Philosophy on Madprof's workshop

Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:43:00 +0000

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”… or is it?

By saying it is, we say beauty is only a subjective quality.

But by saying it isn’t – by saying that something may be beautiful without our being able to appreciate it as beautiful – we divorce ourselves from our experience and our association between words and description…

Is it possible to say

“It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.”

Which I think I may have said, from time to time. In that I can see elements and aspects which, maybe I know, are considered beautiful, or perhaps I can see an underlying elegance and purpose, but aesthetically I find it displeasing… Some of Rembrant’s paintings would fall in to this category.

The thing is, am I just susceptible to the cultural conditioning of my upbringing in saying something like this? I have preconceived notions of what is beautiful and what isn’t? But then, my aesthetic sense is also formed (to a large degree) by the same…

So there’s a whole philosophic field based around these very questions.

But I guess I’m kind of wondering… how variable language is. How our thoughts are modified by the language and words we use, and yet the language and words we use are modified and morphed by our thoughts.

So often, everything seems so vague, so fuzzy, so indefinable, so inexplicable, so possibly variable, so uncertain and indefinate, and so futile. *sigh*

Thoughts...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:44:00 +0000

We’ve booked our tickets to leave Cyprus in a month-ish. This time has gone SO fast … it did last time too.

I’ve started thinking about “stuff”. Very vague, I know. More, possessions type stuff. Here’s a picture of my cupboard:

as you can see, crammed full of all kinds of bits and pieces. From recorders (blockflöten) to juggling balls to old marmite jars with elastic bands to rope to old telephones to candles to old CD players to scissors…

I know I’m naturally something of a hoarder, and don’t want to throw stuff away… but on Doulos I think I either learned to be more balanced, or else some how got even more messed up! :-)

By the time I left AV, I had picked up quite a bit of “are we using it? No? Is it working? No? OK, then throw it away.” - I know Ant and Adam will claim somewhat otherwise *cough*oldA&Hsound-desks*cough* - but I know I’ve actually changed a lot. So now, looking at all this stuff in my cupboard, things I haven’t used in over 4 years now… I find it really hard to want to keep it.

How is it helping me to have this here? How is it helping anyone? Am I using it? No. Is it working? Well, some of it, kind of. Will I use it again?

Probably not… well… some of it? Maybe?

Sentimental value seems to be something I no longer really care about much.

I’ve thrown out the old hand-made juggling clubs (plastic milk bottles, newspaper and kitchen-roll centers :-) ) and broken telephones (for a juggling routine to do with communication), and some other odds and ends, but amn’t sure what to do with the rest.

Does it actually behoove me ( I’ve been wanting to use that word for AGES! ha! Done it! ) to throw stuff away?

Now I’m going back to Carlisle for a few years, and getting married next year, I need to think more about such stuff, I guess. I will no longer be a batchelor, able to just keep random clutter in a cupboard. I’m fine with that. (I’m pretty sure I’ll end up picking up more…)

I do have a lot of projects on the go at once. Juggling stuff - one day I will get back into it more; Obscure music stuff - I will take up the bagpipes one day; art stuff - I love painting, I just haven’t done any for a while; computer programming - a hobby. I don’t want a job of this! But a little is fun; graphic design… etc… etc…

But it’s not very efficient. I know I need to prioritise, cut away the cruft. I don’t NEED this stuff! But maybe not? Maybe actually having lots of clutter and things on the go is actually how I function best? Or maybe not?

Isn’t it great being decisive? Well, perhaps? Or perhaps not? Some times? Er…

Modern Christianity.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:29:00 +0000

We’re not sure of the difference between baseless optimism and faith.

Blinded by love?

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Just a random thought.

I was walking past a sign today, I don’t remember what the whole sign was about, but it contained the phrase “love makes you blind”.

Does it?

It’s a weird concept. I know what it means, but isn’t it kind of antithetical to what we would want to believe?

We say love (in it’s purest form) is the highest of virtues, biblically, it’s one of our main goals, God uses “love” to describe himself, Paul waxes lyrical about it, and almost every page of the scriptures are saturated in it. Songs have been written from the beginning of time about it.

Surely love does the opposite of blinding. It’s only in love that we are actually able to see. Without love, we are blind.

If what we call “Love” causes us to no longer see (flaws, problems, sins, etc), then is it really love? Or infatuation, idolatry?

