Help I'm Alive!

Help I'm Alive!

Help I'm alive
My heart keeps
Beating like a hammer
- Metric

As I continue my personal philosophy blog, I'd like to share an idea, abstract as it may be, that has been fascinating to me as of late.  It has to do partially with time, but philosophizing about time is one of my weakest areas, so please don't expect the ideas to be too deep.

What I am overwhelmed by is the amount of time that has past, by the time that has come before and the time that will follow our short existence.  We come and go, but the city we live in, the buildings, the sky, the streets, the mountains, these will continue on long after we are gone.  How does it feel to go to the store with the knowledge that that same store will be there even if you are not.  Whereas it seems like I am complaining, and anybody with compassion would allow others to complain about this, our ephemeral nature actually brings about a newer, deeper appreciation for all that is fleeting.

What amazes me the most is that we are all here, alive AT THE SAME TIME!  What are the chances that, out of all the previous and future times, we happen to be born within a span of about 80 years apart.  We breathe the same air, we feel the same sun, we follow the same news reports, and sometimes we actually share the same space in the same moment.  If you think about it from probabilistic terms, it would be easier to win the lottery than it would to share a moment with another person or other people.

So next time you feel alienated or like you are just not connecting with someone else, stop and think about how special it is to be in the presence of another, about how we are both here, still alive, experiencing life together.  And if  you think someone is special, tell them how grateful you are that you happened to be alive at the same time.  We share more than we know, and when we put time into perspective, all of our interactions can seem new, meaningful, and precious.

Shine!

Firework

Ok, now that we will be transitioning into personal philosophy for a while, we are going to do some restructuring.  Enough of what Friedrich Nietzsche thinks and more of what I think.  What is my philosophy? What questions are of interest to me?

Lately, I  have been overcome with a feeling that I'd wager is shared by most of you.  I have been thinking about who we are and who we present ourselves to be.  Have you ever had the experience where you are thinking one thing, but then you say another because you are unsure of the appropriateness of your thoughts?  Of course, we follow social niceties and rules of politeness, but have you ever thought something that felt right to you and were unable to say it because you didn't want to rock the boat or for fear of what someone else would think?

In a professional world, this is the game that we play, day in and day out.  We are to compartmentalize ourselves and put our best foot forward, not letting too much personality shine through.  In the workplace this is fine because it is efficient (and you are getting paid to be professional).  

But what about in your personal life?  How much do you compromise yourself to fit in?  Are you one of those who keeps it inside, or are you one of those who polices others, making sure that all of the participants play their roles?  I challenge you to let your true colors shine through whenever possible, and to let others show theirs.  I think we would be surprised at how much more interesting and fascinating life could be.

P.S. Pop music hasn't been my style until as of late, but I feel that there is no good music out there in the genres that I like.

In My Place

In My Place

It's time to change perspectives.  So far we have been dealing with philosophy from an academic perspective, but what of personal philosophy.  Since all philosophy begins with a question, a personal philosophy of life would ask, "How should you live?" or "What constitutes a good life?"

Have you ever heard the cliche, "Have no regrets."  We hear these words and assume that we automatically know what the speaker means.  They mean that you should act, presumably in your  best interest or in the interest of others, and then forget about the consequences.  Don't reflect on the past, but move on and begin your next set of actions.

I support a different idea, again proposed by good old Friedrich Nietzsche, that takes the cliche and gives it a new meaning.  Having no regrets means that if you had the choice, would you choose to live your life all over again, taking all of the bad with the good?  I know I've made my share of mistakes and lost my way a few times along the path, but each time we are beckoned to create a new meaning that integrates all of our previous sufferings into a new and stronger hope.

Can you create a new meaning that is satisfying enough to do it all over again?  If the answer is yes, then according to Nietzsche, you are living the good life.  If not, what would it take to make sense of all of the suffering that you have endured.  Perhaps pondering this question is what will help you get back on track.

What is the Greek conception that underlies Plato's theory of forms?

Made in likeness

Plato is pointing up to indicate that
reality lies in the 'heaven' of forms.

One philosopher that has been consistently argued against in postmodern critique is Plato.  He believed that there was a transcendental realm of forms and that all of the objects on the earth were merely copies of those forms.  He thought that the realm of forms was guided by mathematical and logical principles and that the world was just an imitation, mere appearance with no substance.  Nietzsche overthrows this theory by positing that what appears to us composes reality and that there are no abstract principles (that we can know) that guide the order of things in the world.

What makes Plato’s theory of forms interesting is that it uncovers a cultural predisposition of the Greeks at the time, namely, the reverence of likeness.  Objects in the world are like the realm of forms, but they are merely an imitation.  They nevertheless resemble that transcendental realm as copies.  Truth is, on the basis of a one to one correspondence, like the theory of forms, abstract, logical, and mathematical. Plato’s philosophy has permeated the worldview of the West and many of our institutions are founded on the basis of an ultimate reality that is distinct from appearance.     

What separates early postmodernists from their followers?

