OF A GOLDEN AGE

wednesday in philosophy class we argued tangentially about free will, which I only mildly buy into in any form, and I told the class that I believe humans are utterly predictable if there existed the capability to analyze us fully. good thing it doesn’t, right? unsurprisingly, I join the ranks of millions of other people who choose to not think about free will at all.

free will came up because of Hegel. through his idea of divine spirit, Hegel wraps up the entire universe in a process wherein we hone in on perfection for eternity — like a wildly oscillating curve that smoothes out as it extends toward infinity. in his mind, the germanic (christian) world is the best thing to come down the pipe and the best setup for the triumph of “reason” in order to perfect mankind.

his definition of reason, though, is aggressively vague. it guides the universe? okay, sure. it is substance and infinite power? here is where I start to lose the daylight in this concept. it’s probable that he defines the concept through examples in the rest of his book Philosophy of History but, frankly, the introduction doesn’t interest me enough to make me want to read on. Hegel’s writing is so obtuse and inaccessible — moreso than can be explained by his time frame in the early 1800s — that it turns me off in a big way.

ironic that Emerson and the transcendentalists were so influenced by Hegel when, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Hegel is considered largely impenetrable and only really relevant because of his influence on others. people resent having to read Hegel and only do so reluctantly, which I would imagine leads to far fewer people gleaning anything from Hegel’s writing. it’s sad, really. I liked the twenty pages that we read, but that was only after spending a number of hours reading it aloud to myself again and again. even logistically, that is too impractical to tolerate.

my classes this semester are already folding in on each other in fundamental ways. in fact, I would go so far as to say this is my most “liberal-artsy” semester ever and it is my second-to-last. maybe synthesis is what being an upper-level student is all about, but I think this is even beyond that.

Tom Mcbride is an interdisciplinary creature by nature; I’ve had two prior classes with him and this latest one is no different. it combines elements of philosophy and formal logic with the study of poetry and other literature. basically, this concept is incredible and our reading list is also something to marvel at, and of course tom is a dynamic, compelling instructor. one of the things I like best about Tom is that after teaching for decades, he stays abreast of new concepts and is more up to date than most of my other professors, who are almost all younger than he is.

anyway, Wittgenstein is an intellectual misanthrope unto himself. no man is an island, apparently, but Wittgenstein relied on his knowledge of a scant two other philosophers (whilst openly shucking off the rest of philosophical history and refusing to study it) in making his career. we talked about him in class and tom also discussed the Kantian concept of phenomenal versus noumenal.

I left that class and went to Heath Massey’s “Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche” class, where we immediately dove into Kant’s influence over Hegel — Hegel who hated Kant and wrote criticisms, Hegel who in turn greatly influenced Wittgenstein — and the phenomenal and noumenal.

sandwiched in the middle of this philosophical interplay are the transcendentalists. Emerson seems to restate Hegel’s points about many things. he blends them into nature, yes, but largely they are very Hegelesque. this makes sense because of the German idealists held such influence over the transcendentalists. it is still pretty wild that everything is crashing into itself like this.

my math class is safe, though.

last night I was speaking with an old friend about depression. my friend has been on antidepressants since age twelve and recently decided to take a break from them and let them get out of his system. I asked why he wanted to do that, and he said something amounting to, “I’d rather feel depression with clarity than take Prozac and feel glossily depressed.” this is what he described as the beige malaise, which is both a sonically-pleasing and accurate phrase — it should be the name of a band, or at least a modest mouse song.

anyway, his point was well taken.

I’ve been listening to a lot of “post rock” lately, some explosions in the sky and other more popular bands, but mostly my favorite post-rock group: a chicago band called seam. the fact that this band is pretty unknown is really accidental, and usually my taste in music lives nicely in either classic rock or mainstream independent rock. in my mind, there are a number of fairly straightforward progressions to explain the music I enjoy:

early non-syd barrett pink floyd —> explosions in the sky

early instrumental metallica + r.e.m.’s melodicism —> seam

the rolling stones —> the black crowes —> collective soul

the liberal arts student in me doesn’t like to break things down into such obvious logical progressions, but the mathematical part of me is happy it works this way.