Playing Morrowind again
I’ve started up a new character on Morrowind – there’s no point in saying anything about my character choice; it’s the only sensible Morrowind character of course, Strength/Intelligence, Long Blades, Destruction and Medium Armour. Morrowind has got to be my favourite game of all time besides Skies of Arcadia; I’m pretty sure it’s the game I’ve spent the most hours playing. The most recent Elder Scrolls I’ve played has been Oblivion, and in addition I’ve added some graphic update mods to Morrowind (not sure I like all of them atm and may remove some), so it’s taking some getting used to. But the stunning depth and variety in the world of Morrowind is unparalleled. There are so many different styles of place to go to, from the smuggler’s caves to the mines to the six or seven different types of castles. And the thing is, each one has a detailed and well thought-out backstory behind it. There’s different factions fighting for power and influence; each has its own history, own history of relations with the other factions and own building style. There’s such a rich world to explore and be a part of, by joining factions and rising in them, that the game is perhaps the most immersive I have ever come across. Then there’s just exploration. Sure, you don’t meet the wandering guards on horseback as in Oblivion and this can make things feel barren at times, but you do meet interesting quest givers, random towers or farms or caves. And that’s kind of the point – aside from the south-west, Vvardenfell is not a very populated place. While there might be a side of the island that has economic and political strife to get involved in, most of it is the domain of the wild free adventurer. And there are plenty of people only too willing to send you out there in search of whatever it is they need.
Camping gear set out in a temperate area
Then we have mods, and so many more hours of interesting things are opened up. Sure, so many mods are extremely unpolished (you should see the houses I built – very basic), but there are some classics that I’ve got a huge amount out of. The Private Mobile Base – huge floating stronghold that teleports to cities around the world; the Dragon Riding mod – just what it says; many many houses. I want to stay away from these with this character for now because I think they distracted me, in the past, from the core quests which I ended up neglecting, and ended up levelling my character inappropriately for. So I’m going to try to rise to the top of the various factions and develop my character that way. But there are two mods I want to use that I don’t think break anything, and make things more fun. Firstly, we have Acheron’s Camping Gear, which provides you with a movable camp site. This is cool from a roleplaying perspective – when I’m raiding a dungeon (ew WoW terminology has infected even me) I like the idea of setting up a little place to come back to in a nearby hollow. This makes the game more fun and doesn’t give you any advantage at all, considering that you can just dump loot on the ground instead if you want to. Then secondly there is the Ashlander Tent mod, which gives you a tent you can put up with rather a lot of stuff inside. Since you also get a teleportation necklace to jump back there it gives you a huge set of advantages as a starting player: you can get back to town without yet having developed the requisite spells or acquired enchanted items. But I’m not going to use it like this. I’m going to set it up in whichever town is my base of operations at that stage of the game, and use it as a base like that, and then I don’t think it has much potential to spoil things.
The Ashlander Tent in snow
A challenging thing about keeping Morrowind fun is getting round the game making things way too easy at certain points. I know a trick (e-mail me if you really want to hear about it) that means you can basically earn limitless cash for doing a certain set of things over and over again; this is how I bought my way into things like the Private Mobile Base (which, to balance its epicness, costs something like 1.1m gold to fully purchase and equip). But this trick removes any balancing costs in mods, and removes a lot of challenge. There are other things that you can pull off too to level yourself quickly. And there’s a point at which you can either win a fight incredibly quickly or lose it every time you try (until you get a bit better) if you’re a standard melee character, which takes a lot of the challenge and excitement out of completing quests. But I’ve played an awful lot of Morrowind, so I know most of these flaws and I can avoid them to get the most out of the game.
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.
A personal manifesto for the rediscovery of scholarship
Nostaligia is an incredibly powerful piece of human psychology. It’s effect on this post will be one of turning up the brightness setting of the past, and the contrast with the present, but I don’t think that’s going to be hugely detrimental to what follows. It’d probably be pretty similar even if I had a time machine to get a truly accurate picture. A picture of myself just a few short years ago, when my subject (philosophy, if you want a name for it) stood open before me, where I thought I could go at it and handle any of it and where I would want to keep looking and keep grasping the new perspectives. Where I confidently strode out and proclaimed, and accepted the challengers and defended and retracted as appropriate. Where I didn’t hesitate for a moment before engaging with a new thought or thinker.
