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| The beautiful weather is both a gift and a curse. Cold weather, unpleasant weather, does nothing if not distract. But on a day like today, the weather is warm the breeze gentle, and my thoughts are free to wander as they may. Nice weather here can seem so rare and it never fails to remind me of home.
I am into a graduate school, but is the continuation of my education but an excuse for me to prolong my days of pondering and daydreaming, even as those around me enter into various practical disciplines? Am I even progressing in my understanding of my subject of choice? I ponder my abandonment of my aspirations towards involvement in practical politics and my dissillusionment with that field. Strange to think I have changed so much in these past years in this respect. Do I seek to change things in a different fashion, by sculpting the ideas that shape political reality? Or am I truly abandoning the political and letting such matters work as they will?
An old friend of mine once spoke of abandoning politics in favor of seeking an understanding of the Divine. He said that politics never changes, because people never truly change. The balance merely shifts and shifts back, progress occurs in one area, regression in another. And all the while the necessities of politics break down those who participate in it. Politicians turned corrupt by the need for money and backroom political deals. The endless scramble for leverage by all manner of persons and interests. The reduction of complex ideas and issues to sound-bites and catchphrases, and the reduction of people to billboards and broadcasted taperecordings of said phrases. And all of it a distraction from the things of true importance: love of God and of one another, personal relationships, intuitions. It is of these things that the human universe is truly composed and it is towards these things that human actions must be oriented.
When he uttered these words to me, I did not understand them. I was young and filled with fire for things political. While I am still not sure as to the degree to which the political realities to which I have been exposed can be changed, in this much I have found the truth of his words: That there is a higher calling than political activity, and, indeed, that there is a higher calling than intellectual activity, and it is nothing less than the call to love. It is towards this that my efforts must be focused: the undoing of that most terrible lie that has infected Western thought for so long, namely, that reason and intuition cannot be reconciled but must be divorced from each other or (worse) opposed to one another.
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| Ive been thinking, and I have realized that, in my tenure at CUA, I have:
Blocked a Vice-Presidential Motorcade on the way to a speaking engagement and been surrounded by Secret Service,
Nearly collided with a sitting US Senator at a dead sprint towards an elevator,
Been evacuated from a Senate Office building when a small plane strayed into Capitol airspace,
Walked/tried to calm down/been barked at furiously by the dog of a sitting US Senator,
Fallen asleep and snored loudly in the viewing gallery of the US Senate,
Been interrupted in the middle of playing devil's advocate in a very energetic discussion regarding the status of the Irish in early America by Senator Feingold,
Gotten lost on a walk and ended up outside of the White House, been tailed by a Guard outside who thought I looked suspicious, tried to sneakily evade said guard only to slip on a patch of ice and fall comically sprawled next to the tent of the Nuclear Weapons Protester on vigil there,
Circumvented a security cordon at the second Inagural Address of President Bush (scaling fences and bucking a line of thousands of attendees, various security personnel and angry protestors to do so),
And most recently, had my cell phone blast out its techno-ringtone on the loudest setting while attending a speech by Pat Buchanan (and right in the middle of his immigration reform spiel).
And these are just a few of my adventures here in our Nation's Capital.  It would not have been the same had I ended up anywhere else.
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| I have been writing a paper on Skepticism. Or have I? heh heh A little philosophy humor there..... Anyway, it has brought an interesting thing to mind. Namely, the idea of a known lack of knowledge as a vindication.
In a way, of course, such a thing is really similar to the idea of knowledge as a vindication, although one can add to it the interesting quality of having a certain essential experiential subjectivity.... Doubt, skepticism, the experience of one's own ignorance, is a very personal thing. It is something in which one is engaged and exists both as a process and an experience having to do with one's interaction with ideas. As such, doubt of this kind can be (or be used as) a vindication and a means of self isolation. Thus the disease of the curious and the thoughtful manifests itself: the wonder as to whether one is the only person truly questioning, truly seeing things a certain way, truly picking up on how things really are. While there may be a certain truth to this perspective (given its insights into the nature of subjective experience) it nonetheless presents certain dangers should such sentiments find application. If you are the only one seeing certain things, how can your judgement relate to the judgements of others? How is intersubjectivity even possible when there are those in the world who are too concerned with the subjectivity of their own perspectives to accept it? Is this merely the isolation of the "I" from the "Other"? If so, to what degree should one even attempt to conform to the "Other" and make intersubjective notions possible? Is the only true insight to be found in complete isolation, trapped within subjectivity?
But no. Such is the philosophy of the mad, of the lunatic. Even within subjectivity there is a capacity for sharing one's experiences with others albeit on an intuitive level (as experience, that is). When I was younger, I often had trouble with the subjectivity of my own experiences. The problem of being trapped in my own subjective context weighed upon me. Such is no longer a problem due to the experiential capacity mentioned above. Sadly such a thing cannot be taught, but must be learned for oneself. How ironic, that a trap that can lead to the downfall of one's ability to reason can itself only be avoided by that which is, in some sense, outside of reason (namely, the very subjective experiences that cause the crisis to begin with). Ironic, but not without a certain balance to it.
I shall think more on this.
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| Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
the Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I know of no reason,
that the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Happy Guy Fawkes Day everyone!
"Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliment with honest intentions."
-Irish Saying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
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