Genesis Revisited

A year ago this week, I started the blog "Conversations with Philemon". It began, at least in part, as a New Year's Resolution designed to get me writing more since I had noticed a sharp decline in the amount of writing I had been doing from the end of college to the present. In that capacity, it has succeeded marvelously. I haven't counted but I think I've probably written somewhere in the vicinity of 75,000 words over the course of the year. The 52 posts from 2009 didn't quite reach the 100-post goal that I intended, but I'm neither disappointed nor am I surprised. The exigencies of life often get in the way of the things we'd like to do. This blog has also been an exercise in the theory that people do their best (and most) work amidst the busy-ness of daily life. I posted less in my off-time over the summer and winter break than I did in the comparatively hectic spring--during which I was working overtime, preparing to move out of Michigan, and getting everything together to start graduate school--and fall, which was my first semester of graduate school. To be fair, not everything I wrote was original material. In fact, close to 1/3 of the total posts, and probably a rather higher percentage of total words, were previous writings that I edited for posting. Most of these, of course, were history papers of some sort, but since this blog is at least partially devoted to history, I think this was an acceptable modus operandi.

Has this process taught me anything? I'm sure it has, but I'm not entirely sure what that is yet. Do I write more now than I did a year ago? Most definitely. But has this blog gotten me into the habit of sitting down to pound out my thoughts in written form? Maybe. The necessities of graduate school and of my future academic career have assured that I'll never be in want of writing anymore. Right now, that has turned into great fodder for some extensive blog posts, but I have a feeling that as the years roll on, should I keep up with this blog, it may very well turn into a more personal journal. Or, conversely, it may become a place only for posts of my papers and research. Frankly, I'm hoping to avoid both. The diversity of this blog has been one of my favorite aspects, and although my interests obviously gravitate toward history, I enjoy that looking back on my posts, I've written on topics ranging from particle physics to probability theory to socialism to poetry to synchronicity. If I have anything like a new goal for this blog for the coming year, I'd say it would be something like "introduce even greater diversity into my topics." I think, on occasion, I'd also like to be able to post shorter works too. One of the reasons I think I only made it to 52 posts is that I spent the better part of a week working on some of them. Another goal may be something along the lines of "it's OK to write twice as many posts that are half as long." Not really my style, but it might break up the monotony of some of these posts (even I find the contents dull sometimes).

It's hard not to look back on the year of blogging and think about the year in general. It's difficult for me to think of another year in my life that was as eventful as 2009. I moved twice, lived in three states, worked in (not the same) three states, witnessed the inauguration of America's first black president, applied to, was accepted to, and began graduate school, visited New York City for the first time, rediscovered my love of hiking, and read more than I think I've read in any single year of my life. Despite some minor economic hardships in those last months in Michigan, it was a pretty good year. It's also hard not to look back on the decade. Over two-thirds of my life, so far, was spent in the Aughts or the Naughts or the Naughties or the zeros or the 2000s or whatever the hell we're going to call them. I began the decade not even as a legal adult. Thus, my entire adult life, so far, and the most momentous events of my life occurred in that decade. I graduated from both high school and college, moved out of my parents house, lived several places, owned three cars, traveled to Mexico and all around the US, met some of the best friends I will ever have in this life, and fell in love with Kirsten. It's hard to top that last one. I think most people look back on their twenties as the best time in their life, and I probably won't be any different. This decade encompassed most of that age and even though on the whole, this decade probably does not rank terribly highly in American history, I will always recall it fondly.

What are my new goals, my New Year's and New Decade's Resolutions? My immediate New Years' Resolution is to become, by this time next year, proficient in reading French and Latin. I'm halfway there with the French, and I just started learning Latin over winter break so I'm kicking it into high gear. May 2010 be the year of languages! In terms of the decade, I suppose I have some personal goals and some professional ones. I certainly hope that, sometime between the age of 27 and 37, I get married and start a family. It would also be nice to own my own home as well, rather than continuing to rent from tiny apartments, though both of these, essentially, are contingent on my accomplishment of the professional goals. By the end of this decade, I would like to have completed my PhD in either history or the history and philosophy of science and be gainfully employed as a professor at a university. By the end of the decade, I also hope to have published at least one book. And if I have time, it might be nice to be the drummer in a band. Haven't done that in a while. So, there you have it. Ten years of goals and aspirations. Wish me luck. Ave atque vale!

