Author: Brett

A former Journalism and Mass Communication major at St. Bonaventure, Brett changed his major to philosophy sophomore year. Now, a recent graduate he's looking to continue his twin passions in writing and philosophy in whatever ways he can.

Philosophical Journalism

On By BrettIn Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

Philosophical journalists would be an interesting breed. I don’t mean bent, bearded men toting reporters’ notebooks and tape recorders stumbling across Capital Hill–although that would be interesting. Nor do I mean reporters jabbing politicians with barbs about how the latest bill violates Kant’s categorical imperative. Instead, I imagine people curious to see what other people think, people who like asking questions about our basic assumptions.

Today, I watched a documentary called the “Nature of Existence.” The filmmaker, named Roger Nygard, chronicles answers to those “big questions”–like the meaning of life–by interviewing people from around the world, including hard-core Indian ascetics, fiery evangelists, physicists, artists, and waitresses. Some dash off the questions with a humorous observation, others admit their own ignorance, and some weave stories substantiated by absolute conviction.

His methods are those of a journalist, but his focus is on first principles, the realm of the philosopher.

Scanning titles in the non-fiction and creative nonfiction shelves at bookstores, I realize modern readers still have a lot of questions. We like to pretend we are practical these days, zeroed in on the nuts and bolts of economics and applied science. But I feel we only use new disciplines to fill an age-old void: purpose and meaning.

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Water droplets

On By BrettIn Personal2 Comments

Sometimes I sit and watch water drops form and fall in the sink. One at a time. A small bead gathers on the faucet’s tip, its surface swarming with the water. Then it begins to fall, stretching into a strained neck that clips itself apart and separates into a falling droplet.

For those brief milliseconds, a world forms on the tense surface of the drop. It’s not attached to anything. An individual drop. At first I thought of the literal world of microbes and particulates swarming and whirring through the bead, like H.G. Wells describes at the opening of the War of the Worlds, “transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

The rotifers and paramecium stretch and move along the drop, but then their world shatters like falling glass and rolls down the drain.

I soon imagined a world like ours: skyscrapers, cathedrals, complicated ideas. The infusoria building houses, getting an education, pondering their future, framing an ethical code, “finding themselves,” getting married, divorcing, fighting, killing, preaching, and dying amid the ritual and fanfare of civility. Then their world fragments and drains away.  
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Magic

On By BrettIn WritingLeave a comment

I just finished writing a short story that I started last Thanksgiving. I’ve been picking at it the last few days over my spring break, trying to clinch it. I wrote a novel over my winter break and worked on some essays for scholarships, preventing it then, and thus far, my semester has been too packed to do anything but proofread.

So, finishing it leaves a perfect time to talk about “magic.”

Over winter break, I developed a schedule: wake up early, finish my routine, make a pot of tea, light a candle, open a window and write from 8 to 12 and break for lunch. Nonstop. If I had to use the bathroom, I made it quick. My parents didn’t really get it. They thought I was being asocial or avoiding them out of anger, or that my time up there  was lonesome.

I loved it. I enjoy people, but that four-hour time alone facing the page was something far better. That’s the magic of writing: that healing, redemptive, almost mystic struggle to draw words into the world. To me, nothing else comes close.

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A word on writing: Craft

On By BrettIn Writing2 Comments

Before shifting to philosophy, I was a journalism major. My passion was and remains writing and reading, although my topics have shifted over the years. I read grammar books for fun now and then, and get excited over a well-placed comma or a finite distinction, the difference between farther and further or prophesy and prophecy, for example. I think in words and try to pin down everything I can into coherent syntax. I recognize this has limits, but it’s how I process the world. Besides, language has immense expressiveness.

I have no other credentials than an ongoing college education; a passion for the page; a computer weighted down with essays, poems, short stories, and half-finished novels; and an exhaustive reading list. But I hope my opinion has some depth to it, and can entertain–or interest–a reader.

I think writing is a craft and a type of magic, a dichotomy made by Carl Sessions Stepp in his book Writing as Craft and Magic. Today, I’d like to talk about the first part: craft.

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“Reason as our guide”

On By BrettIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide,” said

Samuel Johnson, pic courtesy of Wikipedia

Samuel Johnson. I read this at the front of an introductory logic book I bought over my last Christmas break. I Googled the quote and found the rest of it on a website of Samuel Johnson sound bites. According to the site, Johnson wrote it in a letter to his stalker-biographer James Boswell.

I base my moral code on reason. That’s how my mind operates. I want to act in a way I can justify with a little more resolve than the tepid assertion an action “felt right.” To put it bluntly, I think the “right” thing to do is the logical thing to do. A deeper moral code underlies this, firmly based in compassion: reduce the suffering of others. Moreover,  I adhere to the “spirit” of the law, rather than the law itself.

An example illustrates this. I choose not to kill. Most  people consider this reasonable: killing creates suffering, eliminates chances for agents to act according their will, and determines their entire future without clear consent. It also prevents future joys for them. But should one never kill?  Zen master John Daido Roshi has an example to test the spirit of this precept. If a deer is suffering on the side of the road and I have the power to “put it out of its misery,” I will. I want to reduce its suffering, and if I flee the scene, most likely I’m just being squeamish, not trying to preserve its life.  Although I’m killing the deer, I’m fulfilling the original point of the precept: reduce suffering. The same is true of lying. I’d never tell the complete truth if I knew it could endanger many lives. My intention remains the same: despite fear or desires, I want to maximize compassion.

Many would term this “compassion ethics,” a generic form of Buddhist ethics. Agents under this system long to reduce suffering in the world. I use logic to apply this general sentiment to my actions. Thus, since anger is rarely logical, I avoid anger. Same for excessive sadness or passion. All these lead to suffering,so I reduce them. Reason is my guide.

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Backyard Philosophy

On By BrettIn Philosophy1 Comment

This is a blog about “backyard philosophy,” a name I made up one day in the shower. But I confess I stole it from Aristotle. Adrift in the boundless arguments and counter-arguments in his Metaphysics, I found a passage about philosophy’s humble birth. From its words, I’ve crafted my worldview and bound up my hopes. Although it’s a bit dense, I want to copy the complete passage here:

That it is not a productive science is clear from a consideration of the first philosophers. It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, or about the stars and about the origin of the universe. Now, he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus, the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders); therefore it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge and not for any practical utility. (Metaphysics, Book I, part  2).

I read these words with a hushed sense of awe because they immediately brought me back to my early adolescence. Sitting beneath a broad canopy of stars in my backyard, my friends and I talked. And between the intervals about girls and school-wide politics, we hit deeper questions. They were still limited, but we stumbled through speculation on God or purpose in our lives, why we do things we do, our identity to ourselves and the world. Personal and simple, the issues nevertheless had the same philosophical underpinning that span Plato’s dialogues and Camus’ novels.

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