"Beyond a shadow of a doubt." What an intellectually dishonest phrase. Can one truly hold anything in such stature? I am not talking about the hyperbole of Cartesian doubt. Pierce was right when he said that such an undertaking was totally unfeasible and even any attempt is untenable. But we can try I suppose. No, I talk not of this overwhelming, earth shattering doubt. These moments are a crisis of faith. No, I speak of just that a "shadow." One of my undergraduate professor's was teaching us about modern metaphysics and in particular ontological commitments. "What status does a shadow have in any ontology? It is not so much a thing as not a thing. But we talk about it like it is a thing. We play with it even," He chuckled to himself. This is not so much some sophomoric attempt to discuss ontology or things being there and not there. That is a rabbit hole I have peered into. Not much there. We are constantly beset but quivers and sensations and whispers that say, "Not quite my friend. Wrong way. Are you sure?" *Adds Mixer*
I thought about this because I found a page from a letter. It must have slipped out. And so I mailed the letter without the offending page. But I read the page and chuckled to myself. I wrote the letter a little over two weeks ago and even now the lines seemed alien to me and my "project." I had a shadow of a doubt about whether or not those words were there yet. If it was the right way. If I was sure. And truth be told I was not. We can see the shadow in the words. But I have come to realize that there are two ways to handle this sensation. One can either step back and get lost in being in a state of doubt. We can do this. This is easy. We can resign ourselves to mull and try and pull the string until it comes together. We can get lost in where to start now. What to do next. But this is not very fruitful or honest.
I have come to embrace doubt. Since we always will be "plagued" by doubt why not use it is a tool. Why not take it on as the gadfly that pushes thought forward. Descartes would have been right if he had just narrowed his thoughts of doubt to see that we do not have the ground fall from under us. It cracks. Here and there. Slowly and deliberately. I think the key is no longer to patch it up and maintain the safety of things. To evade the doubt to maintain what we hope for. I would prefer to jump up and down and fall and see what lies beneath this edifice. It is just more fun that way. I started thinking about this idea because of philosophy. But I think it has more to do with things greater than that small patch of my existence. It does seem pragmatic. To punch holes. To trim. To go on and continue to test. But it is on some other level a natural impulse that I am beginning to grapple with as time goes on. We just learn to guard against it. But then again that is also pragmatic, to relearn over and over. My mind loses its train of thought here.
But I guess there is no such thing as beyond the shadow. We just live it and we play with it.
I got a new bookshelf today. It is tall and natural wood looking (it is not real wood in any sense of the word that a tree would use). It lets me readjust my books and such. I get to triage. I put the one smaller bookshelf in the office. All of my philosophy books "under active consideration" go there: Dewey, James, Brandom, Wittgenstein, Blake, Kaufmann on Nietzsche, McDowell, Critchley, Foucault, et al are there. Plus some german and french dictionaries. The middle book shelf get's my non-active duty philosophy books: Heidegger, especially Heidegger, Plato, the rest of Nietzsche, Hegel, Gadamer, Schoepenhauer, and Derrida (when he comes out of storage) and any more Heidegger. I am also putting all of my DVDs and what few CD's I have up there as well. The new bookshelf gets the rest of the things. This is my proof nerdom (or my section on Ethics depending on how you look at it). My graphic novels, my Harry Potter books, my books on Woodcraft, biographies of Wittgenstein, Openheimer, Russell, my collection of scottish detective novels, and my Sedaris and Copeland. I am not sure why I decided to share this. I guess I just like to share.
That is the point of blogs I guess.
I want to end this blog on a positive note of sorts. As people who read we often attempt to score bonus points by dropping names. Shit. Just look at what I dropped in this post (especially the Harry Potter). It gives us gravitas and gains us something amongst our peers, though what I never quite understood. So I was reading something by a more recent thinker and I thought I would share it as it breaks it down to brass tacks:
"Look. Think what you will. It's not my job to tell you what to think. Only to present this buffet in front of you. You have to choose what you eat, and then be honest with yourself if it gives you indigestion, makes you vomit, is bland, or if it tastes good. The purpose of this talk was simply to get you to think about evil. To be bothered by evil. Continually. To be bothered by the homeless person on the train, to not look away. To pick up the newspaper and say, 'Hey. What the fuck! The world doesn't have to be this way.' However that may fit in with your particular beliefs about God, fine. But there a lot of religion that gets us to explain away evil, to simply dismiss it as the phenomenon of some corrupt individual. No, modern evil, be it banal or radical, is complex, diffuse, pervasive. Many of the classical models of evil (which are religious models) serve only to perpetuate and make us blind to that thousands of small social evils that accumulate and lead to things like Auschwitz or 9/11. Yes. Be bothered by evil. Evil matters."
Good stuff in my opinion. Well my first drink is done. Time for another.
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