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Where do we go

I’m not too sure where to start...I don’t even know what I want to say. A great desire to scream, but I have no mouth. I can’t seem to displace the time I spent with you. I can’t seem to shake off the feeling that the intensity of how I felt back then is something I cannot replace or get over. I want to get over it, tarnish the moment we had even though I said that I would rather live in pain than the regret not living the moment. But now I feel like I am regretting having lived the moment at all. It was beautiful but that beauty is stunning me from growing up. I want to spoil it because I have no means of containing it. Without me even realizing it, just when I thought days past remains where they are supposed to be, the air dampens as toxic seeps out through unsealed holes and poisons me. Let me breathe, let me live. Give me the tools to break what was once priceless to me; release me from its invincible chains that shackle me from moving forward with the people I love; there they go towards a brighter future and here I am a prisoner of my past. A lonely road awaits me. 

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pieces 

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Certainty in Reason

I recently started on a podcast series called Philosophize This! which comprises of a series of 30 minute-long episodes delving into the ideas of classic and modern philosophers. One particular episode struck a chord in me. It surrounded the idea of reason as a basis for culture, beliefs, and meaning in modern society. The episode detailed about the consequences wrought about this mode of thinking - the eradication of values, ethics, and meaning - and juxtaposed it to the pre-Darwinistic ideologies. It is a stark reminder of the increasingly bleak world that is arising and will continue to emerge as society’s reliance on reason, and the lack thereof on faith, grows. The symptoms are evidently displayed by younger generations’ dwelling in nihilistic tendencies caused by the void of meaning attributed to their life. We become so certain and disillusioned by the workings of our mind that we cease to seek or be open to the myriad of opinions available to a problems besides reason. We cease to be tolerant of other beliefs that oppose our one true God that is reason. While the endeavor for solutions are natural when faced with philosophical problems, Leo Strauss reminds us that where “there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems”. Haughtily subjugating ourselves to beliefs that are delimited by our human understanding would be prideful ignorance. Perhaps the words of Alexandre Kojève rings no truer here when he said that “the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution”. Then again, it may be that the refusal to adhere to certainty itself becomes a problematic character of philosophy. While it is impossible to know for certain whether all possible options have been revealed and analysed to a satisfactory degree, when the situation begets an answer, we are propelled to make a decision and cannot make do time for the quest any longer. 

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Paradox of Happiness [P2]

The fact that humans are able to plan and self-reflect on the short-term and long-term hedonic benefits of our actions does not necessarily mean that these strategies to deliberately maximise happiness are advisable. Nevertheless, the notion that happiness should be pursued as an ultimate goal in life has been echoed by important figures throughout history and served as a core motivation for many individuals in their decisions. Given the high importance people have assigned to happiness, the assumption that people seek happiness is hardly controversial. The complicity arises when the idea that people should consciously make an effort to become happier arises. While it is logical to claim that individuals should strive to be happier, intentionally pursuing happiness is ineffectual and will negatively affect one’s goal to achieving happiness. Normative concepts of happiness as embodying virtues will be set aside in this essay, particularly objective list theory, as they tend to make the paradoxes true by definition. Instead, this essay will focus on the evaluative concept of happiness as subjective well-being when linking it to paradoxes of happiness, particularly on that of hedonism or pleasure as the ultimate good in life. 

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Paradox of Happiness

When you seek happiness, you will not find it. This is the adage known as the Paradox of Happiness. However, one’s interpretation of this paradox differs based on their conception of happiness itself. Mike Martin distinguished several paradoxes of happiness in attempt to uncover the various relationships between the paradox of happiness with sources of happiness by categorising them into 4 main categoies - the paradoxes of aim, paradoxes of results, paradoxes of attitude, and the paradoxes of freedom. While all these paradoxes highlight important incongruities that exist within each source or pathway to happiness, Martin argues that they are partial truths and inadequate as a basis for denying that happiness or their constituents should be abandoned because of these insights. He further argues that happiness is an important dimension of a good life and that it would be beneficial for us to periodically review our primary endeavours and relationships to appreciate their meaning and decide on whether they are making us happy. He does this under the optimistic standpoint that humans often possess the capability to coherently reason their attempts to achieve well-being and introspect correctly on whether a certain activity, justified value, or relationship is meaningful. I will argue that Martin’s argument on the paradox of happiness being half-truths based on this justification is inadequate and propose the revised version that the paradox of happiness holds greater truth than that described by Martin because the periodic evaluation or introspection into our current constituents of happiness are often unreliable in assessing whether they are making us happy enough and would adversely affect our state of happiness. Lastly, I will defend this thesis against the counterargument that a general lack of reflection will cause individuals to fail to recognise and appreciate pleasurable experiences to provide them with maximum utilities. 

