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felis_ultharusGradually getting caught up in all my courses. Editing about 10 pages a day -- an excrutiatingly slow rate. I'm also writing a short story on the side, just to burn off some of the creative energy.
Fulke Greville (1554-1628) was a living warning to parents that if you name your child "Fulke," they shall turn to poetry.
Someone was questioning the dominant postmodern viewpoint in class, and for once it wasn't me. His name is Chris.
I've heard people talking about this guy -- mocking comments behind his back -- but he's one of the most intelligent students in the program (well-thought-out and well-read). He was unwilling, today, to automatically rule out the existence of a true self or of free will -- a cardinal sin these days.
Everyone started looking at each other, as if someone had broken wind. Even the professor looked uncomfortable. She accidentally described him as "stuck" in his beliefs, before quickly changing it to "focused on."
Fulke Greville (1554-1628) was a living warning to parents that if you name your child "Fulke," they shall turn to poetry.
Someone was questioning the dominant postmodern viewpoint in class, and for once it wasn't me. His name is Chris.
I've heard people talking about this guy -- mocking comments behind his back -- but he's one of the most intelligent students in the program (well-thought-out and well-read). He was unwilling, today, to automatically rule out the existence of a true self or of free will -- a cardinal sin these days.
Everyone started looking at each other, as if someone had broken wind. Even the professor looked uncomfortable. She accidentally described him as "stuck" in his beliefs, before quickly changing it to "focused on."
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-31 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-01 12:26 pm (UTC)It's not so much the philosophy itself, as the fact that it's increasingly mandatory. Nic's never been one to force it, at least not in our classes. He's always shown respect, and that's the important thing to me.
If other people would demonstrate the same respect for me, I wouldn't be complaining about this stuff here all the time.
It's stuff like that guy Jesse (the one mocking Chris) that gets on my nerves. The fanatics. Nic's not in that category.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 10:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 05:33 pm (UTC)So you going to tell me, or what...?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 06:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 07:49 pm (UTC)(She's a close friend of a close friend, so I know her socially)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-01 01:03 am (UTC)Hmm.
I'm unwilling to deny free will, because I did so already and I found myself choking on logical inconsistencies. True selves are intuitive but impossible to prove. People take philosophical fashions and embrace them like metaphorical body pillows. Stupidity.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-01 12:37 pm (UTC)Problem is, I never feel that respect returned. I'm often afraid for my grades, too, since while truth is relative in postmodernism, some truths are more relative than others.
This guy Chris is clearly religious, probably Christian. He's alluded to it before, though never preached.
Being religious, the idea of a universe that's more than the sum of its material parts is perfectly normal to him. Free will, sould, and self can exist because the self-generating can exist in certain metaphysical systems. I'm religious, though not Christian, so I sympathize with his point of view.
When he tried to present a counter-argument based on that conception of the universe, our professor tried to reconstruct his argument in a watered-down, materialist version. He resisted it.
When did materialism become a prerequisite for studying literature?
Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-01 02:02 am (UTC)Oh, and one last question: since when did being contrarian, nonsensical and blithely idiotic become acceptable among people who are supposed to be learned?
*cue UNABATED RAGE*
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-01 12:48 pm (UTC)You and I, my friend, are not materialists (in the old sense of the word). Our beliefs in the nature of the universe may vary in the specifics, but an understanding of a universe that is more than its obvious physical parts makes sense to both of us.
Unfortunately, materialism is now a prerequisite to university courses. And in the humanities it's a kind of blunt 19th-century Newtonian materialism that doesn't take into account any of the more interesting recent developments of quantum mechanics, and recent theories on the nature of the universe.
This blunt materialism, when it comes to thought, runs down two channels. Either the brain is a machine unable to transcend the molecules it's composed of, and mind is an illusion generated by it. Or mind (and thence identity) is an illusion generated by language. Some are willing to concede a balance of the two, without anything genuinely more than the sum of its parts being possible.
Either way, individuality, originality, self, and free will have all been banished to the outer abyss by postmodernism.
Foucault was big on this. PoMoist (Po-Maoist?) Stanley Fish transferred these ideas over to politics in a now-famous book There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and that's a good thing).
The problem is that this kind of 19th-century materialist reason is unable, on its own, to conceive of an emergeant property, nor of a self-generating quality. So nothing is more than the sum of its parts.
I just realized a good counter-argument would be that if nothing was self-generating, the universe wouldn't be here. Not unless postmodernism wants to retract to the "steady state" theory of existence, disagreeing with both science and every religion I know of, and thus becoming a full-fledged religion on its own.
I could tolerate these views and not agree with them. But inreasingly, they are becoming mandatory. My grades have already slipped a little -- I think my professors' tolerance is wearing thin :/
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-01 07:56 pm (UTC)It is interesting that you mention this, especially in a discussion on materialism and mind.
From Ramachandran's The Phantom In The Brain (re modularism vs. holism in brain function):
Thank you, neurosurgeon!
And here's some trivia:
As impressive as someone with the word "Fish" in their name may be, who the FUCK is he to think he could ever have such a complex machine completely figured out? Pompous moronic ass end of an ancient whore.
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-01 08:31 pm (UTC)20th Century science played a real joke on the old Newtonian materialist order. Not merely in transforming that hard, solid, clockwork universe into a series of tensions and relativities, but because some of the greatest defenders of free will and human possibility are physicists, biologists, and chemists.
The last vanguard of the Newtonian world are, comically, in the humanities, where 19th century scientific thought has finally trickled down with comic effect.
It is ironic that as literary theorists attack the human spirit behind the shield of science, scientists like David Suzuki are urging us back to that path.
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-02 03:00 pm (UTC)I didn't expect you to rule it out; in fact, to me, what Ramachandran has to say implies a "ghost in the machine". Rather than coming to understand the human mind as a simple meat machine, reading those passages fills me with wonder.
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-02 03:27 pm (UTC)Sometimes I'll read something in a science magazine that astonishes me -- like the possibility that it rains diamonds on Neptune. Or the fact that all our atoms were made in the crucibles we call stars :)
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-05 06:44 pm (UTC)Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-05 07:57 pm (UTC)John Ralston Saul said that the reason the big churches often have so much trouble with science is not only because it denies their revealed knowledge, but because it suggests a much more animist/pantheist view of an integrated creation, where everything is interconnected.
In such an environment, spirituality has a place but not one that could be controlled by an organization, nor one that came down to a series of strict rules.
Einstein was definitely religious -- to the point where he refused quantum theory on the grounds that "God does not play dice" with the universe. Both he and early psychiatrist Carl Jung refused to rule out the possibility that astrology actually worked.
Re: Em goes apoplectic
Date: 2006-02-05 08:41 pm (UTC)It's in fact rational thinking and logic that brings me to an understanding of the spiritual as something that can and will be explained by science. How arrogant are those who use our primitive science as an argument against the spiritual.
A Q Continuum-like plane is something I like to think about.