Brettia

This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while now. In the past year or so, I’ve gone from knowing nothing about what I think about anything to…well, still not really knowing what I think. I guess I’m kinda hoping that this entry will help me focus things more, but more than likely it really won’t. Oh well.

I suppose everything began with a book I read for English, one that I think I’ve mentioned already: Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It’s a weird story. Basically, the main character, Meursault, is this random, apathetic French Algerian who cares more about being with his girlfriend than mourning his mother’s recent death. He complains often about momentary issues (head, usually), but major problems don’t really seem to faze him at all. Eventually, he kills an Arab on the beach out of animal instinct and ends up in prison, where his views on life become plain as he awaits death. His main premise is that life isn’t worth living because it’s just a sequence of repetitive events that have already occurred numerous times for everyone else and sometimes oneself. He hangs on to this idea until his execution, even after a priest tries to convert him to a more Christian view of life and death, and when he is finally about to die, he says that he hopes that he provokes the crowd’s anger (perhaps because he regards them with so much contempt). Obviously, this was a pretty controversial book for a bunch of mostly conservative Midwestern kids to read. Many of my fellow IB students just rejected it outright, saying that Camus and Meursault were crazy and that no sane person would ever think that way. Strangely, though, I sort of thought the opposite. While I didn’t really agree with Meursault, I thought that he had a point. The book made me question things more, at least.

I remember feeling pretty insecure upon realizing that I was the only one who seemed to give Camus’ ideas (embodied in the philosophical idea of existentialism) much weight. I began to wonder if I really was drifting toward craziness and this was just the first step. Unfortunately, this became a pretty constant trend…most of the other kids would vehemently oppose a book or idea, and I would think, “Well, it makes sense to me.” I think I can explain this. For a long time now, I’ve thought that within a person there exists two different mindsets: the rational and the philosophical (these names are arbitrary; I have no idea if they fit correctly). We go about our day-to-day lives in the rational mindset, which helps us with everything from simple decisions to solving complex problems. Though the rational mindset is creative, it doesn’t really rock the metaphorical boat. It doesn’t come up with thoughts that violate our core beliefs - it just follows them blithely. For most people, it is easy to spend the bulk of their life in the rational mindset if their beliefs aren’t horribly strict or conflicting and they don’t suffer any major shocks to their values. But for those whose beliefs are still pretty up in the air (like me), it’s easy to get into the philosophical mindset, which can be far more dangerous than the rational one. The problem with the philosophical mindset is that it has the potential of coming to conclusions that could radically affect one’s behavior while in the rational mindset. This is what happened to Meursault. I think that most people know of the dangers of the philosophical mindset in some kind of subconscious manner, and this is why even people who spend more time in the philosophical mindset than others will usually try to stay away from it when they can. Most of us value order and normalcy, and putting ourselves fully into the philosophical mindset breaks that sometimes. This is especially true for more religious people who have strong faith in their beliefs - to question those beliefs by straying into the philosophical mindset would conflict directly with that faith. So, what I’m trying to say, I guess, is that since I spend more time in the philosophical mindset than most people due to my not-so-solid belief system, I have a greater tendency to accept ideas that seem irrational because I’m desperate enough to find the right belief to cling to that I’ll try to look for logic or meaning in just about anything. The other IB students, for the most part, are set enough in their beliefs that they usually seem to just ignore anything that conflicts with them. Then again, I’m not exactly vocal about my thoughts about this stuff…maybe they think about it more than I realize and they just keep it to themselves because of peer pressure.

My next presentation dealing with philosophy was about Friedrich Nietzsche and how his ideas relate to The Stranger and existentialism. I basically found that Nietzsche’s ideas, especially the ideas of nihilism and eternal recurrence, make up much of the foundations of modern existentialism. Nihilism is the concept that life is pointless and that you therefore reject the real world and physical existence (like Meursault). Interestingly, Nietzsche felt that modern Christianity was a nihilistic religion because of how it has drifted from its original roots to the point that doctrine often matters more than core spiritual beliefs. This is what prompted Nietzsche to make the famous, “God is dead,” statement. He didn’t mean that God or religion was really dead - only that the true God had been killed by Christianity over the millennia and replaced with something else. I actually kind of agree with Nietzsche on this…I sometimes wonder why it always feels like Christians dictate their religion at other people (and themselves), in many cases forcing them to conform to a certain moral code, instead of just teaching a way of being as is done in some other religions (Buddhism, I think). It was in this presentation that I really began to self-awaken to philosophy and just how complex it could be. I read some small parts of Nietzsche’s works, and I was amazed at how many -isms and horribly complex logical constructs there were. It’s not exactly what you’d call leisure reading. But it was interesting nonetheless, and it made me interested in studying philosophy when TOK rolled around later on in the year.

