October the 1st, A History of Philosophy, My Dad, Etc.

     

     It’s October the 1st, 2018, and I’ve got a world of trouble on my mind. Foremost at the moment is that I have a water leak which is costing me some large bills, and the process by which this is reported, detected, and addressed is way too slow for me. I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrated I am with all of this. 1 And I just cannot understand why I don’t have a meter in or at least on my house which I could check to see if all is well with my water usage. I’ve got that for my electricity, for fuck’s sake, and it rarely just falls out of the sockets and onto the floor. 
     But there are other things as well. This Kavanaugh Hearing has really got me upset. In fact, this morning I was watching Morning Joe, which I have done regularly for at least a couple of years now, and I was getting so angry at Joe and Mika that I think I may have to end my relationship with them. They both have been so condescending and callous toward Christine Blasey Ford that I am stunned by what they have to say. This morning, for instance, Joe was saying how he was sick of how democrats were whining about only having one week for the FBI investigation, since that was all that they had asked for. Well, there are several things wrong with Joe's statement. I don’t even feel like touching it now 1, so suffice it to say that I want to hear my morning news from someone who doesn’t feel it necessary to disparage people who are seeking justice.
     And there’s other “normal” stuff as well. But enough, the picture has been sketched in. Its personal and national angst. 
     But when I opened A History of Philosophy to do a bit of today’s ten page reading (as the goal has been for some time now, and accomplishing that goal every day has brought me to page 3,406), my blues were quickly dispersed by the fiercely hot wind of Friedrich Nietzsche. 
     I’d started the Nietzsche section a couple of days back, and there was some most excellent stuff there, to be sure, but today was the first Post-Introduction / Overview Day, and the shit was so hot that it would have melted through three or floor floors of the Nostromo before dissipation rendered it non-lethal. 
     For instance: “The world is not an illusion, nor does the Will to Power exist in a state of transcendence. The world, the universe, is a unity, a process of becoming….” (Volume VII, page 407) This hits me on several levels. First off, it sets up an interesting dichotomy: either there is one world which is in the process of becoming, or there is a bifurcated world—pretty much taking us back to Plato’s Epistemology. (Not that those are the only two choices…just that these are the only two choices implied by this Nietzsche statement.) The odd thing about that for me is that I want both of those things to be true. The idea of the world as being In The Process of Becoming makes a great deal of sense to me—especially in terms of my current ideas about God, the Universe, and Everything. But I also want to believe that there is something beyond the madness that is called now, that there is a Higher Realm beyond the reach of the mundane world. Nietzsche says I can’t have it…but shit, his brain was full of spirochetes, so what makes him the last word? For one thing, if you just postulate that The World Is Becoming essentially means that the Mundane Word is evolving into the Ideal World, seems that the problem is solved. But it was still a nice little canter, wasn’t it?
     What hit me harder was a bit on the desire for knowledge. It started out like this: “The desire of knowledge…depends on…a given kind of being’s impulse to master a certain field of reality and to enlist it in its service. The aim of knowledge is not to know, in the sense of grasping absolute truth for its own sake, but to master.” (VII, 408) For as long as I can remember thinking, I have had a very serious desire to know. And I mean that in an (almost?) OCD sense. I spent many hours when I was a kid staring at Mars and the Moon through a telescope, making drawings of what I saw. I took a course in astronomy at the local community college when I was still in elementary school. (They let me attend because my father went with me. Which was an enormous thing for him to do, by the way. He was an 8th grade dropout truck mechanic, and it must have been enormously distasteful to him to sit in a room full of young college kids. But he loved me, so he endured it.) Or how many hours I spent peering into a microscope, looking at slides I had made of hair, plant leafs, spit, sperm…pretty much anything I could find (or manufacture). And, of course, making drawings. I had a science kit, and I made all kinds of weird concoctions. I have particularly fond memories of something made with iron filings and sulphur and then heated. The smell was just stunning. In retrospect, I can’t believe that my parents put up with that stuff. Or, for that matter, that they spent the money to procure a telescope, a microscope, and a chemistry kit…because money was not an abundant  commodity in our household. And books…. My dad built me a desk with some serious bookshelf space, and every space was filled pretty quickly. Which reminds me that there was also an electronics kit, and that I used it to make some things with it as well. Well, point made and beaten to death: from a very young age, I wanted to know things, and I pursued knowing things with some pretty fierce intensity. I put the energy that most young men put into sports or girls into science and literature. (In fact, I had very little to do with girls until one literally showed up on my doorstep and told me that she was taking me out for a date.)  
     But I never thought about why I wanted to know things. I don’t like Nietzsche’s assertion that it has to do with a desire for power, for mastery…but I have to admit that it rings true. And if you are a person who sees the world as chaotic and dangerous, then the desire for mastery is covalent with a desire to survive, isn’t it?
     The last thing I got from this morning’s reading…the first half of which, anyway, as I stopped after five pages to get these things out of my head…because I’ve found that if I don’t do that, they either die and fester or else just disappear in a puff of smoke, like the Invaders on that old TV series from the late 60s…was this: “Reality is Becoming: it is we who turn it into Being, imposing stable patterns on the flux of Becoming.” (VII, 408) And how about that? The two Big Ideas For The Day join up and have a beer.
     So that’s what I got from my first five pages of my ten page reading of Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy for today. Not bad for ten minutes’s worth of reading time, eh? And from a book that you can pick up for about $13, and which will last you (at my pace, anyway) a third of a year. Now I have an intense desire to watch an episode of The Invaders. I wonder if that’s available anywhere? More news as it happens.

1  Unless, of course, you really want to know. I do requests.