Suppose for a moment that, as a thinker, a wanna-be academic, and somewhat of a social isolate, I am out of touch. With what exactly? I suppose the normal answer is “reality”. What is this reality? What is this existence that, for some reason, I do not comprehend?

We toss this phrase around as if there is some reality that is separate from our own creation of it. Obama is out of touch with “real Americans”. How dare those Harvard educated bureaucrats make some decisions about our lives. There is this implicit objection somewhere within our cultural mentality that there is a “reality” that we face every day and that people with intellect just “don’t get it.”

Get what? Starvation, suffering, struggle? Do you, little American, really suffer that like the children of Zimbabwe? Yet you frown at efforts to help the world in favor of your own petty problems. But what am I saying, I live comfortably. I must be out of touch.

Get what? Everyday, down-to-earth motivations and desires?  I am an ideologue, a thinker. Damn the thinker, for he has already thought a hundred times about the purpose of your alarm clock before you’ve hit it in the morning. Damn me for taking apart everything in my life and piecing it back in the order I like because I am incomprehensible to you.  Have pleasure, you can laugh on the inside because it makes me forever lonely.

Get what? The day to day routine of a life that is dull and seemingly inconsequential?  Inconsequential is a word that we created alongside consequential. I cannot comprehend your insistence on a spirit of nothingness in the everyday.  You live with your eyes closed and your ears covered so that your day to day must be routine, learned slowly, and never altered.

Get what? The confusion and listlessness of a life that is incomprehensible? Where is our reality, dear techmen?  Look at where you live and see a world that we, collectively, have created.  We are animals in our own constructed habitats, confused by the brilliance of our own success.

You call me out of touch, the ideologue, the thinker, the critic? Am I some guy in an armchair by the fireplace with no comprehension of the everyday? I drive in cars just like you. I sit in office chairs just like you. I have a computer, as do you. I am in debt, as are you.  I shop in malls just like you.  What is the reality that my head has not comprehended?

Out of touch? You, humans who walk upright and keep nodding to the music, are out of touch. Do you see the world in front of you? Can you move much further past the headlines? Can you question yourself from the toothbrush to the shopping cart?    To truly touch this world you would have to turn off the television for a moment and look at that empty box and realize, in reality, what it is you were just gazing into.

We all struggle with this, even I–especially I, the thinker. What is this reality, this world, that we walk upon? What is this surface that we touch? I touch it, just like you. But do you comprehend the sensation?

I’ve thought about questions like this for a long time. I spent a long time on “What is happiness?” This question is almost as complicated and interesting as that one.

I speak passively, even coldly, but this is obviously something thats been bothering me for a long time, something which I feel very passionate about. The question was there through my whole relationship with Kayley and has weighed heavily on my mind since it ended.

My first thought is to wonder whether the concept has any meaning at all.  But of course it does. We use it all too often. We mean something by it. The word “love” puts a name on a desire, just like the word “happiness.”  Happiness entails the desire for purpose and for a positive (subjectively so) experience in our existence (this was my conclusion before). What desire is love? Why do we seek it so diligently and so desperately?

Love, of course, is a social desire. As I am coming to understand it, love is born out of the intense loneliness of our existence. Our experience entails that we can only know ourselves, and even that somewhat hazily (as we constantly recreate and redefine ourselves in our every day lives). We cannot be someone else, i.e. we cannot experience their experience, seeing the world as they do, with their set of knowledge and memories, with their train of thought, with their bodily experience, and their social situation. So we can never fully comprehend another being. All we can do to connect, to comprehend another being, is to use our limited and woefully insufficient tools–words, physical contact, imagination, art. Thus loneliness is born, an intense feeling of disconnect. These people around us appear like objects, unknowns, unable to be comprehended.  Likewise we see others and know that we are not comprehended but are constantly misunderstood and mis-characterized. We desire to be comprehended and we desire to comprehend.

While our mediums of communication are, in the end, ineffective at completely knowing another person they are enough to give us a sense of another’s existence, a hope for the intertwining of two existences, for the beginnings of a mutual comprehension of another’s experience.

Nature has built for us a physical counterpart for this philosophical desire. We call its sex.  But in a broader sense it is the whole sense of attraction that we feel for family–for children, for lovers, for parents–all of which are either a part of us or which we exchange physical intimacy with in–all of which is physical

So as far as I can see there are three reasons we love, which essentially makes up the three elements of love.