But before TOK I had one last English presentation to give, and this one was by far the scariest. In this presentation, we were tasked with coming up with a metaphor to describe our personal philosophy of life. We had to make a display showcasing our metaphor and philosophy, and we had to present our beliefs to our peers in one-on-one mini-presentations. This assignment, one that I would probably welcome now, did not go well for me ten months ago. I was utterly mortified at the idea of revealing my much more radical philosophy to my fellow students because I valued their respect highly and I feared that I would lose it by having ideas that were so obviously, completely opposed to theirs. I procrastinated a lot on getting my display done and organizing my thoughts. I was up until 4 AM the night before I had to present, tearing myself apart inside over what I did and did not want to say. When I got up at 6:30 to get ready for school, I was a nervous wreck, still overcome by fear and emotion and in no way ready to present my crappy display and explain my corny metaphor (”Life is like a gory video game”). It was not a good moment, as moments go. Eventually I just decided to say what was on my board as convincingly as I could, though by the time I had to present I was starting to stop believing in my own philosophy. I guess you could say I was caving in to peer pressure, but the pressure came more from inside than out. I don’t want to give the wrong idea about my fellow IB kids - they’re friendly, intelligent, good people, all of whom I have a lot of respect for for various reasons. They weren’t pressuring me to be more in-line with their philosophies on purpose. I was pushing myself in that direction because I feared being abnormal, especially after a year of not exactly being in the greatest of spirits most of the time. Having pulled through the dark days, I was desperate to not ruin my chances of having good friends (Friends) again.

I won’t give a play-by-play of my presentation (which I gave twice to two different people), but it certainly wasn’t one of my better ones. It wasn’t so much that my ideas didn’t make sense, but rather that my delivery was ruining them. I kept trying to think of how they were being perceived by my tiny audience, and those thoughts in the background made it difficult to stay focused. I improved hugely, though, the third time, when I had to present to my teacher so that I could be graded (more on effort and logic, not on what my ideas were specifically). It helped that the teacher was my favorite of all my junior-year teachers, and I also thought her to be less religious than my peers from what she had said in some of our class discussions. So I relaxed and gave a decent presentation, and suddenly all of the ideas that made up my philosophy made sense again. It was a weird day.

A few days later, I received my grade (an A-) and the two peer evaluation sheets that my “audience” had filled out after listening to my presentation. They were not positive. Actually, they were pretty harsh, even more so than I had expected. I wasn’t very happy about this, and my arrogant self immediately thought that they were reacting more to the content of my presentation than the quality of it. The rest of my self quickly shut down that idiotic idea before it could cause me to do or say anything stupid, thankfully. My teacher’s comments, however, were much nicer. I remember she said something like, “Some of the conclusions you made were things that I didn’t figure out until I was in my mid-20s.” This was high praise, even coming from a teacher that liked me already. So I came out of this whole episode with a bit of a firmer foundation upon which to build my philosophical ideas, but still not a whole lot of strong conviction about what I had come up with. My teacher’s reinforcement of what I had said, though - that boosted my confidence considerably.

I suppose you’re wondering exactly what I did say that seemed so horribly radical, what exactly it was that my teacher seemed to agree with, etc. Rather than start in on that right now, though, I’ll continue with the story of my philosophical progression. Bear with me; I’m almost done. TOK started in the fourth quarter of that year, about a month after the personal philosophy presentations. I was excited about it, both because of my recent forays into philosophical thinking and because I had heard it described as one of the best IB classes I would take. Unfortunately…the first term was a bit of a letdown. It wasn’t all bad, though, and the concepts we went over were important in the second term (the first quarter of this year), when our discussions got a lot more interesting. One of the first things we talked about was the idea (given to us by the IB gods, I guess) that K = JTB - that knowledge is a justified, true belief. I’m not sure that I agree with this completely, but that concept isn’t nearly as important as some of the ideas that it stirred within me that came out in my daily journal entries. (We were required to journal each day on thoughts from the class, but this requirement sorta evaporated about two weeks into the term.)

In my very first entry, I talked about knowledge, beliefs, the relativity of truth, and a concept that I called “collective knowledge.” I began with an interesting and new (for me) idea: that “underlying all things are key fundamental truths.” Most of these fundamental truths are so impossibly complex that they are beyond human comprehension - however, just because we don’t understand them doesn’t mean that they’re not out there. When humans come up with a “truth,” they rarely come up with a fundamental truth, and even if they do, they can never prove that the truth that they have arrived at is really the be-all-end-all exactly-right explanation for a phenomenon. So basically, anything that humans hold as true is in fact just human perception of a fundamental truth that may have further intricacies that we haven’t discovered yet. This theory appears to be held up by the way that science has progressed over the past half-millennium: we keep arriving at new theories that often become accepted as the “true” explanation for something, yet eventually all of these theories end up being overturned or modified or replaced by something else. You can see this particularly well illustrated in the development of models of the atom. Elementary school students are still taught the simpler Bohr model, which showed electrons orbiting a nucleus in concentric rings or “shells,” yet those of us who have had higher-level science classes know that shells are actually much less defined and that figuring out exactly where an electron is within a shell is almost impossible. (I don’t claim to know my physics very well, so I might be a little off there, but you get the idea.) Mankind, in its insatiable desire for increased order, reason, and stability, seeks greater knowledge in order to ward off uncertainty (explanations based upon faith or other principles that aren’t logically substantiated). This concept is important in understanding some of my later conclusions.

