Man, does
time fly! I look back at the good ol’ blog and it’s been almost a month with no
posting at all. An unpardonable lack of politeness to my increasing audience!
Well, time to take up the metaphorical pen and get back to work. My writing is
as shabby as ever, as convoluted and baroque and circuitous and muddled, and it
would benefit from a bit of practicing and cleaning up as much as in any other
moment of my life. And how do I clean up my writing? Well, practicing it, in
long-winded posts that almost nobody reads, of course! Although I swear I try
to make ‘em less long-winded and more to the point, less derivative and
meandering and more precise and focused, I recognized I’ve not been so far an
exemplar of pithiness and grace…
Now before we
get back to the ill-starred fate of our global society, its many evils and more
or less imminent demise, I feel like I owe to my readership an account of what
has kept me away from the keyboard these last weeks, as it touches
(tangentially as ever) in many themes of the blog, like how to live and what
pursuing a worthy life looks like nowadays.
First, in the
intellectual front, I started a new university career in September, and had
been taking the first batch of examinations until recently. Yup, after a lot of
reflection of what I wanted to learn and develop after getting my PhD in
philosophy, I settled in mathematics. I considered retaking my studies of
Economics (having almost three courses completed, that’s the degree I was
closer to, and the one whose achievement would have costed me less, both in
time and in money), but I’ve come to see the whole discipline as so muddled, so
essentially dishonest, so useless and so lacking in the basic decency to
acknowledge its uselessness as to make every single minute devoted to it a
complete waste of time (you may find the beginning of my musings about such
dishonesty here: Economics suck I,
for a less-dishonest than usual take on the limits and shortcomings of the
discipline, from one devoted practitioner I’ve quoted other times, John
Cochrane, see: Economic humility? Hah!).
So Economics was discarded. I had enjoyed researching sociology and history for
my dissertation, and both seemed entertaining, but pretty full of bullshit and
baloney overall, so I also discarded them.
I have not
entirely abandoned the idea of doing a PhD in history later in life,
specializing in some truly obscure subject matter, period and geographic area (peculiar
versification in Norse sagas developed in the first stages of Greenland
settlement, between 1000 and 1200 AD, say, or distinctive guerrilla tactics of
the Saracen raiders from Andalusian origin that built a holdout in Fraxinet, in
Provence, between 889 and 973 AD), but right now I know myself, and I would
immediately hover towards universal history, the whole of humanity, in a period
during no less than a hundred centuries, trying to discern the currents, the
tendencies and the drifts in such an enormous mass of facts and events
(something serious historians tend to dismiss, and to confine to the later
years of a life previously filled with what for me now seems like uninteresting
and trivial minutiae).
I also toyed
with the idea of studying something truly alien and even tinged with some
utilitarian argument, as it could be used to improve my professional prospects.
To be more specific, I toyed with the idea of studying law (and, being an
all-or-nothing sort of guy, taking the bar exam so I could practice as a
barrister). But it just seemed a) too practical, b) too serious and c) boring
as hell.
So I really
had to dig deep within what motivates me, what makes me tick and what I thought
would be a valuable commitment of my all-too-scarce time. I went back to what a
life well lived should look like for my particular circumstances. And two
immediate features of such life came to my attention: it had to be a life of
achieving difficult things and of deep understanding and pursuit of the
absolute (absolute truth, absolute beauty and absolute goodness). After six
years immersed in philosophy I had a passing familiarity with words and
thoughts and how whole societies had ended up believing a bunch of noxious balderdash
and thinking it formed a sacred description of naked facts revealed by Nature
herself. So it seemed to me like pursuing more words and ideas people happened
to have had wouldn’t take me much closer to that absolute truth I was
endeavoring after…
But if words
wouldn’t cut it, imprecise and biased and amenable to misinterpretation and
manipulation, what could work? What symbols had humanity devised that were
devoted to precision, to exact communication, to rigorous reasoning not
subjected to ideology or propaganda, to certain verification, regardless of
what sorry state the world may be in? Numbers and mathematical operators, of
course! When Aristotle thought about the best life for man, he concluded that
the life of an Athenian gentleman, slave-owning and all was objectively the
best. When Hagel did the same exercise more than twenty centuries later,
surprise, surprise, it was the life of a Prussian bureaucrat of his day and
age, with exactly the same worldview and set of beliefs as himself, what he clearly
“saw” was best. Ditto for Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, John Locke, John Stuart
Mill, Wittgenstein and all the philosophers of a conformist bent. There were
revolutionaries, sure (what I have called “critical” thinkers, starting with my
much admired Kant, and following with Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche) but
even them, it’s difficult not to admit, ended up validating the old Protagoras
dictum “man is the measure of all things” (every single man considered in
himself “and his circumstances” we may add, quoting my countryman Ortega y
Gasset).
Something you
can hardly say of Euclid, Cantor, Leibniz, Hermite, Lebesgue, Riemann, Cauchy
or Fermat. In general they did not give a rat’s patootie about their fellow men
circumstances or opinions (or they fellow men full stop), as they didn’t much
care about their own. They carefully constructed their trains of thought, identifying with exacting
precision what followed from what, and invented new ways of reasoning in the
process. More than that, they defined what reasoning consists in, what is the
proper way of doing it and what ways, sensible as they may seem, end up guiding
you astray. They definitely knew a thing or two about how to discover truth.
