Shout out to waking up

Waking up is pretty legitimate. I've been saying in my head recently, "Unlucky" or "lucky" depending upon the a) things that happen to me, and b) my reactions to them. Remember Nozick's thought experiment poses a man who is destitute and in jail who is happy and a man who is rich with amazing success and is still unhappy. This is supposed to prove that it is somehow great to have happiness even though you are destitute and so on. But I still think the miserable successful life is okay! Look at Wikiquote.org sometimes for a good time. If you type in Wittgenstein, you might see his quote that he doesn't think we're put on earth for a good time. The philosophical concept of doing whatever you want, or getting what you want immediately is called Hedonism.
My philosophy club buddies have a counterargument from definition. That is, if you get going with the talk of how bad Hedonism is, how you should not just do what you want to do at any given time, my philosophy club buddies will just say that hedonism is ever present. That is, even if you are shying away from some other option, you are doing what you want. Even if you go for the bad apple, you're doing what you want to do. Before you weirdos get your underpants in a bunch about if this is such a bad thing, consider that if we all lived in backwards land where everyday is opposite day, and we always went for the worse option, things would get pretty bad pretty quick.
One of the Moderns we're into is Francis Bacon. I found out through wikipedia that Kant was the one who separated out Rationalists and Empiricists, and in the spirit of putting everything into 3's he had Hume, Berkeley, and Locke on one side, and Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes on the other. Supposedly Rationalists do thinking stuff and Empiricists do experimentation stuffs. But of course there was double dipping on both sides. Leibniz thought that you could get to real stuff (sort of un-noumena) through both logic and experimentation, and Berkeley thought that everything exists in the mind, which somehow makes it real outside of us.
Bacon is cool, because we can sort of see him as an Empiricist (experimentation) with Rationalist (reasoning) tendencies. Bacon thought that we should use rhetoric in order to amplify reasoning. That is, it is by reason that we avoid the negative aspects of our lower drives.
My professor of rhetoric gave an example in class of a nice, glazed doughnut. The fact that we are not Homer Simpson means that we are able to avoid the doughnut by choice. How do we make that choice? Reason. In some ways I think this is the only way to do it.