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January 1st, 2011
12:09 am - greetings and salutations
This journal is for my philosophical ramblings. It is here to create a space for my reflections. In it I will not be writing for academic purposes, but rather as an antidote for academic endeavour. It is a place where I don't have to worry about who said what and cite a page number. As such, I hope it will not only provide a reprieve from academia, but also as a counterpart to my academic writing.
That said, I am an academic in training, i.e. a graduate student, and one of my aims is to to publish articles. I expect that most of the entries here will be much too raw for publication, yet it may be the case that I want to use something from here, even if only a paragraph or two, in a polished paper. Consequently, most entries will be locked.
If you are interested in reading, just add this journal to your friends list and I will add yours back.
My personal journal is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) ironed_orchid, and you are more than welcome to investigate that side of me.
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August 13th, 2004
03:39 am - Thinking in Action
We may conceive of thinking and acting as two different capacities. Thinking being merely contemplative, being about the world and acting being something that we do in the world, something that changes the world. Yet thinking itself is pure activity. Thinking is always changing. Thought is temporal; it only takes place in time. Yet no thought is permanent but instead thought the succession of one concept followed by another. Thoughts, like the spoken word, may be repeated but we freeze them. And yet, thought is intentional, it is always about or of something. Thought reaches towards its object, and, in this intentional act, thought becomes a matter of narrowing the field of attention, of focusing on one object among the multitude. The object about which we think may be something that exists in space as well as in time and which is persistent and as far as we are concerned, unchanging. Or the object about which we think may itself be a thought, and idea or a concept, which we try to hold still and steady such that we can consider it. Yet, whether our object is temporal or spatial, even the process of holding it in our thinking attention, our thoughts which are not merely thinking the object into existence but are thinking about it are constantly changing and developing in an seemingly endless succession.
Even when we take thought itself as our intentional object, that is, the very process of thinking, we cannot stop this process, but only form an idea about thinking. We then proceed think about this idea, yet, in order to discover what thought is, we do not, and cannot, stop thinking. Instead we only seem to think more self-consciously, we pay attention to the process and the activity of thinking. Yet in this shift of attention, in which we take our own thinking as out object, it seems that thought has only taken a further step back from the world. In trying to understand how it is that we may think in the first place, in asking "what is thought?" we have erected thought as something that takes place between the source of our thinking activity and the world about which we think. That is to say, we have conceived of a sphere that consists only in thinking: a mind. We have located the source of thought on one side of the mind and the objects about which we think on the other side of it. And those objects that are not dependent on our thinking about them, which persist and may be returned to, or which form a series of causes and effects, these objects are thought to be outside the mind.
( etc )
Previously posted in ironed_orchid's journal
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August 12th, 2004
03:30 am - thinking and acting
Thinking and acting seem to us to be two separate capacities. When we are thinking, we are at a remove from the world around us. We may be thinking about things that are present, that are immediately before us, and yet in thinking about them we are not interacting with the world so much as we are reflecting on. Through reflection we take the objects that appear to us in the world and examine them from a certain perspective. Not a spatial perspective, but rather an intellectual perspective. We take the objects of which we are conscious and transform them into objects of and for consciousness itself. In thinking in this way, we have taken a figurative step back from the world, in order to think about one thing, and not the multitude of other things that we could just as well take as our object. We close ourselves off from the sensory such that we can concentrate on the object at hand.
Our thoughts, then, may be of the world but they are not precisely in the world. That is to say, they are not objects of which others can become conscious. Nor do they exist in space. Instead they exist only for us, and they only appear to us in time. Thoughts, as the saying goes, are fleeting. For all that we might try to grasp a thought, by holding and focusing our intention upon it, the very nature of thoughts appears to be temporal and changing. In trying to hold onto a thought so that we might examine it, it seems to transform into something new through that very examination.
( etc )
Previously posted in ironed_orchid's journal
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