The Horizon

The school year is coming to a close and I have a headache. That headache means quite a bit. I am getting tired of school. I am getting tired of schoolwork and I am getting tired of my head hurting because I haven’t worn my glasses all day. The meanings behind it are quite immense.
But more importantly I am sick of the school system and the ideas behind school and everything attached to what it means. I don’t want to be a functioning capitalist citizen. But it’s getting harder and harder to hold control.
Lately I have been reading blogs about finance and financial control and it’s kind of fun to keep track almost as a sort of game. But I find myself falling victem to a fiscal machine.
Recently I read about creating and organizing co-ops and I would really appreciate and love doing that. We will see.
This brings me to the next point I want to discuss: I am sick of the lack of activism in Eau Claire. I want to see it grow and be a powerful thing that everyone knows and understands and sees as necessary. But those are some intense goals. This means that I will have to truly focus. I intend to use this summer without school work to get involved and start organizing such things. Eventually, I would like to see the next lease I sign be one for a cooperative with people that are willing to combine and work together. We will see if this happens, but it is certainly I goal that I have.
On another note, I have been working on the hopefully new flipside website. I am not even the webmaster but I really want to see this happen. It will make editing and even publishing our issues easier and more involved with the internet.
Otherwise, I am off. I think that I can get my glasses and get cleaned up after a day of volleyball, soccer and a lot of heat.

Well It seems that I lack the ability to post on a regular basis. I think that it is pretty normal for ADD kids to start things and then never finish them. This blog has always been on my mind, I hope that at some point I will continue this blog and in fact I plan on doing it. I just need to get control of myself as a person first.

For instance, I seemingly spent an entire break doing nothing. I mean nothing useful for myself and my stress-levels. Sad that in this day-and-age we consider ourselves and our being in terms of how much stress we have. Though I am sure that this has never really been any other way even if as a society we continually diagnose ourselves with countless syndromes and disorders so that we can manage in a world fixated on efficient functionality.

I for one don’t want to consider myself as an “efficient functioning member of society.” I would rather be a friend, a lover, a community member than anything materially-oriented or efficiency-oriented. But what can we do, right? This is where we are in this world and this is what we must function as.

Though I find myself constantly searching for some better world and some better place and time. I often wonder to what extent this world is my imagined world and that other imagined worlds are others imagined worlds and nothing more. That we imagine better times and we idealize great things but these are personal and subjective visions. This is a fairly postmodern analysis of life. And in that I am glad I can actually find consolation that there are people out there who attempt to synthesize a postmodern miscommunicative vision with an idealist and community-oriented vision.

But away from that philosophical rant, I still must bunker down and understand myself. Through the recent annals of a friends use of psychology, I myself will venture into the world of psychoanalysis and I hope to find someone and/or something that can help me.

In some sense this is a cop-out to my being. I have always been against medicine for fear of losing my personality. Though recently I have decided that my personality will not go with the use of psychoactive drugs even if the rough edges will be smoothed out a bit.

But whatever happens, I think I need to do this, because where I am right now–though I found a wonderful girlfriend, who I love very much–is a place that is stressful and is pressuring me to act and organize in a capitalist world. As much as I despise that vision for our world I must be able to act within it if I am to gain numbers in any cause that I wish to support and work with. Anarchists still organize and leftists still organize and they understand that to gain numbers we must work with the capitalist schedule until that schedule can be finally broken down.

Again I find myself lost within thoughts. But I consider this message a goodbye to the rant-driven quirk-filled mind jaunts and hello to hopefully a more focused a refined drive that can help me fulfill the many goals that I have attained while anarchically jaunting through the forest of my own mind. My vision of freedom and liberty is nothing without a focused response through activism and hard work.

Adieu and cheers to all! Hopefully my adventure will bear the fruit of focused visioning!

Today I had an epistemology class and I was stricken by a few things in that class. One of them being that the teacher can go on endlessly talking about tangents, something that I would agree is a lot of fun. But I think that it could be representative of a core facet of philosophy that is extremely strange.

We are currently discussing some attributes of Hume, Berkeley, and Reid. Talking, specifically, on their positions in regards to perception, most of them referencing the qualities that Locke categorizes as primary and secondary qualities.

But as I saw in the debates on skepticism, it always seems that they all have problems with the definitions of words. Hume, as far as I am concerned, was the most realistic about the whole thing. But Reid comes in and argues against both Berkeley and Hume but in regards to some words that Reid views differently. And actually, Hume does a similar thing with “abstraction” in regards to Berkeley’s idealism.

But it got me wondering, most of these philosophical debates seem to be just debating terms and their meanings. That throughout history it has just been about how to define particular words and feelings.

And I currently see this as a wholly wrong position to take. Because as Hume and Moore both show in many of their writings, that you just can’t show that something exists, but that is wholly irrelevant to use and practicality.

So why are philosophers still, to this day, debating about direct realism (the belief that things exist because we can sense them)?

It seems that philosophers are not satisfied with that definition, but also, on some levels they probably already have a preconcieved notion of what existence is and should be.

If you look at Berkeley’s arguments, they can wholly be applied to existence without changing any perception at all of anything, in a sense this is the perfect viewpoint because it does not affect anything about reality as we know it.

But another argument is that we exist within this realm, as many common sense philosophers have shown, and that is all that matters.

But this point is also irrelevant to my real point that I want to discuss, which is the fact that all philosophical debates seem to be wholly involved in terminology. It could be the use of philosophy is to expand terminology, definitions, ideas within language. But I think that accepting language as the purest tool and the one by which we can explain and understand, is kind of egocentric.

THis is where I will potentially lose people. If we have a beautiful landscape that we see and we stand back in awe. Is it because the tree is placed in the right place? is it because the grass sways in the right way? Have you ever just thought something was beautiful for no true reason at all?

Nature is the best example of this because some could argue that the composition of a painting is about techinical beauty (to which I would ask: name any painting you know, and tell me what, on a technical level, makes it beautiful).

But nature kind of defies this because it isnt about how someone can interpret, its pure, already depicted reality.

So, imagine some beautiful scenery, and please tell me, in detail, what makes this scenery beautiful?