Tag: philosophy

Updating Margins

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces4 Comments

Greetings all you who take the time to peruse my blog.  I thank you.  Let me begin this by saying how I have missed creating blog entries that feel creative to me, that require me to a degree that is nourishing and satiating, rather than feel like marginal notes to my studies.  Thank goodness for a few projects and Friday Fictioneers that  spur me to some dedicated time spent “creating” purposively – differently from intellectual processing toward understanding.  And yet…

As I emerge into a brief pause between semesters, I find myself bewildered with experience and an oddly felt “freedom” that spawn confounding questions in me.  As I completed my final semester paper this week, my mind and body revved to the thought that fictions, essays and poems that participate in the structure of my desk – beckoning and ready as I researched away – can be grasped and delighted in, engaged at will, enter my cranial conversation…but this is also true of my researching – I have been consistently able to construct academic projects that involve and enable my immersion in those things that inspire and enthrall me – that feed my “what do I want to know?” urges.  So where this different nuance of feeling/experience in reading?

This is the question occupying me currently (or field of questions).  As I re-entered Robert Musil’s writings these past few days, while skimming and browsing an unbelievable desk laid with exquisite appetizers (Hejinian, Okri, Danto, Deleuze, Shklovsky, Creeley, Fante and so on) I recognized a feeling I can only describe as “insight.”  My preferential selections do not differ much between resources for academic work and resources for some other purpose.  I am driven to “know” what I am driven to know – it is continuous, related, dynamic.  Any sources from any genre or field or discipline that provide a certain “something” accomplish it.  What felt like “insight” was the recognition as I ranged over very different styles (Floridi, Serres, Wittgenstein, DFW, Larry Levis and so on) that what I seek consistently (and an effect that Musil invariably realizes for me) is work that I must achieve, that challenges, that invents, wrestles, requires change and adaptation, innovation and labor on my part to be ingested, understood.  That forces dialogue between my micro-world of knowledge and understanding and another.  Be it in the mode of expression, the language employed, the ideas, questions and concepts examined or points of view – it must be something that invigorates and surprises, invites dialogue and conversation toward meaning and understanding to occur.  Writing that requires change to be engaged.

At the same time I recognize that I read differently different writings.  I expect poetry, aphorisms, fragments to require percolatory time, as if the texts and spaces sprinkle my mind-lawn and will find their way to the roots in their own time.  I expect logical writings, perspectives or positions to argue with me, to have asked questions beyond what I have had the knowledge to ask, therefore pushing whatever I contain toward corrections and new formulations – adaptation and growth.  If writing asks that I be passive, within sentences it is set aside.

These are the questions I’m formulating and troubling in this margin –

  • How are freedom and restraint – affordances and constraint related (particularly in relation to my felt experience of reading selections – and to what purposes (“academic” vs. – ?)  (is there a versus? or is my criteria for reading homogenous regardless of “assignments” or artifact?)
  • Related: compositions – whether related to schoolwork or blog or journal or artistic projects – are they dissimilar in any way other than forms of expression, manifestation and items?  Or is all processing and expressing work similarly creative, inventive – processes toward meaning?
  • Can I begin to dissolve my penchant for categories and tasks, loosen a little my instinct of organizing complexity?  Do I want to?  Why?

These are my offering for today – reports from the margins, the notations always accruing and collocating in my experience – given air through a shifting of immediate responsibilities…

“To accept questions consists in immersing oneself in the search for the answers that answer them.  Furthermore, the questions specify the answers that they admit.”

-Humberto Maturana-

attached: a phenomenal recollective account of the theory of Autopoiesis – of creatively self-organizing systems like ourselves and our molecules that stuns me.  I invite you to read and differently consider your experience of the world:

Humberto Maturana – Preface to “Tree of Knowledge”

“the pursuit of knowledge does not mean conquest, but invention, the establishment of new relations, which supplement already existing ones and can transform them, make them branch out into unexpected dimensions, rather than deny them, or discredit them as manifestations of opinion, illusion, ‘culture.'”

-Isabelle Stengers-

attached:  a powerful account of “knowing” and how we conceive/relate to the acquisition of knowledge.  Again, if these sorts of things interest you and you are not familiar with her work – I highly encourage you to browse this writing:

Isabelle Stengers – Do We Know How to Read Messages in the Sand?

And again, I thank you for indulging me  in sharing some of my process of living

through this blog…

A lightening, a delicious weight

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings5 Comments

The semester is beginning to dissolve, moments opening up for readings that wander further afield… the pleasure of not squeezing freedoms into necessity however inextricably they are entwined… the reprieve arrives today in the form of:

“What is to be understood through seeing and hearing (even if not at first glance) cannot be too far removed from what is already known.  As incomparably as something unutterable may be expressed at times in a gesture, a grouping, a picture of feeling, or an event, this always happens only in immediate proximity to the word; as something hovering, so to speak, around its core of meaning, which is the real element of humanity…the essence of the person does not reside in his experiences and feelings but in his silent, persistent quarrelling and coming to terms with them.”