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Death

“The tragic of death is a product of our imagination.”

Death is commonly viewed as an intrinsic bad due to its deprivation of the good of life’s constituents. However, there are several shortcomings of this postulation. 

Firstly, there is the absence of the element of subjectivity in the argument. A man who has already been stripped of the constituents of life preconceived as good and destined to suffer from a terminal illness for his remaining time alive might view death as a better alternative than his current situation at that point of time as compared to a perfectly healthy individual. 

Secondly, there are inconsistencies in the argument if posthumous death is juxtaposed with one’s pre-natal abyss. The absence of life prior to birth is not usually perceived as a bad unlike death. However, the elusive reason for this will be further elaborated later. 

Lastly, the fact that temporary suspension of life is not regarded as a misfortune like death serves as an inconsistency for the argument. Like death, if the loss of the opportunity to take pleasure in the desirability of life is seen as bad, it would be logically consistent to assume the same for temporary suspensions of life even if the conscious lifespan is unaffected.   

Now, to fill up the gaps present in the postulation above, we can derive a solution by taking into account the root cause of inconsistency with reference to the three types of shortcomings stated above - the absence of temporal relation or the time factor in its argument. The conception that death is bad does not stem from the loss of life which is a preordained good but the fact that the state of a person at a point of time is reduced to one of lesser capacity to enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer. It is arbitrary to ascribe good and evil that befalls a man to non-relational properties at particular times. In other words, it is not the corpse that we pity, rather it is the man who was once the corpse. To illustrate this point, take the example of a relatively intellectual man who had the mishap of being diagnosed with a disease that degrades his mental state to that of an infant. This deemed him no longer capable of taking on mental tasks with the same prowess as he once could. At this point, the tragic is not attributed to his current state of being an infant, for he could he completely contented in his current state of infantility, but to the man whom he was before he was affected by the disease. 

There lies the philosophical danger of hedonistic ideals in perceiving an existence as essentially riddled with open-ended possibilities. It is based on this assumption that death, regardless of the time at which it arrives, is ultimately bad as it stripes us of what is opportunistically grossly good. If life is perceived to have no limit to the amount of good it can give, the bad will always be in store for us. This might actually be far from the truth and maybe an alternate way of thinking might serve as a better adaptive model for facing our mortality even if it is not. While I try to argue my point here, I note that I am aware of the theological aspects that I am introducing. Nevertheless, its ideals could actually be usefully adapted. We should not perceive it as a tragedy when good things are taken away from us but as a natural fate of all good things that are given to us. When we savour the taste of chocolate, it would be unusual and an unnecessarily pain for us to feel that it is evil that the pleasure should end when we finish the chocolate. The overall activity of consuming the chocolate is wholly still an ultimate good in the hedonistic sense. Taking into account the pain of no longer being able to enjoy that chocolate after eating it would just diminish its overall pleasure. Hence, there is no benefit in perceiving the end of good things as a bad thing. Taking this back to the idea that death is bad as it takes away the good things still possible in life, there is not really a good reason why people should delve into this belief especially if pleasure is their ultimate aim in life. 

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Reflection on The Great Derangement Part 3: How now brown cow?

