Consumed by the questionable questions....
that I said I would never become consumed by because they are pointless. They siphon useful energies and will never have answers. No philosopher has ever been proved right! And yet I feel like I'm not going to be able to properly think about anything else, so to summarize:
Today I had a philosophical crisis. We are reading Nietzsche for one of my classes and as I'm sure you are aware he says that we have no free will, there is no truth, the enlightenment was bullshit and my thoughts are not my own. It's all good an well to read it and process it halfway, which is what I myself initially did. Then in class my amazing professor was further explaining it and it's implications.
I got it.
I BELIEVED it. For 10 minutes I was completely out of control, without hope, without goal, suffering the psychological implications of Nietszche. Maybe I interpreted things incorrectly, but it made sense...and it was awful, so I cried in class, naturally.
But I couldn't live like that, so it just stopped, it wasn't my control...but the panic ended. I'm not really sure what happened or what I think. The inherent thought that I reasoned that such a belief was nonsense implies that enlightenment is real, means that I can reason. But I'm not convinced it was me, that the thoughts were mine, I was at the whim of everything. It doesn't sound like the absurd stretch that it once did to believe that the enlightenment, human power of reason and the idealization of truth is nothing but a deception for ourselves. It's the cliche, I know "we're all just lying to ourselves"...but it's not like it hasn't happened before.
Maybe I only dislike Kant's ethics, I think I need Kant, because really thinking about it...life without Kant is awful. Maybe I worship truth with the same abandon fanatics worship their God. But life without it is bleak, it isn't life. This sounds like either a bad acid trip or a pretentious spewing I'm sure, but its maddening and at least feels very serious.
In attempting to read Descartes' Meditations later in the day it read like a book denying evolution.
Has anyone else read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil?
Then the boy I'm interested in left me hanging again, he's toying with me because he knows that he can, he knows he can charm and leave just enough of a thread to maintain interest...and it's working. Both the profound and the trivial baffled/failed me today.
Today I had a philosophical crisis. We are reading Nietzsche for one of my classes and as I'm sure you are aware he says that we have no free will, there is no truth, the enlightenment was bullshit and my thoughts are not my own. It's all good an well to read it and process it halfway, which is what I myself initially did. Then in class my amazing professor was further explaining it and it's implications.
I got it.
I BELIEVED it. For 10 minutes I was completely out of control, without hope, without goal, suffering the psychological implications of Nietszche. Maybe I interpreted things incorrectly, but it made sense...and it was awful, so I cried in class, naturally.
But I couldn't live like that, so it just stopped, it wasn't my control...but the panic ended. I'm not really sure what happened or what I think. The inherent thought that I reasoned that such a belief was nonsense implies that enlightenment is real, means that I can reason. But I'm not convinced it was me, that the thoughts were mine, I was at the whim of everything. It doesn't sound like the absurd stretch that it once did to believe that the enlightenment, human power of reason and the idealization of truth is nothing but a deception for ourselves. It's the cliche, I know "we're all just lying to ourselves"...but it's not like it hasn't happened before.
Maybe I only dislike Kant's ethics, I think I need Kant, because really thinking about it...life without Kant is awful. Maybe I worship truth with the same abandon fanatics worship their God. But life without it is bleak, it isn't life. This sounds like either a bad acid trip or a pretentious spewing I'm sure, but its maddening and at least feels very serious.
In attempting to read Descartes' Meditations later in the day it read like a book denying evolution.
Has anyone else read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil?
Then the boy I'm interested in left me hanging again, he's toying with me because he knows that he can, he knows he can charm and leave just enough of a thread to maintain interest...and it's working. Both the profound and the trivial baffled/failed me today.