this is going to be fast loose and epigrammatic. Sorry.
I never really cared about the classics until I read Beowulf my senior year of college. I’d been having problems with so much of postmodern theory and even with the whole fucking tradition from Plato to the Present. (This is rooted in that as I was reading Critique of Pure Reason I was reading Jorge Luis Borges “Ficciones”. I realized that there is NO difference between Kant or Neoplatonism and Borges or Umberto Eco’s Novels. They are all the invention of bored fertile minds. If man is not hunting, he will be fashioning new and pretty tools. ) Upon finishing Beowulf, I gave up on trying to read as fast as I could to come up with the new truth, even if it was there is no truth, and then took that damnable Nietzschean turn and began to create my worldview, my tribal place, my locality.
this is quite a bit of what we do now. any thoughts?
I went the other way around. I first created my views, without reading much philopsophy, but by spooning up some from school, TV, and some easy books. And after that I took interest in religion, new age and philosophy in that order.
Do you mean that there are not much educated philopshers here?
I started out reading CS Lewis and a bunch of Philosophy that really lead me to good morals b/c I guess I was looking for meaning going into college and I was really looking for God. But once I got more into Philosophy I started looking at all of the other great ideas out there and during this summer I really rebelled against traditional conservative thought. It maybe bad but I feel my studies have taken a huge leap into nihilism in the past few weeks, but I guess I have my reasons. I guess this is why I dont get along with to many people b/c I looked at them as being blinded b/c of the way they live their lives. Hopefully this yr my studies will take a turn toward a little more meaning and less nihilism.
Sorry for this off topic post, but just how fast do you read Hermes?
It would take me about 3 days to read a 500 page book reading 6-8 hours a day.
I’m just wondering, because you seem to always be able to spout off books and authors like second nature. I know you’re probably twice my age, but still, thats alot of reading for anyone your age(atleast in my opinion).
So just wondering how fast and how often you read stuff.
I’m 25 years old and I’ve been reading heavy since I was about 12. I try to read about three hours a day, but I’ve been slack lately. I could read a good fiction 500 pager fairly quickly (I’ve read the whole Lord of the Rings Trilogy in just over three days), but 500 page philosophy texts stay with me for weeks.
I guess the thesis of this post would be that universal truth is a lie and that we all just make up our little tribal worldviews. Not one of my greatest posts actually.
One thing which came to my mind is a book (also a movie) which I heard of called “Lord of the Flies” (some 95% sure abt the name only). This was abt a group of kids raised in orthodox British households and then fate has it that they land up on some deserted isolated jungle island with no inhabitants and well, its a kind of “nowhere” place with nothing supporting the civilized life they are used to. The kids eventually pick up skills on the island and turn to their self developed tribal ways. Sounds like a convenient diablo manoeuvre with the location transfer from britain to an island, but interesting nonetheless.
The idea portrayed seems to be this that our situational mentality covers all others - and in situations in which we ave to be inventive, we turn inventive by usually picking up new skills, some faster than others. Circumsatnces will decide whether they were adequate or not…essentially, whether we would survive (or succeed, if you will) would determine whether our tribal wishings and habits and the rest were appropriate, need to better themselves or are inadequate. Maybe not all of us are so determined to live as we have understood things, people of principle are rare. Most of us seem to adapt to things. Hmm…seems a matter of choice and seems we change these ideas with time and place. Many of us atleast…
hermes,
I think you’ve just hit the “there ain’t no THE…” Relax and enjoy! After all the myriad world views, slogging through stacks and stacks of learned tomes, you’re still left with yourself and whatever you can construct. Incidentally, whatever you construct will be value because you will always have the right answers. The bitch is feeling confident we’ve asked the right questions…