Boredom is Time's most evil trick. But like all things wretched in this world, it serves a noble purpose.
Boredom is not death. Death is death. Death is an end and a great mystery. It still contains within itself some hope, and some excitement: for we do not know what comes afterwards: perhaps it will be a final explosive release from the earthly body – exciting times!
But boredom is to be in a dreamless sleep whilst awake. Boredom is not exciting enough to be death. It is hollow and predictable - boredom followed by boredom.
If we had to find a uniting factor which linked every human being of every culture in every instance of history, I would say that those human beings eventually grew bored of things, and that they must always distract themselves from such a feeling.
And why not - boredom is wretched. It is not like tranquillity, at peace with the world. No one ever chose to be bored. I imagine a great number of us would prefer death in 'glorious' battle over a dull, long life in the fields.
But let us not be too harsh on old boredom. We grow bored for a reason - a very good reason. Just as to put your hand into fire causes pain, boredom is the 'pain' of lack of variety.
If we never grew bored, we would repeat things incessantly. If old songs stayed forever young, we would never listen to anything else. If we never grew bored of ourselves, we would lose an immense motive to adapt and change.
Boredom, dissatisfaction, dullness - these are platforms to greater things; necessary stages of pain to force us into growth.
Retreating from boredom is hopeless. The truly great know this. They know that they must suffer to ascend mediocrity, and so when boredom strikes, and when the times are dull, they know that they have to ride it out, not hide from it, or pretend it isn't there, or buy another smartphone app.
Be dissatisfied and boring! Turn away from revelment and joy! Do not try to lead an exciting life! In dissatisfaction be forced into creativity. In dourness be strengthened against life's occasional misery. In dullness expect nothing but grey skies and let every gleam of sunlight be a bonus.
How could such a person ever become bored (for very long) again?
Selim 'Selim' Talat
The Limits of Moral Argument
Can there ever be a law for which all of the human race would stand in agreement? Can any statement be so obviously true that it would be impossible to deny its validity, and contradict it? As an example let's take one of the most famous statements in the western canon by Rene Descartes:
“Therefore from the fact alone that I know that I exist and that, at the same time , I notice absolutely nothing else that belongs to my nature apart from the single fact that I am a thinking thing , I correctly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing.”
“…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”
Are you compelled by the first quote but find the second a little hard to accept? The first rests on the second: he has to make an association with the disembodied mind of God to get out of the fix of being deceived by his earthly embodied senses. This idea, roughly diluted to “I think therefore I am!” is a foundation stone of western culture.
Let’s say you disagree with smoking, in fact, to the point that you see it as an absolute evil. Rightly, you would promulgate the argument and argue for its sanction. Already, in making the effort you have to face defeat in that your realisation is not so obviously true in that it requires no argument. It takes Descartes almost sixty pages to attempt to convince us of his.
Let’s say I have a good friend who sees drinking in a similar way. He’s into ‘Straight Edge’ – people who do no drugs of any sort but still go to punk music gigs and the like. Straight Edge, as a movement, seems to me an odd child of the anarchist movement that combines a distrust or hatred for substances such as alcohol and nicotine (seen by them as controlling drugs, like soma in Brave New World, plied to the public by those in power to subdue them) with the libertarian/anarchist principles of having the ‘right’ to live how you wish without pressure to conform to a prescribed method of entertainment.
“Therefore from the fact alone that I know that I exist and that, at the same time , I notice absolutely nothing else that belongs to my nature apart from the single fact that I am a thinking thing , I correctly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing.”
“…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”
Are you compelled by the first quote but find the second a little hard to accept? The first rests on the second: he has to make an association with the disembodied mind of God to get out of the fix of being deceived by his earthly embodied senses. This idea, roughly diluted to “I think therefore I am!” is a foundation stone of western culture.
Let’s say you disagree with smoking, in fact, to the point that you see it as an absolute evil. Rightly, you would promulgate the argument and argue for its sanction. Already, in making the effort you have to face defeat in that your realisation is not so obviously true in that it requires no argument. It takes Descartes almost sixty pages to attempt to convince us of his.
