lara trying to write essays

(brainyquote - quote of the day, 01.11.2020)

- 26 minutes! yeah -

Photography is not always considered a valid art. Whereas a few hundred years ago artists had to practice for years in order to capture something they saw and make it more or less eternal – as long as the material it was painted, sculpted or drawn on would last, anyway – photography was invented and completely changed the game. Among other things, this step allowed painters to take distance from the expectation of copying reality as perfectly as possible, and question the whole idea of art from a new perspective. Did it have to be beautiful? Did it have to be useful? Could it be abstract, simple, even a common object arranged in a different light? From a mainly technical skill, it gave way to a greater freedom of thought, philosophy or for example societal critique in the works that were now produced, and didn’t have so much to do anymore with a perfectly accuate representation of reality.

This place could from now on be occupied by photography. Nowadays more than ever, it is extremely easy to take out a phone, or anything with a camera really – so many devices have them now, and even very sophisticated ones – and capture a moment, a scene, your surroundings. There is no need to be a photograph, no need to have learned much about it before; in fact even very young children sometimes take their parents (or their own) phones or tablets and start swiping, take pictures, and use the camera as a game. What fun it can be to capture people, toys, animals or yourself through a lense! Like a mirror or a looking glass, but better. More room for spontaneity, creating something that lasts.

Only, with the experience of using a camera comes also the frustration. Many of us will have had this experience, maybe not always very strong, but at least a little voice in the back of our minds being unsatisfied with the way reality was captured. „It looked way prettier in real life“, one could say about a landscape. Or, „I’m not so photogenic“, talking about oneself. The sunset really had much more nuances to it, was way brighter, enlightened the entire sky! Why isn’t it showing on the picture? And what if you now missed the real life experience, trying to capture something without real success? I gave up on taking pictures of city lights at night – they are so beautiful in real life, I can never create a photograph that reflects them accurately. Maybe in a painting, I might get a little closer to what I really see.

Because that is the point. You don’t just take a photograph; it would be amazing if things were that easy. I would love to be able to see something and decide to keep the view – or maybe it would be damaging for the actual real life experience, maybe it is for the better that technology is not yet entirely perfect in this regard, to still let us enjoy real life and have good reasons to pay full attention to our real surroundings, real senses and perceptions. Anyway, most of the time it is not possible for me to capture things exactly the way I’d want, simply because I wouldn’t know how. I’m not a photographer, so I might take pictures with a camera, through a lense, capture more or less what a situation was like in a given moment – but not what it actually looked like to me. For this I would have to know how to make a photograph. And I don’t.

- completed in 29 minutes and 50 seconds, wuhu! progress. maybe. -

(brainyquote, 31.10.2020)

A question to be asked, when considering this quote, is whether fear and understanding necessarily have to be opposites, that is : is it impossible, or very unlikely, to fear something that one understands?

Most basic fears, like fear of heights, of the dark or of wild animals (violence upon oneself), seem very understandable. In fact, understanding the situation could even give the fear more strength, since in these situations, it is completely founded. If one sees a person balancing on the edge of a very high place, with a high risk of falling and no fear at all, it can raise the question of whether they are crazy, momentarily out of their mind, drunk or on drugs or otherwise unconscious of the danger. Thus the first thought would rather be : do they not understand the situation? They should be scared, if they understood. (And if they were scared, they would show more prudence.)

However, it can be argued that understanding these fears can lead to finding solutions to them. For example, installing barriers in those high places, have a lamp enlighten the dark and avoid places with wild animals, or plan on how to protect oneself. Do these measures disminish the fear though? In a way, yes, but never entirely. The measures are motivated by fear, so they have to be considered as a consequence. Understanding did not make the danger vanish, so the fear didn’t either.

Maybe it would be wrong to interpret this quote as arguing that understanding makes fear disappear. It says „so that we may fear less“, not that we would stop it completely. In that sense, it is more about understanding as a measure against fear, as a measure to take control of the danger. Find the cause of your fear and do something against it – do not leave it as being frightened, this isn’t the right path to go. With this I would agree, but in that case it would have to be phrased as „nothing in life is only to be feared“, wouldn’t it? Instead, „it is only to be understood“.

Understanding is a way to take control of one’s fear. In fact, overintellectualizing issues is a very efficient defense mechanism against negative feelings, it allows a person to take distance and view the problem as something more abstract, less immediate, less of a danger.

If you were facing a bear, this wouldn’t be very helpful. Front to a person with a gun though, it really could. A person would have to judge very quickly, according to different situations, which type of reaction would be the most sensible.

