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Wednesday, 2nd of April 2025
08:20
Mohsits as Protestant analogues. Heaven dispenses an order that humans can follow to become moral and happy; interesting that this order expresses consequentialism as opposed to a deontological conception of moral law (as in Divine Command).
14:16
'A Mencian approach to integrating your cognitive and emotional sides would be to take note of your emotional responses and then strive to change them for the better. Use your mind to cultivate your emotions. Become aware of what triggers your emotions and reactions on a daily basis. What are the patterened habits, the entrenched narratives, through which you perceive the world?'
Tuesday, 8th of April 2025
15:02
'We experience the very same reality differently from those who haven't cultivated the same interests. But how often do we think of deliberately applying these principles of cultivation to other, commonplace aspects of our lives so that they can be lived with more expansiveness too? Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet, made famous the concept of a flâneur: a person who would stroll the city streets observing and taking in, with great openness, all that he saw. If you take a walk with a toddler, or a dog, or your grandmother, you'll notice that they experience the walk differently than you do. The child will stop and gaze raptly at every rock and bug; the dog is tuned into an entire vibrating world of scent; your grandmother might be an avid gardener who names every flower or tree that you see. A walk with someone who has a different perspective on the world can allow you to step outside your normal patterns and to see the world not just differently but also with incredible openness. Through his or her eyes, a casual walk becomes imbued with greater depth and freshness. You read your surroundings differently; new dimensions become visible to you.'
15:05
Interesting conversation on mindset here, reminds me of Plato's 'Evil is a disorder of the soul caused by ignorance.' Here it's not ignorance as such, but a permissible differentiation, and traversing of that difference that is born of distinction:
'What Zhuangzi would say, though, is that rigid distinctions lead to such situations in the first place. If you really were training yourself to flow with the Way, you wouldn't be a robber. You wouldn't kill anyone. A robber thinks in terms of distinctions from the start: he thinks in terms of my stuff, their stuff, I want this, I'll take that. Someone who kills another is interrupting the flow of the transformation of things by prematurely ending life. For Zhuangzi, the argument against stealing, or killing, wouldn't stem from the fact that they are immoral acts, but that they arise from making rigid distinctions.'
Much to think on.
Sunday, 20th of April 2025
17:16
Kierkegaard from some random googling: ". . . the equation of righteousness with the middle way is a sign of the world's contentedness with mediocrity." Pithy. Doctrine of the who? Aristotle and Zisi send their regards.
Monday, 21st of April 2025
16:51
I'm suicidal again. It's really bad this time, to the point I can't get the thoughts out of my head. I never understood what people meant when they described intrusive thoughts until this; I can't will my mind to think otherwise. It's an omnipresent film that colours everything my mind perceives. I'm just so tired and upset.
Every morning I stand near the tracks I have images of taking that step, or of myself ablaze in a remote forest clearing. I've had thoughts of self-immolation even when I was was very young. The thoughts haven't been this bad in a number of years, not since my last journal entry on the subject, but recently I just don't feel like anything has gone my way—none of this is how my life was meant to go. It makes me cry and I feel so helpless.
I was up last night breathless and scared. I need it to stop, I can't take it, I can't. There's nobody I can turn to because everyone that cared about me is gone. They all left me and I don't know why. I can feel the time limit on my head as real as the beating of my heart or the rise and fall of my breath—the last of which can't be far off.
I'm just so upset.
Wednesday, 23rd of April 2025
17:49
Perhaps the relegation of ethics as discourse almost entirely into the sphere of hypotheticals has lead to a passive form of individual ethical stagnation.
When the premise of any given moral dilemma itself is excised from our immediate worldly concerns and knowledge in order to highlight the blacks and whites of a situation—a binary division on which we live, in reality, at the interstice—one is conditioned to view oneself as an individual to whom such conversations don't exactly apply, because reality can't be so black and white. Such moral judgements can't apply to us, surely? No, our ethical concerns are abstract, distant, like whether a consumer ought (or ought not, one might suppose) have a lick of ethical consideration upon buying produce in a world fraught with questions regarding the rights of animals, or of the modern labour economy, for instance. But we can't just not buy produce, certainly. That's a hypothetical that doesn't account for this and that, it doesn't speak to character!
It's interesting in that once the ethical discussion is centred around such hypotheticals, the ineffectiveness of them in reasonably guiding moral behaviour in the day-to-day is precisely the get out of jail free card that permits moral laziness. People do not offer a counterfactual or seek to cultivate their ethical considerations otherwise, no, they merely go back to intuiting.
When all ethical behaviour is framed through such 'what one ought do' situations, and ones that rarely actually arise in our day to day lives at that, it's hard to think of ourselves as ethical agents at all, whether one is engaging with the hypotheticals on their own terms or not, and thusly, we do not apply as much conscious thought as we could, or perhaps, should. An active, cultivated sense of morality in this sense is dissipated in its abstraction and externalisation.
On the other side of the equation, virtue ethics seems to centralise the moral nexus of consideration at the forefront of the mind when it comes to immediate living, it can't not do this.
Started on 'Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy,' Ivanhoe, Norden.
