Philosophy

Book: Less Than Nothing

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Less Than Nothing

I ran into this book over Christmas vacation and want to read it. 1000 pages and all. Of course I found myself in the philosophy section. The difficulty in all this is that I couldn’t actually tell you what distinguishes Hegel from any other philosopher, and I don’t have the breadth of understanding in philosophy that would be best for reading this book. No matter. Why not start in the deep end? And why such interest? Besides a fact I can not currently explain – that philosophy holds a dear place in my heart – this author is just good: precise word choice, varied/rhythmic sentence structure, and style/personality which permeates/soaks through his thoughts (from my reading of the first few pages and from the reviews of others). Written style tends to compel me as much as content itself. So, should I actually read this book or learn about Hegel (or discover that my previous claims were wrong), I will post back.

Ethical, Moral

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I started an “Ethics and Education” class the other day. It is pretty philosophical. My problem so far is what is “ethics” and what is “moral” or “morality”? I spent a decent part of the class just looking up these terms in my Merriam Webster app. It appears that these two terms are, at a high level, interchangeable and mean nothing more than a preferred standard of behavior. This immediately begs a few questions. Who is doing the preferring? Presumably this is the largest part of society which may mean nothing more than the noisiest part of society. And then we have to ask what is the source of their standard of behavior? I believe it’s in answering the second question that the can of worms opens. One obvious difficulty could be that your source is your religion and it is simply not a religion that your neighbor shares with you so your morality is different. Then there’s C.S. Lewis’ idea that, at base, all morality’s are the same. That’s a really nice, neat, and tidy idea. I like it, and I do actually agree with it. Of course, there is more than “the base” and it’s when you progress further in your thought, or attempt to apply your theory that things get messy.

More to come. I hope to explore ethics/morality more.