Field Notes and Fragments #3: My New Philosophy
Weekly Observations from an Unfinished Journey
Welcome to another weekend Field Notes!
This is my weekly “newsletter” where I can go behind the curtain a little bit, speak more personally to you, as well as show off some things I’ve been tossing around mentally of late. I usually have some book recommendations or other blogs to share. This weeks is a short and sweet five minute read, but with some things I’m excited to bring to your attention. Enjoy!
This Week in Lamentations
This week was another exciting and busy one, with Wednesday’s essay seeming to resonate with a lot of folks! I have officially been writing here at Lamentations for one month now on Substack, and the response has been a big surprise. If you’re new here thanks to that essay or found my writing recently, I’ll recommend starting at the beginning with the link below.
This is the introduction to my ongoing project here, with some helpful background context as well as some links to the following essays. Welcome again, and thank you for being here!
We’re also getting closer to July 13th, which is when the community writing event of Elias Thorne stories concludes. I published my entry already and you can check that out below.
A New Philosophy
As I continue to publish my writing here, this journey that started as a place to openly think and learn through philosophy is also gaining new forms. I keep coming back to certain ideas and realizing that these essays are not just separate arguments about different philosophical topics. There is something weaving them all together as part of a larger system that I have been slowly uncovering.
Lamentations of Late has become a project about inheritance. That none of us, or anything else, begin from nowhere. We inherit our families, cultures, and our history. We arrive in a story that has already started, and doesn’t seem to have an end. Alongside that inheritance is participation. We can’t help but to participate in the world we are brought into. Even choosing to not act, is itself an act of participating.
Heroism is thus the ethical ideal that follows from this and then the greater philosophical system as a whole. It is the working name for the project, and for a few reasons. Heroism often makes people think about a chosen-by-fate conqueror or a purified glorious “great man” of history. To me, this doesn’t fit.
The Hero, to me, is the person who recognizes their responsibilities, and in the face of an uncertain future, chooses to bear the burden and carry them forward. The high school teacher who lives with how disastrous the education system is becoming and fights every day to still give the best education they can. The parents who still raise compassionate and critical thinking children to continue the work into the next generation.
Even someone with no family, no friends, and who would otherwise see themselves downtrodden and with little self-worth can become the hero. Recognizing that we all have the responsibility both to ourselves to self-develop and to the future generations that we will affect with our actions. Heroism is conscious participation in an unfinished world, passing the fire forward to those who need it after us.
I am beginning to organize this into a more formal philosophical system. Eventually, I want to take everything I’ve written here and turn it into a book. I might take individual essays and make some physical zines as well to send out to interested subscribers here. These will all be handmade and include the kind of aesthetic vision I have for the project.
Field Notes and Fragments will be one of the places where I work through this in public. I do not consider the system finished and that is partly the point of this journey. To uncover it together through the work here, while living inside of that very system.
So in my mind, Lamentations of Late is the platform where I can witness the issues and work out my response to them. Heroism is that response, it is the action. What we actually do after hearing the lament and heeding the call.
Recent Reading and Recommendations
I’m still working on some of the previous mentions in the last Field Notes, namely Schelling’s Clara (it’s so good). This week though, I just wanted to mention Spinoza’s Ethics. As I mentioned my own philosophical system-building, this was the obvious go-to.
I have been generally familiar but had not done a real deep dive into the work and am starting that now. Structurally, Ethics is Spinoza’s entire philosophy laid out with definitions, axioms, propositions, reflections, and consequences all arranged in what he called geometric order. I’m taking inspiration from this, and really enjoy the way that things are laid out here. As I’m going to keep using Field Notes to make progress on Heroism, I’ll keep working through this and provide my thoughts as I go.
Fragments
Some departing fragments of ideas that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet.
This upcoming week’s article will focus on the plague of apathy that has taken over, and why a serious need to care about things should be our goal.
I’ve been thinking more about my use of fiction and myth to express my ideas here. I’m even considering trying to make some type of comic book or, like I mentioned before, zine to showcase Lamentations and Heroism. Open to ideas if anyone has suggestions!
I’ve been thinking a lot about vegetarianism/veganism, animal rights and ethics, and things along those lines. Nothing that I’m ready to write about, but as anyone who knows me, I like to be subversive and controversial, so this topic will be coming sooner or later.
As Lamentations approaches more contemporary current events and topics, political and economic philosophy becomes more relevant. So, my ideas on capitalism and it’s opponents will be coming soon as well. Mainly, my thoughts have been on this trend of calling our current era “late stage capitalism.” All I’ll say is that I disagree with this naming. It seems to me that this doesn’t necessarily need to be the late or end stage at all, and we might be involved in a terrifying show that is just getting started.
That’s it for this week everyone, thanks for being here. Be kind to each other and take care of yourselves. New essays every Wednesday.
These are my lamentations of late.
- JD