The Beast of Burden

Postmodernists are known for criticizing traditional thinking in the West, and postmodernism has become a caveat for anything that is new, creative, or goes against the grain.  Contemporary philosophers and popular culture spew postmodern critiques at anything that can be called knowledge or truth.  But what makes the original postmodern philosophers, like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger (not to mention Pascal, arguably the first postmodernist), different from their followers.  In one sentence, early postmodernists did the work of learning the tradition, incorporating ideas and references from countless books and articles, whereas followers of postmodernism offer critiques freely and frequently without having done any of the work. 

Nietzsche understood Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Leibnitz, Hume, and Aristotle.  He also knew about the history of philosophical thought and could trace ideas back to their origins as early as Thales, Epicurus, and Heraclitus…not to mention to religion and Greek mythology.  Contemporary philosophers and participants of popular culture, on the other hand, are just fine with spouting new ideas that have no philosophical basis.  They criticize any idea that is traditional, but they don’t even understand the traditions that they criticize.

The same goes for creative writing.  Can you just create a new work from your own imagination, or do you have to learn the literary techniques and theories that you are attempting to overthrow.  I believe that doing the former is just a sign of intellectual laziness. In any subject area, you have to understand old ideas before you can reject them.  You must carry the beast of burden, as Nietzsche says, before you can become like a lion, and then like a child.

On questioning the nature of truth...

What is Truth?

We walk around as if each of us was placed at the center of the universe.  Of course, if the universe is infinitely large, then we are all at the center of the universe.  The fly buzzes around with this same sense of significance.  But hasn’t knowledge bloated our pride?  The hubris that links what we perceive and claim to know to our external world, how frail are these illusions?  What are words and feelings but the result of sensory stimuli, a response to our nerve endings?  Attaching a word to these stimuli is already one metaphor.  Using words to refer to a group of similar things, another metaphor.  We see a tree and assign it a name.  Then we see all things that look like trees, like so many stimuli circling through our senses, and we call them trees as well.  But has not each tree lost its unique quality, the differences among each one disappear as we assign them all under the category of ‘tree.’        

What holds our fragile species to existence but the use of these categories?  We see patterns and then believe that these patterns are evidence of truth and reason.  But would we survive on this planet for an instant without pattern recognition?  Do we have a right to existence over the animals because of how we evolved, and does that right translate into truth?  Nietzsche (1873) writes,  

      

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (p.3)

We rely on language and concepts, abstractions and reason to guide us through this world, and are sure that the regularities that we perceive correspond to what is without.  This is a leap of causality upon which no foundation lies, no connection other than the precarious tie that holds us to existence – the concept.  When we allow chaos back into our worlds, and begin to trust our intuitions and sudden fancies, we might begin to aspire towards attaining truth that goes beyond the human realm.  We might reach outside of ourselves and connect to existence as being reveals itself to us under a new light.

References

Nietzsche, F. (2014). On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense. (W. Kaufmann & D.            Breazeale, Trans.).  (Original work published 1873)

Credits

1.  Picture of universe http://iron.lmc.gatech.edu/~atahler3/center.html

2.  Picture of Nietzsche http://www.lyrik123.de/wp-content/uploads/Friedrich-Nietzsche.jpg

What do we know about the nature of language?

Philosophy of Language

The Limits of Objectification

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1971) questions the nature of language in his book titled On the Way to Language and makes the following observation, "the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words—in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language" (p. 81)

Heidegger’s critique of the philosophy of language lies in the fact that, as philosophers, we objectify the nature of language through the use of reason and insight, and use language to represent what we have learned about language.  Language that we use to speak about language is called metalanguage, and, resonating with my marginal background in applied linguistics, philosophers use metalanguage such as semantics, syntax, pragmatics, speech acts, assertion, proposition, and truth-value to describe language.  We objectify language through the use of metalanguage, but rarely do philosophers consider the limits with which we are confined when examining language ontologically, that is, from the perspective of its nature.  If language can only reveal itself to us through words, then we must make language the fundamental foundation upon which we can learn anything about language.  We are confined by language when describing the nature of language, and therefore cannot discover its nature beyond the use of  words themselves.  In essence, language turns in on itself and reveals to us that it is in hiding.  It is a mystery that cannot be known by humans.

As an experienced ESL teacher who is getting her Master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), I am constantly objectifying language and discovering the regularities and patterns within language, using the aforementioned metalanguage to describe my objectifications.  But can I truthfully say that I have knowledge of the nature of what I am teaching?  On the contrary, I study language for a purpose that derives its criterion from utility, namely, to extract the regularities in language and develop means for conveying those regularities to students.  Surely we use language to construct meaning, but the meaning of language can only be revealed to us by language itself.  We cannot know its nature beyond the system within which it reveals itself to us.  Although the study of the nature of language rightly belongs to philosophy, and not research in language acquisition or applied linguistics, it behooves us to take time to think about the wonder that is language.   

References

Heidegger, M. (1971). On the way to language. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Credits

1. Picture of Martin Heidegger:
 http://unlockyourmind.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/heidegger-and-sartre-on-death-and-authenticity/ 

2. Picture of book titled On the Way to Language
 http://gandhi.com.mx/index.cfm/id/Busqueda/source/SearchResults/categoria/libros/criteria/MARTIN%2HEIDEGGER