-Robert Musil-

Additional “freedom fare:”

A Complexity of Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

“I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”

– Percival Everett by Virgil Russell-

and highly recommended

Of Goals and Achievements: To be thinking

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy1 Comment

In considering progress.  In thinking reflexively.  In pondering what humans are as well as what we are able to produce.  Gilbert Simondon, like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, John Deely, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Thibault and many other profound scientists and thinkers, continually examine “human progress” within a conceived totality of systems.  This enables us to reflect, question and surmise.  To be conscious.  To conceive.  The following article, only recently published, provides I think an intriguing overview of such networked and systemic thinking…

Gilbert Simondon – The Limits of Human Progress

Relevant

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings2 Comments

Attempting an entire academic paper in one day.  To the tunes of:

Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes14 Comments

“What, in summary, is the nature of the singular entity referred to by the word ‘I’ in judgments like ‘I am in pain’?  Answer: since those uses of ‘I’ do not refer, the question is nonsensical.  One might as well ask after the nature of Nobody.”

-John Canfield-

“The ‘main point’ is rarely extricable from the digressions.  Every section spills into every other… [he] no longer knows what he was talking about.”

-R. M. Berry-

            It grows hair.  It remembers things differently.  It is singing as if in a mumbling voice.  Yesterday I got angry.

It thinks, but after talking with the child I was upset with, it revises its conception, taking into account that she said I exhibited joy.  Yesterday I was happy.

This glassy essence.

“I will need to accomplish a task tomorrow,” it thinks, in a manner different from image, music or text.  It can almost see me doing it – in a situated context – surrounded by people (other ones), objects, time and space.  Not essentially.  Well, maybe.

It calls to mind (read fabricates) what I was like two decades ago.  I was climbing mountains then, most often alone (i.e. not in the company of additional humans), still it is able to consider me there.  There where?  It imagines Long’s Peak in Colorado (in neither image, language nor feeling – it cannot recall particulars well enough to reconstruct)…it senses I was there.  It is reading in a diary.

Does this make it me?  The same as the I who wrote it, camping somewhere along the Eastern slope of Long’s Peak in 1995, apparently gladly absent of friend, foe, spouse or tamed animal counterpart?

I had a pack full of peanut butter and potatoes, a couple jugs of water, a tent, a cloak, a knife, an assortment of pens, books and blank journals.  It roughly remembers some of that.

It reflects (not to itself – that doesn’t even make sense) – must be a sort of nuanced synonym for thinking – (with itself? of itself? nonsense, it simply reflects) – I’m sitting cross-legged on a small clearing near a frothy crystalline stream within a circle of baby pines, trying to read philosophy texts packed in for the purpose of uninterrupted, or it could be me yet-to-come as distinguished by Swiss mountains and an understood language barrier protecting my solitude along with evident (it imagines) distance (and therefore time) between whatever residents might exist and I.  It (hypothetically) notices that (well, enough to pick out an “I” on the Jungfrau or Matterhorn).

But that has happened too.  Does the case that it conceives me thus proscribe an identity?   It isn’t sure, but there are similarities of some variety.  It isn’t saying for certain (the fact is it could say “for certain” but what might that establish as regards me?) – the appearance and accidents, character and behavior are in many ways inexact and altered – but for pragmatic and discriminatory purposes – it would designate me “me” (if it were in conversation or thinking extrinsically).

Could it really say, most definitely, that I was there?  Any more than that I will be?  It is uncertain, entirely possible.

This glassy essence.

It remains, for now.

Thinking of the time I was writing this (nearly now but just before).  It is writing, but not this, I have written this, it is aware, but only just before or just after – that it is I.

It writes.

“…man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.”

-Shakespeare, Measure for Measure–

Sure it runs!

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing24 Comments

I wasn’t sure I had it in me this week, concocting something from a picture, worth a 100 words (you should try – visit Friday Fictioneers), but I battered and welded something together in the nick of time.   For what it’s worth –

Copyright - Beth Carter

We sang when we made it.  We laughed and we drank and we sang.  So many said that it couldn’t be done.  Not by philosophers.  But why not?  Sappy, crappy and happy we sang.  And we drank.  Marty stole the carts, Jerry supplied the pictures to spur us along – as if they were sure to result.  Trey provided visors and sunglasses, given the absence of roof.  We swore we’d take it 10,000 miles.  10,000 miles a year.  We ditched our courses, thirsty for reasons.

Of course it runs!  Look close – you can tell where it’s been.  Take it further.

fRiction

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

“The more narrowly we examine language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement.  (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement.)  The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. – We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk.  We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

“Language is a labyrinth of paths.  You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”

Today’s Nonlinear Equations

On By NW FilbertIn Graphotos, Journallings1 Comment

 +  +  +  +  + 

=

Question

Live Models

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing2 Comments

Notes on Fiction and Philosophy

(complete text linked)

Brian Evenson

I thickly recommend you print and mark up the entire essay, but to tantalize your imaginative mental taste buds, here’s a representative nuggety excerpt:

“Good fiction, I would argue, always poses problems – ethical, linguistic, epistemological, ontological – and writers and readers, I believe, should be willing to draw on everything around them to pose tentative answers to those problems and, by way of them, pose problems of their own.  For innovative writers, I believe, philosophy is always best an errant affair, a personal and intense wandering, a series of tools that one can employ, move beyond, come back to; it is our ability as writers to stay curious, to borrow, to bricoler, and to adapt and move on that keeps us from becoming stale.”