A Semester's Worth of History

It's been a rather longer hiatus from bloggerdom than I thought it would be. I didn't post at all in December and haven't posted anything in nearly six weeks. I have no excuses, and perhaps worse than no excuses, I forewent my chance to really post some good ones since I had three weeks with literally nothing to do but eat turkey and stuffing, drink wine and wassail, and watch full seasons of LOST and Star Trek. Instead that's all I did, and though I read a few books I'd been wanting to get through before the new semester began, I also spent a lot of time sleeping till noon and and staying out at night drinking with friends. Poor me, eh? So, I've finished my first semester as a graduate student and am in the process of beginning my second. I thought I'd make my triumphant return to the world of internet posting with a little reflection on that process and what I hope the new year has in store for me in academia.

Firstly, while I haven't been particularly surprised by the workload, the amount of reading I've done over the past four months is pretty staggering. With only two classes, one of which was a graduate/undergraduate mix and thus less intense, plus thesis research (which I did little for, since I haven't even fully settled on a topic yet), the reading was still at a high level. I haven't counted specifically, but I think I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 pages of text over the course of the semester, totaling somewhere around twenty-five full books and significant portions of perhaps sixty to seventy others. The amount of writing I did was also rather high (higher than usual, from what I've been told), totaling at around 115 pages--two lengthy research papers, five shorter reading analyses, two non-research papers, and two finals. Still, I never felt particularly overwhelmed, and after I mastered the arts of skimming and picking precisely the most important passages of texts without reading them in their entirety, the voluminous content breezed by rather quickly. I also managed to avoid having any serious panic attacks, although the one all-nighter I pulled to finish a 15 page final paper I had not had a chance to work on until the night before it was due, left me gasping for breath somewhere around 3 AM as I had serious doubts I would meet the 10:30 AM deadline. Of course, it all worked out though.

What has this process been like and how has it changed my outlook on the idea of history? I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned thus far is the difference between the study and practice of history. Studying history tends to be easy: you absorb all of the information in front of you by reading and understanding the arguments presented by historians. The practice of history, however, is usually a lot more challenging. One must know the proper research paths to take, how to evaluate the sources (not to mention the necessity of studying language to broaden one's source base), how to recognize the various points of views the authors bring to the table, how to approach history from the theoretical frameworks of the day while never denying the actual information one must find to confirm one's own theories (this of course, does not always happen, which is why one should derive theories after the research). This is a contentious topic in history, as many historians have been accused (and rightly so) of simply searching for information that confirms their arguments. I think the biggest difference between studying history as an undergraduate and studying it as a graduate student is the amount of theory and criticism employed at this level. This seems obvious in retrospect, but it never dawned on me as an undergraduate that this aspect of historical study was missing from my education. As an undergraduate, for the most part, one studies history, in the words of the founder of the professional history, "wie es eigenlich gewessen ist" or "as it actually happened." That is not to say that controversy over interpretation is not acknowledged, but in general, professors lecture, students take notes as authoritative, and papers and tests are written and taken to prove that a certain level of knowledge has been achieved. Not so, graduate school.

Most of the classes we take are on the theory and philosophy of history, rather than on the accumulation of knowledge. It is essentially assumed that you will do that sort of legwork on your own, and when class time arrives, the goal is not to regurgitate these facts, but to argue your case based on the evidence you've amassed. While this may not seem like earth shattering information (and it's not), I do find it interesting that history seems to be one of the few disciplines that is taught this way. Theory and criticism are not at all a part of the undergraduate experience. To me, this is a bit like being a biology major and never being introduced to evolutionary theory, or studying philosophy without ever understanding what metaphysics or epistemology are. I also received a bachelor's degree in English, and after the first few introductory courses, the coursework became rather theoretical to some degree, or at least we were initiated into the vocabulary of the trade. I had two courses on literary criticism as an undergraduate. Courses are rarely even offered on historical criticism or historiography at the undergraduate level.

