The powers that be, that force us to live like we do

We have big important papers which are due next Monday, and thus kinda require attention RFN. This was sufficient to distract us from the passing of 2007. I'm not sure, but I think "Back on the Chain Gang" was playing on my headphones when midnight arrived.

In general, the philosophy biz is not a friend of the winter holiday season. Luckily, we're not much for celebrating holidays. But even I can recognize that it's less than ideal that pretty much everyone who wants a job in American philosophy has to try and get one right between Christmas and New Year's.

For a sample of how that works out, see here. Now there's something to look forward to.

Speaking of looking forward: as of next Monday, we start dissertating (supposedly). It turns out I'll be dissertating on Plato. Who knew? Until about a year ago (less than that, actually), I wanted as little to do with ancient philosophy as possible.

On a dark Midwest highway

I ride a long, dark line, in a deep, dark time.

For Christmas is a dark time, and the Indiana toll road is a dark place. At a time like this, in a place like this, a man is given to forking over cash to a fast food chain for the first time in nearly four years, and drinking foul-tasting lightly-coloured water masquerading as coffee.

And a bad brew on a dark road in a dark time can turn a man's mind to dark thoughts....

Dark thoughts, like about how the Pope can get into the news for declaring that terrorism is bad.

Dark thoughts, like about how holy crap can be not only atrocious, but also very creepy (via).

Dark thoughts, like about how crafty Mike Huckabee is to play innocent about his sectarian political ad, spinning it into a little War on Christmas riff (via). Said he to the flock at Cornerstone Church (that being the church of that great fat cat for Christ, John Hagee): "I got in a little trouble this last week because I actually had the audacity to say 'Merry Christmas.'" That's right—and you could be next—unless of course there's someone like Huckabee around to stand up for you.

Don't worry: he may have been in a church, but he said it wasn't a political appearance. And if you can't trust Huckabee to tell the difference, who can you trust?

Not that he's the only one to walk that fine line this season.

For it's a fine line, the line between church and state. But it's a bright one.

Not like the Indiana toll road. No, that's a long, dark line, snaking between Nowhere... and Hell.

(I mean, not literally Hell—just Gary.)

Adventures in networking, flooring, and whatnot

What with my getting to be an old man and all, I'm inclined to be none too welcoming of this new fad of social networking websites. But recently Facebook has kinda sorta redeemed itself by getting me back in touch with old friends and acquaintances I thought I might never hear from again.

Then it also helped Dawn and I end a fairly unsuccessful and disappointing bout of apartment-hunting when I was able to look up a student in the college with a soon-to-be-but-not-yet-expired-lease (after having stolen some names from the property management office), and arrange a viewing of her apartment, and subsequently get dibs on the place.

If all goes well, I'll soon be making the switch from linoleum to hardwood floors, which I'm told is a matter of infinite importance, for reasons which are largely inscrutable. Apparently, linoleum's ability to lie flat under furniture and feet is insufficient to redeem it as worthy of constituting the upper layer of one's floor. I fear this issue may utterly transcend my intellect: as a child, I was tutored in Bert's school of linoleum appreciation (seriously, I had that song on tape or a 45 record or something).

The place also has balconies. Appreciation of this may be within my grasp.

Backblog

O! my poor neglected blog!

Lessee, what's been happening?

1. One of my sisters is going to college down in Daytona Beach. So, naturally, when Spring Break hit, she wanted to come up to visit me in frigid unbeachy Chicago. All things considered, I very much approved. (My teenaged sister? In Daytona Beach for Spring Break? Like hell.)

2. The new crop of prospective grad students came down for the annual "prospective week" to check us out. I hosted a guy from Finland who said he'd already decided to accept our offer of admission, barring anything short of a "catastrophe". I guess they knew what they were doing when they sent him to stay with me.

As per tradition, the week's festivities included a night of Live Band Karaoke. I horribly abused "Living on a Prayer" (accursed rock anthems!), but then redeemed myself by doing a decent rendition of "Hunger Strike" with a fellow rockstar (I was Vedder, he was Cornell, and we totally nailed the harmonies).

3. Dawn and I went thrift shopping uptown. Chicago has some awesome thrift stores. One of them was in the heart of the gay neighbourhood, which is cool, because gay guys are more likely to wear pants that fit me. (Chicago is, by some estimates, the fattest city in the country, and I have a skinny ass.) I found a pair of shiny black Armani pants in my size for $20. A good deal on Armani, I'd imagine, but that's about 4 times the price of any other pair of thrift store pants. Still, I was sorely tempted to buy them, and then go around saying "Who are you wearing? (etc.)"

4. My preliminary essay (mini-dissertation, due right after the next New Year) is going to be on Socratic irony. I've totally decided.