Stupendous truth, undeniable truth, self-evident, kick-you-in-the-teeth truth.
No matter if you’re black or white, a man or a woman or something in between,
rich or poor, liberal or conservative, an ISFJ or a ENTP, a proper
demonstration is a proper demonstration, and a logical fallacy is a logical
fallacy. 2 + 2 = 4 here and in China, today and 30,000 years ago (and in
another 30,000 years, even if there is nobody left to appreciate it).
As is
normally said, what can be used to explain everything doesn’t explain anything.
A set of knowledges that obtain whatever the state of the universe doesn’t
describe much at all, and then the universality of mathematics is not its main
strength, but its Achilles heel. Bollocks, I say. The more I learn the more I
realize that apparent discrepancies between mathematical order and the deepest
structures of reality only reveal our insufficient grasp of such structures,
and once the veils are removed and the errors corrected we find an even deeper
agreement. That is what guided me back to a very peculiar and highly
idiosyncratic form of belief in an all-powerful (and likely all-benevolent) mind
in the origin of reality itself many years ago, but that would be a topic for another day.
What I mean
with this, as usual, tortured and full of circumlocutions discourse, is that
the clearest path for me in my search for truth was to deepen my understand of
mathematics. Not this time by reading a bunch of books and reaching my own
conclusions. Mathematics is subtle and complex and vast and branching. So I
paid the tuition fees, and enrolled in a full degree, to ensure I get the
basics right. Slow and steady, as I’m not leaving my day job, or my training,
or my family (God forbid!) but surefooted and disciplined as always. Do not be
surprised, then, if more rigorous reasoning occasionally creep in this blog,
and if some numerical concept shows its head every now and then. Not that the
blog couldn’t benefit from some more streamlined and logical argumentation,
mind you.
And is maths
difficult! Specially if you haven’t practiced it formally for years (or rather,
for decades, as in my case). I may work in an engineering firm, but I don’t
remember having done anything more challenging than basic algebra (add,
substract, multiply and divide) for most of my career (I’m in quality and
organization, after all). So this is like having been all your life in a “toning/
weight loss” program in the gym and suddenly starting a powerlifting routine to
take you in a short time over 1,000 pounds competition total (for those not in
the know: tough!) But that is the other reason I chose maths. It is difficult,
and doing difficult things, mastering complex and challenging subjects, is what
a life well lived looks like.
But of
course, that’s not the only thing that has kept me away from posting. Doing
difficult things with your head is allrighty and well, but we shouldn’t forget
the old Greek adage about the healthy mind requiring a healthy body (funny that
we all think that comes from the Greeks, whilst the sentence used to convey it
is in latin…) And since the end of last year I was thinking in what physical
skill to invest into once I finished the brunt of preparing the first
examinations (in mid February).
Although my
initial inclination was to learn how to properly box, and had been informing
myself about boxing gyms close to my work location, an unexpected opportunity
opened up with the creation of a weightlifting club in the Crossfit box of one
of my loved ones. Weightlifting is something I’ve been doing (awfully) since I
was about 12 years old, without much progress in the last twenty five years (well,
I clean and jerked 100 kg again, something I hadn’t done since I was 23, and I
also equaled my best snatch soon afterwards, but just couldn’t keep the
momentum and let my PBs fall again). And if you intend to do something for,
roughly, the rest of your life (as I do), you better learn to do it right.
So a month
ago I also enrolled in a weightlifting team, with a coach and all, and for the
first time in my whole life have been following a program written by someone
different from myself. A program that has me snatching, clean & jerking and
squatting basically every friggin’ day of the week (and then somehow trying to recover
in the weekend). Not half assedly performing the power versions of the lifts
every now and then, or doing three or four 90% lifts and calling it a day, but
doing 6-8 sets of 6-8 reps of each one day in day out.
I’ll devote
considerable more space to what I’m learning, about the lifts and about myself,
but I’ll just advance here that I’m a) loving it and b) being thoroughly challenged
by it and c) adjusting to the new rhythm, trusting in the process and the coach
and trying not to rush it, as I’ve done so many times before, just to reach a
plateau faster, and then paying attention to a different thing and having to
start all over again a few months later.
Not yet the
nicest view, I know. I’m old and rusty and slow and not that strong and specially not that
mobile (in the muscles and joints required to move the weight stably and with
agility and grace… I’d be happy with just doing it competently).
The thing is
that with such an increased demand on my time (studying mathematics plus
weightlifting every day plus job plus family plus regularly reading to try to
understand how the world and the mind work) I haven’t had that much time to
blog, hence my lack of posting. But despair not, o faithful readers! Even if I
have to write much shorter posts, writing is one of the characteristic features
of my life, one of those things I’ve been doing from as far as I have memories
(I still keep the reams of paper that received my first musings, and
occasionally reread them and smile by how naïve, but also how intellectually daring
and curious and most definitely unconventional I was at such early age), and I
do not intend to interrupt it. I may write more haphazardly, more touch and go,
more discontinuously, but you can keep coming back here for some scathing
social commentary, some amused advice on the barbell sports and some abstract
musing about what this human life may be all about.
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