Shortly after entering the program, a second year graduate student, following an engaging discussion on how to be a historian, told me that "You will find out rather quickly what type of historian you are," by which he meant that the theories we accept and the theories we regard as bullshit will differentiate themselves rather early in our career. So far, I'm not entirely sure that I agree. Perhaps it's my moderate personality or my ability to find the positives and negatives in modes of discourse or perhaps I'm just wishy-washy, but I have not quite found any particular historical framework that I feel is either the theoretical approach to take, nor have I found any that I feel to be complete bunk. One recent trend in historical studies is, since the late 1970s and early 80s, postmodernism, which is extraordinarily difficult to define. As far as history is concerned, postmodern theory treats "truth" (and oftentimes fact as well) as entirely subjective and tends to view historical thinking and writing as more of a humanities study than a social science. In this ideational structure, literary criticism and linguistic theory inform history more than research into the past itself. Everything, as they say, is "text". While I believe that the vocabulary and rhetoric employed by postmodernism has enriched historical study, I think that the denial of factual information has done something of a disservice to the profession itself. One of my major problems with postmodernism has little to do with the more arcane and jargon-laden arguments set forth by the theoreticians and more to do with the imprecise definitions utilized by the field. I plan on writing a bit more on this later, but for now, suffice to say that, in my view, postmodernism contradicts itself by making a "truth claim" that "there is no truth" and by failing to understand the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. Western thought in general, but postmodernist thought (and for that matter scientific, rationalist thought) in particular, regards subjectivity and objectivity as essentially binary or entirely separate from one another, rather than as a continuum, which I believe they are. That is to say, something is not either objective or subjective, but most forms of knowledge are somewhere along the continuum, and one can observe facts and make arguments that are more or less objective than other arguments. A denial of all objectivity (which many postmodernists do) is, to me, as illogical as denying all subjectivity as well. In any case, some postmodernists historians have an "anything goes" attitude, which celebrates bias, in a sense, by saying that since no one is really ever capable of true objectivity, we should embrace subjectivity. For my part, as a historian, I think it would be absurd to claim that we don't approach our subject with bias, but it would be equally absurd not to mitigate these tendencies and attempt to rely on evidence (and where it takes us, even if it takes us somewhere we do not wish to go) at all costs.

Finally, it's been an interesting experience working with undergraduates. I've had some contact with different levels of education via my two years as a substitute teacher in high school and middle school and my summer grading standardized test for the state of Kentucky. So far, the undergraduate experience has been less trying on my nerves but no less challenging intellectually. Obviously, in dealing with a higher level of student, one expects a higher degree of intelligence, writing ability, behavior, and so on. For the most part, this is true. As a teaching assistant, I haven't had any discipline problems with any students in my classes. I have to say though, that while many times students surprise me with their lack of certain basic sets of knowledge, most of them generally seem as competent in historical knowledge as I would expect the average college freshman to be. The class I TAed for had around 120 students, and their grades ended up following a pretty standard bell curve, though the apex of the parabola hovered around the low-B rather than the mid-C mark. Probably around a dozen students in the class were able to write sparkling essays in relatively polished prose that demonstrated a fair amount of knowledge, just as there were around a dozen students who believed that Italy was Sweden, the French Revolution occurred in the Early Middle Ages, and AIDS caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And this is after listening to a semester's worth of lectures. Most students who can't handle it drop after the first few weeks but it's not uncommon for students who think that the Mediterranean Sea is named the "Sea of Calamity" to be there taking the final on the last day of class along with the history majors.

I look forward to my future semester. I have a class called Hermits and Heretics: The History of the Medieval Church, 300-1450, which looks promising, and I'm furthering my historiographical studies with both European and non-Western historiography as well as American historiography. Plus, I'll begin my thesis in earnest this semester through the prospectus course all first years must take in their second semester. I still don't know exactly what my thesis will be on, though it will almost certainly be on a late medieval or early modern history of science topic. Currently some ideas include looking at the evolution of the soul/body to mind/body dualism among natural philosophers from, say, Albertus Magnus to Rene Descartes. Another idea is to pick one country during a particular time period (or, after taking Hermits and Heretics, perhaps the Church) and look at its specific legal attitude towards astrology. I have a few others but haven't fleshed them out yet. I guess that's what the prospectus class is for. You can be sure, dear reader, that, like it or not, I'll probably be posting about it along the way. It's good to be back to the world of blogging and the world of academia.

