Unity of Thought?

Wednesday, September 22, In the year of our Lord 2010
My House, Caronport Saskatchewan
Preparing Supper, 5:58 PM
Weather was warm and sunny, is now cool and overcast

I have been learning some interesting things today. I am attempting to keep up with 'The Dialectic of Reading and Writing.' (heh... my prof just gave me 5 bonus marks if he ever reads this)

Now what did I learn again? I got distracted on the internet for a few minutes and don't remember. I think this was it. The different modes of writing. There is free writing (which I am doing now) which is a warm up exercise for the brain. After all, the brain is a literal muscle that needs some prepping before running an academic marathon (writing a paper) just like you need to warm up your other muscles before running a literal marathon. Then there is actual writing where you are interacting with the material, dialogging with it, but not overly concerned with format or detail. Then there's different levels of re-writing and editing to create a well thought out and thoroughly understood project.

I find it difficult to believe that I will be writing a thesis, I mean, that level of scholarship is a definite jump from where I am at now. It will be a lot of hard hard work of research and writing and actually becoming a master (I am going for my Masters after all) in a piece of academia.

And then there was philosophy class. I love it. Jamie is an amazing professor and I sincerely hope he is actually teaching how to acquire Freedom of Thought and not just Plato for sake of teaching us Plato. Regardless of that, I found some interesting connections between Plato's philosophy and my own life.

My disgust at TV and pop music isn't just me, apparently it is the first step in acquiring true knowledge. The media provides pop-stuff that appeals to our immediate desires which affect our reason which determine our wills. Pop-anything is an attempt to brainwash us. I am glad that I am not the first and only person to have given up on these things. It is strangely comforting to see that I have been already moving towards what Plato would call Freedom of Thought.

Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Thought... what a strange concept to our Canadian ears. We have never heard of such a thing, but as Jamie says, "the best way to brainwash someone is to make sure they never hear about what you don't want them to hear about." Making decisions and pursuing things not based on Canadian acceptability, ruffling the status quo, questioning the foundations, and being able to rationally and convincingly prove something different that reshapes entire world views is historically seen as subversive... enter Platonic philosophy. Or at least that's as far was we have got in this semester.

So on one hand I am grappling with the pursuit of academic knowledge to write a masters thesis and on the other hand I am grappling with the foundations of knowledge itself. It is slightly overwhelming to say the least.

On that note it's time for hotdogs. Maybe I will find some objective truth in the mustard and ketchup.

Greg Out.