A Note on Education and Interests

Before the train of thought slips my mind, I thought I'd make a quick post about it. Recently a few thoughts have been permeating my mind, some inspired by Paul Graham's essays, some by my general anxiety and fear that I'm not interesting because I don't have any particular interests, that I'm not as smart as I'd like to be because I can't find anything particular to be interested in.

One of the aforementioned Paul Graham essays is called 'Copy What You Like' which in a way answers my fears and worries about not being interesting, not knowing what I'm interested in. I simply need to mentally trace the things I enjoy down to their core principles, schools of thought, and subject matters and then chase those. I'm currently in my first year of university in the UK, so I've unfortunately already specialised in the fields of Philosophy and Italian (language and culture), but it's no massive problem because I think I've chosen correctly in some respects. Maybe not exactly, but I've chosen what I like vaguely. I'll now try to trace down exactly what things I enjoy and see, in an ideal world, what I should be pursuing.

In this endeavour I will go from the larger picture and try to cut it down until I find a few specific things that interest me.

Firstly, I like life. It's living things that interest me. This mostly means things like maths, physics, computers are less my forte. I know those things are especially useful to know in relation to life, but I'm interested in life more directly. So fields that would interest me more than those would include: biology, zoology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology -- to sum them up: the biological sciences, the humanities, and the arts.

But let's get more specific: secondly, as a sub-section of life, I am mostly interested in humans, human endeavours, the human condition, consciousness etc. So this eliminates most of the biological sciences, with the exception of cognitive sciences which may give very interesting insight into consciousness. That seems a fairly specified field, so I will chalk that up as one thing I am interested in, although presently I know little to nothing about it.

• Cognitive Science in relation to the phenomenon of consciousness

However, I must continue because I can feel within me that there's more still. I feel like cognitive science can't give us a perfect account of the human condition, which seems to be my main general interest. I'm interested in how humans interact with the world, so I'm interested in general history. By "general history", I don't mean nearly so much as specific dates and certain decrees or treaties signed -- I mean things like the reasons for revolutions, the reasons for wars, the reasons for the formation of cities, etc. But perhaps without being interested in the specifics, this fits more closely under the umbrella of Anthropology? After a quick wikipedia search, either social or cultural anthropology seem to be closest to the sort of thing I would be interested in. I'm annoyed because I had a chance to study social anthropology this year and was very excited for it, but couldn't because their lectures clashed with my Italian lectures (and Italian is one of my main subjects). But yeah, let's tally that up too:

• Social/Cultural Anthropology
• (Edit) Biological Anthropology interests me too, as being also a kind of general history of humans, e.g. human evolution

Again, I'm not settled. That's not all. I'm not just interested in the mere observation and understanding of societies and cultures. I'm interested in being involved in culture; I'm interested in the arts. Mostly, I'm interested in narratives that can give you some kind of guidance in how to live your life. I'm interested in didactic, moral novels. I like the works of J.D. Salinger, John Green, George Orwell (namely 1984, I haven't read his other works), H.G. Wells, Camus (The Outsider is the only one I've read). Despite moral novels often being criticised as preachy, I'm actually more interested in novels with a clear, more particular message, not some vague metaphor that is difficult to grasp. In fact, I'm interested in writing such moral novels myself. I would say a moral novel's traits include: being character-driven so as to extol virtues or reprimand pernicious behaviour, and having some kind of practical message or question you can take away from it. So let's tally this one up too.

• Fictional narratives, but in particular Moral Novels (novels with a message about how to live the good life)

I'm interested in this question beyond just narratives, though. Surely your writing of moral novels must be informed by some kind of reasoning as to what living the good life actually means? This can be drawn in parts from anthropology and general history, but there seems to be two other main ways of doing this that I can conceive: experience and philosophy. Experience means going out into the world and figuring out for yourself what is the good life, learning how to live life and how to interact with other people. This means being social, it means food, drink, romance, culture, travel, language. There's no particular academic field to cover what I'm talking about; it's just the business of living. But there are certain things that are still recognised as academic pursuits that involve these things, and that's learning languages, normally 'modern languages'. By learning a language you are increasing your living potential in my opinion, and by learning one academically you happen to learn in a more structured manner about how the speakers of that language eat, drink, dance, read, etc. Italian was a bit of a whim for me, but I still feel justified in choosing it on account of the reasons I've stated here. And hopefully I won't be done with learning languages after my degree.

