Thoughts, aphorisms, fragments. (twice updated)

I scoured through a fair amount of notes and journal entries for random thoughts that I found interesting:


The moment should be more than a means to an end— it should be an end in itself.


Religion is a means of explaining and providing a reason for occurrences that defy any observable explanation. But when sciences, history, etc. are so vast the only thing that remains is being—such a thing becomes difficult to place in a narrative, as it seems itself to be a sort of singularity.

Or: Mysticism is a means to make clear what is problematic or unknowable in one's world. When everything in one's world is accounted for, all that is left is the world itself. When, for instance, this world lacks a clear telos, a concrete religious story becomes difficult to maintain.


It takes just as much faith to be atheistic as it takes to be religious, only less imagination. To believe that this is all there is is every bit as presumptuous as believing that there is something more that remains unseen. Agnosticism requires neither faith nor imagination—only an impassive acknowledgment of subjectivity.


The reason I got into English was because I am fascinated with the idea of representing the universal through particulars. (Cultural/historical + notions of life, death, god, love, etc.... but all so inseparably stirred and interwoven into the objects of everyday experience.) Philosophy tries to go the other route, or at least a lot of the more prominent and pretentious schools do... trying to represent the particulars through the universals.

If I manage to carry my study of philosophy to its end, what poetry would there be left? (Plenty: fragmented feelings and circumstances of individuals.)


If I don't consider the past or future, the world is a very depressing place. If I consider past without future, the world is motionless. If I consider future without past, there's nowhere to go.


So... take philosophy (narrow epistemology) and a sort of clarification of language to dispose of false presuppositions and put everything out in open--that is what is in need of scrutiny-- and beyond that apply pragmatism as a secondary standard of scrutiny. Thereafter, conjectures of the unknowable can be expressed in a latitudinarian fashion provided that they function within natural theology. These different forms of worship are thereafter culturally/anthropologically different takes on the same subject.


One never reads in the news recent developments or discoveries in philosophy; it is regarded as a sort of recreational or entertainment-like field, like poetry-- subject to no verifiable certainty and no transcendental meaning.

"[T]wo warring camps [of philosophers]: the tender-minded ones who thought philosophy should aim at Significance, and the tough-minded philosophers who thought that it should aim at Truth" -Rorty

The meaning of life is living.


The experience of life is a longing, not a gratification.

One should be occupied with the process and not the destination, for life's destination is death. Life's unfolding tells a more glamorous tale. It's beauty is in becoming.

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." -LW

"[I]f life is to be appreciated as a process rather than an outcome, it is completely silly to consider end results of no great matter..."



sun/moon as a deity : sun/moon as time : time as a deity



I'd prefer confusion to boredom any day.


Isn't it interesting how riveting a biography can become when you sympathize with its subject?


There's an excitement and acute awareness that arises from viewing one's current circumstances as the products of a story. With this context in mind, one feels as if on stage--as a newfound teller of the story, as a descendant of history, and as a sculptor of the future. How glorious is life under this lens?


Seduced by the brilliant colors.. or words. [painting.. or poetry.]

Dichotomy between beauty, not beauty is unacceptable; |- dichotomy between good and evil? "Beyond good and evil," just as in aesthetics?

"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks." -LW

Being able to draw does not for one second make me an artist.

It's interesting to view actions under the context of motivation. When I write poetry, or draw, what I am really doing a lot of the time is sulking or concentrating on me. What I do when I play videogames is waste time and expose myself to a flurry of sense-data.

What is one's motivation in doing philosophy? In writing poetry? I've eliminated the notion of beauty— it's an intangible oversimplification... What? A flustered attempt at self-expression? An assertion of the rightness of one's view of the world?


Anima mundi---every part useful to the whole, perhaps not "useful" to other parts.

"At best it [life] is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." -Frederick Locker Lampson

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." -LW

"The Tractatus is like a clock that doesn't tell the right time." -LW

Still, that every person is made in God's image is a very profound statement--albeit dependent on your understanding of what God is. The profundity, for me, comes in viewing the statement in light of a God cast as a representation of the totality of things. That is, man is made in the image of the totality of existence.


Then again, if language is a means for abstract thought, then it may be required for truly "human" thinking. But in this case, what is abstract thought? That which has no corresponding empirical situation or contextual relation? Abstract thought is what I am engaged in at this moment......

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." -LW

[Life as integrity.]


The essence of critical thinking is an awareness that not every thought that runs through your mind is precious.

Don't always expect complex answers to complex questions. ...Although at my present outlook, those questions that I am referring to are not complex, as much as they are weighty.

Although I can't quite find the right words for it, logic and philosophy say very little... it is humanity and experience that are important. Philosophy, for the most part, is usually a secondhand or after-the-fact means of sorting through what happens in experience.

"Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits." -James

"The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion." -James

It makes little sense to view us as categorically independent individuals.

One thing that I think is terribly important, as did Dewey, was to encourage critical thinking--to plant that seed in your mind that tells you to always ask yourself if something is being done the way it needs to be done. And as this awareness flowers, so does self-efficiency. If everyone put forth the effort to always ask the world of the themselves, one couldn't help but be optimistic.


Many philosophers use the historical, cultural, or genealogical development of their subject as their basis for its construction... with regard to morals, this is a reflection of their fundamentally arbitrary nature. (Arbitrary = aesthetics are neither absolute nor innate.)


Indeed, that's often how we understand life, as a story. One event happens, then another. And after that, another, inspired by the last. And then another that was completely unexpected. We understand our lives, our cultures, our societies as ongoing stories. I was born in a small Midwestern town, I grew up, I got a degree in..... I married, had kids, worked for so-and-so many years.... retired... passed away. All stories; all understood under the guise of progress and temporality.


When all is said and done, one cannot be austere.

Another passing thought: that if the music was in some way augmenting my mood, I could someday go without it. At the moment the songs are like training wheels that can later be discarded, and my optimism can continue without the aid of a soundtrack.