States of Awe
***[WARNING: EXTREMELY LONG POST AHEAD. PROCEED WITH CAUTION, HIGHLY ADDICTIVE, ONCE YOU BEGIN READING YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO STOP DUE TO THE EXEMPLARY PROSE.]***
I dont joke about warnings so take that seriously.
2:44AM and I am sitting in the Syracuse Airport waiting for my flight that leaves at 6:15AM. I have been here since shortly after 10:00PM.
I have been trying to get writing done on a paper that is due on Monday, but it is kind of hard to write. I did get some good stuff into the intro--which was rather sparse until now. I hope that I will be able to finish it in some manner that I will be happy with. (Well, maybe that is over optimistic, I am almost never happy with the way that my work turns out.)
So, my preferred method of trying to get the creative juices flowing is to write this blog post. Lets see how it goes.
A number of times in the last few days I have been struck with a feeling of awe. Not at the cold blowing wind that Syracuse has had the last week or so goodness not that. The awe has been directed at a number of things. So, as I mentioned, I have been in the routine of sleeping in until 12:00PM or 1:00PM and staying up until about 4:30AM or 5:00AM. I really have been liking this. As I mentioned before, my brain seems to focus better at night. I really have no good speculations as to why that might be. (I thought that it could be that I was just tired, but since I was sleeping in late, that cant be it.) Anyways, all that to say that I have walked home at 4:00AM a number of days this week. One day, Tuesday maybe, I checked the weather before I left and it said that it was -9C but that it felt like -14C. Not too bad, but I was expecting it to be a cold brisk walk home to my warm apartment. (I should add at this point that I really dont like the cold, I dont like snow, and I dont like wind when it is combined with either of those.) So, on the walk home, I soon realized that there was no wind and that there was a fresh layer of snow on the ground but that it was no longer snowing. Since it had just been snowing I suspect that there was a lot of snow still floating around well up in the sky, the result of which was a orangey/pinkish coloured sky. As I walked through the graveyard with the crisp but clean air flowing into my lungs I could see the tombstones clearly. They each had their own personal dusting of snow that made them well quite picturesque. As I looked around the whole scene was awe striking. That is the first case.
A day later I was working on my paper and trying to figure out what to say about these things called plural universals that the author invokes in order to solve a problem. I wasnt happy with the way that these things were looking but I really didn't know what to say about them. So, what do you do when you have a philosophical problem? You go and look in one of the five volumes of David Lewis's collected papers. He has a paper called: Against structural universals. Structural universals are not exactly plural universals, however his arguments against structural universals apply (in a more generalized form, I think) to plural universals. At this point I was struck with the: WOW Lewis was so frickin smart! I SO wish I was that smart. I know that what I just wrote doesnt sound like awe, but it was. (I mean come on now you try to describe what awe feels like without using some equally unclear terms like wonder or amazement.) This was the second case.
The third and last case of being struck with a sense of awe occurred when I went into the deep. The deep was cold but warm, wet but dry, noisy but silent, bright but dark, sedating but stimulating, cavernous but uncomfortably small. All of these things it was and none of them at all the deep cant be explained, it is understandable and non-understandable. You grasp it or you dont; if you dont, then you dont and if you do, then you do. The thing about the deep is that you really cant visit it, but you feel like you are always there. People worry that they cant fathom the deep, but it is just then---in their un-fathoming---that they fathom it. The licentious attitudes that people harbour against the deep will only further push them into the cavernous expanse that is uncomfortably small. When they feel the walls caving in on their noisy but cold inner selves they think that the cavernous expanse becomes fathomable, but this just swells the divide between them and the deep.
Ok, enough subjection. If you think that you understand what I was writing, go see a psychiatrist or something like that, you need drugs! There is a lot of philosophy that is as unintelligible as what I just wrote. And lots of people think thator at least claim that they think thatthey understand what is going on in that sort of text. This invoked the sense of awe that I felt.
Meta-thoughts: The first two cases that I described are, I think, quite clear about what the focus of the awe is. However in the third case, the focus is multiply ambiguous. It might be that the awe is directed at the people who write that stuff (I am trying to avoid evaluative terms so stuff in scare quotes will do). It might be at the stuff itself; more specifically, it might be at the sheer ridiculousness (oops, evaluative term) of the stuff. Finally, it might be the case that the awe is directed at the people who say that they think they can understand what the text is trying to say and why they are not yet on any sort of heavy drugs.
I realize that there are times where we can say something by saying nothing; but I think, that anytime this is possible are times where we are expressing something via body language. In the case of the text above, the claim that the author was expressing something by saying nothing is false. I agree, the author (ME) said nothing (sheer nonsense it was) but in doing so, I did not also say something.
Well this has gone on FAR too long. It is not 3:35AM. I will save this and it will be posted when I get home.
(Interesting aside: I expressed the thoughts in this post between 2:45 and 3:45 lets say (rounding off for ease). If I then post them at 11:30AM, have I expressed the same thoughts again? Interesting I dont know. If it is the case that I express them again, do I mean something different by them then when I wrote them now? ok, I do have an opinion: namely, no, the meaning doesnt change; but I do think that there are some interesting things to say in favour of the converse claim.)
