fastidium

I’ve been ruminating lately about the direction I’d like to take this blog. The original goal was to address topics in popular culture that had a significant impact on the way in which we think of ourselves and the world around us. But alas, its hard for one person to concentrate on writing such lofty thoughts and blog consistently, especially since that one person (me) has other responsibilities in life.

So, even though I haven’t had much to say lately, there will be some new things happening around here. I will continue to post about some of my favorite shows and certain topics in popular culture but things will turn slightly philosophical.

Television and movies are still the most accessible types of narrative that express ways in which a culture thinks of itself (for lack of a better phrase). Shows like Reaper and movies like No Country For Old Men (just saw it; its excellent, by the way) display our social categories of good and evil but are reluctant to give any metaphysical significance to those categories. In Reaper, we know the devil is evil but he’s got a girlfriend so he can’t be all that bad. He’s just a fun loving guy who’s got some demons to manage. In No Country For Old Men, evil is what Anton Chigurh does; he doesn’t beat around the bush, he just does it. It makes me wonder if our storytelling about good and evil is just a tip of the hat to older times. In modern times, we know that good and evil are a matter of perspective. Those categories get blurred in real life, right?

One of my favorite works of philosophy is a book called After Virtue by Alisdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre is one of those thinkers who speaks too much about the way we live our lives for the academic philosophical world. Academic philosophers like to speak and write about how we know what we know and how the table in front of me embodies ‘tableness’. MacIntyre is way too practical for such theorizing. His main field of study is moral philosophy but the conclusion of After Virtue, his landmark work that was dropped on the philosophical community in 1981, is that morality is a perfectionist aim and that any attempt to justify claims of morality, whether by emotivism (Hume) or rationalism (Kant), is doomed to failure. It is a critique of contemporary moral philosophy and, in short, it argues that we cannot discuss morality today because we really don’t know what morality is (at least, not in any significant way).

So, I’m going to read my favorite book on moral philosophy again. And, I’m going to blog about it. When tie-ins to popular culture arise, I’ll mention them.