Category: philosophy

Don’t read this! Go watch history being made!

With so many momentous things going on I think there are better things you could be reading about today.

Al Jazeera’s coverage of the happenings in Egypt – Al Jazeera has been seeing a lot of traffic since the trouble in Egypt started. They have correspondents on the ground (most of the cable news networks and some of the major networks no longer do,) and they’ve given far more coverage to the events than American media has.

Tunisian Revolution – The secular uprising in country of Tunisia is what started the large scale rioting and demand for right throughout the Middle East.

Jordanian Riots Cause Reform

Student Riots in Yemen – Have forced the country’s autocratic ruler to stop grooming his son to replace him.  Students have larger goals too forcing out the autocrat entirely.

By the time this goes up I’m sure other people will have taken the initiative do demand their governments recognize their natural rights as well.  I only wish our government was more supportive of such movements.  The United States was founded by people who were tired of seeing their natural rights denied, but our government often asks against the words found in our Declaration of Independents:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

For too long the United States government has actively worked to make a mockery of Mr. Jefferson’s word and their meaning. I encourage you to remind the President and your elected representatives of that fact in the hopes they will reconsider American policy towards Egypt and countries like it.

Making Goals You Can Meet

 

Common resolutions

 

This post was supposed to go up two weeks ago, but life has a way of driving you 500+ miles away from your home and dropping you in the middle of “the Happiest Place on Earth” during the “Busiest Time of the Year” (more on that later.)  In the last post I reviewed my goals for 2010, in this post I will be talking about what I learned from making goals and then trying to spend a year accomplishing them.

1.  You have to care about the goal – If you are mentally and emotionally invested in the goal you’ll never meet it.  This was the problem with my skydiving and SCUBA license goals.  These are two things that would be fun to do but they were really just whims, things I’d like to do but have no real reason or purpose behind doing them.

2.  Make goals that can be done with others – Doing things on your own is hard, especially when the task is difficult.  Surrounding yourself with other people makes it easier, they can provide encouragement, advice, support, someone to compete with, etc.  Humans are naturally social (yes, even nerds need occasional human interaction) and harnessing that in-born desire is a great way to insure you meet your goals.  Better yet let those around you know this is a goal and they’ll be sure to provide even more help!

3. Make goals that make sense for tomorrow, not today or yesterday – Do you know where you are going as a person?  What are your professional aspirations?  What do you do in your spare time?  Who are you hanging out with?  These might not seem like important questions when it comes to goal making but they are!  Two of my goals last year (Painting armies and making a gaming table)  didn’t happen because the gaming group I used to spend a great deal of time with split up and my tabletop wargaming came to a dead halt.  With no one to game with there wasn’t any incentive to spend my limited free time painting tiny metal soldiers.  I knew that before the goal was made, but felt guilty having these things lying around and not using them.  That is a perfect example for planning goals for yesterday instead of tomorrow.

4. Make goals that scale –  New Year’s resolutions or goals are supposed to be life altering acts of improvement.  Not your to-do list for the first month of January.  You can make said goals but there isn’t much of a point putting them on a list.  A goal to get in shape, while on everyone’s list, is perfect as a year-long goal.  It scales nicely and is easily broken down into steps.

And that is it.  If your goals/resolutions follow these four guidelines you (and I) should find meeting your goals easier than you thought.  It goes without saying that it won’t be easy to change your life, just easier than it would have been before you read this =P

Next:  My goals for 2011

It Came and soon I will Brew

 

Will this be awesome? It will... It might also be smelly...

 

I don’t know when I first thought about brewing my own beer…  I’ve known for a long time that brewing it wasn’t that difficult and that humans had been doing it for thousands of years.  The history of brewing is, like all histories, fascinating and worth your time even if you don’t drink.  One thing that struck me about its history that struck me though was how domestic the industry was, by that I mean people brewed their own beer for their own consumption.  Perhaps I don’t write about it much here but I’ve been holding an extended discussion with one of my dear friends about self-sufficiency and moving from consumption to production.  I think this is a direction that our nation as a whole needs to move in order to get its economic house in order but, right now I can’t do anything to direct national policy what I can do is learn a useful skill and try to pass it on to others, and hope that it inspires them to take action in their own life to consume less and make more.

