Introduction: Weekly Journal Entries on Philosophy/Literature

I've decided to post up on here a few journal entries I write every week for a literature/philosophy class on Contemporary Theory. They are usually relatively disjointed, however I think it's important to resurrect this blog a little and since I've been so occupied with classes, I might as well put my own work for these classes online.

The first discusses extracts from Judith Butler and Genevieve Lloyd's "Man of Reason" (which I am in the midst of reading at the moment) on Hegel's famous "Lord and Bondsman" theory.

Judith Butler and Genevieve Lloyd on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”

On the war against modern healthy eating

Here's the thing.

Modern healthy eating should not be very difficult. There's a strange perception that eating healthily now is much more difficult than it used to be. This perception is true if we consider the way modern society and marketing works.  The only natural barrier is that it may be a little expensive and take a little effort.

This is because fresh food is often more expensive than mass-produced, easily storable food that can be kept for long periods of time.

The 'effort' I'm referring to is simply checking when foods are in season and buying them at the right time of year. Strawberries in January, even though they all look red and delicious and uniform(which is actually quite a scary comment on the way farming works nowadays) taste like nothing. Strawberries in July have their own notes of flavour, like vanilla and wine. They taste incredible. Every summer when I taste my first delicious ripe strawberry I'm shocked by how good it is; I feel exactly like Remy in Ratatouille when he takes a bite of strawberry in the farmer's kitchen and there are pink explosions and music plays.

Branding creates an artificial barrier between the healthy food we should be eating and the bad stuff. Isn't it bizarre that unhealthy things considered bad for us are usually heavily processed foods that can be kept for long periods of time (chocolate, biscuits, crisps, ready meals, dried pasta, rice, etc)?

It shouldn't be difficult to eat healthily; with the miracle of transportation we can literally buy fresh produce from all over the world down at our local supermarket and not blink an eye if we're eating plums from Morocco one day and tomatoes from Tanzania the next. (that is certainly its own problem but we can take it as a kind of blessing at the same time)

A quote by Salisbury

"Whatever happens will be for the worst and therefore it is in our interests that as little should happen as possible" 

Salisbury 1887 re: British foreign policy

I just wanted to share this beautiful piece of pessimism by a very interesting figure in British foreign and imperial policy.

On length of material and examples

From Kant's 1st preface to A critique of pure reason:

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time requred for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short.

This idea is interesting in itself in exploring the tension between making a book short (because of the lack of breaking down of ideas and examples to clarify or simplify ideas) and making a book longer but perhaps easier to read due to use of examples to clarify complex or even abstract ideas in simple human examples.

However Kant counters this with his own explanation for why he uses so few examples and illustrations of the points he makes, instead using logic to 'prove' or explain his ideas. He contradicts Terrasson's statement, saying:

Many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear...aids of clearness, though they may be of assistance in regard to details, often interfere with our grasp of the whole. 

A quote by Edvard Munch

"We should no longer paint interiors with people reading, and women knitting. We should paint real people, who breathe, feel, suffer and love."

Edvard Munch on painting and the nature of Expressionism, and why despite training with a Naturalist painter he rejected the academic tradition and instead decided to express the internal emotion subjective view of the painter in his work.

On the difference between eternal sleep and death

"... by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished - to die: to sleep - " 

From Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be", Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet(Second Quarto)

I watched "Star Trek; Into Darkness" the other day, and one of the concepts intrigued me. Bear with me if you haven't seen it; this post may make a little more sense if you have, but not much.
Khan and his crewmates are sent to sleep in their little incubators at the end of the movie; near the end, when someone asks Spock if he killed Khan's crew (assuming he'd sent the missiles to Khan's ship with the crew in them) he tells them something like "I would never do something so heartless" and this is folowed by a shot of the crewmates, still in cryo-sleep.

I just thought it was interesting that the idea of keeping someone in an eternal sleep/coma is more humane, more comforting than the idea of putting someone to death. Spock didn't blow up the crew but would it really have made a difference if he had? I suppose the difference is that there is a potential for the crew to wake up; they are not dead, they are still alive. 

But the end of the movie makes it pretty clear that noone has any intention of ever waking any of Khan's crew up. They are stored away.

So why is there such a big moral difference between killing them and keeping them in an eternal coma? There is some degree of debate about what being in a catatonic state means in terms of whether the person is still 'awake' in their own heads, able to think and imagine and remember but not perceive the outside world. If this is the assumption, then I suppose there is a kindness in keeping the crew members in their 'eternal sleep'. 

But being in a coma isn't the same as being asleep, and therefore isn't there the implication that they are not 'awake' at all but fully dead to the world/vegetative? And if this is the case, would keeping someone eternally in this state still be morally superior to killing them?

This is obviously a big argument re; euthanasia and comas and switching off machines. But there is a difference in that the crew in Star Trek are intentionally kept in this 'state' but can be awoken from it at any time. Despite the fact that this will probably never happen, does that mean it's still better than being dead? It's all about contingency; if you could choose to be kept eternally 'asleep' or just killed, you might choose to sleep as there would still be the slim possibility that you might one day be awoken and organisms cling to life with every chance they get.
(there's a parallel with cryonics here, in which people are frozen at vast costs in the hope that future technology will be able to 'resurrect' them, although the variables in that situation are different, relying on future advancements rather than random chance/human curiosity or need)

Is eternal sleep morally superior to death? If you could choose between them, between eternal sleep and death, which would you choose? It shouldn't really matter as they are essentially the same thing, although there is a certain promise to the idea of 'sleep', the lack of finality and the potential(however improbable) for a return to awakeness that might lead people to choose eternal sleep. 

Still though, if beings are kept in comas rather than being killed, this isn't morally superior in any real way unless there is the intention of waking them up in the future. Otherwise they are dead to the world either way.

A quote by Saint Bernardino of Siena, 15th cent.

"Eternity appears in time, immensity in measurement, the Creator in the creature...the unfigurable in the figure, the unnarratable in discourse, the inexplicable in speech, the uncircumscribable in the place, the invisible in vision."

Saint Bernardino of Siena, quoted in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman.

This discusses the nature of the paradox of the Incarnation, and the visibility of the 'Divine'. It also shows the thought process painters have/had to go through in considering how to represent holy figures in paintings, conveying the divine and unknowable whilst making it tangible and accessible to worshippers and church-goers.
Renaissance artists (and all artists conveying holy stories from the Bible, Apocrypha or otherwise) conveyed the divine message in different ways; Fra Angelico steps on the thin line between Renaissance and International Gothic, using mathematical perspective, a single light source, cast shadows and pairing this with refinement, detail, decoration. However all of this is only ever used to further the narrative, to form a "spiritual exercise", an "aid to meditation". It's fascinating how his faith is clearly shown through the painting, his desire to convey spiritual calmness and holiness.

Revising Art History can be interesting, or rather can lead to interesting distractions.