A Short Hiatus from Bloggerdom and Some Things to Come

I'm currently in the home stretch of my first semester as a graduate student in history, which, as you can imagine, is why I've been away from the blogging world over the past couple of weeks. In fact, not counting the revised papers on witchcraft I posted here, I haven't done much of anything original since late September. Obviously, I've got a lot to do, so I probably won't post again until the semester is over around the third week of December, but I thought I'd give a quick preview of some things I intend to get up here on the site before the end of 2009.

Firstly, I have several book reviews I've written over the past few months and a few from over a year ago that I would like to post. I don't really do book reviews too often, but it's something that academic historians do for shorter works in journals, so I'd like to get some up here. I recently read a really fascinating work for my witchcraft class called The Devil's Dominion, about the existence of magic and its integration into religion in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century. It really put he events in Salem in political, religious, and cultural context and really breaks down some stereotypes about not only the ultra-rigidity of Puritan religious beliefs but also the myth of the strict homogeneity of their colonies. I know, it's one more post on witchcraft, but since it has to do with Puritan New England, I can loosely tie it to Thanksgiving. I'll post it soon. Some other books, history (though most is not terribly current) and otherwise, that I'll review soon include a a biography of Alexander the Great, an examination of the military explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire, some of the works of Arnold Toynbee, a few works on the history of astrology and magic, as well as some Jungian stuff. Like many other things I post here, these will mostly be revised versions of things I have written for myself in the past.

Secondly, I have two pretty big papers coming up and once the semester is over and I've gotten back professor comments and made the necessary adjustments I'd like to post them here. The shorter paper I am writing compares Giordano Bruno and Domenico Scandella, two victims of the Inquisition in Italy in the late sixteenth century. By examining their respective cosmologies and heresies, I hope to draw some conclusions about the similarities and differences between elite and common conceptions of the cosmos at a time when a multitude of contradictory ideas proliferated. Scandella, a literate Friulian miller, was a man on the margins of society. He was exposed to cultural diversity and pluralism in his profession, benefited intellectually from the rise of the printed word, and performed an integral function within his peasant community though he was often alienated from it for his unorthodox ideas. Bruno was a peripatetic scholar who never resided in one location longer than a few years, and consequently, he was often a mistrusted figure in his adoptive lands. He advocated Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy, and his early acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric theory, though it had little to do with his eventual trial and execution, has earned him a place in the history of science. For these reasons, among others, both figures aroused the suspicions of the Inquisition. By positioning these two historical personages in the philosophical, religious, and socio-cultural settings of late sixteenth century Europe, I seek to better understand why their cosmologies were so offensive to the Church and why both were condemned for heresy. I also hope to submit this paper to a graduate student academic conference at North Carolina State. The longer paper is also a comparative paper, and I've written about the topic many other times, so I won't go into too much detail. In short, I'm comparing Andrew Dickson White - a late nineteenth century historian and president of Cornell University who wrote an extremely influential work on the history of science and theology, in which he argued that they have historically been enemies - with modern historian of science David C. Lindberg, who represents the modern school of thought that neither warfare nor harmony accurately depicts their relationship. Both these papers exemplify my general interests in history and I'll post them later in December.

Finally, I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of this bog's inaugural post, which is in the first week of January next year. This blog started, in part, due to the fact that I made it my new Year's Resolution at the end of 2008 to write more and I decided a blog would be the best testing ground for that commitment. I think the results have been pretty good though I am going to far well short of my one hundred post goal. I intend to write at least one post reflecting on my year of blogging and what I'd like to accomplish in the world of writing in the coming year. With my first semester of grad school almost behind me, I also want to write a bit on how that process has changed me, what I've learned, and how I have interpreted the lessons of graduate school. I don't necessarily want to write so much about history, but what higher education means to me and how this type of schooling is, in most ways, entirely different from all other education I've received up to now in my life. So, for the future, you can look forward (I hope) to some book reviews and some actual normal blog posts that have to do more with my life and less to do with my increasingly abstract thoughts. Enjoy!