Ethics

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:36:00 +0000

“The Good is often the greatest enemy of the Best.” - Maxwell
“If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable” - Proverbs 28:9

Which is better, to spend ones time sitting with street kids loving them and giving them hope for the future, or sitting in an office, wading through tedious documents that it’s actually your duty to understand?

Which is more worthy, to slog away at understanding a law you know that 99% of people really care nothing about, nor even believe in, enforcing it over others and creating unheaval and more work and stress for all of them, or to spend time creatively working on more fun and generally well-recognised projects?

How do you find motivation to inconvienence yourself and others to a phenomincal degree, appearing to red-light and be negative to all the other people you want to encourage and help, in order to fulfil a law you don’t even agree with yourself?

For the Christians in mainline western churches:

If your country declared it illegal to meet in groups larger than 15, would you keep meeting as normal in defiance of the government and protest the loss of your “rights”, or find a way to keep “doing” church and fulfilling the call of the bible within the constraints of the law?

Which is more important: Comfortably doing what you’re used to, or uncomfortably denying yourself in order to be a righteous and unimpeachable testimony?

Getting to know me, or not.

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:07:00 +0000

Good morning, blog. Although, actually, it’s more like evening, seeing as how it’s 7pm and everything.

It’s probably morning somewhere in the world.

I have a friend on this ship who has a fetish for “Awkward moments”. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it to be called a fetish, but whatever, he really loves them. He savours them, as a connesour, specially saving them up and preparing them, finely planning moments of Awkwardness in the same way that a conductor of an orchestra prepares the finale of a grand opera.

He’ll often say stuff intentionally to make people uncomfortable.

So I asked about a week or two ago, why?

And his response was something like,

(a) it’s fun,
(b) I enjoy seeing how people really are.

And the second one is the bit that I took issue with.

He said watching how people react when they don’t know how to respond gives a great insight into them, and let’s you see them without the pretence and acting that accompanies so much of human interaction.

What’s there to take issue with?

Well, seeing people when they don’t know how to react, is that really how they “really are”?

It seems to me to smell slightly of the whole humans-are-nought-but-animals thing.

And also, the “You know the real person by seeing how they behave under pressure”. - Likewise, the same.

There is some truth to it, of course. It’s much easier to act nice and give a good image when you are relaxed and can concentrate on impressing others, or on behaving well, than when things are stressful and you’re under pressure and don’t have time to think about what to do next.

Others have also said that you know how someone is by what they do in their spare time, or when no one else is looking, and so on.

Some people seem to do well under pressure, and be able to think quickly and clearly. Others don’t. Some people find it easy to find jobs to do and to use their spare time productively and pro-actively.

So… it’s often very useful to know how someone behaves under pressure, but I don’t think it really shows who they “really” are.

This would have been all nice and theoretical, and all that, except for this week.

I got sick.

And, it turns out, I don’t act very nice when I’m sick.

Usually, when I’m healthy and fine and everything, I tend to use a lot of hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony in my general day to day language. It tends to be (I hope!) fairly good natured, and over-the-top enough that others realise it’s not intended seriously.

“Could you play this CD for me?”
“Nope. It’s completely impossible - the computer can only play CDs on Thursdays.”

and so on.

Well, the thing is, recently I’ve started to tend to mix double meanings and more biting sarcasm into what I say, and, usually, it doesn’t mean anything - to me.

Ie, “hey, the programme schedule says you’re doing a song later, but you haven’t put a form in saying you want any microphones or instruments or anything, so it’s just a Capella, right?”

Of Coffee Makers and Consciences (part 1?)

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:50:00 +0000

One of the things I love about the “Peanuts” cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy’s book that he writes occasionally “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.

Anyway.

Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?

It’s been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.

I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture…

Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it’s not. I just mean “mad”, in a slightly more complex way of speaking.

To take simpler mode of address, I’ll quote Freddie Mercury:

“It’s finally happened, I’m slightly mad.”

Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.

I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a “this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it’s so stupid…” sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.

Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.

It all began like this…

This house is great. I’m really enjoying living here. right now, I’m sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.

Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?

What could there possibly be to complain about?

Well, there’s no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.

Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.

I say it again, for emphasis.

There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!

Shocking! But true!

There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the “Fair Trade” and the “Nescafe” varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.

So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.

In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.