Curie’s quote seems to encourage people to take control of the problems they encounter, instead of being scared. Depending on societal problems and the people’s mentalities, it might be what they need to hear to wake up from a passive state of mind and go on to face the issues. Facing danger, humans – and animals too – usually have two types of very well known reactions : fight or flight. Knowledge can be viewed as a way of fighting, or at least preparing to : finding out which tools and measures are needed in order to do so, or whether the fight is actually not necessary and the problem can be solved otherwise, following some insight given through our understanding.

In the end, maybe this is the most important aspect of the quote, that we had better remember : now is the time to understand more. It might make the fear diminish, might make the danger vanish, or not – but even if not, it will always help us take action, accomodate to a situation through better transparence, and feel that we are not only victims of the circumstances. Maybe in certain cases, we are, at least in parts. But never only that, because we understand, we see our place in the greater scheme of actions and can take part in what is happening, even if we cannot influence all of it.

(brainyquote.com ; 31.10.2020)

- written in 50 minutes instead of 30. -

Let us begin with animism, a very ancient way to view the world, found at the roots of most religions. Objects and phenomena of nature such as the weather, climate, single mountains, trees, rivers, accidents or catastrophes are interpreted as actions of living beings motivated by specific intentions, that sometimes one had to find out. In Shintoism in ancient Japan for instance, local deities were present everywhere and had to be included in everyday decisions. They were said to have a good and a bad side, only one of them meaning well, and humans had to be careful to favour the nice one. Earthquakes could be the expression of the deity of the mountain, but so could rain, or being able to take a path safely, „under their protection“. Thus, the current state of mind of the deity, whether it expressed itself as angry or happy or calm, was directly, and almost exclusively, related to the consequences it had on humans. Assuming that those deities existed, they would have been perceived „as we (humans) are“, which might not always have been concordant with how they actually were.

Furthermore, the questions of animism leads to another aspect of human perception and interpretation, which is a tendency to seek sense everywhere, and more easily in ways that put ourselves in the center of the explanation. In shintoism, a mountain couldn’t just be a mountain, it had to be alive, like us, think, like us, and have emotions, sometimes irrationally so, like us. And not only that, but most of the time, all of this revolved entirely around human behaviour. It was angry? The village had done something wrong. Climate was very good for agriculture this year? The prayers and rituals had worked. If the explanation wasn’t about humans, the people wouldn’t have even known what to do with the information.

What’s interesting is, a similar thing happens for all humans during development. For very small children whose parents get a divorce, even if the latter explain the reasons to their child, the child is very likely to interpret all bad things that happen to it as its own fault. In psychology, we call it egocentrical reasoning (which has nothing to do with egoism) : at first, it cannot understand things otherwise, and it takes a long development to be able to inhibit this first intuitive reasoning style. So, a divorce might make the child see its own past actions in a suddenly very dramatic way („I didn’t always listen; I didn’t go to bed when they told me; I kept playing with the curtains when they told me not to; I wasn’t good enough at school“, …). This can of course be prevented through repeated explanations from part of the parents, and the child’s maturation processes will make it understand the situation in a new light later. But these thoughts can still be traumatizing, in the sense where if they were believed for a long period of time, they will have shaped the child’s personality in some way.

Later, we become able to interpret other people’s actions by identification with them. In psychology, this is called Theory of Mind. If I were you, why would I do that? Whereas the child under six years old wasn’t naturally able yet to put itself in other people’s shoes (thus putting itself at the center of everything), those over seven will gradually develop the ability to abstract their own perception and imagine what it would be like from another person’s point of view. I know the gloves are drying on the heater, but that doesn’t make the other child stupid for looking for them in the drawer : they didn’t see the adult put them on the heater to dry. If I were them, I wouldn’t have been able to know either. This ability is less intuitive than the egocentrism, but in most adults in becomes automatical too. Some neurological differences, like autism for instance, can complicate it though.

In a similar way, „I would never hurt someone on purpose“ can turn into „he didn’t do it on purpose“. But in fact, we have very little access to what other people think : maybe he did and maybe not. It is our own responsibility to evaluate what we think we know, and how we think we know it.

Last but not least, what we know and feel will always keep influencing our perception. If we are already anxious we are more likely to perceive someone as potentially dangerous – if it expresses as social anxiety for example, we might perceive a comment as being mockery, although a person was actually just trying to help. Anxiety levels are influenced by basic things such as food, working out, socializing, whether one got good sleep, etc. But also past experiences, our own personality, shaping our expectations… So yes, another time, „what we are“ makes up a very important part of how we see the world!