• Learning languages, and about speakers of that language's lives (drawing lessons about how you might live yours from it)

I mentioned philosophy earlier and return to it now, as what I think is my final point. In the search for how to live a good life, thinking in detail and clearly plays an important role. Now, I understand you don't need philosophy for this, and oftentimes in philosophy, the fact of thinking in detail jeopardises the attempt at clarity. Philosophers often push words to breaking point, until they make no more sense, as Graham Paul writes in an essay. And I definitely agree with this and it's something I'm often dismayed with. But like he says, it doesn't mean we have to give up on philosophy entirely, and I agree. It just means we have to go about it different, with clarity at the forefront of our minds, even before detail. But I would argue further that this doesn't mean we have to throw out previous philosophy either. We can look at these confused, detailed philosophies and attempt to draw clear meaning from them -- try to rephrase or re-interpret them in ways that can be cashed out in clearer or more practical terms. Where we can't do this, we give up and admit that the author had nothing to say. 

However, I think philosophers do have something to say, so the question for me becomes: which parts of philosophy am I interested in? I mentioned earlier being interested in consciousness. I think at least while the cognitive sciences are still in their infancy, philosophy can have a good guiding power on how to look at what the mind is and how we can make sense of consciousness, so the Philosophy of Mind interests me. I'm also interested in less prestigious philosophies, areas that some wouldn't even consider philosophy; I like systematic thinking about motivation, and the purpose of living. I sometimes think that therefore I will be interested in what is now rising as 'continental philosophy', but this kind of philosophy is often very obscure and difficult to understand, perhaps (as Paul Graham fears) because they aren't actually saying anything. But as I mentioned earlier, I would still be interested in looking into certain philosophers and seeing what can be re-hashed into clearer, more 'layman'-istic terms, in more practical words. The existentialists and phenomenologists disappoint me with their excessive use of the-creating-of-neologisms-by-hyphenating-words-and-making-these-strange-and-confusing-cumbersome-things. I would much rather they cashed out what they mean every time, but hey, maybe that's a job for us future philosophers to do? To clear up what mess they've made. I'm not sure; I'd have to read them. I want to get into Nietzsche primarily and then maybe Sartre. My friend is hopefully giving me a book by Roland Barthes for Christmas, so perhaps I'll see with that.

Morality I am also interested in, although I fear I'm just not very good at thinking about it in detail. I don't particularly see the value in the other kinds of ethics, unless they are used for the purpose of normative ethics. By which I mean, I don't see the point of doing value theory or meta-ethics for their own sakes, without the eventual end of thinking about how people actually live their moral lives and how they ought to. I do find value theory and meta-ethics fascinating, but only really in the context of normative ethics. (Edit: I forgot that the first leg on the ladder of ethics is 'applied ethics', e.g. politics and living day-to-day life. Funnily enough, I think those things should be informed by normative ethics, so I guess normative ethics is the mid-way point that I'm most interested in).

Philosophy of Science hasn't excited me much because it strays away from humanity. I didn't know this before, but I know it now. I will probably learn the same about logic next semester, but I don't mind. Perhaps learning logic will be a good brain exercise.  So in terms of philosophy, my interests are:

• Philosophy of Mind
• Continental Philosophy/life philosophies (or, the clearing up of; e.g. Nietzsche)
• Moral Philosophy, in particular normative ethics

So, in conclusion, I can say I'm interested in life, but mainly the human condition, in particular:

1. Philosophy - philosophy of mind, continental/life philosophies, moral philosophy
2. Learning languages
3. Fiction - in particular moral, character-driven novels and narratives
4. Social/Cultural (also Biological) Anthropology - the history of human development and studying the various ways in which we have lived and do live our lives
5. Cognitive Science - how do we think?