Let’s say I have a good friend who sees drinking in a similar way. He’s into ‘Straight Edge’ – people who do no drugs of any sort but still go to punk music gigs and the like. Straight Edge, as a movement, seems to me an odd child of the anarchist movement that combines a distrust or hatred for substances such as alcohol and nicotine (seen by them as controlling drugs, like soma in Brave New World, plied to the public by those in power to subdue them) with the libertarian/anarchist principles of having the ‘right’ to live how you wish without pressure to conform to a prescribed method of entertainment.
Now if we take this from the angle of having a right to be at liberty to do as you wish in so far as it doesn’t affect others then, given we are all different and confronted with different situations simply by the act of living, plus the capacity for change within our environment, the goal of achieving a situation in which we can practice this right is unachievable: the law would not be able to act quick enough.
This is why we have politics and make agreements on ‘to what limit’ interference will be tolerated. We haven’t moved on from the group mentality; we band together with those who share similar habits/interests. A group’s members may find themselves at extreme odds with another group’s habits/interests; or they may share their interests but not their habits! So we have democracy to iron things out.
I fear this is about as good as it gets. Nothing is certain for nothing can be argued for as existing as an absolute, undeniable position.
This is why we have politics and make agreements on ‘to what limit’ interference will be tolerated. We haven’t moved on from the group mentality; we band together with those who share similar habits/interests. A group’s members may find themselves at extreme odds with another group’s habits/interests; or they may share their interests but not their habits! So we have democracy to iron things out.
I fear this is about as good as it gets. Nothing is certain for nothing can be argued for as existing as an absolute, undeniable position.
The language is partly to blame: for it to work we must make distinctions (between this and that; yes and no; yours and mine). Due to the vagaries of human experience opinions differ and different groups are formed: one group eats meat, another eats soya, both are destroying the rainforest, but how much does the rainforest matter and who makes that decision? Did this become a problem just because people like eating meat and soya or was it for other reasons; did problems arise for the rainforest before or after they started doing this?
Too prescriptive and you get Germany in 1939, the Japanese Empire, Communist Russia – they thought they had ‘the one right way’. Too free and you get the holocaust of the American Indians by ‘liberated’ European immigrants. Both lead to the same ends it seems? British democracy has been used to plunder the world of its resources, but in that slow creeping way with lots of incentives to the local populations to ‘get on board’ (see the recent Scottish referendum)! There are more people about, so some people seem to think this global economy has worked? But here it is – space is the real issue: more space less interference; less space more interference.
Well that’s a long winded way of saying I will try and accommodate/can accommodate your desire to be free of smoke but that wouldn’t stop me smoking given the space to myself, because whatever your argument is, it will never be as strong as my experience or not so neatly, I counter Descartes’ claim above.
There are many issues I’d like to resolve such as car pollution, use of nuclear power, the various evils of humankind and the belief that going somewhere faster is necessarily better, but none of these will be resolved without compromise for the very fact that every thought we have is informed by our sensual, embodied experience of the world.
(I’m making a lot of claims of my own here: how am I doing this? Am I not contradicting my own argument? Is it that I’m not making a claim to anything other than the need to make such argument in the first place. Aah – the beauty of language; the allure!)
Too prescriptive and you get Germany in 1939, the Japanese Empire, Communist Russia – they thought they had ‘the one right way’. Too free and you get the holocaust of the American Indians by ‘liberated’ European immigrants. Both lead to the same ends it seems? British democracy has been used to plunder the world of its resources, but in that slow creeping way with lots of incentives to the local populations to ‘get on board’ (see the recent Scottish referendum)! There are more people about, so some people seem to think this global economy has worked? But here it is – space is the real issue: more space less interference; less space more interference.
Well that’s a long winded way of saying I will try and accommodate/can accommodate your desire to be free of smoke but that wouldn’t stop me smoking given the space to myself, because whatever your argument is, it will never be as strong as my experience or not so neatly, I counter Descartes’ claim above.
There are many issues I’d like to resolve such as car pollution, use of nuclear power, the various evils of humankind and the belief that going somewhere faster is necessarily better, but none of these will be resolved without compromise for the very fact that every thought we have is informed by our sensual, embodied experience of the world.
(I’m making a lot of claims of my own here: how am I doing this? Am I not contradicting my own argument? Is it that I’m not making a claim to anything other than the need to make such argument in the first place. Aah – the beauty of language; the allure!)
