While posting,
I thought it might be easier to read later if I split off the part about recognizing the problem(?) and the approach process from the part where I compile the notes,
so I decided to split the page.
Rather than the convenience of seeing everything at once,
the hope is that separating the process and the conclusion
will help more with contextual understanding so that the approach can be applied or reused in other situations.
Even after copying out this much, there are still many good passages I could not transfer. Among these good words, the short line that sticks with me most right now is Hegel's definition of Napoleon.
'The great man who turns the rational into the real'
Yes—maybe we… no, the biggest koan I am holding right now is just this.
Since last year I have been drawing a big picture, and I know it is not an easy challenge given my current circumstances. In the process of trying to resolve it, I have been experiencing internal and external conflicts due to many interests and realistic issues.
So various thoughts about all this have been tangled up in my daily life. To find an answer I went to a book club, and in that flow the books I came to know (Ten Thousand Behaviors, The Stranger, Nausea) were driving me even further into a corner—at exactly that moment.
Of course I have not yet found an answer, thought has not stopped, and no choice has been made. But I was given another chance at what the author calls 'representation.'
* Representation: stepping back from the given situation and looking at it from a distance.
Thinking, the Noise of Consciousness, Kim Jong-gap (Micro-Humanities 2014)
(p.142)
We think in order to live. And we think for our own happy life, not for someone else's. Because the self is always at the center, thought becomes self-centered. Thought is the work of placing the self at the center of the world and reconstructing the world. We, who are mere supporting actors in reality, restage the situations of reality as leading actors in the theater of thought. In the logic of reality I am a supporting actor. But on the stage of thought I am the director and the leading actor.
Just as a pine puts its roots into a crack in a rock, thought has divergence from reality as its essence. Objectifying and thematizing reality is thought. And in this divergence the unhappy consciousness germinates. Why am I only a supporting actor, not the lead? Why couldn't I have acted more gracefully, more confidently, in that moment? The echo of self-consciousness reverberates—'I could have done better, but I didn't.' That echo keeps hitting the walls of the mind and causes reverberations of regret, self-reproach, guilt, resentment, jealousy.
These thoughts come close to wishful thinking. The absence of a reality that ought to be fans the thinking. Thought is the alibi of the reality that should exist. Instead of thinking what is, you think what is not.
Is there an alternative to thinking? In one sense this question is not only foolish but impossible. We cannot help thinking; thought is the essence of the human. But if we keep in mind that in this book I have targeted for criticism the self-centered idle thoughts, the reactionary thoughts, then an alternative is possible.
I think the path the modern person should pursue is not thought that slips past reality but perception that widens the contact surface with reality's being-there. We need to turn our gaze from the thought of non-being to the perception of being.
(p.153)
Hegel saw Napoleon as a great man who makes the rational real.
—omitted—
Philosophy is not the pursuit of knowledge or truth, but, like dynamite, a force (power) that blows up our prejudices and transforms our lives.
