Tag: Philosophy

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig explores the balance between technology and spirituality. I wrote a longer response here. Also, for a different take on the novel, see Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now.

Marginalia

1

Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don’t get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding.

2

the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing…and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

5

Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.

7

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

8

to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

9

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

10

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

11

Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a “Copernican revolution.” By this he referred to Copernicus’ statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out.

13

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

15

But how’re you to teach something that isn’t premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students would get something from that. It wasn’t satisfactory.

16

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything… from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

18

Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

22

Poincaré then went on to demonstrate the conventional nature of other concepts of science, such as space and time, showing that there isn’t one way of measuring these entities that is more true than another; that which is generally adopted is only more convenient.

24

What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination… “unstuckness,” in other words…are completely outside its domain.

25

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical.

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

26

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.

if you know which facts you’re fishing for you’re no longer fishing. You’ve caught them. I’m trying to think of a specific example.

There’s no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn’t know what you’re doing.

The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don’t hear about it…just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education.

I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who don’t like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because they’re not interchangeable.

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

28

The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side… that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

30

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

Replied to https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/01/you-should-compile-your-own-philosophy/ (brainbaking.com)

Now you know why my hopes of reaching eighty diminish by the day. But it’s not too late to create my own philosophy. I’ve never felt a more urgent need to do something than this. I have been taking notes on how to live and how great philosophers before our time approach life in general, but in 2025, it is time to grab those notes and rework them into something of my own. Then I too can rest assured that the remainder of my life, all I have to do is to live up to my own set of rules.

Source: You Should Compile Your Own Philosophy by Wouter Groeneveld

—

Wouter, the idea of my own philosophy has me thinking about Angus Hervey’s idea of holding on tightly … and letting go lightly. I feel like my blog probably captures a philosophy, maybe? However, to bring it together? To make it more condense? To eliminate all its contradictions? Here I am reminded of (or haunted by) Michel Foucault:

Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’

‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, into which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Source The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(Arendt_book)
I stumbled upon Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition on Audible as a part of the ‘Plus’ collection. I was always aware of her work on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, but had never actually read anything. I therefore decided to dive into her discussion of the human condition.

I remember when I was training to be a teacher and I attended the history teacher’s association conference. One of the sessions on offer involved a discussion of VCE history subjects. I thought that it might be useful to attend. However, it quickly became clear that it was intended for discussion and feedback by those who had been teaching the subject for a number of years, not some newbie. In a small room, I sat as quietly as possible and tried to take in what I could. I had a similar experience with Arendt’s The Human Condition.

Wikipedia describes the book as follows:

The Human Condition, first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt‘s account of how “human activities” should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. She distinguishes three sorts of activity (labor, work, and action) and discusses how they have been affected by changes in Western history.

Source: The Human Condition (Arendt book) – Wikipedia)

On the one hand, I understand that, but I am still not sure that it addresses the book. It may well be that it is because the book is one in which different readings prise out different thoughts. For example, quite a few discussions touch upon the rise of the social and the importance that serves.

The characteristic political forms of modernity – the nation-state, the welfare state, and totalitarian regimes – all fail to provide any public space for the achievement of identity. These forms all testify to the modern severance of the political from issues of identity, the modern loss of a basic understanding of the freedom and action that citizenship makes possible. Only participatory democracy – a dimly remembered possibility that makes brief appearances now and then in our era – rekindles a sense of what politics and those who participate in it can do.

Source: Hannah Arendt An Introduction by John McGowan

In the end, I found myself caught by various ideas, such as identity, action, privacy, and knowledge, but never comfortable with the full story. (For what it is worth, I had a similar experience with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.)

All in all, I probably need to dedicate more time to this book (and possibly Arendt’s work in general), possibly a lifetime. It really leaves me wondering about the importance of prior knowledge and at which point you can truly have a point of view on things. In particular, I really feel that I need to dive deeper into Hegal and Marx.

Continue reading “📚 The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt)”

Bookmarked Book Summary: The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences / Michel Foucault by Huzeyfe Kıran (Thinking Prismatically)

“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area — European culture since the sixteenth century — one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledges prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities differences, characters, equivalences, words — in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same — only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility — without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises — were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (The Order of Things p.386-387).

I remember reading Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge during university, but never got around to The Order of Things. Wondering about the crux of the book I stumbled upon this lengthy summary from Huzeyfe Kıran. I was left thinking about archeology in relation to my Honours thesis on psychoanalysis and the way in which what we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis.
Read Notes from the Underground

Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpólʹya; also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels.

It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form through the Underground Man’s diary, and attacks contemporary Russian philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called “Apropos of the Wet Snow” and describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

I have never read any of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works before and was always intrigued by the supposed associating between Notes from the Underground and Catcher in the Rye.

Like The Stranger’s Meursault and The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, the Underground Man is our sole window into this world. As a result, we only get his skewed take on the “reality” in which he lives. Key to this reality is the Man’s status as “underground.” He identifies himself as underground for two main reasons. First, it establishes him as an outsider, and although this status is the source of much misery, it is essential for the reality he has created for himself. Second, it hints at the notion of revolution: there might be other Undergrounders out there waiting to unite against the oppression of their everyday lives. Ironically, the Underground Man is too apathetic to seek out other Undergrounders, creating further dissatisfaction in himself.

