The Pursuit of Happiness

We intuitively understand that happiness is our aim and the very point of our existence. I outline the various theories on happiness, and use Hannah Arendt’s vita activa and Georges Bataille’s concept of sovereignty to explore how we can be happy in a world that seems to, on the contrary, propel us away from our happiness.

Jackass! What a Blast!

Jackass! What a blast! How I first discovered the film franchise was when I needed a mood lightener. I was studying philosophy at the time and really needed a laugh, and so I searched for ‘wacky films’ online. And boy, what a discovery.

The Right to be Neutral: Should Russians Lose Their Jobs?

In the last week, two prominent Russian musicians had been dismissed or forced to resign from their jobs. In today’s parlance, they have been cancelled. What precisely did they do to merit their cancellation? Or in this case, what didn’t they do?

Labour, Work, Action by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt investigates the sources of human happiness in her essay entitled Labour, Work, Action, exploring the relation and differences between the three concepts. The text was originally a lecture delivered in 1964.[1] Since the ancient Greeks, the vita contemplativa (life of contemplation) has been considered a superior form of life than the vita activa (life of action). However, both aspects can be found in every person, as distinct but related “faculties” and are also “ways of life.”

Being in the Moment: Sovereignty in Bataille

The Accursed Share, Volume 3: Sovereignty, Georges Bataille
Chapter 1: Knowledge of Sovereignty
1.1
Bataille begins the volume by explaining what he is not describing in his concept of sovereignty. His sovereignty is not the sovereignty of states but the sovereignty of people. What is sovereign is not “servile and subordinate.” Sovereignty belonged to kings and chiefs, gods and their priests which by being close to the gods shared in their sovereignty. However, the sovereignty that Bataille is interested in is the sovereignty that all people possess.

Sovereignty in The Accursed Share, Volume 2 & 3 by Georges Bataille: First Impressions

What is sovereignty for Georges Bataille? When was the last time you did something for its own sake, where you indulged in an activity for the sheer pleasure it gives you and not for some other purpose such as earning money? Do we go for a run so that we can enjoy the wind in our hair and the change of scenery, or do we do it for some functional purpose such as to lose weight just so that we can become more attractive for other people?

On Diversions from Pensees by Blaise Pascal

Is man a happy creature? Is it in our nature to be happy? Blaise Pascal in his Pensees, translated as ‘thoughts,’ muses over these questions in his chapter on diversions and concludes rather pessimistically that we are not happy creatures. The book is a collection of his notes and was not meant by him to be published in its current form. Hence a reader of the work might find it fragmentary and incomplete. This is not a terse and rigorous philosophical treatise. He makes non-sequiturs, repeats himself often and some sentences are merely phrases. He wasn’t being intentionally cryptic -- this is his notebook we are reading though he did have in mind for it to serve as a basis for a work on Christian apologetics, i.e. a defence of the Christian religion. Unfortunately, this project still remained incomplete upon his death in 1662. Pascal is not a theologian, in fact most people would recognise his name from his theorems in mathematics but he was more than that, he was also an important and interesting thinker. There are some valuable jewels in this work such as his chapter on diversion which I would discuss here.

Selfhood Versus Sociality in Hobbes and Rousseau

While both men may seem to harbour views of human nature and the ideal society that are polar opposites, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) share important similarities such as self-preservation as the primary goal of man, the need to give up some rights in exchange for the benefits that can only come from society, and the need for coercion and punishment to keep the people in line. Both works are polemical, with an agenda to convince and frighten their readers into accepting their conclusions. Coming from an era of extreme political turbulence, Hobbes’s longing for stability resulted in his doctrine of the leviathan, a powerful sovereign to control the otherwise endlessly combative individuals. Rousseau responded to him over 100 years later. An Enlightenment thinker and apostle of the French Revolution, he was keen to overthrow Hobbes’s tyrannical ideas but his thoughts by today’s standards would paradoxically seem also to contain strains of totalitarianism.[1]

Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is about the “coming to be of knowledge.” Understanding the title of his book goes some way to help us understand what this complicated book is about. Phenomenology is the science of experience and so the phenomenology of spirit is the experience or journey that our consciousness makes, where consciousness “comprehends within itself the various SHAPES OF SPIRIT as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit,” according to the ad that Hegel wrote to advertise this book. [p. 468] These shapes or stations are broadly five stages that we make, starting with consciousness, then self-consciousness, reason, spirit and finally absolute spirit. How this journey proceeds from an earlier stage to a later one is when an earlier stage finds in itself contradictions or oppositions which resolves, leading to a more advanced stage, which in turn runs into contradictions which then resolves, leading to a new stage and so on.

The Most Important Lesson in Chess

The most important lesson I have learnt in chess as a novice is to keep calm and play on. I know what you might be thinking. Who is this guy to teach us anything about chess when his ELO on chess.com is 600 and he has lost almost as many times as he has won, who learned chess when he was 20, a special shout out to meesterzack for teaching me then, and who still suck at 40? Well, keep your hats on. Hear me out and then tell me if you think I am wrong about this. And more significantly, I am making this video for my kids, so that they understand why it is important to not give up when playing chess.

