So, despite being a humanities student, this evening I decided to do some math. This past week, I've read 4 books, 9 essays and various miscellania, totalling a grand total of approximately 683 pages.
683. Think about it for a minute.
That's a lot of pages, and a lot more words. My entire head is filled with words. Not fun words either. These are words like "vicissitudes," "pictographic," and "totemism."
Normally, I love to read and I don't mind reading academic writing and philosophy, but even I am reaching capacity. I walk around bleary-eyed, with an IV of overpriced-yet-always-crappy campus coffee, carrying heavy books with titles like "Being and Time" and "Identity and Violence." I read on the bus. I read while I'm in line at the grocery. I read at the gym. I'd read while I was sleeping if I could just figure out how to work that out.
So you know what I mean, here's an example. This passage part of an essay I read this week for my Philosophy (with a capital P, meaning, "serious intellectual stuff happens here") Class:
"If a man holds some course of action to be the best one, everything considered, or the right one, or the thing he ought to do, and yet does something else, he acts incontinently. But I would also say he acts incontinently provided he holds some available course of action to be better on the whole than the one he takes; or that, as between some other course of action which he believes open to him and the action he performs, he judges that he ought to perform the other. In other words, comparative judgements suffice for incontinence. We may now characterize an action that reveals weakness of the will or incontinence:
D. In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: (a) the agent does x intentionally; (b) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and (c) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.
There seem to be incontinent actions in this sense. The difficulty is that their existence challenges another doctrine that has an air of self-evidence: that, in so far as a person acts intentionally he acts, as Aquinas puts it, in the light of some imagined good. This view does not, as it stands, directly contradict the claim that there are incontinent actions. But it is hard to deny that the considerations that recommend this view recommend also a relativized version: in so far as a person acts intentionally he acts in the light of what he imagines (judges) to be the better."
That passage is from an essay by Donald Davidson called, "Is Weakness of the Will Possible?" Um, yeah, I'd say so. I do things all the time that are clearly, in my mind, opposed to my own best interest. Like today, I was eating Thai food for lunch and I came across something that looked like a very spicy pepper. I saw it and thought, "that's probably pretty damn spicy." And you can probably guess what happened next. Yeah, I ate it. My head turned bright red and practically exploded. But whatever, maybe the rest of you are always rational and continent beings.
Now imagine 683 pages very muck akin to the above quoted nonsense.
(Okay, not all of it is that bad. Some of it is actually quite interesting, but I'm going for dramatic effect here.)
See what I mean? My head is full of words and they are starting to lose their meaning. Which is a bad thing since the reason we use words is to convey some sense of meaning. I have no idea what will happen to me in a few weeks when I'll have to stop reading, and write something.