To end, here is a great quote from Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando:
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage than the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. […] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue...”
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage than the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. […] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue...”
Simon Leake
Why Karl Marx is the most relevant philosopher in the modern world
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” ~ Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach.
Many people, if they have the misfortune to read my black and pixellated thoughts, may groan when they see the above title. After all, many philosophy students conform to a rather stagnant stereotype by utilising a Marxist dialectic. Whilst this isn’t a negative thing in itself, I would rather be a contrarian, than to be a man whom conforms to bland consensus. However, I would plead that any reader does not presume that I am a Marxist, or that I am not Marxist; all I am offering is an analysis of Marxism with regard to its focus on the material, rather than a sense of idealism.
Having been a passionate man, I have spoken to many people about my love of philosophy (I can be regarded as a philo-philosopher in that respect), and as a consequence, I have been told in a most robust manner by many people that philosophy is pointless. “What will philosophy get you?” I have been asked. The question was implied towards my material needs: how could studying philosophy lead to gained employment, and how would I be paid through gaining philosophical skills?
I already had an immediate answer to the question, but I must confess that it did not satisfy me. I told the questioner that, “Life is too broad to be narrowly confined to the pursuit of value tokens (money).” The reason my answer didn’t satisfy me was due to the fact that although the veracity of my answer held true for me, it didn’t hold true to most of society.
Society is focused on the average, the mundane, and the post-modern, hyper reality TV culture which dominates the current British media zeitgeist. Joey Essex, uneducated and fake tanned as he is, represents something which more people in post-modern society British society buy into when compared to philosophy. Nietzsche, Hume, and Wittgenstein do not. One could argue from a Nietzschean perspective that this proves only a philosophical superman is worthy of thinking about such high-brow topics; after all, “All rare for things are for the rare,” as Nietzsche would say.
All of this panem et circenses (bread and circuses - Ed) is a distraction from what is most relevant to society: the fact that with regard to material possessions, an incredible amount is owned by an elite. If the average working man – be he middle or working class – realised he could, in fact, have much, much more, then he would almost certainly demand it.
Marxism is very broad, as well as complex. Das Kapital is a well renowned, in philosophical circles at least, to be a behemoth of a work to read. Nevertheless, one of the major successes of Marxism is the fact that it can be simplified so that the average man on the street can understand it. Religion’s greatest boon is that anyone of sound mind – however average – can understand its message.
Where religion and Marxism differ, however, is around the issue of the very now. Christianity is, by its very nature, conservative. Marxism, however, overtly determines that revolution – one, I must confess, should be televised – is of the essence.
The fact that Marxism is concerned with humanity’s everyday existence is exactly why it appeals to such a wide demographic. Whether the mind works through the senses or through ideals actually doesn’t matter if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.
Whilst liar paradoxes test the very limits of logic, how important are they when you are forced to work for thirty pence a day whilst making clothes for Primark, so that the British underclass can mimic the whimsical fashions of the rich and famous? I love the aphoristic nuances of Nietzsche, but how salient is his wit when your house has been repossessed by an insidious bank?
I could continue with many more examples, ad nauseum, but I think my point has been well and truly made.
Philosophy is a subject which only wealthy people can study. Wealth can be analysed in many different ways, and money isn’t a sole indicator of wealth; time, for me, is a very important factor. Very often, the bondage of work is the very barrier to the study of philosophy. I must concede, after a day of work, I feel very tired – using my intellectual energy to write this article is almost a Herculean effort. Thus, those in the rat race – whether well remunerated or not – are actually quite poor, if they are commuting into the heart of London every day, their noses in their neighbour’s armpits, packed in like sardines to maximise profitability of the privatised rail cartels.
We are often iterated the narrow maxim: time is money. The sad truth is that a lot of people live their lives by this maxim. It is these people who lack the passion and inclination to philosophise: for, if they did, they would realise how hollow a life of chasing value tokens is. If they had read Marx’s philosophy, they would surely realise they are being exploited (again, I am no Marxist, but I do believe that companies exploit their work force).
To conclude, if we do wish to engage the time poor, money rich, or the time poor money poor, then we, as philosophers, require to show them how relevant philosophy can be. Furthermore, we must be honest with ourselves, not all philosophy is particularly relevant. I know I made that point earlier, but the whole point of a conclusion is to say what you’ve already said, isn’t it?
