The Book Wolfe

A note on nostalgia. The part emotions play in creating identity and meaning.

Listening to the music of The Advisory Circle has been a fascinating experience for me. It’s a style of music which produces, quite deliberately, a profound sense of nostalgia. But what is nostalgia all about?

I strongly believe that emotions are much more than merely feelings. An emotional experience, I believe, contains a set of information about both who we are and what the world is about.

For…

Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception

A review and exploration.

The brain, Aldous Huxley asserts, is like a reducing valve, filtering out great masses of unnecessary experiences, creating a unified, simple experience of the world. Although Huxley’s Doors of Perception is based around his experience of the consumption of the psychedelic drug mescaline, the wealth of wisdom within the book stretches far beyond that of speculation…

What Plato’s forms tell us about our identity and its attachment to our culture and music

What is it about music exactly which seems to be so profoundly meaningful to each and every one of us? It’s a question which, with a little exploration, will teach us a lot about ourselves and the eternal metaphysical reality we live in.

Watching the BBC show Rhythms of Indiarecently, Richard Widdless interviews an Indian musician about the nature of the composition of Indian classical music.…

What is it about music exactly which seems to be so profoundly meaningful to each and every one of us? It’s a question which, with a little exploration, will teach us a lot about ourselves and the eternal metaphysical reality we live in.

Watching the BBC show Rhythms of Indiarecently, Richard Widdless interviews an Indian musician about the nature of the composition of Indian classical music.…

The things you enjoy, your emotions, and who you are- why some emotions persist and others do not

Why is it that when you listen to a piece of music, you feel a deep emotional connection to that piece of music, but as soon as the next piece of music comes on, your previous emotions are all but forgotten, replaced with the feelings the new piece of music induces? This may seem like an uncontroversial point, you may argue that that this is merely the nature of our experience of mediums like…

The ethical problems we must face as consumers

It has been argued by many that one of the great crimes of our times isn’t the product of action, but of passivity. It is undeniable that every waking moment of our lives we are constantly making decisions to do or not do things. Most of these decisions are so small and inconsequential that we aren’t even conscious of making them. However, the realities in the world beyond our decisions are often…

Capitalism deflates your consciousness- Mark Fisher’s ‘all of this is temporary’

In our current times, we are unable to see a future or alternative reality beyond capitalism because it has become so ingrained in us. Indeed, as Slavoj Zizek famously said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. This is what Mark Fisher calls ‘Capitalist Realism’. In his talk entitled ‘all of this is temporary’ (available on YouTube), he makes…

Capitalism deflates your consciousness- Mark Fisher’s “all of this is temporary”

In our current times, we are unable to see a future or alternative reality beyond capitalism because it has become so ingrained in us. Indeed, as Slavoj Zizek famously said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. This is what Mark Fisher calls ‘Capitalist Realism’. In his talk entitled ‘all of this is temporary’ (available on YouTube), he makes…

The Genius of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl

Today I’m discussing a prescient novel which analyses the subtleties of social order and stability, and the place we each accept within it. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brilliantly insightful work about a pearl diver named Kino, who lived in a poor area of Mexico in 1940. He acquires the most valuable pearl he, or anyone he has ever known, has ever seen. The acquisition of this pearl, rather…

The Nature and Ethics of Enjoyment in Modern Society

Recently there has been a lot of controversy in the UK over The Jeremy Kyle Show, after the sad news of a reported suicide of the of a guest who took part in its recording. Discussions of this show should function as a metonym from which we can extrapolate discourse to all shows of this nature. As Amol Rajan rightly asks

“…is it right to allow private trauma to become public spectacle? And is the…

A few thoughts on eternal recurrence

The idea of eternal recurrence, as read in Nietzsche, has fascinated me for a long while. The first time I came in contact with the idea was in fact in reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where the author writes

“If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross… In the world of eternal return the weight of…

Is your consciousness created by marketing?

In our everyday life, we are brought into a world of ‘otherness’ through the induction of language other than that of our own. In particular, here, I mean the language of the product; food and drink, clothes, anything which can be marketed. Our own life contains its self within a field of language, I.E. that language which is natural for us to use and think through and with. Each field of…

The World as Object- Roland Barthes

The simple act of perception transforms the objective landscape into a human landscape. The Dutch masters have used the canvas as a metaphor for the way that we do this. Their paintings have traditionally shown a world which is utilized by the human. It has also depicted cultural divide between the patrician (the rich, who have power) and the peasant (who are subject to the power of the…

Sam Harris’s Free Will, a review and evaluation

Sam Harris’s book Free Willis short, but very smart, and packs a lot of punch. He argues that the concept of free will, as it is commonly understood, is an unfounded myth. He does not believe, however, that this means we lack any control over our lives at all. Instead, he states that his belief that we lack free will has changed how he lives his life for the better, and believes that it could…

The Sources of Plato’s Opinions-Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, chapter by chapter- (13)

This is a short post, and in it Russell outlines the areas of Plato he is going to discuss, whilst also explaining the thoughts which influenced Plato’s personal philosophy.

He tells us that Plato was born 428/7 BCE in the early years of the Peloponnesian war. He came from an aristocratic family and despised democracy. There were two main reasons for this, the first of which is that he attributed…

Sparta- Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, chapter by chapter- (12)

Sparta had a profound influence on the subsequent philosophy of Greece through Plato and Aristotle, so Russell takes a chapter to explain their fascinating culture. We will see the politics of Sparta replicated in the Politics of Plato, and even as far in the future as Nietzsche’s thoughts on culture.

Helots

Sparta had no interest in being a part of Greek culture on the larger scale, they were…

Socrates- Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, chapter by chapter- (11)

Today we move on to a discussion of Socrates. Russell only focuses on him briefly because of the fact that we have so much historical uncertainty regarding him. This article will mostly focus on what we know of him through Plato and Xenophon. One interesting thing about the historicity of Socrates is that we can say that we either know very little about him or quite a lot. This is because there…