1. The desire to comprehend another’s existence, and to be comprehended
2. The overcoming of loneliness, to share one’s experience
3. Sexual and physical desire

These are the reasons we seek relationships. Elements of these three are what form love. The second involves the sort of thing we have when we say that someone is “really fun to be around.”  The first is more implicit, involving knowing the other person–on a simple level their likes and dislikes, on a more complex one, their deeper desires, feelings, and preferences. Both one and two involve the sort of thing we share when we help each other out and listen to another’s thoughts, concerns and feelings.

Thats my basic conclusion. I have some more questions about the role of sex in relation to the first two but that is an issue for another moment. Specifically, I wonder about the classifications we use in “friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, “fiancee”, “husband/wife.” What do all these labels mean given the three reasons that people love? How does relationships change between each? What use do these labels have for us? I have some thoughts on it but I’ll wait for another post.

What do you do when you are faced with a conclusion, when you really feel that something is right or that you really want to do something? Do you actually pursue it? Does a conclusion have any reality within our lives?

I’m of the impression that it doesn’t really. We realize things all the time. We hear little bits of wisdom and we may even be of the opinion that we want to make something of them or that they are, at least, correct and true. But we don’t tend to make them part of us, to really let the feeling of the conclusion sink into our minds and saturate our lives. “That sounds right” we say. “I think thats important.” But then tomorrow we have moved on. We are always going on, moving on past whatever it was that we encountered, decided, or concluded today. Of course we can do this–as Sartre says, we are radically free and are choosing every moment who we want to be. This, however, is a nonposition, where one lets one’s thoughts have no reality in the world, where there is little guidance in one’s own step, in one’s own choice.

This seems strange to me. But I’ve done this of course. I spent my whole life doing it. Then one day I decided that I was going to pursue what I thought. I’ve tried since then to make the conclusions I reach become a reality in my life. So many people scoff at philosophy as impractical and silly; but perhaps it is simply because these people do not live by the words and thoughts that they themselves reach. I think that so much of our lives are spent following and living by the words and thoughts of others that sometimes we forget that it is our own thoughts and conclusions that matter. Or perhaps in the violent ever going-onward of our every day existence we can only grasp the logic of habit and conviction is something to be rationed and sparsely apportioned to only our most significant of conclusions.

What a lot of people don’t understand about me is that my constant exploration of life, this thing we call “philosophy”, these words I call “thoughts”, they are all an inextricable part of my character. What I conclude is myself–and this self is ever changing. Beliefs are not something that remain solid but change with the change in position, the growth of understanding, knowledge, and experiences to draw from.  What I am saying is that I am by no means a unified “Me” nor do I want to be, perhaps ever, but that this process is the constant process of creating my own existence as I like it.  Sometimes I surprise myself that my “opinions” have changed. But for me they are not merely opinions but the basis from which I act. Why would it be any other way?

I am not the bundle of conflict I used to be. But for a lot of people I meet, words don’t seem to sink in, conviction seems to lack substance. Is this because they have not truly understood what is said, even if they are the ones saying it? Or, to be less demeaning, is it because they have not really concluded it for themselves?

Since I made the choice to abandon the religious question is has seemed absurd to me that others are so unwilling to even consider the thought of doing so as well, despite their objections to religion and their critique of it as an institution and belief system. Likewise, as a vegetarian it is difficult to hear people give lip-service to their beliefs when they have no real object in the world, no real effect on their lives.  I am not lauding my own position as morally superior, I am only saying that it confuses me that people would believe, conclude, and hold to things that they don’t even hold to or which have no effect in their lives. It seems strange. Contradicting. Absurd.

Been thinking a lot. As always. Come to blog about it. Yep.

Kevin Elliott, a philosophy professor at USC sent me an article today explaining how stupid of an idea it is to go to graduate school in the humanities. Its a good article. It’s stupid to go to graduate school in the humanities. Luckily, my angle doesn’t place me in the normal “humanities”–the people who want to teach/study history, literature, or ancient philosophy. Anyways, I was having an exchange with Nathan and he had a nice rant about graduate school.  I thought this was particularly great:

I think this guy is spot on about the reasons for attending grad school though.  I’m really glad that I didn’t go straight in; the real world is kind of fucking awesome.  The tremendous amount of bad faith that goes into the concept ‘graduate student’ (I once walked into the USC philosophy department and found a skinny, slightly scruffy fellow wearing a fedora, listening to contemporary jazz and slouching) is stupid incredible, and trying to apply academic text in a free and open space changes them completely.  I’ve had no deadlines, no syllabi, no professors and quite the opposite of affirmation from my peers for half a year or so now, and it brings up a lot of really good questions that wouldn’t be confronted couched safely inside that apparently masturbatory culture: do other people give a shit?  No.  Should they?