Academic update

This quarter has consisted of:

A logic course on the meta-theory of sentential and first-order logic. I've done more than enough logic before, but I think it would be a good career move to be able to teach logic in the future, so I wanted a refresher. Turns out a fair bit of the material is new to me - as far as I can remember, which isn't saying much, considering that I learned some of this stuff a decade ago (eep).

A course on medieval philosophy. I'm not going to do much with any of this, but I think it's worth having filed away in some compartment of my brain.

I'm also sitting in on a course on the New Testament in the Divinity school. It's interesting, sometimes-despite / sometimes-because it's not presupposing any sort of Christian perspective.

Plus some of us have been doing a reading group on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is just marvy.

My coursework gets wrapped up next quarter. Looks like I'll be getting deep into Freud territory. I'm planning on taking a course titled "consciousness", which is really about the unconscious mind (it should be titled "the unconscious"). I've also just found out that another department is giving a course on "neuropsychoanalysis" which has me intrigued and somewhat excited. I plan on taking that, too, so I might end up getting to make use of some of my cognitive science background, which is a little unexpected.

I'll also have to start work on my "preliminary essay", which is like a mini-dissertation. First I'll have to find a topic. Then I'll have to write about it. Both are daunting tasks.

Windy winter wonderland

I just got back from a quick trip to the store. Or, it should have been a quick trip the store. It took a bit longer than normal, because I had to contend with the odd 3 foot snow drift, and 50 km/h wind gust.

Woo! Great fun. For me, I mean. For people who actually have things to do and places to go, it's a terrible inconvenience, but, me, I just got to bound around in the snow and get blown around a bit, and share a chuckle with a guy using a briefcase to plow his way to his door.

Fake American Thanksgiving

According to Wikipedia, the Canadian version of Thanksgiving started with Martin Frobisher in 1578, a full 41 years before the Pilgrims started doing their thing at Plymouth. So I guess that basically means that the Canadian Thanksgiving is the authentic one.

Anyway, I spent this year's Fake American Thanksgiving in Indiana.

One of the highlights of the trip was passing through the city of Gary, Indiana (birthplace of Michael and the other Jacksons). Let me preface my comments about the place by saying this: I'm sure that, for those who live in Gary and have learned to love Gary, it contains wonders and moments of beauty that my untutored eyes simply fail to register. That said, it seems to me that Gary is quite possibly the most depressing city in America. Despite having a population of just 100,000, it's consistently one of the top ten most dangerous cities in the country. I guess it's basically a big suburb of Chicago, with all the disadvantages of urban sprawl, but not any of the advantages of being urban. A prominent billboard announces that the people of Gary are currently "Celebrating 100 Years of Steel". Evidence of their love of steel, and assorted matters industrial, can be seen in the forest of smokestacks which populates a good part of the city. (I've been told that at night the fire and smog does a fair impression of the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. This sounds pretty awesome, and I plan to make a return visit to see this first hand.) Between the smokestack forest and the endless sea of suburbia, Gary features a small lake, which some gentle soul has adorned with an abundance of metal platforms and spikes--these don't seem to fulfill any functional role, so they were probably put there purely for their aesthetic value, as they nicely complement the canopy of criss-crossing powerlines hanging over the lake.

So much for Gary. In some other town in Indiana (I forget the name), there are street signs that read "CHURCH". I don't mean signs put up by the churches, but street signs put up by the town (or county or whatever), like ones that announce "DEER CROSSING" or "SCHOOL ZONE", except instead of warning drivers about the presence of deer or school children, they warn about the presence of churches. This is hard for me to understand. Are they meant to be interpreted as "PASTOR CROSSING, SLOW DOWN", or "NO SINNING, NEXT MILE", or what?

So, parts of Indiana are kinda weird. But for the most part it looks just like Alberta.

Because I'm just not busy enough

This year I intend to participate (successfully) in NaNoWriMo; i.e., I intend to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.

No, this isn't a particularly bright plan. But it's not the stupidest possible plan, either. The month of November will end before this quarter's paper-writing season begins (at least, as I procrastinatorially understand the quarterly paper-writing season).

I invite others to join me in my madness. (If you need a writing-buddy, look me up under "flyingricepaddy".)

Academic update

I asked around about the format for the German exam, and decided that, at least for now, I can't translate quickly enough to really stand much of a chance of passing. So I guess I'll be doing in the spring instead. In the meantime, I've got some practising to do. Oh, joy.

(Why didn't I study up for French instead? I could take a French exam instead of the German. The French language puts its verbs in sensible places, doesn't make its basic vocabulary play 3 or 4 drastically different roles, plus I studied the bloody language for something like 8 years. Mais que je suis bête!)

In case anyone's curious, here are the courses I'm taking at the moment.

