Sweet Sorrow?

Is it necessary to dislike something in order to be glad to see it go?  I ask because I don't think I've disliked Kant all that much.  But after a month of seminars entirely devoted to him, I am super ready to move on.

For one thing, can we all agree he's just difficult to read?  Agree with him, disagree with him, doesn't matter.  Fact is the man uses big words and arranges them in complicated ways.  Luckily, at least he's meticulous about using each word to mean only one thing.  Confusingly, the way in which he uses any given word may or may not match up with the way that word is in common usage.  It's very hard to talk about a book without saying something along the lines of "I get the impression the author means..."  But that right there?  The word "impression"?  That no longer means what you think.  Nor do the words "concept", "idea", "thought", etc.

But you know what?  Still better than Hume.

Definitions

Well, it's after midnight, but I haven't gone to bed yet, so I'm going to consider it still a seminar night.  

And what, you may ask if you don't know me personally, is a seminar night?  Well, the school I go to runs on a great books program.  So we learn via reading the works of Western Civilization's great authors and then talking about them.  Many of these works are broken up into subjects.  We take math, language, laboratory science, music...and seminar.  If seminar doesn't sound like a subject, that's because it isn't.  It's the catchall class -- a little history, a little literature, a little philosophy, etc.  Point is, on the nights we have that class, I'm pretty much guaranteed fodder for deep thought.  Sometimes it's a little overwhelming, so don't expect every post to be about Kant or Locke.  Still, I figure if all else fails and my life is otherwise boring, I can make something up about them.  This is why I promise(ish) to post on those days.  It's for my convenience, really.  

And, just so tonight isn't only about scheduling, here's a thought:  When one encounters two situations that can lead to negative outcomes, is the lesser of two evils the one that leads to them less frequently but more egregious ones, or the one that leads to them more frequently but less egregious ones?  

Geronimo

May as well jump in, I guess.  Last year, I gave up Facebook for Lent.  If I were a more virtuous person, this would have meant the time that used to be used scrolling through a newsfeed would have been used to work on my academics or take up a new hobby.  Instead, all that changed was that I started reading more blogs.  Now, this in and of itself was not bad.  They were good blogs.  But I thought this year I would try a slightly more productive variation.  I have, as you can obviously tell, started my own.  

For the duration of Lent, I hope to keep this fairly serious.  I'm not going to critique pure reason (though I may rant about the Critique of Pure Reason) or anything like that.  However, the idea of posting on seminar nights (something I'll explain in the next post) should help me in this by providing fodder for deep thought.  

It's now officially Lent.  Let's do this.