The second idea that I mentioned in my first journal entry was the concept that “all facts are simply collectively-held opinions.” Each individual has his or her personal beliefs about what is true, and those beliefs are blended into a society’s idea of common sense, things that everyone should know as truth. Common sense forms one part of the larger “collective knowledge,” which is a broader collection of a society’s most commonly held beliefs on what is true. To become a part of the collective knowledge, an idea simply has to gain traction to the point where it eventually becomes impossible not to accept. Historically, it has never been easy for an idea to go from a thought in someone’s mind to being generally accepted, but the amount of time it takes has become shorter as communication has become faster and people have become more numerous, to the point where collective knowledge almost seems to change too quickly. In the past, it has always been the role of religion to check the power of science and intellectualism by freezing a snapshot of collective knowledge at a certain moment and requiring followers to believe in that older perception of the world even when it started to become out-of-date. This was not necessarily a bad thing - it is similar to the way that software is released today. Software gets packaged and prepared and feature-frozen into a release - a version of the application that users can depend on to work well and be at least somewhat backwards-compatible with older versions. Users willing to live closer to the bleeding edge can upgrade more often to beta or alpha releases, which are often less stable and more prone to causing problems. If we think of religion as a software company, the human perception of the world as a piece of software, and mankind as one giant user, then this metaphor makes sense. In earlier days, mankind would upgrade its software only when forced to. Later, after the Protestant Reformation, new ideas came up faster and mankind upgraded in a way similar to how people upgrade today - not too often, but often enough that there is progress. Now, however, our upgrade speed is getting a little scary. We’re past using beta and alpha releases now - many of us have advanced to using highly unstable, daily snapshots of the latest philosophical software, code that is supposed to be only used by developers (philosophers) and not the general public. Today, new scientific and technological breakthroughs are coming so fast that the influx of new knowledge is becoming hard for society to comprehend. Some have even elected to stick with older, stabler versions of our philosophical software, waiting to see which snapshot becomes a final release. Unfortunately, now that religion has retreated in a major way from the huge role that it used to play in our lives, there might never be another final release.

I digressed a bit there - that chunk about religion wasn’t in my original entry, but it did come up a few times later on in other writings for that class. The final major part of my first journal entry (and the last thing that I’ll talk about tonight since I’m getting tired) was about mankind’s tendencies. (Let me note quickly that when I make these broad generalizations about mankind and religion and such, I know that there are exceptions. All of this is only my perspective…for all I know it could be completely wrong.) Let’s go back to the idea of the fundamental truths. For quite a long time, humans were unable to grasp them, and so we came up with the concept of faith and applied it to beliefs that usually only half-explained phenomena they meant to describe. I find it interesting that we humans have such a strange tendency (compared to other animals) to need to find reasons and explanations for everything that happens to us. When a reason doesn’t exist, we invent one to use as a placeholder until we can find a better one, and we have faith in its truth to mask our uncertainty. This faith is often reinforced by our inherently chaotic world and universe, in which the infinite number of reactions and events occuring all at once is bound to produce strange, inexplicable anomalies that become known as “acts of God” or of some other higher being. Sometimes, no other explanation is found (though, of course, due to humans’ natural imperfection, not having an explanation doesn’t mean that there isn’t one waiting to be found), but usually, we come up with a more rational reason for a phenomenon eventually.

What I think that my analysis of faith above shows is that the only way to understand ourselves is to study ourselves from the most objective perspective possible. We have to zoom out and look at ourselves as we would tiny bacteria wiggling around on a dirt clod. Unfortunately, in doing this we’re trying to examine something (our own minds) objectively that we ourselves are stuck inside. Our conclusions, therefore, are always subject to our specimens, making them impossible to verify exactly. So I guess there really is no truth when it comes to self-analysis - we can only come as close as we possibly can. Personally, I feel that my philosophy has taken me closer than anything else I’ve ever believed in has. I think that I have begun to remove some of the subjectivity involved in examining the human mind by trying to accept some of the things that many are unable to deal with, such as the idea that, in a chaotic world, things really do sometimes occur without any discernible reason. The key word there is “discernible” - there might be a reason, but it’s so infinitely complex that it is beyond our limited ability to comprehend it. Even when faced with the incredible challenges of coming up with valid reasons for some of the most complex phenomena, however, we still strive to move forward. As maybe you’ve inferred from my entry so far, I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the traditional Christian sense. However, if there’s anything that makes me think that there must be some kind of higher power out there, it’s that tendency of mankind that I described before: the desire for order, normalcy, and reasoned explanations for the unknown. Unlike every other being we have so far discovered, we strive to create structure from chaos. We’re different - perhaps God is what made us that way.

I’ll talk about all of this more in the future. For now, I always appreciate any comments you have, whether or not you agree with me. *falls into bed*

This entry was frickin’ long!