This isn’t a post about my own philosophy, it’s a post about beer brewing.  I purchased the one-gallon brewing kit pictured above from the Brooklyn Brew Shop who also sell five gallon kits, several recipes packs, and other brewing accessories.  Obviously, I haven’t had much business with them but its been good so far and they came highly recommended by friends.  They have a several mixes and seeing as I’d never tried one I went with the one that sounded most delicious:  Apple Crisp Ale.

I’m currently scheduling the actual brew next weekend.  I was initially worried that I’d have to muck through this alone, but it turns out that not only is the internet full of resources (google: beer brewing), but my local community has numerous resources:  a restaurant that lets you brew your own beer; a local brewery with a its own brewers group that meets monthly to discuss all things brew; and, my Fraternity also has a Zymurgy committee.  With all that help at my fingertips I’m hoping my first batch isn’t a dud.

Of course, I’ll be blogging more about this as I move forward, as well as other projects I’m undertaking to shift from consumption to production.

Re-reading Camus: the Myth of Sisyphus Pt 3

No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution. They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing. They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.

Find the first two parts here and here.

Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus
Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus

I left you last at the beginning of Camus’ critique of other philosopher’s thoughts and rationalizations for suicide.  Camus doesn’t deal with every philosophy, ever -ism, he takes up the only existential philosopher’s and only those who have directly dealt with the issue of suicide.  This list includes: Chestov ( I haven’t read), Kierkegaard (I have), Jaspers (haven’t), and Husserl (have).  Camus states in the very beginning that each and every one of them fails, they abandon reason and escape the problem of suicide by a leap of faith, “a forced hope.” Jaspers’ is the most forthright of the philosophers in this regard.  After enumerating in how many ways Man fails to connect to the world around him, turns that failure is transcendence?!  Unable to find purpose or meaning Jasper inverts it all and says that this is meaning, “That existence which, through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god, and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”  How convenient for Jasper that when his reasoning got him in a tough spot, when it appeared he  might have to say that the only logical thing to do in an absurd world is to kill yourself, he declares that the complete absence from reality of meaning or purpose is a direct sign that there is!

Chestov simply states that when we reach the absurd we have found God, that “we must rely upon him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”  Faced with the absurd we must take the leap of faith and trust to God.  Chestov rejects reason and hopes that there is something beyond it.   Camus is quick to point out that reason and this world are all Humanity has to work with and that by making the absurd God and removing them from this world into a world beyond, they’ve both lost all meaning to mankind.  Logic and reason, which if you remember were all Camus was going to use when he began his inquiry into suicide, is not these philosopher’s strong point as Camus repeatedly points out.  They’ve abandoned it when they make the hopeful leap of faith, Kierkegaard does the same as Chestov if not more so turning the Christian God of his youth into a monster of a deity that requires a sacrifice of the intellect to satisfy it.

Camus rejects all of this, he wants to know if he can live with what he knows and with that alone.  Camus dismisses the failed attempts of his predecessors with these words:

If in order to elude the anxious question: “what would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”  everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

So what do I think about all this?  I find that without me knowing it that my thoughts on life have been heavily influenced by Camus.  The first time I read this I know there were parts that I didn’t understand and simply continued reading in the hopes of finding some clarity…  I do not recall finding it, but rereading the essay it is clear I did.  I haven’t sat down and mapped out my logic or reasoning, but I don’t need any other reason to live than that I have a life.  In a conversation with a Mormon Bishop I was asked, “Without God why do you even bother getting up in the morning?”  I honestly do not understand this question.  I suspect that those who ask it don’t either.  No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution.  They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing.  They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.  I told him this and he seemed taken aback, and then asked “What about when you die?”  I laughed out loud at that point, though I quickly apologized.  I don’t remember my life before I came in to it and I don’t think I’ll remember it afterwards.  Is your life, right now, only worth continuing if a eternity of existence is promised after you die?  I doubt it.  Living is its own reward… Camus’ thoughts are quite a bit more stylized than that, demanding that Man live life constantly rebellion against the fact that the world is absurd and that life must end…

I’ll be discussing and commenting on that in the next edition, which covers Camus’ “absurd freedom” and then moving on to the “absurd man”

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