Reading - Warning: Written in a Tired Stupor and Not Proofread
In my recent leisure, I've been occupied with a great deal of reading. At the beginning of the break I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I finally can say two things definitively. Firstly, I'll never read another book by Ernest Hemingway. And secondly, that particular work is one of outstanding craftsmanship. I enjoyed it immensely, but I'm so sick of all of Hemingway's other books which I have not enjoyed, that I can no longer bear reading him. The Old Man and the Sea is the only other one worth reading in my opinion.
Following that, I read Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud. It's one of those incredibly confusing and perplexing books that is profoundly insightful. I unfortunately don't have a fraction of the understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis to fully appreciate, but I think that I comprehend the main point about the catch-22 of civlized life: man creates civilization to achieve security from natural aggression (i.e. strength in numbers), but furthering it requires a continual suppression of the sexual instinct whence the aggression originates; this is made possible through the introduction of the interalized super-ego, which also creates a sense of guilt, thereby increasing the strength of the aggressive urges. And so the whole process defeats itself! It's really very fascinating. This has led me to conjecture, outside the purely psychological realm, that "progress" in civilization is really an entirely self-defeating process. Our entire existence is spent in the pursuit of reducing our environmental stresses. To a large degree, we have accomplished this. But to reduce an environmental stress requires a certain input of labor, which in turn is a stress. So the elimination of stress requires, at least temporarily, an additional amount of stress. Furthermore, the elimination of environmental stress takes us further from our natural condition, thereby increasing the stress on the body in many ways. The net result is that humans create about as many problems for themselves as they solve in the solutions of their problems (very reflexive sounding...). So would we be better off sitting in a cold cave knawing on raw meat and tubers right now? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Anyway, now I've started reading Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes, and I can't tell you how frustrated I am with his simple and obtuse logic. The first two parts of Method is on the actual method, and it's reasonable and somewhat insightful. But what hideous and false conclusions he comes too! I don't have time to write about it, but I think that the sheer number of conclusions to which he comes that we now know to be false, shows how incredibly presumptious his logic is. The method he prescribes for dealing with problems is rational and good, but his application of it is nothing short of appalling. More to come later, for sure...