Approaching the issue via the moral perspective has always struck me as the excalibur of resolving the issue, the deux ex machina when all other options are lost, the pillar to which I hinge all my hope of humanity. But Ghosh tells me otherwise, stating 3 reasons why this alternative would not work as if they were elementary flawed to begin with. Firstly, the fossil fuel companies are unaffected by the moral imperatives of preserving the world. Infused by neo-liberalistic, capitalistic, industrialism, it is obvious they will not readily give out, or even have to, their armaments which have been the roaring engines of global economies. Fossil fuel is power. And power moves the world. Why give up this power, don’t you trust that I use can this power to even eradicate global warming? The fact that the benefits wrought of capitalism and globalisation are unprecedented deems us unable to imagine a world without their gears at play. Taking away our toys is seen as incapacitating and backward moving, and that is against the whole idea of capitalism (growth growth growth). Secondly, using the moral imperative as a tool to promote climate change action might become a double edged sword to the advocates themselves. The backlash can come be presented in a form of contradictory perspective when contorted by the deniers. “This person says he wants to stop global warming, but look at him he has 10 lightbulbs in his house, and even has a television!”. It is not the most ideal frontier to approach the debate from. Thirdly, morality is not seen the same way in different countries. Which perspective should we adopt if we were to introduce it into the debate? Should western christened values be normed given their historical standing as world leaders? 

This book is great and a definite recommend for people who are interested in climate change. It brings in mind-blowing concepts about climate change which deviates from the conventional scientific and political stratagems of arguments but remains paramount and critically overlooked in the climate change debate. 

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Reflection on The Great Derangement Part 2: Wishful thinking

Ghosh delves into the details of history - particularly reviewing on the relationship between asian colonisation and climate change. It’s a very interesting notion he brought up that the western way of living is unsustainable, and that colonisation probably hindered the rate at which the climate situation worsened, quoting Gandhi’s pronouncement on industrial capitalism: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the West. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts”. Sadly, his ghastly pronouncements would lead to his assassination afterwards as Gandhi’s political enemies sought to characterise him as a man who wanted to weaken India. Although this happened almost a century ago, the effects of modernity and capitalistic mindsets of immortality persists today with China ending their one-child policy and India’s increasingly expanding population. Capitalism promises to continually improve our standards of living, yet this promise is empty. Not everyone can enjoy an air-con or own an automobile, but we continue to live in this great derangement. 

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Reflection on The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh Part 1: Climate Change on speed

Ghosh is, as in my most acute and personal description, the product of Greta, Yuval, and acid mixed in a cauldron. His take on climate change goes beyond the conventional means of scientific approach, indeed he hints dissatisfaction towards the limitations of the scientific method of illuminating climate change, coining Latour in his position where the theory of social ‘partitioning’ occurs. Culture and nature are hypothesised to be communally separated entities, which explains the intentional segregation of scientific fiction and fiction. To create ‘neatness’, as said by Ghosh, in environment of amalgamated concepts, there was a necessity for sciences, or nature, to be categorised in a separate compartment. Ghost clearly explained the cause of this fissure in a passage, “Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability. But what does probability have to do with fiction? The answer is: Everything. ...probability is [according to Ian Hacking] a “manner of conceiving a world constituted without our bring aware of it”. Constrained by the walls of linguistics, we struggle to grasp what is presented in front of us. The mystery of the nonhuman agents and our difficulty in grasping them with renewed recognition is beyond the capacity of language. The anthropocene (which even tumblr hasn’t added to their dictionary of words) is difficult for the human race, the experts of the human word on which we base our intellect on,  as it is a nonhuman form that we have yet to position with adequate clarity in our, perhaps unreliable, world fo words. We might need to think, as Ghosh puts it, of “hybrid forms” that utilises the interpretative flexibility of the arts to address the “intransigent way the Anthropocene resists literary fiction...ultimately in its resistance to language itself”.

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Neither Civil Nor Servant Leadership Lessons

1) Eunuch’s disease 

There are 3 layers of oraganizational management theorized in the book, the workers, the eunuch and the emperor. Eunuchs are paper pushers and affect the productivity of workers. If the emperor does not keep a close scrutiny of the eunuch’s influence downwards to the workers, he risks contracting the disease and loses productivity of the workers, remaining distracted by the preoccupations and entertainments of these staffers. Always be aware and don’t remain blind-sided to the day-to-day operations of the organization.

2) Relational leadership

Fostering close relationships with those under you goes a long way. Most workers are not motivated by the pay but by intrinsic factors such as appreciation and recognition. Get to know those who work for you and get that personal touch, acknowledge their efforts, and you will see that the fruits that they bear turn out to be sweeter. 