First up is one on the philosophy of religion, from Hume to Kierkegaard. This is largely about the demise of natural theology. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments are on the syllabus. Yay, Kierkegaard!

Next is a course on Plato's Protagoras. Ancient philosophy isn't really my thing, but Socrates was one of Kierkegaard's things, so that gives me a reason to pay some attention.

Last is a course on Heidegger's Being and Time. Reading Heidegger is a chore--which you would expect, since he was German. Of course, I'm reading it in translation, but no matter how well you translate German writing, you can never fully cleanse the sentences of their intrinsic awfulness. Still, he is very cool, and so far the prof has been targeting what strike me as the extra cool bits (his writings on philosophical method, and the significance of anxiety).

Books! (Bücher!)

Tis the weekend of the local coop's annual used book sale, where pocket-book-sized paperbacks go for a quarter. A fricken quarter. Even in American money, that is absurdly cheap.

Following a pair of lengthy expeditions spent digging through trashy romance novels in search of gold, I think I've expanded my library by about 40 or so. My finds included a number of good Freuds (both Sigmund and Anna, plus an absurdly large biography on Sigmund), some all right philosophy (Husserl, Pascal, Montaigne, Locke, Marcus Aurelius), classic sci-fi (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke), and some fiction written by snooty foreigners (Kazantzakis, Nabakov, Solzhenitsyn, Achebe).

Since I'm all into religion now, I picked up five carefully chosen exemplars of that category: Dianetics, Left Behind, the Book of Mormon, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Karl Barth's Evangelical Theology.

In other news, I'm trying to prepare for the German translation exam which I'm planning on taking on Friday. I don't think I have the words to express how unbearable it is to read German--but that's OK, because Mark Twain did a fine job back in the day of describing The Awful German Language. An excerpt:

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab -- which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:

"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED."

However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject, and will not be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six -- and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Reading that essay is pretty much a necessity for anyone who wants to study German without going insane.

It's a simple message and I'm leaving out the whistles and bells

The news

For everyone I haven't told yet; and also for those I have told, but haven't the foggiest idea what the hell has happened to me:

After a lifetime of atheism, almost entirely devoid of any exposure whatsoever to religious practices; after cofounding a secular humanist club in undergrad; after spending way too much time picking apart really bad arguments for the existence of God; after declaring a few times (before witnesses) that I was an "incorrigible" atheist, probably the last atheist who would ever, ever convert to Christianity--after all that, I've converted to Christianity.

(What really tears me up about all this is that I proved myself wrong. I hate that.)

No, it's true. It happened a couple of weeks ago. I committed myself to God and accepted Jesus Christ as my saviour.

Yes, I'm serious.

No, really, I'm serious.

No, I'm not crazy. (Or, if I am, it's the same kind of crazy I've always been, and not some new, extra-scary kind of crazy.)

And no, I can't explain why, because there is no explanation. I converted, and there was no reason for my conversion. None. Really, none.

(But, to adapt a bit of Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, remark 289), to act without reason does not mean to act without right.)

Let me be a bit more explicit as to what I mean when I say I converted without reason. I received no visions, heard no voices, had no hallucinations of any sort (a pity, since I'm rather fond of hallucinations, though I doubt they're any sort of basis for faith). I was not convinced of God's existence by some amazingly clever philosophical argument I'd never considered before. I did not feel that I was at the end of my rope and needed some supernatural force to get my life back on track. I didn't feel a deep psychological need that only religion could fill. I felt no deep sadness, no sense of lack, no sense of despair. No arguments, no needs, no wants, no motivations were responsible for my conversion.

I found myself in a position where I faced an incomprehensible choice to either commit to God, or not, with no basis whatsoever for choosing one over the other--and I chose to commit. It was that simple (that difficult, that bizarre). I know next to nothing about existentialism, but I get the feeling this was some hardcore kinda existentialist moment.

I chose the title for this blog, based on PI 217, before my conversion, but it fits remarkably well here.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

Except in this particular case, I start out at bedrock. I start out without the ability to offer any justification for my conversion. I had none at the time, and I can't think of any now.

Anyway, there were no reasons for my conversion, but there is a bit of a narrative. The process of conversion itself took a few days, and was preceded and attended by a series of highfalutin intellectual developments. I'll try to cough up that narrative over the next few days, for anyone who's interested.

I'm still me

First, though, I'd like to do what I can to reassure friends and family that I'm still me.

My philosophical, moral, political, and scientific beliefs remain basically unchanged.

I still think the universe is however many billions of years old the astrophysicists are saying it is this week. I still think we are highly evolved pond scum.

I still think dualism is bad metaphysics--in fact, I still think metaphysical inquiry is mostly a waste of time (in philosophy, of course, and I think probably in theology as well). I still think arguments for the existence of God are (each and every one of them) bad arguments. (Arguments for the existence of God played no role whatsoever in my conversion, and have nothing to do with my faith.)