Samuel Mack-Poole
Many people, if they have the misfortune to read my black and pixellated thoughts, may groan when they see the above title. After all, many philosophy students conform to a rather stagnant stereotype by utilising a Marxist dialectic. Whilst this isn’t a negative thing in itself, I would rather be a contrarian, than to be a man whom conforms to bland consensus. However, I would plead that any reader does not presume that I am a Marxist, or that I am not Marxist; all I am offering is an analysis of Marxism with regard to its focus on the material, rather than a sense of idealism.
Having been a passionate man, I have spoken to many people about my love of philosophy (I can be regarded as a philo-philosopher in that respect), and as a consequence, I have been told in a most robust manner by many people that philosophy is pointless. “What will philosophy get you?” I have been asked. The question was implied towards my material needs: how could studying philosophy lead to gained employment, and how would I be paid through gaining philosophical skills?
I already had an immediate answer to the question, but I must confess that it did not satisfy me. I told the questioner that, “Life is too broad to be narrowly confined to the pursuit of value tokens (money).” The reason my answer didn’t satisfy me was due to the fact that although the veracity of my answer held true for me, it didn’t hold true to most of society.
Society is focused on the average, the mundane, and the post-modern, hyper reality TV culture which dominates the current British media zeitgeist. Joey Essex, uneducated and fake tanned as he is, represents something which more people in post-modern society British society buy into when compared to philosophy. Nietzsche, Hume, and Wittgenstein do not. One could argue from a Nietzschean perspective that this proves only a philosophical superman is worthy of thinking about such high-brow topics; after all, “All rare for things are for the rare,” as Nietzsche would say.
All of this panem et circenses (bread and circuses - Ed) is a distraction from what is most relevant to society: the fact that with regard to material possessions, an incredible amount is owned by an elite. If the average working man – be he middle or working class – realised he could, in fact, have much, much more, then he would almost certainly demand it.
Marxism is very broad, as well as complex. Das Kapital is a well renowned, in philosophical circles at least, to be a behemoth of a work to read. Nevertheless, one of the major successes of Marxism is the fact that it can be simplified so that the average man on the street can understand it. Religion’s greatest boon is that anyone of sound mind – however average – can understand its message.
Where religion and Marxism differ, however, is around the issue of the very now. Christianity is, by its very nature, conservative. Marxism, however, overtly determines that revolution – one, I must confess, should be televised – is of the essence.
The fact that Marxism is concerned with humanity’s everyday existence is exactly why it appeals to such a wide demographic. Whether the mind works through the senses or through ideals actually doesn’t matter if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.
Whilst liar paradoxes test the very limits of logic, how important are they when you are forced to work for thirty pence a day whilst making clothes for Primark, so that the British underclass can mimic the whimsical fashions of the rich and famous? I love the aphoristic nuances of Nietzsche, but how salient is his wit when your house has been repossessed by an insidious bank?
I could continue with many more examples, ad nauseum, but I think my point has been well and truly made.
Philosophy is a subject which only wealthy people can study. Wealth can be analysed in many different ways, and money isn’t a sole indicator of wealth; time, for me, is a very important factor. Very often, the bondage of work is the very barrier to the study of philosophy. I must concede, after a day of work, I feel very tired – using my intellectual energy to write this article is almost a Herculean effort. Thus, those in the rat race – whether well remunerated or not – are actually quite poor, if they are commuting into the heart of London every day, their noses in their neighbour’s armpits, packed in like sardines to maximise profitability of the privatised rail cartels.
We are often iterated the narrow maxim: time is money. The sad truth is that a lot of people live their lives by this maxim. It is these people who lack the passion and inclination to philosophise: for, if they did, they would realise how hollow a life of chasing value tokens is. If they had read Marx’s philosophy, they would surely realise they are being exploited (again, I am no Marxist, but I do believe that companies exploit their work force).
To conclude, if we do wish to engage the time poor, money rich, or the time poor money poor, then we, as philosophers, require to show them how relevant philosophy can be. Furthermore, we must be honest with ourselves, not all philosophy is particularly relevant. I know I made that point earlier, but the whole point of a conclusion is to say what you’ve already said, isn’t it?
Samuel Mack-Poole
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