3) Responsibility and ownership

If you don’t back your staff, they won’t have the confidence to follow through with their tasks as they do not know whether their boss had their backs. My time in the SAF showed me the importance of this (ahemmm AOP) where you felt betrayed (okay maybe too strong a word, maybe abandoned) by your superiors when you needed their support the most. Standing behind your decisions and your subordinates goes a long way to attain their trust and confidence in their work. 

Bonus point that is unrelated to leadership. 

4) Boldness and creativity of a maverick 

Where most people are afraid to put their head on the chopping board, take the initiative and spearhead the project if you believe in it. Jurong island amalgamation, biopolis biomedical science R&D, and other successful projects in the span of Philip Yeo’s career serve as inspirational examples. Quoting Job’s commencement speech at Stanford, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. 

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Crooked

In a clean, dim-lighted place, there lived a man with a crooked nose who wore a chained mail everywhere he went. He couldn’t recall the last time he took off the mail. He did remember the great discomfort he went through during the first few weeks of his new accustom. However, as the months flew by and months grew into years, the mail on his body slowly seemed less of a burden of a foreign armament and more of a mere extension of his body.

While he couldn’t remember how long this has been going on for, he could recall vividly the reason why he decided done on the mail.

TBC

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Active Denial of Nihilism

Lately, I’ve been feeling quite conflicted with my mode of thinking. I fear that I am slowly becoming too complacent with my attitude towards my studies. Tendencies of procrastination under the veil of self-restoration and the excuse of constructive me-time slowly but surely grows more apparent in my lifestyle as I slowly sense a shift of priorities within me. 

I have been thinking much about the direction which I am currently cursoring my life towards, whether I would ultimately be contented if my lilo floats to the island which I have set course for. If truth be told, for my own sake, I foresee that my eyes will remain fixed on the periscope looking out for alternative destinations as long as I continue cruising around the vast sea of life. 

Academy of Idea philosophical, part self-motivational, videos never fail to impact me. One video of theirs that I watched today engendered a particularly profound epiphany of sorts for me. Weeks back, I had a lucid dream where I was shifting books and furniture around a multi-tiered glass castle. Each tier of the castle represented memories of a specific period of my time except for the highest tier which represented my future. Altering the arrangements of each tier of the castle morphs the future tier through dynamic relationships seemingly beyond my comprehension and control. In relation of my dream to the video by Academy of Ideas is the idea of cognitive reframing that was the central theorem encapsulating the video. Cognitive reframing, as pointed out by the video, can be utilised as a psychological tool to affect the way we view and relate to our past experiences (both bad and good) which will consequently affect our perspectives on the future and attitudes. 

Being a religiously growing person (it would be immodest of me to presume myself to be fully religious if I were to be completely honest with my conflicting opinions at the moment), I tend to attribute a portion of my thoughts to the hand of God in my experiences. While this coincidence of content can most definitely be argued in a ultra-rational viewpoint that I was self-aware of this concept before the video was presented to me, the religious part of me still persists to intervene by justifying that the birth of the idea would not have been possible without the initial God’s will. Two ways to look at it, maybe more if I were to be ostentatious about it. 

I have been reading a lot of blogs curated by expats living in Korea for a long time. I am not too sure yet of my motives and intents behind doing this, for recently I have been developing an unusually great interest in the culture of korea, particularly on the cultural tuck-of-war occurring between Confucianist-misogynistic and feministic ideals, and the nature of nationalism in South Korea. I would hypothesise that this could be due to the recent trip to the country but previous experiences do not tally. Well, let’s see where this lilo takes me. 

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Pliant Personality

“Man excels all animals even in his ability to be trained”

If I keep moving, they won't know I'll morph to someone else What they throw at me's too slow I'll morph to someone else I'm just a ghost I'll morph to someone else Defense mechanism mode

Took MBTI test again today after a year. Resulted in ENTJ personality type, with the extroverted portion increasing to 68%. Feels like a sham though. I have a vague memory of a notion that hypothesises the inability of our selves to truly comprehend your own reflection on the mirror and see it in the same manner as how we see others. Thus, we are formless in our own image, mediums that are can be morphed into our own self perceptions. “I think, therefore I am.” However, this mode of thinking could just be an idiosyncratic part that defines me, which would be coherent with the results showing that I was 51% for my thinking and Judging types (not here not there, possibly anywhere). 