Wednesday, 2nd of April 2025
08:20
Mohsits as Protestant analogues. Heaven dispenses an order that humans can follow to become moral and happy; interesting that this order expresses consequentialism as opposed to a deontological conception of moral law (as in Divine Command).
14:16
'A Mencian approach to integrating your cognitive and emotional sides would be to take note of your emotional responses and then strive to change them for the better. Use your mind to cultivate your emotions. Become aware of what triggers your emotions and reactions on a daily basis. What are the patterened habits, the entrenched narratives, through which you perceive the world?'
Tuesday, 8th of April 2025
15:02
'We experience the very same reality differently from those who haven't cultivated the same interests. But how often do we think of deliberately applying these principles of cultivation to other, commonplace aspects of our lives so that they can be lived with more expansiveness too? Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet, made famous the concept of a flâneur: a person who would stroll the city streets observing and taking in, with great openness, all that he saw. If you take a walk with a toddler, or a dog, or your grandmother, you'll notice that they experience the walk differently than you do. The child will stop and gaze raptly at every rock and bug; the dog is tuned into an entire vibrating world of scent; your grandmother might be an avid gardener who names every flower or tree that you see. A walk with someone who has a different perspective on the world can allow you to step outside your normal patterns and to see the world not just differently but also with incredible openness. Through his or her eyes, a casual walk becomes imbued with greater depth and freshness. You read your surroundings differently; new dimensions become visible to you.'
15:05
Interesting conversation on mindset here, reminds me of Plato's 'Evil is a disorder of the soul caused by ignorance.' Here it's not ignorance as such, but a permissible differentiation, and traversing of that difference that is born of distinction:
'What Zhuangzi would say, though, is that rigid distinctions lead to such situations in the first place. If you really were training yourself to flow with the Way, you wouldn't be a robber. You wouldn't kill anyone. A robber thinks in terms of distinctions from the start: he thinks in terms of my stuff, their stuff, I want this, I'll take that. Someone who kills another is interrupting the flow of the transformation of things by prematurely ending life. For Zhuangzi, the argument against stealing, or killing, wouldn't stem from the fact that they are immoral acts, but that they arise from making rigid distinctions.'
Much to think on.
Sunday, 20th of April 2025
17:16
Kierkegaard from some random googling: ". . . the equation of righteousness with the middle way is a sign of the world's contentedness with mediocrity." Pithy. Doctrine of the who? Aristotle and Zisi send their regards.
Monday, 21st of April 2025
16:51
I'm suicidal again. It's really bad this time, to the point I can't get the thoughts out of my head. I never understood what people meant when they described intrusive thoughts until this; I can't will my mind to think otherwise. It's an omnipresent film that colours everything my mind perceives. I'm just so tired and upset.
Every morning I stand near the tracks I have images of taking that step, or of myself ablaze in a remote forest clearing. I've had thoughts of self-immolation even when I was was very young. The thoughts haven't been this bad in a number of years, not since my last journal entry on the subject, but recently I just don't feel like anything has gone my way—none of this is how my life was meant to go. It makes me cry and I feel so helpless.
I was up last night breathless and scared. I need it to stop, I can't take it, I can't. There's nobody I can turn to because everyone that cared about me is gone. They all left me and I don't know why. I can feel the time limit on my head as real as the beating of my heart or the rise and fall of my breath—the last of which can't be far off.
I'm just so upset.
Wednesday, 23rd of April 2025
17:49
Perhaps the relegation of ethics as discourse almost entirely into the sphere of hypotheticals has lead to a passive form of individual ethical stagnation.
When the premise of any given moral dilemma itself is excised from our immediate worldly concerns and knowledge in order to highlight the blacks and whites of a situation—a binary division on which we live, in reality, at the interstice—one is conditioned to view oneself as an individual to whom such conversations don't exactly apply, because reality can't be so black and white. Such moral judgements can't apply to us, surely? No, our ethical concerns are abstract, distant, like whether a consumer ought (or ought not, one might suppose) have a lick of ethical consideration upon buying produce in a world fraught with questions regarding the rights of animals, or of the modern labour economy, for instance. But we can't just not buy produce, certainly. That's a hypothetical that doesn't account for this and that, it doesn't speak to character!
It's interesting in that once the ethical discussion is centred around such hypotheticals, the ineffectiveness of them in reasonably guiding moral behaviour in the day-to-day is precisely the get out of jail free card that permits moral laziness. People do not offer a counterfactual or seek to cultivate their ethical considerations otherwise, no, they merely go back to intuiting.
When all ethical behaviour is framed through such 'what one ought do' situations, and ones that rarely actually arise in our day to day lives at that, it's hard to think of ourselves as ethical agents at all, whether one is engaging with the hypotheticals on their own terms or not, and thusly, we do not apply as much conscious thought as we could, or perhaps, should. An active, cultivated sense of morality in this sense is dissipated in its abstraction and externalisation.
On the other side of the equation, virtue ethics seems to centralise the moral nexus of consideration at the forefront of the mind when it comes to immediate living, it can't not do this.
Started on 'Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy,' Ivanhoe, Norden.