Friday, May 4, 2007

final reflection

Final Reflection: Letter to myself

Dear future self,

Praxis, Praxis, Praxis

Don’t choose between theory and practice, live between the two. Do not live one then the other, live them both together. Let them guide and check one another. Don’t act without thinking. Don’t think without acting. It sounds so easy, but its realization is not necessarily its actualization. I will never know how to live between the two until I am living between the two.

Talk is cheap. Theory is insufficient.

Don’t let philosophy be your exit, let it be your entrance. Share it, use it, adapt it, destroy it, create it. Defend it, not to protect it but to experience a necessary tension for growth. Let the world mold your philosophy. Let your philosophy mold the world.

Compromise without comprising (Eske Moellegaard)

Most people give up on their dreams, you must live them. Be deliberate and patient with your intentionality. Move through, cut through your environment. Let your environment cut you, almost but not quite as deep as you’ve cut into it. The most subtle asymmetry is the ideal equilibrium. The world can cause both your enlightenment and your insanity. To know the difference you must live between.

To know the difference you must take it with you wherever you go. You must see everywhere the potential for both success and failure. With both forethought and instinct you must swallow the world whole and see how it tastes.

Kill the self to become the self,

Matt Sims

May 2, 2007


My philosophical future

My Philosophical Future

My future will be philosophical, there’s no doubt about that. Whether I come back to academia or not I have become conditioned to live philosophically. I will question the unquestioned, most especially my own beliefs, my own actions, to listen to be heard, to take the time to think just for thinking’s sake, to wonder.

I might go back into academia but perhaps not in philosophy. I think I can apply skills developed within and through philosophy to so many other academic and professional focuses, most especially politics, but also environmentalism and law to mention just a few. I could definitely see myself working in either three of these fields, especially a focus at all oriented toward social justice.

Can philosophy be its own end? Can going to graduate school just to carve out a career that is often a privilege and rarely a chore really sufficiently philosophical? Is a philosophy professor even necessarily a philosopher? (thanks Eske Moellegaard for introducing a tremendously thought provoking discussion on this question when he visited out metaphilosophy class). I wish. I used to think. I’d love to believe, but sadly, I think not. But is this really all so sad?

Philosophy is simultaneously both a means and an end. I have been for some time quite attracted to the idea of becoming a professor in philosophy, but right now I just don’t know. My concern, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone who is a philosophy professor, is that academic philosophy, like academia in general, is far to specialized. We’ve discussed at length in class how factionalized the discipline remains with splits between Contintental and Analytic and the ongoing marginalization of such subfields as eastern philosophy, Latin American philosophy, African philosophy, feminist philosophy (essentially anything and everything critical of philosophy from within philosophy). I don’t want to live a life reading, writing, discussing and teaching issues that I have not had some direct experience with myself. Philosophy is much more than books, ideas, and theories. It’s about acting, living and praxis. This is not to say that I can’t do all of this from within academia. In many respects my greatest ambition remains finding a place within academia and radically change it from the inside out. Education is so political. Moreover, I think I could make a good professor or teacher at the high school level. In all likelihood I probably will be back in school at some point down the road, after all, what else do I know. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to say here. School has been my life since before I can remember. I’m so used to structure. Structure is such a paradox. It motivates and demotivates. It guides and it confines. My ambiguity towards all the structure in our educational system inspires me to experience something else, anything else, because if not how will I ever know if this is the pace of life that I’m best suited for. Like I said, I know nothing else, except summer, but unless I want to be homeless, I’ll avoid living in my typical summertime mode.

My life is and will forever be philosophical. There is no turning back, and like the protagonist in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the shadows on the cave wall can never, at least in my eyes, be real again. I am forever searching for the right balance of truth and value. I will never rest because if there is one thing I know it is that I will never possess my end. Thus, my life is an endless journey as I meander the world and my mind for a little peace of mind, for the ability to sleep tight at night knowing that I did what I could to make the world a better place. I can never just know something for itself. I don’t care if I heard it at a hockey game or read it in Heidegger I want to share that experience with someone, anyone. Philosophy is inherently communicable, because lacking my intentionality to communicate what knowledge would I be inspired to seek, to create. Since communication implies action, a knowing how, the maturation of any philosophy requires philosophical experiences.

