from the likes of, say, the academics around me in Oxford? Why do they conciously try to separate these things? The way that Plato weaves together the act of doing Philosophy (rigour, clarity, elegance) and the philosophic life (examination as the good) is something I really want to look at some more/properly/at all.
One possible blunt answer is that they disagree with Plato I guess. It’s very hard to begin to talk about these things when you have words like ‘philosophy’ all over the place, something which is of course hugely ambiguous due to the amount of people that have used it to mean different things.
Need to actually decide separation (if any) between this blog and my tumblelog because right now it’s very ambiguous which this post should go on.
Historical Philosophy
I’ve been arguing about this and thinking about it for a year so let’s write a few things about it to guide where I go with it. I am currently doing the paper The History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant, and I’m finding it thrilling. I’m reading ways of looking at the likes of Descartes that are subtle, clever and revealing; there’s a lot of intricate thought going on here that opens the mind up yet further, which is of course why I do this subject. It’s very hard, of course, to get a firm grasp, and this is made harder by not putting enough hours into Philosophy this term. But what I’m doing is valuable and enriching.
While most PPEists do this paper, it’s very rare for a Math/Phil such as myself to be engaging with it: I am scoffed at by fellow students for my choice. To them, the likes of Descartes and Berkeley were ‘wrong’: their arguments can be chopped up with powerful counter-arguments that philosophers have had a good few centuries to come up with, and if we can’t prop them up in our own terms then that is that, and they are discarded by the wayside. People tell me that by studying them in this paper I’m wasting my time, and that if I wanted to do this sort of thing then I came to the wrong university. For them, Philosophy in Oxford is solving the problems set out (reformulating them as we go, of course – I do not wish to paint an entirely condescending image here) in the twentieth century, couching things mostly in terms of language (‘meaning’ is the buzz word) and then going at these things like Maths problems. Philosophers in the top universities have their posts by virtue of their ability to churn out impressive-looking articles in journals that attempt to move the debate forward, closer to a solution that they think is within their (department’s) reach.
This is not, of course, to say that they are not extraordinarily clever and interesting people – a derogatory tone is coming through and I must stop myself. What we might call professional philosophers do in places like Oxford has a great deal of value. Firstly, they are attempting to answer very important questions, and even if they take the tack of solving problems rather than merely increasing understanding of the problems themselves, as I prefer to do, they’re still contributing immensely to said understanding with their attempted solutions. Further, Kant might be more subtly brilliant than your average Oxford Don, but the latter is several orders of magnitude better at expressing himself. The clarity and rigour that we have achieved is of immense value, allowing us to unlock philosophy for our own minds. As someone who gets cross with his tutors telling him to stop telling a story in his essays, and instead to lay things out as the basis of tutorial discussion, I might romantically bemoan the fact that this rigour and clarity often comes at the expense of elegance. But that doesn’t diminish its value.
The issue here is that Philosophy has been reduced or confined to this clarity and rigour. And as some would argue (see E. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man for one example though this is not a book I have read all the way through), there’s a secret worldview here. In setting themselves up as something different to the worldview-creation of the likes of Descartes and Hegel and Kant, modern philosophers actually have a deeply pervading worldview of their own. What greater intellectual criticism is there besides inconsistency! Having not finished the book or thought enough about this, I can’t follow this line of thought further.
What I’ll do to conclude this post is attempt to set out what the value of a serious consideration of our Great Dead Colleagues, to use my tutor’s term, is. My sceptical tendencies, and avoidance of assent, will come through here to anyone who knows me. The difficult thing about reading someone like Descartes is getting into his head and understanding how his philosophy fits together. While it is interesting and enlightening to challenge his arguments in the modern context of the way we all like to think now (the hegemony of liberal positivism about the natural sciences), it will always seem puzzling why these criticisms did not occur to Descartes or his contemporaries, and if they did, why they did not appear to persuade him. But these GDCs are clever, seriously clever. Their minds were complex and so chances are they did come up with similar arguments, but they weren’t relevant. In the same way that we very quickly dismiss questions of faith today (or, so many of us do), they would see them as being very relevant, as an example. So the challenge is to get into their heads and see how everything fits together. A big part of this is analysing their arguments in detail, but after they appear to fall apart, we still have a lot of work ahead of us in our study of that philosopher.
Now onto a more recent thought. Take these worldviews and package them up (not sure that’s really possible but it’s enough for this), and then put them in a row, chronologically, say. At the far end we have our current worldview, and the way that subjects like Maths and Physics make progress leads us to believe that we have a upward trend in gaining a better understanding/solving problems/whatever you see Philosophy as wanting to do. The views get progressively better over time, with some weirdly interspersed ones of course. But here is the mistake from my extremist’s perspective. Actually all we have is difference. Each worldview is different and appealing to different people for different reasons. Understanding the reasons for this (based in analysis of argumentation), and why the various views appeal, is a monumentally more difficult, more valuable and deeper challenge than the mathematical problem solving that modern philosophers seem to want to put their time into.
