I have aquired from the Dave “Russell: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell” a man of amazingly wide tastes who’s prediliction to history makes me even more interested in what he has to save. Being a work that Dave is aware of it has an Atheist bent of course, not that I consider this a bad thing, other veiwpoints are the key to developing understanding. Reading it on one side makes me regret not taking more Philosophy in my Bachelor of Arts and at the same time makes me devoutly glad that I did not look into this at a point when I could have made it a large part of my educational path. I spend too much time thinking on things without grappling with what the nature of thought and reality is at its most basic level. Although these ideas are fascinating (And with another 600+ pages to read I will have more to say) so much of it falls under what some would consider not worth knowing.
I do not know if it is the intellectual climate of this City and Province or that of the Country or even world as a whole there just does not seem to be the respect for philosophers that we used to have. Maybe its because we all think now, not just those individuals of ability and station. Making the act of thought beyond the day to day drugery of society something anyone can do diluting the impact of genius in the modern age. Even look at this writing I am doing now, I am intelligent but I have never considered my lazy absorbtion of information something deserving of a term like Genius, like all intellectuals I am one part regurgitation one part actual idea and two parts bullshit. I find it hillarious that my earlier university essays are more coherent than those I write now because I have been taught so well to dodge around the point of any given thing. So much of what academia pushes out could be taken down to a solid sentence or paragraph with footnotes for proofs, but instead we are taught to create gigantice intellectual monstrosities in order to demonstrate our ability to understand a given point. That last was lifted from Russell perhaps not directly but what I have read is influencing how I say it and what I think does that make this plagerism? I am not wholely sure but I would think not, an idea cannot be owned by one person, a thing or an idea for a thing certianly but the idea that, the Pre-Mycenean Greeks were the people who are depicted attacking Troy in the Illiad cannot, but it seems to me that many want that to be the way of things locking us out of the ability to look at others work and go “Yeah that was good but if I change this right here look at THAT”.
I worry we are trapping ourselves into intellectual stagnation, I look at my life and I compare it to those thinkers and individuals of the past and wonder how I could even aspire to their levels. Living moments in the present like one such as Hunter S Thompson is one thing, but as he himself proves that path leads to ones own destruction. One habit of life of Russell that he shares in one of his papers is that of reading History with his spouse and discussing it. I may lack the spouse but I do think that I need to stop letting myself get into an intellectual funk, I NEED to learn, and with how Education has conspired to only state the obvious maybe that is what I need to change in my life. Sides I like writing papers and thinking, that will be the best part of teaching, is learning more and more about everything as one teaches, Social Studies is far to broad to know everything, although I plan to make a go of it.
Huh barely talked of the doings, suffice it to say I had a good time, and maybe I will write of it later.