A few punch in the guts (which Daniel easily empathises with) followed after scrutinising a few other types. Is it right to regret my actions? Is there a purpose of regretting anything? Could I have done things differently? Freedom takes on the form of chains that bind me. 

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My Broken Compass

Part I: Inside Your Mind

“

And my wife inquired of understanding But of course, my dear, you can’t She said, “How can I relate to somebody who doesn’t speak? I feel like I’m just treading water

“ - Antichrist

While Antichrist seems to be referencing (in part) her lack of understanding of him, Inside Your Mind is flipped the other way around, with Matty going a step further to try and understand his (hopefully future) wife.

It is easy to juxtapose romance with toxic tendencies. A seemingly romantic obsession with figuring out a lover’s mind can easily become an abusive mindset of possessiveness and entitlement. Is the act of figuring out a lover’s mind unjust when the motive is to understand the other? Under the assumption that the motive remains constantly as such, what should the limit, if any, be to such motives?

Part II: Robbers

“

Now if you never shoot, you'll never know And if you never eat, you'll never grow You've got a pretty kinda dirty face When she's leaving your home she's begging you, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay

Well, now that you've got your gun It's much harder now the police have come Now shoot him if it's what you're worth But if you just take off your mask To find out that everything's gone wrong, wrong, wrong Now everybody's dead And they're driving past my old school And he's got his gun, he's got his suit on She says, babe, you look so cold, you look so cold, you look so cold You look so cold, you look so cold, you look so cold

“ - Robbers

An over-analysed interpretation of the possibly literally-intended lyrics would be that of 2 lovers robbing each other of new things to come by refusing to let their love die off and for each other to move on.

The police coming symbolizes reality coming, the dangers of the world , how hard it is to keep the love under the circumstances that are presented to them. Shooting the gun is seen as a mercy killing on the partner’s part, the deliberate act of release and freeing, letting him/her roam free to experience other things. Take off your mask stop your pretence that this relationship that’s destined to doom will do us any good. It’s all wrong in the first place, and with the police here we should start seeing things as they really are.

She’s withheld the act of mercy killing for so long, killing off and robbing him of all the new things that could’ve come. The police is driving past his old school in search of him, reality is creeping in and he knows he has to face it. He dresses up in a suit because he is older and grown up and a part of reality, he isn’t the hopeless dreamer he used to be. He gets his gun ready. The lover sees him and he is hurt and jaded and sad to the world now … he seems fine on the outside but he is cold.. and the irony is she was the one who made his temperature drop.

I kinda get the feeling that she might be grateful to him for being the one that takes up the gun and pulls the trigger in place of her. She won’t need to live with the regret and guilt of committing that act and is thankful that he takes up that morbid task instead. I find a paradoxical irony in this because if you really care about someone, you’ll forgo personal interests to let him and, eventually yourself, to move on to not rob new things to come from them. Yet, there’s a contradictory motivation to want to shower this person with all the care and love that you feel for them. The act of suppression and act of giving both stem from the same motive. When should one precede over the other?

Part III: Introspection

Perhaps what my friend said holds some truth, that ‘time waits for no man’. The worst position to place oneself in is to constantly second guess between the greater value of each decision other the other and never stay convicted to any of them. Seems like there is no hard and fast rule to how we deal with a relationship, no rights and wrongs, but only decisions, results, and decisions again. Do what feels right to your heart, it is impossible and redundant to consider to such great detail the consequences of each step. Time is short and might move along without you if you stay stagnant on the spot. You won’t know how things might turn out, no matter how much analysis is done.

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Umi ga Kikoeru (1993) - Tomomi Mochizuki

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lazy 

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Cyborg

“

Right now you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you never wanted to feel anything and maybe it’s not me you want to be speak about these things but feel something you obviously did. Look you had a beautiful friendship, maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste! Have I spoken out of turn? Then I’ll say one more thing it'll clear the air. I may have come close but I never had what you two have. Something always held me back, her stood in the way. How you live your life is your business just remember our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once and before you know it your hearts worn out and as for your body there comes a point when no one looks at it much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow, pain don't kill it and with it the joy you felt.

“