Dieting for the mind

 We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.- Alain de Bottin "On Distraction" in City Journal

I actually read this article to take a break from reading an article on Haeccity, Pierce and Duns Scotus. Reading philosophy had the advantage of requiring less secondary reading than other disciplines. The relative depth of thought appealed more than reading repetitious papers that seemed to qoute each other. Now, of course, I can easily download more scholarly articles than I could possibly read each day.

Is this really learning, given the impossibility of knowing everything? A phd, they say, knows more and more about less and less. As their knowledge of a very narrow object grows- for example Galopagan sea snails, or a particular Shakespearean sonnet- they have less time to consider anything else. That is to say, anything else save it's relationship to their object of study.

My day is a steady stream of information- some scholarly, some journalistic, some personal- and on diverse topics. However, as my personal and professional relationships increasingly involve the academic disciplines of philosophy, art history and game studies(video, not strategic), my focus has begun to drift away from some issues. perhaps, in a decade or so, I will reemerge ready to reengage topics like freedom of expression without solely referring it to the phenomenological consideration of the visual culture/art history of digital games.

moreover, that stream of information is not merely cognitive. Affective information, feelings the heart also infuse my moments. Joy, pride at writing something good, frustration with administrative details, lust and love and gentle affection, not to mention the loneliness of a writer. Psycho- motor information also takes up my day. As a phenomenologist, how can I ignore the particular sensations of cool morning air blowing through the window, guided downwards by the curtain and spilling out across my legs? The pleasant stoicism of doing pull ups and dips on the apparatus i have scattered through my apartment, so i can do more than just sit at the computer, reading and writing.

Yet all this can distract from my work at hand? This balance between focus and obsession, between depth and narrowness.(These sentences without verbs:) each moment has its individual call for attention, specific, and necessary. My problem is to hear that call and respond to it appropriately. Perhaps, sometimes the correct response is not to hear it at all.

Another step

Despite everything, I have completed my course work, today, and have a thesis supervisor. Now, on to researching and writing my thesis.
(Champagne cork pops!*)

Back to the Basics; Philosophy, Art History and what I'm Thinking

It often helps to return to the sources of what we think about, so we can determine how far and how well we have gone. So...

What is True, Good and Beautiful were the classical conceptions of philosophical questions. I would rephrase them tentatively as: Why is there something rather than nothing? How can we know this? How can we evaluate it's relevance to us?

Obviously, we ourselves are included in the set of things that comprise that something. The language we use to ask these questions also comprise part of that something, as does the methods of knowing that we use to ask that fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.
-David Hills

I think Prof. Hills' was being sardonic, but there is a useful approach in his functional definition. The questions are often very simple, but the logic required to precisely structure the question as well as provide criteria to propose and evaluate an answer are torturous.

My broadest question is what does it mean, if anything, that we are here now, looking/sensing/perceiving all this stuff and reacting to it. Why do Joe Pass and Oscar Peterson make me feel good when they play "Caravan"? What does it mean that my consciousness reacts to these apparent perceptions? What does it say about this universe that I can experience these phenomena and then express them? Why can my perceptions apparently err?

These are questions so vast that they seem to defy answers, so they must be analyzed, or deconstructed into questions narrow and sharply defined so the answer has some chance of remaining valid.

Does aesthetic experience some how touch "reality" in the noumenal(Kantian), Dionysian(Nietzschean) or phenomenological (Merleau-Pontian) senses? That question arose from some logical problems I had with Emmanual Kant when I studied him with Gerry LaVallee over twenty years ago. My questions were not original, as I learned later, because Arthur Schopenhauer had asked them and provided his answers in 1500 pages or so. My questions were creative, I think, because I had never read or encountered Schopenhauer's thought prior to ten years after I raised my questions about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Now I'm asking a very specific question, set in very defined temporal(because I am doing Art History) and spatial locus. Can the relationship between linear perspective and the feeling we often call immersion better be defined as "Ekstasos" when we consider games such as Prince of Persia juxtaposed with Piranesi's Carceri drawings?