Updates from August, 2010

  • Degree of Comparison

    j_ling 12:24 am on August 22, 2010 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags:

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the sea­son of Light, it was the sea­son of Dark­ness, it was the spring of hope, it was the win­ter of despair, we had every­thing before us, we had noth­ing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nois­i­est author­i­ties insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superla­tive degree of com­par­i­son only.

    - Charles Dick­ens, A Tale of Two Cities

     
  • Theories of Experience

    j_ling 11:18 pm on April 14, 2010 | 1 comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    So here I am, one night away from my last day of classes as an under­grad­u­ate, with piles of work to fin­ish up…but I really really want to share one thing…before the end of of an era: A beau­ti­ful pas­sage on expe­ri­ence and the human condition.

    The truth of expe­ri­ence always con­tains an ori­en­ta­tion towards new expe­ri­ence. That is why a per­son who is called ‘expe­ri­enced’ has become such not only through expe­ri­ences, but is also open to new expe­ri­ences. The per­fec­tion of his expe­ri­ence, the per­fect form of what we call ‘expe­ri­enced’, does not con­sist in the fact that some­one already knows every­thing and knows bet­ter than any­one else. Rather, the expe­ri­enced per­son proves to be, on the con­trary, some­one who is rad­i­cally undog­matic; who, because of the many expe­ri­ences he has had and the knowl­edge he has drawn from them is par­tic­u­larly well equipped to have new expe­ri­ences and to learn from them.

    The dialec­tic of expe­ri­ence has its own ful­fill­ment not in defin­i­tive knowl­edge, but in that open­ness to expe­ri­ence that is encour­aged by expe­ri­ence itself. But then this gives the con­cept of expe­ri­ence that we are con­cerned with here a qual­i­ta­tively new ele­ment. It refers not only to expe­ri­ence in the sense of the infor­ma­tion that this or that thing gives us. It is that expe­ri­ence which must con­stantly be acquired and from which none can be exempt. Expe­ri­ence here is some­thing that is part of the his­tor­i­cal nature of man. Although in bring­ing up chil­dren, for exam­ple, par­ents may try to spare them cer­tain expe­ri­ences, expe­ri­ence as a whole is not a thing that any­one can be spared. Rather, expe­ri­ence in this sense involves inevitably many dis­ap­point­ments of one’s expec­ta­tions and only thus is expe­ri­ence acquired. That expe­ri­ence refers chiefly to painful and dis­agree­able expe­ri­ences does not mean that we are being espe­cially pes­simistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through neg­a­tive instances do we acquire new expe­ri­ences, as Bacon saw.

    Every expe­ri­ence wor­thy of the name runs counter to our expec­ta­tion. Thus the his­tor­i­cal nature of man con­tains as an essen­tial ele­ment a fun­da­men­tal neg­a­tiv­ity that emerges in the rela­tion between expe­ri­ence and insight. Insight is more than the knowl­edge of this or that sit­u­a­tion. It always involves an escape from some­thing that had deceived us and held us cap­tive. Thus insight always involves an ele­ment of self-knowledge and con­sti­tutes a nec­es­sary side of what we call expe­ri­ence in the proper sense. Insight is some­thing to which we come. It too is ulti­mately part of the nature of a man, ie to be dis­cern­ing and insightful.

    - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Chap­ter: Analy­sis of effective-historical con­scious­ness, ‘The Con­cept of Expe­ri­ence and the Essence of Hermeneu­ti­cal Experience’)

    Com­plex. Intrigu­ing. Rad­i­cally undog­matic. Expe­ri­ence with purpose.

    Here’s to — not the end — but the con­tin­u­a­tion of some­thing purposeful.

     
  • What is in a degree?

    j_ling 11:43 pm on April 6, 2010 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags:

    You are edu­cated. Your cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative.

    Think of it as your ticket to change the world. — Tom Browkaw

     
  • At the end of the day...

    j_ling 9:14 pm on January 16, 2010 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    (from: http://tinyurl.com/yey35nv)


     
c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
esc
cancel