I dont joke about warnings so take that seriously.
2:44AM and I am sitting in the Syracuse Airport waiting for my flight that leaves at 6:15AM. I have been here since shortly after 10:00PM.
I have been trying to get writing done on a paper that is due on Monday, but it is kind of hard to write. I did get some good stuff into the intro--which was rather sparse until now. I hope that I will be able to finish it in some manner that I will be happy with. (Well, maybe that is over optimistic, I am almost never happy with the way that my work turns out.)
So, my preferred method of trying to get the creative juices flowing is to write this blog post. Lets see how it goes.
A number of times in the last few days I have been struck with a feeling of awe. Not at the cold blowing wind that Syracuse has had the last week or so goodness not that. The awe has been directed at a number of things. So, as I mentioned, I have been in the routine of sleeping in until 12:00PM or 1:00PM and staying up until about 4:30AM or 5:00AM. I really have been liking this. As I mentioned before, my brain seems to focus better at night. I really have no good speculations as to why that might be. (I thought that it could be that I was just tired, but since I was sleeping in late, that cant be it.) Anyways, all that to say that I have walked home at 4:00AM a number of days this week. One day, Tuesday maybe, I checked the weather before I left and it said that it was -9C but that it felt like -14C. Not too bad, but I was expecting it to be a cold brisk walk home to my warm apartment. (I should add at this point that I really dont like the cold, I dont like snow, and I dont like wind when it is combined with either of those.) So, on the walk home, I soon realized that there was no wind and that there was a fresh layer of snow on the ground but that it was no longer snowing. Since it had just been snowing I suspect that there was a lot of snow still floating around well up in the sky, the result of which was a orangey/pinkish coloured sky. As I walked through the graveyard with the crisp but clean air flowing into my lungs I could see the tombstones clearly. They each had their own personal dusting of snow that made them well quite picturesque. As I looked around the whole scene was awe striking. That is the first case.
A day later I was working on my paper and trying to figure out what to say about these things called plural universals that the author invokes in order to solve a problem. I wasnt happy with the way that these things were looking but I really didn't know what to say about them. So, what do you do when you have a philosophical problem? You go and look in one of the five volumes of David Lewis's collected papers. He has a paper called: Against structural universals. Structural universals are not exactly plural universals, however his arguments against structural universals apply (in a more generalized form, I think) to plural universals. At this point I was struck with the: WOW Lewis was so frickin smart! I SO wish I was that smart. I know that what I just wrote doesnt sound like awe, but it was. (I mean come on now you try to describe what awe feels like without using some equally unclear terms like wonder or amazement.) This was the second case.
The third and last case of being struck with a sense of awe occurred when I went into the deep. The deep was cold but warm, wet but dry, noisy but silent, bright but dark, sedating but stimulating, cavernous but uncomfortably small. All of these things it was and none of them at all the deep cant be explained, it is understandable and non-understandable. You grasp it or you dont; if you dont, then you dont and if you do, then you do. The thing about the deep is that you really cant visit it, but you feel like you are always there. People worry that they cant fathom the deep, but it is just then---in their un-fathoming---that they fathom it. The licentious attitudes that people harbour against the deep will only further push them into the cavernous expanse that is uncomfortably small. When they feel the walls caving in on their noisy but cold inner selves they think that the cavernous expanse becomes fathomable, but this just swells the divide between them and the deep.
Ok, enough subjection. If you think that you understand what I was writing, go see a psychiatrist or something like that, you need drugs! There is a lot of philosophy that is as unintelligible as what I just wrote. And lots of people think thator at least claim that they think thatthey understand what is going on in that sort of text. This invoked the sense of awe that I felt.
Meta-thoughts: The first two cases that I described are, I think, quite clear about what the focus of the awe is. However in the third case, the focus is multiply ambiguous. It might be that the awe is directed at the people who write that stuff (I am trying to avoid evaluative terms so stuff in scare quotes will do). It might be at the stuff itself; more specifically, it might be at the sheer ridiculousness (oops, evaluative term) of the stuff. Finally, it might be the case that the awe is directed at the people who say that they think they can understand what the text is trying to say and why they are not yet on any sort of heavy drugs.
I realize that there are times where we can say something by saying nothing; but I think, that anytime this is possible are times where we are expressing something via body language. In the case of the text above, the claim that the author was expressing something by saying nothing is false. I agree, the author (ME) said nothing (sheer nonsense it was) but in doing so, I did not also say something.
Well this has gone on FAR too long. It is not 3:35AM. I will save this and it will be posted when I get home.
(Interesting aside: I expressed the thoughts in this post between 2:45 and 3:45 lets say (rounding off for ease). If I then post them at 11:30AM, have I expressed the same thoughts again? Interesting I dont know. If it is the case that I express them again, do I mean something different by them then when I wrote them now? ok, I do have an opinion: namely, no, the meaning doesnt change; but I do think that there are some interesting things to say in favour of the converse claim.)
posted by Mark at 2:15:00 PM
1 comments