I'm still a political leftist. Far, far, far leftist. I still want to eat the rich. I still think LGBTQs should be allowed to marry each other (in whatever combination), and I still have a great deal of difficulty understanding why so many people are so opposed to that idea. I'm still pro-choice.

I still hate Bush.

I still think that state and religion need to be cleanly and thoroughly separated--in fact, this is infinitely more important to me now than it was when I was an atheist, because politicization is even more poisonous to religion than Goddification is to politics.

My taste in entertainment, music, humour, and etiquette remain the same. Kurosawa and Kubrick still compete for status as my all-time favourite director. I still think D&D is a lot of fun. I still like angry music, including music that's angry at religion. I still make really tasteless jokes. I still make jokes about the Baby Jesus.

My nascent theology

Ooh, I've got some work to do here. I have figured out almost nothing as of yet.

In general principle, if not in detail, the sort of Christianity I now find personally valuable is the sort represented by this story, or by the Slacktivist (whose blog struck me as way cool long before the possibility of conversion became a thinkable thought).

I'm not sure what sort of Christian I am. I've been trying to construct a label for myself; at the moment I'm tentatively inclined to say that I'm a Wittgensteinian-Kierkegaardian, anti-metaphysical, errantist, theologically liberal Christian. But that's pretty long-winded; for most purposes "miscellaneous Christian" would do just as well. (Technically, I'm also a "born-again". I like that label because of its happy connotations.)

I do know that I don't believe in the rapture. Well, actually, I don't much care what people think about the rapture. I do believe that many Christians think about it way, way too much--so much so that it has become a way of forgetting what it means to be a Christian.

I don't believe in hell, and I've suspended judgment about heaven. In general, I don't much care about the concept of the afterlife--I don't live there. The only issues I really care about are practical (in some very broad sense of 'practical'). I think the concepts of sin and salvation are important, but I don't really care about any role they might have to play in sorting people into a possible heaven or a possible hell. I'm more concerned with what they (and the Christian story of salvation through Christ) say about the possibilities of human existence, here and now, in this messy mortal world populated by various forms of highly evolved pond scum.

I'm pretty sure that being a good Christian involves, most crucially, (a) being committed to God and (b) being committed to alleviating the suffering of others, such that these become somehow inseparable. I'm pretty sure I have a long way to go on both counts. (Yes, having just (b) is good in itself. In fact, Matthew 25:31ff makes it pretty clear that (b) alone is enough to make the Baby Jesus dance a happy little jig. Nevertheless, adding (a) to the mix is important.)

Grad school: one year down (sort of)

Four more to go. (Or thereabouts. If my undergrad experience is any indication, it may take a wee bit longer. But I hope to be more efficient on this particular run through academia.)

The academic year had a pretty good finale. In the afternoon there was a reception for philosophy undergrads, which involved a great deal of catered food. Not many grads were around for that, but a lot of that food was still there in the common room by the time the grad student "coffee hour" came around a few hours later. The pre-existing spread was augmented by one hundred fifty wonderful dollars worth of food and drink (double the normal amount set aside for coffee hour--I guess some money was left over in the budget). Included was a beer keg. This was advertised beforehand, and for some reason attendance was heavier than usual. Good fun.

I think grad school is treating my brain pretty well so far. I learned a bunch more about Kant (I was already a fan) and Frege (he's much more important than I ever realized). I was also introduced to the very cool Wittgenstein (already kinda knew he was cool), Wilfrid Sellars (ditto), Freud (used to think he was a nut) and Kierkegaard (had no idea who he was before). I can say without hyperbole that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in particular have already Changed My Life in a variety of positive ways. (Philosophy is not useless. It may even be good for the soul, whatever that is.)

One class focused on some really recent philosophy of language concerning one of the Big Debates of the day. This seminar was, in the words of the prof, both "sobering" and "encouraging". He mused that there have only been about ten good arguments in the history of philosophy, with the implicature that probably none of these arguments have been made in the past five years--and yet it is still possible to have a flourishing career as a philosopher. Yay!

Summer plans include a reading group on Kierkegaard, a reading group on Hegel, and a reading group on Miscellaneous Philosophers We've Heard Are Important (maybe starting with Dewey; I'm going to push for Rorty). Later in the summer will be German lessons. Meanwhile I'll have to spit out the approximately three dozen papers that I owe profs from the courses I didn't quite complete over the past year.

(In case anyone is wondering, I will probably be spending the whole summer here in Chicago.)

Patience please

Someday this blog will be a real blog. But not today.

As per some other words from Wittgenstein:

This is how philosophers should salute each other: "Take your time!"

Of course, with respect to most things, I'm generally inclined to take my time anyway, but only insofar as I'm really lazy.