No man is an island, Mr. Donne, but lots and lots of people are in cars;  where sometimes in spite of ourselves we get tired of listening to the radio and it's still just us.  

Connection can be a philosophical question because the issue of connection is not the connection itself.  Being in a connection, working in it and so on, is different from thinking about that connection.  

Aside from the connections between humans, there are also hundreds of connections that individuals have.  The fact that a connection is a possession in this language has significance, too;  because if it were otherwise, we might call it sharing, or giving.   One could think of a couple of other ways that a person could have a connection.  

So there's this idea that consciousness causes a connection because in the human mind it is the self that has connections.  

Therefore, one could conceivably have a relationship with oneself.  This sounds like the new age spirituality concept of loving oneself.  But you have to know what you are loving before you start loving that thing, right?  

Conceivably, a person could love the nothing.  But as soon as they are loving the nothing, that's something, isn't it?  Mmmmhmmm.   

Something that you think it is

People ask, "Am I who you thought I was?"  

Is there a more philosophical question?  

Professor Smythe of North Carolina College said that the most fundamental philosophical questions we can ask are, "Who am I?" and "What is this?"  He might have been quoting Martin Buber.  

Am I who you thought I was?  One time I was with my friend Nick and we were outrageous together.  He had this way of laughing at my jokes, sort of supporting me while I talked.  I thought that I supported him in that way, too.  Then one day, and I don't remember if he even marked the emotional occasion with any words, he just stopped laughing.  Conversations which had been really good before were just slow, and had various awkward silences.  

It was much more dramatic to me about a week afterward.  Now, seeing it written down, I realize that a story about how there's no drama isn't that interesting.

Am I who you thought I was?  I always think of the subjunctive when saying things that require the subjunctive.  I sort of feel the subjunctive dying out in the English language.  Sort of feels like there needs to be a 'were' there.  Am I who you thought I were doesn't feel right, either, though.  Are we who you thought we were?  But when do we ever ask that?  Why would any group need to prove themselves to an individual?  Or another group?

That is, being in a group is self-justifying.  The very act of being in there is a comforting process.  This scary stuff, when we put some cognitive dissonance theory to it:  if a group never thinks that it is unjust as a group, then there are not any checks and balances.   

Am I who you thought I was?   Posters cover my walls in my house.  Posters dot my dormitory in my room at the University and then disappear.  Am I who you thought I was?  Doesn't involve the present tense for the thought.  What an oblong sentence!  "Am I" is in present tense because we have the default sentiment that the self never changes.  We also think that we do not change how we are viewed by people.  

Am I who you thought I was?  Charles Dickens wrote 2 dimensional characters.  He wrote about people who simply have one act, one thing that they do.  He would write a character called, "Mrs. Washtub," who would take a bath every time she was in a scene (every time she were in a scene? The subjunctive is dying out).   But we don't want to be two dimensional characters.  It's a sin, in the United States, to be two-dimensional.  Call it the Denzel Washington problem:  we don't want to be cast in the same role over and over.   

E.B. White said something to the effect that it seems like people want to be considered evil rather than silly, a lot of times.  What I take home from this is that people want to be taken, perhaps not seriously, but honestly, and importantly.   

Now more than ever, we have stuff telling us who we are and what we do.  So there's mob mentality, there's facebook with our pictures on it, there's myspace with our pictures on it.  There's school identifications, there are thousands of people who "really know us".  Nine inch nails has a song "You know what you are?"  Coldplay has a song, "Lost!"  Millions are fascinated about Kanye West's struggles of identity (is he pompous or does he simply have very low self-esteem?).  The punchline to the joke is that the more that we are told who we are, the more we want to break out of that.  A friend told me that I'm a libertarian this past semester.  I was enraged.  Everyone has heard the phrase (at least everyone who has heard the Ludacris song)  "Get back, you don't know me like that."  The other punchline is that the more we do build the self, the more we want to build the self more;  in other words the more we build the self, the less we know ourselves.  

Philosophy of Friendship

I have been wondering about friendship ever since I was just about in 3rd grade.  I have wondered what the difference between friends, mentors, professors, workers, and teachers are with friendship.  I've wondered about love and friendship and all of these really interesting relationships all around us.

I was talking to a Rabbi a couple of weeks ago, and one of the first things he said to me was that with all of this technology we have thousands and thousands of friends, but no real friends.

I was quick to point out Leibniz's theory of relations:  everything is related to everything.   So for example, if you took a point in space A, this point is already in relation to anything around it (like space), but if we put a point near it, because the potential of the point was there, and because that point B is already built into the concept of A, the relationship is inherent.  One could say this about point A on this screen, for example.  There's just no way that this point A on the screen is unrelated to the screen, and your eyes, for example.  They are in a relation to each other whether you say so or not.  

And don't discount that it was inherent, that it's there with or without you, either.  

So the Rabbi countered that his clothes are made in China, but what's that worth?  What's it worth to say that we have a relationship to China?

Those of you who know me too well already know that I feel this way, but I sort of felt then, and at this time, too, that we do have a relation to China.  In fact, the Rabbi, as a Hasidic Jew rooted in the Kabbalah, should know that there is a spiritual element to everything.  When I say everything I really mean it.  

That is, there should be a greater emphasis on who you buy your clothes from and the spiritual element of the people who make your clothes.  

But to strike at mere casual conversation is so rude!  He was only telling me to consider my friendships and who my friends are.

Well I know this:  Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics, says that there are roughly three types of friendships:

1)  When people are meeting for a cause or an appointment, like an event or multiple events.

2)  When people want pleasure from one person for themselves.  So if I am friends from a person because they bring me pleasure, but I am not necessarily interested in their pleasure.

3)  When both partners is interested in virtue for the other.  

This is fundamental!! Western philosophy, and popular culture, has been derived from Aristotle.  

I'll bet you already sort of felt this way about your friends.....

One counterexample that I can put up against this is the fact that sometimes the best friendship, the 3rd kind where both partners want virtue, is when one wants virtue in the other, but the most virtuous thing would be to not be friends.  This can get tricky.  

Recently, I read a February 2009 Article of the Economist which says that scientifically, people are only able to have 7-10 close friends in their lives, and are only able to understand or have the capacity for about 150-200 (The Dunbar Number, folks).  The article was using Facebook, Primatology, and Harvard Social Scientists in order to come up with these numbers.  

In my own life, I feel that this is true at any given time.  But it is so important that there is a type of life cycle to friendships, and that the process is organic.  More on this point in  a later post.  

The article concludes that facebook means we are passively tracking and presenting ourselves to the world instead of "friending" people like we would in real life.  

There's some pretty big ideas here but I'm all out of gas so I'm going to post more on these thoughts later.