Here I am, in my second favorite White Spot (Richmond Centre),  waiting on my Macaroni. and Cheese (aka Kraft Dinner) Burger, and relaxing.

I am here to treat myself after doing something that was not easy for me : showing up for group study with Luka (who lives on The second floor), one of my two study partners for that group exam in Ethics on Monday.

This was a bit of a hurdle for the ol’ social anxiety, but that wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been due to the reliable unreliability of mass transit. I waited 45 minutes for a 405 bus while four, count’em, FOUR #401 buses went by.

As a result, I was far too aggravated to worry about such trivial things as social anxiety.

And Luka (yes, I think you’ve seen him before) seems like a pretty cool guy. Cute too, but don’t tell them I said that, unless you know he’d be into it, in which case, hell yeah and come back for seconds).

On the way to KPU, the bus driver sang softly in Chinese for the whole trip. I didn’t want to believe it was the bus driver doing it, seeing as that was the person in charge of the ten tons of bus with my favorite me in it. But I looked al around the bus and there was only one other person in tge bus was an East Indian guy who seemed to be asleep.

Or meditating. Hard to tell the difference from afar.

It gets weirder! I have had multiple encounters with a seemingly developmentally challenged dude who sings in Chinese all the time on that very same bus. 

So either that guy was hiding somewhere on the bus, or  that guy now drives the bud .

That doesn’t actually bother me that muvh. After all, odds are that guy is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I implicitly trust tnose people with anything to do with mass transit.

Honesly, half of the time, all Luka (just don’t ask him what it was) and I did was bitch about the course and the prof. I like the prof, but she seems to have no idea what she is doing. She practically admitted that we were doing a group exam because it gave her 2/3 fewer papers to grade, which is great for HER, and really, isn’t that all that matters?

Because that is what education is all about, right? The teachers?

We spent a whole three hour class on cultural relativism, and another on why religion and/or God  can’t be the basis of morality, but Kant? We barely got thete, let alone actually covered the subject.

Because, ya know, he is only one of the most respected and (sadly) influential thinkers in the history of Western thought, the successor in rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, the guy whose name is on an entire branch of ethics.

But please, let’s belabour every minute point about why cultural relativism is wrong first.

Well, I am done eating, the bill is paid, and I am tired of one finger typing.

Seeya when I get home!

(—)

519 words while noshing at the Spot. Decent.

Had their salted caramel ripple ice cream again. It’s really good. You don’t taste the salt, of course… that would be gross. What you taste is the effect it has on the flavour of the caramel, which is to heighten the sweetness in a rich and very pleasing way, IMHO.

The caramel sauce does tend to freeze into little chewy caramel nuggets in places, but that’s clearly a feature, not a bug. They are quite tasty, and once you know they are there, make the experience more fun.

While talking to Luka (after that you don’t ask why), it occurred to me to wonder exactly what it means to be a philosopher.

I was telling him how, up until the mid 19th century, philosophy was done by scholar for scholars, and that is why it is written in this abstruse and legalistic language. The philosopher expected his rivals to be looking for errors, omissions, and such, and as such they were not worried that said rivals would lose interest in their writing.

Their rivals, unlike us common folk, were motivated by a powerful force : spite.

And that got me thinking about what it means to be a philosopher. It’s certainly more than dusty librarians playing “gotcha” with one another. It’s a trite truth to say it is about a search for the truth, but that doesn’t really explain much. The truths of philosophy often have a lot more to do with the seeker than what is sought. It can’t just be the truth, it has to be the truth in a form that our mortal minds can understand. Even the mightiest of ponderers can only comprehend a tiny fraction of the totality of human existence.

Doesn’t stop me from trying, though.

The act of philosophy is simple : think about things. That is truly all there is to it. Try to figure what is really going on.

But the act of being a philosopher is entirely different. Arguably, you only become a philosopher when you try to put your thoughts into words meant for others, whether it’s in writing or speech. The need to communicate these truths is what makes someone into a philosopher. Otherwise, the person would just sit around and think all day and be content with that.

But that is not how humans operate. Even Nietzsche’s holy hermit Zarathustra felt the need to come down from the mountaintop and share his truths with the people of the world.

So to be a philosopher is to search for novel and important truths to share with the rest of humanity. In that sense, the philosopher is the advanced scout of the mind. They enthusiastically seek out the outer edges of human understanding, and explore past them, hoping, on some level, to come back to the tribe and tell them of the treasures and dangers that lie ahead.

Of course, because we’re human beings too….. it’s not that simple.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.