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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: 2006-02-01 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?