Episteme

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The other day I was chatting with someone special who hit me with the ultimate question.

You know, the kind of question you’d hear in a movie when a supercomputer has taken over the world and the hero saves the day by asking one question that melts the computer's brain into a little brick of cheese.

It’s the question that goes like this: “What’s the secret to happiness?” (AKA: "What is the meaning of life")

I considered the fundamental nature of the universe. I considered the human soul. I considered the power of love. I rifled through all of my memories, grasping for any enduring, solid handhold to break the fall down the elevator shaft of logic.

In that moment my questioner was upon me like a street-sweeper on a distracted pigeon.

Being more vigorous than the average pigeon, I fluttered about seeking something solid to hinder my pursuer.

Continue reading "Turtles of Happiness" »

Posted by at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been struggling to understand physics, just slogging through my muddy understanding of relativity and time/space. I doubt I'll ever experience or see something moving at the speed of light - I can't even begin to conceptualize what an object moving at that speed even looks like much less how it manipulates the curvature, the nature of time/space. I didn't start with the easiest book to explore these ideas, but the one I have spent a good deal of time with (though moving too slowly through it) is Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Written by Werner Heisenberg (who I just found out explained the uncertainty principle), what has made the biggest impression on me isn't his explanation of modern physics, Einstein or Newton (most of which has gone beyond me because I never formally studied any of this stuff, but am simply curious about the nature of the universe), but his exploration of language.

Continue reading "What Words Can't Explain" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am the last one to tell a PhD from Cambridge that his lecture was "uncontroversial and banal" to use his own words, but that's exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to do this but I didn't, I just left early. I should have said as much or at least asked a question, but it was late on a Wednesday and well, I was thinking of other things. There you have it.

I suppose was so disappointed because I had a high expectations for Kwame Anthony Appiah. This lecture was going to answer some serious questions for me, clear up some major ambiguities and make sense of the world and why we face existential threats from fundamentalism. That's what I was expecting but it was fluff, a prolonged introduction to a much deeper conversation. He talked about the origins of cosmopolitanism, the first citizen of the world (Diogenes) and how we should strive for a universalistic world view but respect differences. Fair enough. But that's where it ended. Literally.

Continue reading "Why This Turned My Mind Away" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't really have any elaborate theories on God. I can't really debate with someone whether God exists or not because I go back and forth on that question all the time. (Yes when I am scared, desperate, nervous or mad. No when I am everything else.) I think my lack of elaborate theories or talking points on the subject stems from the fact I don't have a really well developed philosophy around that and I haven't read a lot on that whole are of does-God-exist-and-what-does-it-mean-for-me-kind of thing, so there. If he does, then why do so many horrible things happen? He doesn't, then are we nothing more than highly complex animals ruled by purely by chemical reactions in a universe that is random, cruel and without meaning? That's pretty much it for me. I don't believe that life is entirely random and without meaning, but I do believe this idea, put forward by a former evangelical preacher turned evangelical preacher of the doctrine of inclusivity (as told on This American Life), meaning Jesus loves and forgives everyone and the only hell we should be concerned with is the one we create for ourselves here on Earth.

Continue reading "God In This World and In Others" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As strange as it sounds, my life in the weirdest place on earth is getting a little mundane. Age, like Dawn says, changes you - it's not university classes and growth so much anymore as doing the little things we need to do to keep living. So much of life seems to be just that, maintenance. So what about the higher meaning, expression, sacredness? How can we live in a space like that if we're not artists, or monks, or philanthropists?

With the daily repetition of it all, it feels like we get used to things that aren't really consistent with the way we saw the world before. What does it mean when we see people suffering and don't or can't help? If a poor person is begging in the street, should I give her money or not? How do you weigh personal risk along with the idea that you might just be perpetuating begging, and the fact that you just might not feel like digging in your pocket for change? Helping people just doesn't feel convenient anymore, walking by is easier. Then the routine doesn't change. Just outside, inside, eat, sleep, out again.

Continue reading "Patterns" »

Posted by Kim at 03:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is the inevitable conclusion of liberal democracy nihilism? We will become sick with the disease of relativism? Is a society based on equality where all things are believed to have great importance render everything meaning less?

I don't believe the world is anymore fractious to us than it was to anyone else living at any other point in history. We've become fooled into believing it is so because standing an inch from the mirror doesn't reveal much. Is the world like Edward Hopper saw it?

I was thinking about this today, after I heard an East German woman on the radio describe how she liked living under communism because she never had any anxiety over the future. Now living in a democratic system of government she was preoccupied with choices and the uncertainty of the future. She preferred centralized planning because it eliminated that uncertainty. Someone else made your decisions and you had nothing better to do than accept it.

OK, that aside, I am happy because I will be seeing Sufjan Stevens live. It’s not until October but barring an attack from North Korea, I see nothing to stop me from looking forward to it! I feel I need to publicly declare my love for people more often on this blog.

I also spent my July 4 holiday in the woods, 10 miles in, the whole time in a state I can only describe as bliss. Not only I was I repaired from spending four whole day outside and my companion was incomparable. We talked about "Leaves of Grass" – a topic maybe all too appropriate for such excursions – but that’s how it’s meant, for the air, the light, the water.

Posted by Dawn at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kim and I are taking up the theme of democracy for a few weeks and seeing where we can go with this. With her experiences living in Mexico City and mine pouring through books as a befuddled observer of American politics, we think we can generate some discussion and ideas that will connect what we know with the state of things. That's our hope.