.. thats complicated.  Probably not.

Nietzsche, of course, says that the creators of values are the most important people in the world, and also the most misunderstood.  But in his day the creation of values was fairly straightforward: write a book.  Things have changed a little bit.  Stephen Colbert has had and will continue to have a greater impact on the American psyche than Robert Nozick, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty put together.  People quote Star Wars, not Goethe, Homer (Simpsons) instead of Homer (Homer).  Maybe philosophers don’t have jobs and don’t get hired because they’re antiquated.

And I really don’t think its that we don’t have anything to say.  We do, and people need it.  But nobody reads philosophy.  And yet the entire concept of professional philosophy seems to be chained down to scuffed tile floors, obnoxious neon lights and overhead projectors, shut away in little buildings for white people with an upper middle class background who get stoned, feel profound and decide to learn some neat words to make their heads feel bigger.  If there is nobody in the field dynamic enough to actually communicate whats so ridiculously important about philosophy to everyday people, why the fuck should they continue to be supported anyway?

Yeah, so this was something I was thinking about today. People don’t read philosophy. They don’t even really read. They watch movies. Surf the internet. Chat with friends. Watch TV. Play video games. Work. Anything but read. My parents have’t picked up a book in ages and when they do its to read some novel (my mom has read Twilight recently and my dad like Koontz). Yet this stuff is important. There is so much nonsense being tossed around its hard to see anything worth seeing for most people. Action, excitement, movement.  We don’t really want to be shaken because we are shaken constantly. Meh, but if I continue in that direction I will make it sound like a bad thing that people don’t read philosophy and I’m not sure I want to do that. I’m just referring to aspects of everyone and the technological world.  Thats all I ever do with this stuff. Every day stuff.  But by the time academe gets through with it, through with me…will it be? Not really. I’m already incomprehensible to so many people. They just look right past me, blow off the words that are coming from my mouth.  Not that I’m that important; I’m only saying that the things I want to talk about…it seems like most people don’t even want to give them a few moments. And its everyday stuff. Its your cellphone in your hand, the car in your driveway, the roof over your head, your entire existence. Can we not talk about that?

To subsume myself in the rhetoric I am speaking about: my intellectual gears have been pumping away here at the end of the semester, this swirl of thoughts exploding and fragmenting into an array of ideas that are at once disorienting and invigorating. My classes this semester have fit together brilliantly, and here at the end they have been particularly potent. I have had several instances that have really stimulated my thoughts, most notably a series of conversations with various people, especially one I just had with Laura Walls, and the analysis of the online conversations about nanotechnology that I’m doing with Gehrke. These have made me realize that there is a significant niche for me right there in this, as Laura put it, “new genre” of literature. The analysis of this genre will not only be fruitful in understanding a new and important socio-cultural and political phenomenon but will also lead me to be able to dissect out of this some really interesting philosophical and socio-cultural commentary in the long term.

The core of this new “genre” is what I will call, for now, “reverse historical narratives/studies” The terms came to me while talking to Dr. Walls today and she really liked it and I see it as incredibly fitting. What this involves is a sense of certainty of the future; writers and speakers of this genre speak of future events using the same method as people who write historical accounts. In a sense, there is a set future and a set past and the current course is just a matter of moving between the two. This doesn’t mean that these people necessarily agree on what this futuristic outcome is but they speak as if they are sure. That is, they speak of the future like historians speak of a contestable past event, rallying the same sort of evidence and using the same sort of language. A lot of times this involves taking the past and projecting it to the future, but it is not always the case.

Caught up in this is a melding of science into a narrative form. Science and fiction, essentially, are blurred together to form an inseparable mass.  The most common mode of speech is a form of speculation, that is essentially a strong thought experiment where the implicit assumptions are not recognized. Except here the speakers don’t recognize it as a speculation but claim it as the practice of science. That is, they dress it up in scientific language, use scientific terms, construct real looking models, give their items scientific sounding names, etc.  A good example can be found here, an article by Robert Freitas. (continue reading…)