For me, the first person style of writing reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Liked The Philosopher Stoned by Adam Kirsch (The New Yorker)

Benjamin always hoped to turn his powers of reading to even more tempting and obscure kinds of signs—astrology fascinated him—and his willingness to indulge such ideas hints at the metaphysical, even mystical inspiration that is at the heart of all his work, especially his understanding of language. This affinity for the mystical was evident to Scholem, who described Benjamin’s work as “an often puzzling juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological and the materialistic,” but it is not easy for modern readers to embrace. The theological side of Benjamin’s thought remained hidden, during his lifetime and long afterward, in part because he chose to hide it. He never published the seminal 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which explicitly set forth his mystical vision of language, or later writings that show its continued hold on his imagination. Only with the publication of the “Selected Writings” has it been possible for English readers to grasp the crucial fact that the “metaphysical-theological” element of Benjamin’s thought was older and more profound than the “materialistic” element.

ᔥ “Austin Kleon” in Diving in ()
Liked muse-letter 24: time and the self (colinwalker.blog)

What if we are just a collection of thoughts and reactions and there is not an actual self sitting behind the thoughts. It’s quite a mind-fuck and goes against everything we tend to assume in our post-Descartes world — “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes argues, even if everything around us is a deception and our senses do not report reality, that our experience of our world, true or not, is real. Our perceptions and thoughts are ours and we can be certain that we exist because of them. Others, however, have gone on to say that just because thinking is occurring it doesn’t mean that it is being done by any given ‘I’.

Bookmarked How to deconstruct the world by Peter Salmon (Psyche)

Derrida saw this kind of reading as reading against the grain. Take a text, find what it seems to advocate, and look in the opposite direction. G W F Hegel wrote about spirit, untainted by the mess of life – so Derrida explored his relationship to family. Husserl wrote about subjectivity by describing the surrounding world, so Derrida looked for moments where Husserl invoked God. This doesn’t eliminate the text or the thinking, but it problematises them, it finds the limits. In a sense, we’re to treat every text with suspicion, although Derrida himself called this an act of ‘hospitality’. To read a text this closely is to treat it with seriousness, to really look at what’s going on.

Peter Salmon provides an introduction into the work of Jacques Derrida, one pipe at a time.
Bookmarked Peter Singer Is Still Interested in Controversial Ideas by Daniel A. Gross (The New Yorker)

Daniel A. Gross interviews the Australian philosopher Peter Singer about freedom of speech, disability, capitalism, and the launch of his peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

A thought provoking long read diving into the ideas of Peter Singer.

I was a founding member of the Australian Greens, which said that we should accept all the so-called boat people from Afghanistan and Iran and other places, who were seeking asylum in Australia in the eighties and nineties. For a time, Labor did as well. But it was clear that those issues were exploited by the conservatives to suggest that Australia was going to be swamped by different people, and I’m pretty sure it cost Labor a federal election on at least one occasion. And then you see the other bad consequences of this: not only did the borders get closed and the refugees were put in horrible detention camps, which the conservative government did, but they also opposed doing something on climate change. They cut foreign aid, they run down the hospitals and schools and universities. There is a real cost to this.

The E.U. has had to realize the same thing. You got right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland and Italy for a while. Clearly, immigration was a factor in Trump getting elected in 2016. So that’s why, as a consequentialist, I think you have to have policies that include some restrictions.

Replied to

Bianca, I really enjoy the Minefield podcast featuring Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Not sure if this is what you are looking for.
Liked Notes on Richard Rorty’s ‘Philosophy and Social Hope’ by jennymackness (jennymackness.wordpress.com)

In this book Rorty wanted to convince people that ‘relativism is a bugbear’ and that discarding dualisms will help bring us together. Trust, social cooperation and social hope, he says, are where our humanity begins and ends. The most praiseworthy human capacity is to trust and cooperate with other people; to work together to improve the future. He urges us to substitute hope for the sort of knowledge that philosophers try to attain, to substitute imagination for certainty, and to substitute curiosity for pride. Hope (rather than truth) is the ability to believe that the future will be unspecifiably different from, and unspecifiably freer than the past. It is a condition of growth and the direction of growth is unpredictable.

Listened The Minefield from abc.net.au

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

Started listening to Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ podcast on ‘wicked’ problems. I am always taken by Waleed Aly’s perspective on the world. I feel that the length of this medium allows more nuance than something like The Project.
Listened Philosophy in a nutshell pt 3: Derrida and the text from ABC Radio National

In 1967, French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote “There is nothing outside the text”. Or did he? It’s a bad translation that’s launched a thousand bad interpretations – but it’s gone on to become a key element of Derrida’s work.

David Rutledge speaks with Rebecca Hill about the the famous quote: “there is nothing outside the text.” The discuss what constitutes a text, including ideas of masculinity and feminism.
Listened History of Ideas (Talking Politics Podcast) from talkingpoliticspodcast.com

History Of Ideas is a new series of talks by David Runciman in which he explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock down.

David also talks about the crises – revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics – that generated these new ways of political thinking.

Bookmarked Why the chaos of 2020 is turning us all into philosophers (abc.net.au)

Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that when things are going well, we tend not to bother ourselves too much with the how or the why of our delight.

Pain, on the other hand, makes philosophers of us all.

David Rutledge explores what the ideas of existentialism and stocism have to offer during the current pandemic.
Liked Søren Kierkegaard’s Struggle with Himself (The New Yorker)

By that time, the Copenhagen eccentric had become one of the most important influences on twentieth-century theology and philosophy. Although the term “existentialism” wasn’t coined until the nineteen-forties, in retrospect Kierkegaard appears as the first existentialist, thanks to his insistence that life’s most important questions—How should I act? What must I believe?—can’t be resolved by abstract reasoning. They present themselves as urgent problems for each individual, demanding commitment and action. “To be entirely present to oneself is the highest thing and the highest task for the personal life,” he wrote.