I hesitate for risk of speaking too soon, but graduate school seems easier than West Point. I have class on Monday and Tuesday. For each class I maybe have twenty pages of reading. Albeit hardcore philosophy, in one case even metaphysics, this is still light, given that I have literally days to dawdle through it all.
I also feel prepared. St. Andrews, like nearly every philosophy 'programme' in the UK, completely ignores continental philosophy. This is probably a flaw, but a flaw I'm used to, given that West Point was the same way. The Academy's philosophy major covered most of the important texts in analytic philosophy, more or less the texts we're starting with here. I move forward without the added anxiety of Dr. P's treatise on So-And-So lurking in some dark alleyway.
As has always been my case with questions like, "where are you from?," my part of being a scholar from West Point is even more difficult to explain as a philosophy post-graduate student. "I don't see the need of that," a candid if perhaps rude Brit said to me. But wouldn't you want soldiers, if you could pick any cohort, to know philosophy most of all? The BBC thinks so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/9006784.stm.
That's at least what I'm telling people. It is, I should hope, more sophisticated than that. Religion is dying and so also the theology it attends to. I'm beginning to think that the cure for the 'Modern Man,' as Arcade Fire puts it, only a hair from the mainstream, is a healthy dose of those ignored continentals. I read Camus to read Kierkegaard, and somehow it seems clearer how it all fits together. As Vonnegut once said and I paraphrase, 'literature should not disappear up it's own asshole.' Philosophy already has, but something being so disposed is not a reason to not seek it out, a diamond is a diamond if even in the rough, or for that matter, an asshole.
The point of the above comes to this: a thread of truth runs through all the great thoughts of literature and philosophy, even in those thoughts that are incorrect. And should you pull on it, the great apparatus around you comes undone, and maybe, for the first time, you can really see. What you see, I think, can only be described as 'faith,' and is, by its very nature, central to the 'self' and nothing else. This is why Camus insisted that it cannot be explained in common language, and yet, it seems he was, in some 400 pages, able to do so. 'It' is personal, but for the few cases where it extends to those we love. I think the apparatus claimed Col. Ted Westhusing, and I think he could have found solace within. Too inchoate for a thesis, maybe, but for a blog all is fair game.
I cursed out my GPS today. So peace still eludes me, though I daresay it seems nearer than ever before.
I cursed out my GPS today. So peace still eludes me, though I daresay it seems nearer than ever before.
On 8 September 1840, Kierkegaard formally proposed to Regine Olsen. However, Kierkegaard soon felt disillusioned about the prospects of the marriage. He broke off the engagement on 11 August 1841, though it is generally believed that the two were deeply in love. In his journals, Kierkegaard mentions his belief that his "melancholy" made him unsuitable for marriage, but his precise motive for ending the engagement remains unclear.
ReplyDelete"How strange, I had never really thought of getting married, but I never believed that it would turn out this way and leave so deep a wound. I have always ridiculed those who talked about the power of women, and I still do, but a young, beautiful, soulful girl who loves with all her mind and all her heart, who is completely devoted, who pleads — how often I have been close to setting her love on fire, not to a sinful love, but I need merely have said to her that I loved her, and everything would have been set in motion to end my young life. But then it occurred to me that this would not be good for her, that I might bring a storm upon her head, since she would feel responsible for my death. I prefer what I did do; my relationship to her was always kept so ambiguous that I had it in my power to give it any interpretation I wanted to. I gave it the interpretation that I was a deceiver. Humanly speaking, that is the only way to save her, to give her soul resilience. My sin is that I did not have faith, faith that for God all things are possible, but where is the borderline between that and tempting God; but my sin has never been that I did not love her. If she had not been so devoted to me, so trusting, had not stopped living for herself in order to live for me — well, then the whole thing would have been a trifle; it does not bother me to make a fool of the whole world, but to deceive a young girl." - Kierkegaad
Faith is important!
Faith is what it is all about. I wouldn't make it through the day without it. It makes you see differently.... clearly and offers freedom.
ReplyDeleteLisa: I think that one decision of his, if I may speak with biographical looseness, prompted him to write 'The Sickness Unto Death,' a book about what it means to despair. It would be interesting were it so. I don't think I'd ever have to write a book like that, thanks to you. :) In my case, I was so swooned that 'no' or 'ambiguous' was not an option.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous (Who I suspect is Mom): We can say 'faith' in exactly the same sentence, but mean many different things. To me, faith is an extension of intuition into areas untouchable by traditional logics. As I see it, this is interchangeable with 'faith' as normally described, though those describing it normally might not agree.