Philosophy is a part of me. What I have learned in academic philosophy shapes how I will approach and work through any future project whether intellectual, ethical, or even the most mundane task. Philosophy is under my skin. It is the lense through which I perceive the world, and I couldn't be more grateful for the perspectives it has shown me.

new philosophy map

New Philosophy Map

I see myself as still most connected to ethical and political philosophy. I don’t want to make a map of the myriad of philosophical subdisciplines because (in addition to lacking the necessary computer skills to arrange such a map in a word document) I feel such a map would necessitate prioritizing different subdisciplines over others. I don’t feel as though I am adequately capable of making such a judgment given my extremely limited experience within philosophy. I definitely have a bias towards the continental and non-western, in great part, because that’s what I’ve been exposed to the most. I don’t want to commit a straw man fallacy and attack analytic philosophy for neglecting the context in which they philosophize in, because this probably isn’t even the case in all instances. If I had to make a map I would try as I might to draw connections between every philosophical subdiscipline because I think they are all already connected, whether consciously or unconsciously. I hope in the future academic philosophy can make more and more bridges between the disciplines. I also hope, and this is essentially why, I am not drawing a map, is that if any such maps are to be drawn in the future this project should be a collective rather than an individual effort. I am sure getting together philosophers from different subdisciplines to work together on a common project in creating such a map would be filled with considerable drama and frustration yet I would love to see it happen. I’d love to see all of philosophy (if there even was such a thing) to sit down at a single table and philosophize about philosophy itself together.

reflection essay on philosophical methods

Reflection on Philosophical Methodologies

I think I have applied most of these philosophical methodologies in philosophy classes. First off, the logical analysis is a method we employed in various exercises for my reasoning class. The conceptual analysis is something I am doing quite a bit of right now in my European Contemporary Though class through examining such terms as “democracy”, “freedom” and “sovereignty”. I also experience this methodology through some of the Save Our Constitution panel discussions. I took a whole course basically just about the method of deconstruction in the Sociology of Knowledge class I took last semester. Phenomenology and one that is not on here but seems quite similar to phenomenology, “introspection”, is something I have been doing on my own since I was seventeen. It is, in many respects, my self-therapy as I struggle to reflect on my life experiences and the meanings or lack thereof that they so entail. Also, in a class I am taking now, Feminist Philosophies, we were just reading an essay by Iris Marion Young titled Menstrual Meditations, where young talks a lot about Heidegger’s methodology of exploring oneself by going into and through and reflecting upon one’s moods. The Philosopher as Public Intellectual is a method that I would like to utilize more often, especially once I am out of school. The example I have given through my article about democracy matters I actually got published a few weeks ago in the hill news. In all, I think I have applied most, if not all, of these methods whether in courses or just in my everyday life.

A couple methods that I would like to explore in more depth in my own philosophical activities are the philosophy as conversation method and the two respective comparative methods. I believe these two methods could be synthesized in a way as to facilitate a true dialectic between a diversity of philosophical positions. All too often philosophy is only talking to itself. While the comparative methods might still be subject to this problematic I believe the philosophy as conversation method could really serve as useful tool to bridge the gap between the formally philosophical and everyday experiences. The comparative method is one that I in fact employed in my first philosophy class called Humanities which I had in my senior year in high school. I believe this method is most necessary in terms of its political implications. I say this because the current methods of “Identity Politics” have fragmentized and specialized the Left in comparison to the what I would consider the over-specialization of academia. While particular groups on the left such as women’s liberation, civil rights, socialists, gay rights and environmental organizations fight for there own particular ends, they all too often fail to form coalitions as they instead fight (both internally within organization and externally between different movements) for the same resources and media attention. I firmly believe that the Left needs to bridge this gap if it ever hopes to achieve any of its particular goals in a sustainable way. Thus, if I choose to return to academia my work will most surely focus on making these connections and explicit comparisons between different social movements and between different philosophies.

I think if there is one method here that most reflects my own philosophical work it would be either phenomenology or deconstruction. As I already mentioned I think I’ve been doing phenomenology for some time now, and I believe in the necessity of looking critically and reflectively first and foremost at one’s own experiences. I believe that the deconstruction and phenomenological method are implicit within one another. If there was anything I learned in Sociology of knowledge it is the reciprocity by which our epistemology is created and legitimized by particular subjectivities with particular intentions (usually power). Only by understanding how one’s own sincere intentions figure into this power struggle can one begin to determine how to change the system. One cannot do this by simple abstraction for there is no view from nowhere. The key is to be honest with oneself and one’s intentionality, for it is my contention that only from within the system may the system ever be altered.