These new blogs are going to be my attempt to document my daily research, reading, writing and video-making activities. It has two-functions: (1) for my youtube subscribers to know what to expect, what's coming, where I'm at, and allow them to insert their own ideas or questions; (2) for me to gain perspective, as it is easy for me to "get lost" in my reading and loose track of the larger projects I'm taking on (the largest being the completion of a book(s). Knowing that I have people 'expecting' something from me is a strong impetus to wake up at 5:50 am as I do 80% of the time.
This is totally an experiment, so let me know what you think ...
What do I study? What should you expect? Well:
i) I'm primarily a philosopher (broadly, not a specialist) I take both the suffering AND the grace of other people to be the starting point of my philosophical analysis (i.e. philosophy has historically ignored the impetus towards philosophy: resolving or helping oneself and others, i.e. 'wisdom.' At the same time, philosophy has ignored the physicality of other people (until recently, but still ignores beauty of others and love).
At the same time, I'm both dazzled and frustrated by the magnitude of philosophical problems (especially the problem of consciousness, the problem of temporal modality / ontological identity and problems in semiotics / axiology (i.e. aesthetic representation) and general cosmological problems). These problems might not be ‘real,’ but for me they have an intrinsic interest – kind of like a game of chess (or a game of chessboxin for all the fellow wu fans out there).
I hope to produce an ‘introduction to philosophy’ book / textbook. That is my eventual goal. Everything else within this research falls within that desire.
ii) I’m primarily an Anarchist – meaning I’m opposed to domination in all of its forms. So a lot of my work goes into understanding the roots and dynamics of anarchism in its history and philosophy, as well as current anarchism in the works of Agamben, Zizek, John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker, et cetera. Specifically, my own anarchism falls somewhere between what I call ‘Black-Collar Anarchism’ (working minimally within the system with the intent of destroying it, stealing from it, scamming, et cetera) and Anti-Totality / Post-Civ philosophy (a critique of civilization / the totality from the most apparent (division of labor) to the most non-obvious (reified symbolic language, i.e. later-Wittgenstein and early-Heidegger).
I hope to produce something with closure at some point – i.e. a book on anarchism, or post-civ anarchy et cetera.
Iii) My third area of research is into aesthetics. This has two tendencies: i) The study of philosophical aesthetics – i.e. what is beauty? Is it intrinsic or a human construct? Is there a difference between human-made art and natural beauty? Ii) The second tendency is into the practical analysis of various works – from poetry to visual art, from music to performance art. My research into this is more than tangential, as here I won’t follow a plan so much as follow my nose like a dog in a storm.
My ultimate aim here is to develop fully the capacity to experience art as such – as it is a valuable source of meaning for myself and others. I am pretty critical of the role of art in today’s world, so I imagine producing a work in that area at some point.
So anyways ….
Day-by-day I will give a brief update as to what I’ve been reading or studying, what I am getting from it …
Currently I’m studying these things:
Hebrew thought, literature and some culture (presenting a close reading of the Torah, as well as commentary) … Greek thought, literature and culture (readings of Illiad, Sappho and Aeschylus to come) … Philosophy (specifically epistemology and an introduction to philosophy) I am doing philosophy in 3 different circles: philosophy questions, philosophy readings, and syntopical philosophy (my own philosophy, as the first two are semi-neutral presentations) … Classical Anarchism (the basics) … Post-Structuralism / Postmodernism (specifically the theory of meaning that is central to it, of which I’m critical of) … Post-Civ Anarchism (this will be a huge project of mine for a long time) … Practical-Anarchism … Literature: I’m planning a series of videos that are ‘book reviews’ of novels I recommend: I just finished Franny and Zooey and Tropic of Cancer, now I’m reading Rabelais’ Garganuta and Pantagruel. From here I will be reading Moby Dick and Everything is Illuminated (all of which will have reviews) … I’m also reading poetry at night, prepping videos for Robert Frost and then I will be doing WB Yeats … I’m also trying to figure out how to present readings of works of art (first will probably be Corbet) … on top all of this I will be presenting my journals (maybe all of it in writing here as a blog, but I will def be taking clips out for videos) …
Oh yeah, as for philosophy: I’m doing slow / close readings of both Heidegger’s Being and Time and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason …
So there you go. More to come.
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