Friday, January 7, 2011
#3
Why Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is on my shelf, I'll never know. That and Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. I wish I could understand the philosophy contained as easily as I could name drop. Ha.
Instead I am settling for Sophie's World which is philosophy for dummies, really. It's a delightful novel that manages to cram 3000 years of philosophical history into a few hundred pages. Sophie Amundsen receives letters from a mysterious philosophy teacher who asks her the tough questions that great thinkers have been trying to answer for thousands of years and explains the conclusions they came to. Through it all, you're forced to come to grips with the ideas yourself. It's my form of brain training for the moment. After this, I will return to an anthology I bought at my favourite book store which selects some interesting excerpts for me to read from everyone from Plato to Nietzsche. Here's hoping I can wrap my head around it.
Instead I am settling for Sophie's World which is philosophy for dummies, really. It's a delightful novel that manages to cram 3000 years of philosophical history into a few hundred pages. Sophie Amundsen receives letters from a mysterious philosophy teacher who asks her the tough questions that great thinkers have been trying to answer for thousands of years and explains the conclusions they came to. Through it all, you're forced to come to grips with the ideas yourself. It's my form of brain training for the moment. After this, I will return to an anthology I bought at my favourite book store which selects some interesting excerpts for me to read from everyone from Plato to Nietzsche. Here's hoping I can wrap my head around it.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
#2
I'm learning several things about myself lately and the latest is that I am hopelessly squeamish. I cannot handle pain and I absolutely hate gory movies; blood and guts and the like. Yet my distaste isn't restricted just to the world of horror, excessive violence and the promise of visual suffering in any film can put me off in an instant. A friend of mine recently offered to lend me his favourite film, City of God, about a young boy who grew up in a notoriously dangerous and violent slum in Rio de Janeiro to become a photographer and subsequently exhibit the truth about life there. My interest deepened when I found out that it was based on a true story but as I reached out to take the DVD, I noticed the R rating and the men on the front cover toting their guns menacingly and I decided to give it a miss. To this attitude my dad says "you can't ignore life, Christine", as he did on Christmas evening when he decided it would be a good idea to subject me to a movie about Jews escaping from a Nazi death camp. The ending would have been worthwhile, the escape from Sobibor was the largest by far, but the half of the movie that I saw exposed me to nothing but death, death and more death and it was just a bit too heavy for Christmas evening, you know?
Perhaps I need to have a cup of concrete and harden up. But here's the thing - I turn away from violence, pain and suffering because I am acutely aware of it, not because I wish to ignore it. I know that people in the past, in the present day and in the future have and will hurt and I hate it. Of course I still watch movies and read books that involve conflict and suffering but I can honestly say that in some way or another it affects me. What really troubles me is the extent to which people are desensitised to the violence that they are exposed to and the joy they receive in seeing it portrayed. Violence and conflict may be necessary to tell a story but there has certainly come a point where these themes have become so profuse in movies, books, video games and music that we can accept them as normal. I can be almost apologetic about my low tolerance for blood and guts but on second thoughts, maybe it's not such a bad thing. I cannot easily stomach seeing another person in pain, regardless of how fake it looks or even if that is what the world says a nasty bugger deserves. I guess I'm destined to watching my palms and sneaking looks through my fingers for the rest of my life.
Perhaps I need to have a cup of concrete and harden up. But here's the thing - I turn away from violence, pain and suffering because I am acutely aware of it, not because I wish to ignore it. I know that people in the past, in the present day and in the future have and will hurt and I hate it. Of course I still watch movies and read books that involve conflict and suffering but I can honestly say that in some way or another it affects me. What really troubles me is the extent to which people are desensitised to the violence that they are exposed to and the joy they receive in seeing it portrayed. Violence and conflict may be necessary to tell a story but there has certainly come a point where these themes have become so profuse in movies, books, video games and music that we can accept them as normal. I can be almost apologetic about my low tolerance for blood and guts but on second thoughts, maybe it's not such a bad thing. I cannot easily stomach seeing another person in pain, regardless of how fake it looks or even if that is what the world says a nasty bugger deserves. I guess I'm destined to watching my palms and sneaking looks through my fingers for the rest of my life.
Monday, January 3, 2011
#1
Here we go again. I make no apologies, it was bound to happen sometime. I've left behind my last blog for two reasons. Number one: I cannot seem to log back in. Number two: every single entry makes me wish I had kept my half formed ideas and strange opinions to myself. Me? Employ some kind of filter on my thought processes? Unlikely. I expect to fill this blog with more of the same.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)