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I wonder how I should use these writing sessions. The most productive use of my time here on this computer might be to sit down and ponder about a specific question that I would want to have answered at that point, like how I am doing right now. I sat down with the issue of how to write “productively”, and here is the result. Although, that process might in the long run turn out to be way too mechanistic, way too artificial.
It isn’t as if the phenomena that we encounter on a day-to-day basis organise themselves in neat questions for a philosophy-student to go through one after another. I don’t know if it can be characterised as a stream of consciousness, though that is an issue of phenomenological study more generally. ¹
The major benefit of me processing one question at a time, essentially looking at this like an analytical philosopher, is that it allows me to make the fullest use of my limited time writing these entries. I only have around 20 minutes on public transport each way, 40 minutes in total, of which I never really utilise more than 10 minutes one way (so really 20 minutes in total). It isn’t a lot of time for writing, I would have to find other slots of my day to fit in if I want to write anything more though, which seems difficult at the moment. AuDHD has both its benefits and drawbacks I guess.
Maybe I should make a list of questions that I would like to explore more generally, and then follow questions leading from that more generally. Let’s attempt to do a bit of that now.
Questions:
- Why do far-right movement produce non-coherent world-views? 1.1 What are non-coherent world-views? 1.1.1 What is experience? 1.1.2 How can experience create world-views? 1.1.3 How can non-coherent world-views be created? 1.2 What are far-right movements?
- How does Capital operate?
It is now the second part of the day, the second 20 minutes. I am looking over these questions again (which I didn’t finish), and I feel them quite reductive. I have been listening to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism again on audiobook (due to my only reader saying they are reading it now), and I want to rethink what my goals are for my project. I live in one of the last remaining social-democracies in the world, one that is continually being bit-by-bit privatised, yet it is still a social democracy. With the access to student loans (plus disability stipend), I am one of the only students in the world that is able to study full-time without a job or money from previously/parents. I am going to have this ability for roughly 5.5 more years. Yet, in Norwegian higher education, due to the ways that market Stalinism has played out here, there has been a push for the last 20 years to make education more simpler. More students, more money. More students passing, more money.
The situation I thus find myself, is a weird one. I am faced with being able to study full-time, but having a lacklustre education that does not demand a lot. In order to learn, I have to be willingly an autodidact more than I have been previously. These few breathers I have like Easter gives me the taste of independent research that I would like to continue, and thus I need some kind of overview of what I want to do, what I wish to study. On the question of what I’d like to study, it seems like the answer should be obvious, “I AM STUDYING PHILOSOPHY” I could say. Yet what are my aims? What are my goals? I feel like this should be a separate question on to its own, but I should take a start here.
I wish to study how to end capitalism, without situating my body on its frontlines. I have wished previously to study non-coherent world-views, thought I’m not so sure I want to do that any more. I want to study what experience is, and how it relates to how we relate ourselves to the world. I am not sure if I want to study how principles can come about in and of themselves, epistemology has seemed frightfully uninteresting to me due to the dominance of the analytics, but I’ve now tasted others and a thirst has been born.² I don’t know the horizon of my wants, thought I want to investigate it and figure out what I want.
1 I really should start a reading circle for phenomenology in Bergen, it seems way too useful to not learn it. Martin however has warned that not doing it properly will result in not the best outcome, so I’ll have to talk to him about it if I want to go forth with it at all. 2 stupid cliché lines are surprisingly fun to write.