That form of hesitation now defines me, and the evidence for this is so very clear about me. A schoolfriend berated me some months ago for never actually doing/reading all these things I was doing to do/read. A tutor I’ve had this term echoed him, imploring me to read and explore. Two things have now come together: the student I have become in the latter half of this term, and my realisation that the comments of this tutor and of my friend and of other factors are one and the same. I’ve stopped, and I’m starting to fall backwards and to fall behind, intellectually. A task requiring effort that doesn’t absolutely have to be done now is always postponed. I don’t develop because I don’t put in the initial effort, because I hesitate and then never do it. Each of my four essays this term has been at the last minute, and each has been much poorer than they could have been. Problem sheets the same. And this is the very worst thing: as a direct result of this, I’m wasting my teaching here. On both the Maths and Philosophy sides I’ve had some absolutely fantastic tutors this term, and I’ve been inspired on both sides, but then I’ve let that flame of inspiration die before it’s really got going. I’m permanently failing to fan the flames. Perhaps it’s a problem of procrastination, but I dislike using a technical term like that without much of an understanding of what it means outside of popular parlance, where it’s rarely a serious issue. If you know more about this sort of thing then do say.
It’s not like I haven’t written about this before, but I think I have my finger on it now, with these factors that I’ve listed coming together. People will likely be saying “finally Sean’s realised what I keep telling him” – I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. The big thing that separates this post from my post at the end of the summer in terms of severity is that all this is now the very same problem during term. I’m not able to pull myself together in Oxford, of all places. This has got to stop before there is nothing left to salvage.
What’s it been replaced with? What’s dominating my thoughts (as well as worrying about this of course…) instead of what used to? A lot of the time it’s nothing. A lot of time-wasting, a lot of messing about with computers and silly videos. But also busy-bodying. While neglecting my actual duties, the amount of scheming and gossiping and politicising that I’ve been doing relating to the various student politics I’ve been involved in this term has been staggering. I’ve been so ashamed at watching myself. Firstly, the stuff is mostly insignificant, but it’s not even significant to me! It’s all self-created and it feels so stupid to write it. Politics is all about people and it’s all about that with me now too. I’m worrying about the fact that my friends are all third years who are about to leave. I’m comparing myself to others while refusing to allow myself to be positively inspired. I’m getting saddened by the subconscious and blameless yeargroup divide that will always keep me separated from everyone else around here. I’m using all this as an excuse not to break free and return to where I was. I can have friends, but at the end of the day, with what I want to devote myself to, I’m always going to be left in solitude. Once I was okay with that, but now I seem to spend a lot of time (fruitlessly, I might add, for it is my nature) trying to escape it.
Further, I’ve let the sapping of enthusiasm that often accompanies intense study here seep into me and further sap my reserves of interest. Someone e-mailed me recently, having followed the link to my blog in my e-mail signatures (which went out to about 500 people multiple times a week for the past three terms while I was JCR Secretary; I sometimes wonder how many people follow the link and find this site); she’s just started at Balliol and commented on how her willingness to start discussing things with people in a non-academic context had ebbed away. You start up conversations with the usual people to find hanging around College, and it’s always the same. For them, they can be proud of (one particular story here) getting in at 3 in the morning, going to bed, and then getting up at 5ish to write an essay for a 10am tute, or something, then trying to snatch some more sleep and still doing well. But this is not a life I am suited to nor is it a life I want. Yet as shown by all these last-minute essays and problem sheets this term, it seems to be what I’m left with and it doesn’t suit me and I am left unhappy, and worse, severely unfulfilled as expressed in this post.
But now I’ve got six weeks free from all that. I shall turn away from others until my scholarship is restored, until I take the plunge immediately and with gusto, like I once did. I’m going to forcefully throw all else from my mind. When I flag, I will accept mental fatigue from a mind unused to turning itself forcefully to its studies; I will take a break, I won’t give in. What is it hope to achieve? Firstly, I need to fix the lack of efforts in the latter half of this term. If I really work at it, it’s quite achievable that I’ll get on top of the term’s work: it doesn’t feel as out of reach as last year (this feeling is another source of regret for wasting teaching time this term to actualise this new-found confidence). Further, I want to read all that stuff I said I would. Or just read something, anything, and write about it a bit perhaps, so I have something concrete in order to wean myself off my need for quick results and easy insight. There are other projects: I have my website to fix, the JCR’s website to write lots of code for, I have some changes to my computing environment that I think will help me to deal with some of the organisational difficulties and inefficiencies I’ve had lately. I have lots of lists; I need to spend a little time bringing these together. I don’t know right now where I’m going to find the enthusiasm for these things. The bottom line is that it has to come from me. The balance of myself as an individual and as a cog in a social system is way out from where it should be.
I don’t know how the heck I’m going to get myself to do all this.
The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect … If he cannot lead, he goes alone … There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.
source, emphasis mine
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