Unintended Consequences

Introduction

Unintended consequences infect our lives, frequently rearing their heads in the outcomes of our actions. We tend to recall the ones that negatively affect us though we might not realise that they have surfaced at all if their effects were not harmful. However, when adversely affected, the prudent may strive to consider them as lessons learnt, incorporating these hard-earned lessons consciously or unconsciously into their future actions. They try to understand how these unintended consequences wormed into their plans and then modify future plans to avoid the possibility of their arising.

Should We Block Ads on Youtube?

So I have made two videos on how you can block ads on youtube on your computer and also on your mobile phones or tablets. Most viewers of these videos will find these videos from searching on youtube or a search engine for information on how to block ads or they may come across it when youtube suggests it to them. To be clear, while I made the videos on how you CAN do it, it doesn’t automatically mean that I am telling you to do it, or even suggesting that you SHOULD do it. I am not telling or suggesting that you do it, or not do it.

Economic Technological Dys/Utopia

You walk into a fast food restaurant. You do not speak to any staff but enter your order into a touchscreen machine. You pay the machine, which spits out a receipt with a queue number. You collect your food from the counter when your number appears on the screens. You sit down, you clear your own tray when finished and you leave. You make zero contact with the workers working there.

The Totalitarian Anatomy of Hellbound

Hellbound is a popular dark fantasy South Korean TV series. What speaks to me most about it is how the story is about a society’s metaphorical descent into totalitarianism. Totalitarianism you ask? Yes, that totalitarianism that we have already encountered in history from fascist Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union and the horrors of the Khmer Rogue regime in Cambodia.

What is Art for? Alfred North Whitehead on Truth, Beauty and Art in Adventures of Ideas

To look at the purpose of art, we first have to understand what art is. Alfred North Whitehead relates art to truth and beauty in the final section on Civilisation in his book Adventures of Ideas published in 1930. He systematically examines each of these notions, so he explains first what truth is, then what beauty is and then what art is, finally relating them to the purpose of art. This essay will recount his theory of these notions but first, some words on the man.

[Fiction] My Eulogy – Mea Culpa

[Christopher enters stage left, walking towards the podium in front of a coffin set up lengthwise but at an angle to the audience. The background is a clear night sky full of stars and the scene is moonlit. He had been tasked to read the eulogy his dearest friend, Alan, had prepared for himself, which was to be read at Alan’s funeral.]

I thank you all for coming this evening. I have intentionally arranged for my own self-written eulogy to be the last speech for today, the day you come to mourn my death. I regret that I have to speak to you like this, from beyond the grave. Please do not be mistaken that it is a mark of my insincerity. Indeed, it is quite the opposite.

The Experience Machine Part 2

Previously, I have explained what Nozick’s thought experiment on experience machines is about and his arguments against plugging in. If you have not watched it, please find the link, watch it first and then return here. To recap, his three arguments are and I quote:

1) “We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

2) “We want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.”

3) “Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.”

While they may seem reasonable, I have hinted at some scenarios such as wanting a holiday or to escape from a life of suffering, to be reasons why people might want to plug into the experience machine. I want to expand on that today, to argue against Nozick’s arguments and then reconcile it with what I think is the real takeaway from his thought experiment.

What is Everything?

Democritus: What is everything?

Socrates: Everything is a thing. Nothing is also a thing.

Democritus: Why is everything a thing?

Socrates: Everything is a thing and are things.

First, let’s tackle how everything is a thing, i.e. how everything is one single thing. Everything contains many things, in fact every single thing. What makes everything one thing is that it is a concept that covers, that encompasses, that is used to conceive of all things, including the concept itself.

This means that everything is a thing, including (the concept of) everything.

Democritus: But isn’t the word ‘thing’ used only to refer to material things?

Socrates: Things can be material things or immaterial things.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin

“Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party,”[1] reads the first sentence of Stalin’s text, which explains the importance of his book, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Originally published in 1938, it was a section of a chapter in a larger book entitled History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/]

In the year of publication, Stalin was the secretary-general of the Communist Party and already he had amassed a lot of power. He will become the premier of the Soviet Union three years later. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he exercised dictatorial rule over the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. Among his achievements is his industrialisation of the Soviet Union, bringing it from peasant nation to the country with the 2nd highest industrial output only behind the US. During his rule, the USSR also defeated the Nazis during the second world war, and he led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. However, he did all these through a paranoid reign of terror that led to the deaths of tens of millions including the most powerful members of the elite closest to him. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin]

Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

What is science? A common understanding of what differentiates science from other disciplines and pseudoscience is the scientific method. What then is this method? Philosophers of science have attempted to answer this question, and to understand what led Paul Feyerabend to his conclusions in his book Against Method, we need to understand the book in its context of prior theories put forward to answer these questions. To do this, we need a brief excursion through the history of the philosophy of science up to the time of the book’s publication in 1975.