This is very unpolished. It’s critique of modern philosophy remains too strong despite my best efforts. I’m worried I’m being pulled into my maverick tutor’s world; he’s a big fan of Mr Craig…
To return: if we can see philosophy as thus articulating philosophies – even if the historical detail of my account be questionable – there will be various consequences which I should like to encourage. One will be an increased sympathy for the idea that philosophy may occur in a variety of media. There may be a number of ways of giving expression and substance to such an underlying picture: a novelist may give it force and content by embodying it in a narrative, a poet with imagery; but it could still be a very similar picture to the one which the philosophy fills out with what in a generous sense we may call logic.
E. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: OUP, 1987), p. 4
Not enough public writing; problems of focus
In fits and starts over the past eighteen months or so, I’ve produced an awful lot of text. I might go for a week without writing anything non-academic down, but then I’ll they’ll be a fortnight in which I’ll write close-on a thousand words a day. This term has been one long such fortnight, which is good. I’ve seen a number of interesting people in new lights and I’ve come to some new outlooks on various aspects of Oxford and of my experience studying here. But I should write these things publicly. When I write about these things, it helps me to untangle them in a way that makes me more content with whatever unhappiness they may bring. I think that writing about them publicly is likely to be even more effective, somehow.
These things are academic, these things are personal, these things are the mix in between which is often the most interesting – attempting to apply principles of good thought to the difficulties that go on between the people around me and between myself and others (or, as is more usual, myself and myself).
The only way to get over my unwillingness to do this, which stems from my perfectionism, is to just get some stuff written publicly and start to see that it’s quite alright really; otherwise this blog is limited to more planned out pieces rather than freer charges into language. So let’s have something tonight – here we go.
I think that the hardest thing about undergraduate academic study is maintaining mental focus. While one might sometimes work for an hour and a half on a problem or a chunk of an essay (or a whole essay…), this is rare for most and often the challenge of keeping focused is half the battle right there. I am not just talking about getting distracted by e-mails and the like: I don’t suffer from this because I turn my Internet access off when working on my laptop, and the distraction potential of the various text files I have on here is pretty low… That’s a different kind of lost focus. The other is the main thing that holds me back. By not having one’s mind 100% on the task at hand, it takes longer and thus not only do you lose time, but you lose track of the bigger picture of what you are doing and this is fatal to developing a proper understanding of the area you’re looking at.
The fact that a task is hard contributes to this, of course. Right now I’m writing about something that I’ve had floating around for some time. It’s not a hard topic, and I’m familiar with what I have to say on it, so it’s quite easy to stay totally focused in and just type type type away. Reading a hard piece of Philosophy or thinking my way around a hard Maths question is entirely different. In the former case, I don’t really understand how it happens, but when I’ve been doing nothing but read and type out the occasional note and I find I’ve got through rather few pages and rather little content in the time I’ve been sitting there, it’s easy to see how my mind doesn’t really feel like it’s been working properly. It’s stuffy and not alive with whatever it is I’m dealing with. In Maths, this factor differentiates me from my classmates, from what I can tell. I might do more hours of work, but when they sit down to do it they gosh-darn do it. I keep finding myself staring a question not really thinking about it, not really being proactive, and get really frustrated that I’ve just spent four minutes doing that.
Thinking back to the various things I’ve heard about studying, the first thought is that this has something to do with the length of time one tries to force one’s brain to concentrate for. Go on too long and the words just don’t sink in. Fine. But finding the happy medium here is very difficult. If I try the “take a ten minute break every hour and your focus comes back after” strategy, I find my focus after the break to be just the same as it was before. It’s almost as if I have just half an hour of properly focused brain power available to me each day! Surely I am capable of more than this. The only other thing that occurs to me is the need for more sleep. I only get about six/seven hours at the moment which is a bad habit, and I should be getting eight.
I imagine that fellow students are nodding their heads at this post in general. You’ll ask someone how their afternoon in the library went when you leave together when it closes in the evening, and they’ll tell you that for some reason they can’t quite put their finger on they achieved almost nothing, and are thoroughly frustrated at having set aside the time with apparently no real return on it. Half of the time they have got more out of it than they think but the topic is sufficiently hard that a second run-through is needed in order to become comfortable with the material. But so often it’s a case of not being able to summon forth the necessary focus. I remember reading an article in a magazine a few years ago about students taking various drugs properly used against ADHD to allow them to pump out an essay close to a deadline. A radical solution better solved by actually doing your work, but perhaps related to this family of problems.
I’m not ever going to solve this problem; based on the way that I have described it, that would be tantamount to giving myself unlimited intellectual capability. But it holds me back and thus makes me very unhappy and so if I could improve on it just a little I would be a great deal better off.