The Republic

Thank you, Plato.

Today I have finished my final essay for The Republic course. I have also read Bloom's interpretive essay. I knew Whitehead called philosophy a series of footnotes to The Republic but now I understand. It also feels my background in economics helped. It's about scarcity. I know it is. Were there not scarcity there wouldn't be injustice. There would also not be immoderate reproduction rates. Philosophy is the only way to make us happy again. For it's beyond scarcity. There is a tiny flaw in this logic concerning abiogenesis but I will play it down.

The Social Network

I think it is actually an important film and I quite liked it. First, it is more or less the first movie about things on the Internet. Second, they actually used scary words like Python, Pearl and Apache and never bothered to explain. Finally, Fincher, the rest of the cast and the narrative - cute. Aaalso, the fact that they used real names and real company names - they must have spoken and/or paid to A LOT of people.

Space Station Cézanne

It's painful to realize the absence of a natural talent to write concisely. It's also rather pathetic that neither 11 years of school nor 1 + 4 years of college could fix that. My Space Station Cézanne which I've been building for the whole day today took off, orbited the Moon once or twice, tripped, fell into the Pacific Ocean and got eaten by a shark. I'm not sure if it counts but I can come up with many excuses: 1) one day is not enough to write a paper from scratch; 2) phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty + antics of Cézanne is a pie I tried to bite too much of; 3) I smoked too much; 4) I ate too much (nope); 5) I slept too little; 6) I'm lazy; 7) Nietzsche fucked me up. All but 4 and 5 seem valid and 6 is an über-excuse implying one can but does not want to. I'll try harder next time. I enjoyed it, really. And I've learned disproportionately more than it shows.

Two things

First, it came to my attention that in a certain thesaurus of philosophic terms the definition of the meaning of life is "grilled cheese sandwich". It is somewhat heartening that we have arrived at the point where the question - at least in academia - is admittedly unanswerable and hence can be joked about. On the other hand it seems dangerous to simply discard it as a joke and proceed with one's intellectual endeavors elsewhere. All the good stuff is always open to interpretation without ever giving definitions and step by step guidelines. Plato's scribblings would have never survived for well over 2k years if he actually told us what the good or justice is. Heidegger complained we aren't perplexed enough and Camus elaborating on Kirkegaard would invent an absurd man - a notion in itself irreconcilable, inconclusive and without definitive answers. In the best traditions of Mr. Bloom the "grilled cheese sandwich" is a symptom of "nihilism without the abyss": there's no meaning but I'm good; are you good? good.

Second, for today's French test, among other things, I had to memorize genders of quite a few inanimate objects. I drew two pictures: the "Le picture" and the "La picture". It helps: here's le bureau sur le tapis with a bunch of les cahiers et les crayons lying around. We are wired to better remember stories and space-time relationships rather than abstract notions. And surely making up pictures and/or tales is a great shorthand for fast learning. But in the end the method seems to be a crutch for an ancient sitting-around-fire-song-singing brain. There is no place for abstract notions in such frame of thinking. It's about time we learned to be led to conclusions "through forms by forms" rather than simplifying and inevitably distorting abstractions by tying them to concrete objects. thus the question is this: Do I deal with my imperfect brain via crutches or do I struggle for the sake of pure dialectics and lose time? I cannot but think in evolutionary terms that even if abstract thinking proved to be a somehow more advantageous approach to natural selection (doubtful) it is just not worth pursuing from the perspective of a single individual's lifespan.

In a way those two things seems to be connected. Do I deal with the given and maybe relax a little bit or do I struggle towards something new but so uncertain? It sometimes appears an individual is enough to push the whole of history into a new spiral. Such individuals - I'm thinking Cézanne - exhibit inhuman determination toward their thing that, by itself, by not being given up, validates the effort. The reward often comes posthumously and thus, in a way, means nothing. This is the problem that cannot be easily (if ever) reconciled with and for which the "grilled cheese sandwich" is an answer both appropriate and very much not.

Ahem

About three days ago I promised myself the following: writing a post a day, in English. Clearly, I'm already three posts overdue so it's not going well. Reasons behind the shift of format are very simple and effective (or so I'd like to think). There's no thought beyond language and there're no ultimate ideas that we 'put into language'. And so I thought a piece of writing a day would really help conceptualize and synthesize the actuality of the day. (I also decided not to ever use "reality" but replace it with "actuality"). The second reason is even simpler. I generally dislike Russian and I'm forgetting how to use it anyway. Switching to English, on the other hand, would cater to an array of my ambitions from improving the language to becoming a world-renowned haiku writer. Lets try then.

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#003

Снегу нападало.

Перечитался книжек про Сезана и всю ночь мне снилось как я обсуждаю сам с собой его картину. Картина запомнилась, умел бы - нарисовал. Две искоса слева направо чуть вверх полосы разного оттенка белого и жирное белое пятно посередине. На пятно было потрачено столько масла, что рельеф дает четкую тень. Это я, видимо, сам с собой и обсуждал. Я, конечно, был неправ во сне - Сезан бы такое никогда не нарисовал, хотя вот был период в его жизни, когда масла он совсем не жалел.

Остаюсь на каникулы в Берлине. Приобрел абонемент во все госмузеи - там преимущественно и буду обитать.