Genesis

This is my first blog. I used to keep a journal, several times, but it never quite stuck and I could never quite keep up with it. I hope this changes. I'm starting this blog for a few reasons. Firstly, though I tend not to make (or keep) New Year's resolutions, I resolved this year to start a blog because it's been a while since I've written anything other than Facebook posts, emails, or research papers, and a blog will give me the chance to jot down whatever. Secondly, I think that this is probably as good a way for my friends to keep up with my life as social networking is, and this will actually give them some insight into my thoughts and actions than the superficiality that Facebook affords. Finally, my girlfriend Kirsten is about to graduate with a Matser's degree in Speech-Language pathology and enter the real world and I am (presumably) about to begin my graduate school career and retreat from the real world (presumably) so in any case, our lives are about to change drastically, and the stability of sitting down at my computer semi-regularly and pecking out some thoughts seems like it will be a good catharsis. So, here's the format:

The Title

The title, "Conversations with Philemon," refers to the most important figure Carl Jung is said to have conversed with in his "confrontations with the unconscious." The phenomenon entails actually participating in one's dream or fantasy life to the point that literal conversations within one's own psyche can occur. The structure of the unconscious, according to Jung, is such that archetypes common to all cultures (the elderly guide, the reluctant hero, etc.) manifest themselves in our unconscious and are used as templates for all sorts of literary and personal creations--from myths and folklore to Star Wars to the figures we meet in our dreams. "Myths are public dreams; dreams, private myths." One figure for Jung was Philemon, specifically the incarnation of Philemon from Goethe's Faust, based on the Baucis and Philemon story from Greek myth. Through Philemon, Jung began to regard his own thoughts not necessarily as products he had created but a reality within himself that was dynamic and could be explored in much the same way Livingston explored Africa or Armstrong explored the moon. This reality, while subjective, could be investigated as if it were objective by conversing with these mythic figures in our own unconscious. As fas as my blog is concerned, I'm attempting to treat it as a dialogue or conversation with my own psyche, filtering the exterior through the interior.

The Objective

The objective of my blog is the objective of any blog I suppose: to record my thoughts. But I feel some caveats are appropriate. Though I don't want to limit myself in any way, what I'm going for in this blog is an intellectual conversation, with myself and anyone else who want to participate, about everything that interests me. Primarily, I imagine I'll write a lot about history and historical issues, topics on medieval thought and antiquity, philosophical issues (especially metaphysics and epistemology), the philosophy of science and in particular science/religion issues, and Jungian psychology, particularly the psychology of mythology. I'd like to keep the blog at least somewhat topical, though the more and more I read and surf the web, the further my interests move from the here and now. Is anyone still reading? I guess in general, I want the blog to be "intellectual," whatever that vague and somewhat pretentious term means. So, no topic is off the table, but I'll likely never write much of anything that can't be discussed intelligently. Think Underground article (for those who knew me from high school)/newspaper editorial with an even more personal bent, plus research paper with personal annotations included.

The Anti-objective

I suppose what I'm trying to avoid is two things: simple descriptions about what happened to me today and random thoughts without context. I'm not against those types of blogs at all, it's just not what I'm terribly interested in wrting about (or thinking about for that matter). If you couldn't tell from my profile and the previous thousand words or so, I'm a Jungian, and I feel the need to contextualize all of my thoughts with the greater collective unconscious that is our human culture. I used to despair at the idea that "nothing's new under the sun" but now I take comfort in the fact that we are all connected in some way by the structure of our minds. I'm sure that there will be plenty of times where simply relating the events of the day will be informative and the sort of self-reflection I'll need to make sense of everything. For now though, be prepared for tirades on medieval nominalism, the necessity of falsificationism, Chomsky's views on anarcho-syndicalism, and interpretations of synchronistic events in my own life. Seriously, is anyone still reading?