"Peace will arise instead out of the specific nature of democratic legitimacy, and its ability to satisfy the human longing for recognition." So writes Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. As most people educated in the liberal west with an unerring preoccupation with world prosperity, I often wonder if, despite advances in living conditions and general human prosperity, if war, famine, these inequities are inevitable because there's something to the human character that is unalterable.

By recognition, Fukuyama touches on an idea, he argues, has thrived best in liberal democracies. I got into some psychoanalytic stuff recently, so I won't rehash that. But recognition is essentially human dignity through freedom. It is through liberal democracies of the 20th century this has come to fruition. Of course, all societies are beset by racism, homophobia and the like, but legislation like the Civil Rights Act seeks to publicly mitigate that and is a sign of how liberal democracies can, and do, address inherent inequities in society, however imperfectly.

Anyway, I'm nearing the end of the book so ideas are starting to coalesce. Seeing how Kim and I are going to tackle the notion of democracy, I wanted to start (and continue) with this idea presented in Fukuyama's book, "The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one's life in battle for pure prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination."

Continue reading "Democracy For Peace" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I remember Susan Sontag's essay for The New York Times magazine about the photos taken at Abu Ghraib and what those photos signified about our society. Her ultimate conclusion: The photos are us. With the advent of cameras every where on every gadget we can purchase and carry with us (I think of them as appendages), what do we sacrifice? What do we give away? What do we surrender? How has the ability to document every part of our lives and disseminate that information with relative ease via the Internet, do to our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of each other? What I remember thinking after reading Sontag's essay was how despite our ability to utilize technology to achieve a deeper, fuller understanding of ourselves and the world, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib signify exactly the opposite: They are grotesque acknowledgement of our ignorance, cowardice and brutality propagated through the same technology that's supposed to save us. Technology, it seems, hasn't lessened these tendencies but instead allows to us indulge them (I'm remembering the excitement of students in some of my college classes watching the beheading of Nicholas Burg online, in class).

Continue reading "The Impenetrable Eye" »

Posted by Dawn at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So as I'm plodding through day-to-day existence my mind is weighed down: should sheets match the comforter? did I just hit that person with my car? sugar or splenda? But today I made room in my tin-trap brain for something else, a small space, but something else: "Only man is capable of engaging in a bloody battle for the sole purpose of demonstrating that he has contempt for his own life, that he is something more than a complicated machine or a 'slave to his passion,' in short, that he has a specifically human dignity because he is free."

How I can get my work done when this is what I think about? (This definitely helps....)

Continue reading "Just Like Fish " »

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe historical progression, human progress, advancement, is based on our desire to be recognized. So Fukuyama says of Hegel's idea. Not having read Hegel, I can't really add much more to that idea but in reading The End of History, this idea stood out to me (buried, it was, page 135, amid streams and streams of other ideas) because that seems to be central to our lives as individuals. People want to have children, so I'm guessing, because some level they want their genetic legacy to go beyond them, some flesh and blood embodiment carry on after they've died. When you're dead, what does it matter? But that's just me pooh-poohing the idea that children ever really embody their parents.

Continue reading "To Be Recognized" »

Posted by Dawn at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German director Werner Herzog (whose movies I've never seen) captures perfectly the spirit of tenuous humanity (something I think about every time I see the pyramids of apples in the grocery store):

"Herzog was born in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, in 1942. The disaster of Nazism, he said, informs his brooding world view. 'I try to understand the ocean beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilization,' he said. 'There's miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.'"

From a recent issue of The New Yorker.

Filed Under Philosophy, Current Events

Posted by Dawn at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Physics has proved what metaphysical religions have postulated for centuries, nay, millennia: that everything has energy, a life force, if you will, a universal vibration. In scientific terms (I'm going out on a limb here), the atomic structure, the electrons and protons, constantly moving. These things are better explained by students of quantum mechanics, but I remember this point being made in a humanities class I took some years back. It's stayed with me for obvious reasons.

Continue reading "An Unsettled, Natural Life" »

Posted by Dawn at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a more than 10 years since the publication of End of History when, as the title suggests, the end of history was declared by Francis Fukuyama. OK, that’s not what he really declared but that’s what’s been written about the book and Fukuyama in all these long years since it debuted. I was really prompted to read this book after reading a review of Fukuyama’s latest book, which The New Yorker reviewer characterized as being an update, a critique if you will, of Fukuyama’s standing as a neo-conservative.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.

Continue reading "The End of History" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DADA. I took this photo at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, when I was there for a break in February. I have been sitting on this exhibit since, mentally anyway, and I’m bit embarrassed to admit it’s taken me two months to get around to talking about it. But DADA presents us with so many ideas about war, mechanization, progress, humanity, and it wasn’t until I saw the whole thing displayed – film clips, audio files of DADA poetry, the paintings, books and posters – that I realized DADA is political protest embracing the absurdity of our modern notion of progress drawn to its logical extreme (is our ability to perfect mass slaughter a sign we no longer believe we are fallible (in the Christian sense) and are we really progressing? What does it say about a species that, if nothing else, has become violent on a larger and larger scale as it has also made the greatest advances in sciences and the arts?) and the rebellion against war and fascism that crushed Europe in this time.

Continue reading "DADA, Vonnegut, Sin" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)