OF A GOLDEN AGE

last night was the 48 hour film festival, the film commission’s four-year-old brainchild. one of my best friends runs the club along with two of our other friends, so i volunteered to do various bitchwork during the event itself — handing out tiny pencils, for instance; handing out, collecting, and counting ballots. the not-so-secret secret is, i love doing this kind of thing. watching the logistics of an event take shape warms my logical, order-loving heart.

our discussion of pragmatism in class the other day really stuck in my mind because my mom has been telling me how pragmatic i am for as long as i can remember. in philosophy class we always, whether indirectly or head-on, ask ourselves and our classmates how we can apply these philosophies to our lives. some fields, like applied ethics, are much easier to view in a practical light — most writings in ethics deal specifically with one issue and draw parallels to help the reader to abstract it. in any comprehensive philosophy, especially those of Marx and Hegel this semester, there is a gulf between buying the philosophy and living it somehow. this is, i think, one of the biggest reasons why the general public either dislikes philosophy or thinks philosophers have no common sense.

however, pragmatism is not without its own hangups. saying that i just do what i think is right, and that truth is what i believe to be true, is an interesting and practical way of doing things, yes. it is also impossible to generalize and apply on more than an individual or small-group level, which leads me to think it may not be a philosophy at all so much as a lifestyle or belief system. not sure!

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