Claud

An avid collector of your hopes and worries, a romantic at heart.

She thanks her fairies, for blessing her with people who know compassion down to an art.

For accepting her for who she is, who never fails to turn up,

in times of need as well as happiness, or just there for a loving hug.

Today in Geographical Philoposhy class, I learnt a few things about myself - it came because the class basically sparked a questioning of "how do you know what you know?". Essentially, it's asking about the theory of knowledge, how does one understand the world?

This led me to think  - why am I so interested in analysing social phenomena in the first place? Where did the idea of 'personal interest' come from? I suppose it all came from fairy tales and fables. The whole idea of having a meaning behind a story. For instance the three little pigs tell us not just a story of three little pigs and a big bad wolf, but that we cannot be lazy and skimp on future contingencies. That really propelled me into thinking if there is a world of meaning out there, that is waiting to be discovered. Going into secondary school, I felt an inclination towards patterns and categories. How geography seems to have a well elaborated syllabus where the content is easily understood and sometimes, quite self-explanatory.

In JC, I was then exposed to Chemistry where there were theories to be learnt that were beyond the naked eye. In Geography, we were exposed to processes and globalisation - suddenly it became quite abstract and no longer self-evident. I suspect then, that I could do well in economics and geography, was because I subconsciously align my thinking with causal understandings of reality (what in philosophy is known as realism).

Coming to NUS was not my first choice, but being 'stuck' here, I think is the best thing that has ever happened to me. In a way, I finally understand that it's not so much of Geology I seek (understanding earth processes because it was so evident and well illustrated in textbooks of that discipline), but the kind of understanding - to interpret the literal so as to understand the underlying meaning.

Essentially, I'm not interested in the three little pigs' houses, but why the brick house was not blown apart by the big bad wolf.

It's very muddy, and philosophy can 'turn people off'. However, I think philosophy is to make known in words of how we think and the limitations of our 'style' of thinking. When we reading the news or what someone said, how sensitive at asking "what position did this person come from, that made s\he arrive at this conclusion" or "Why did he say this? What was he thinking?". I believe that if we stop reflecting, we become sheep that can be easily manipulated. Of course, there's another extreme side where people argue for the sake of arguing when the argument has clearly exhausted itself or that the two people arguing are not even on the same boat.

I guess nearing the end of my undergraduate experience with geography, sociology and philosophy (to a smaller extent as a discipline, but rather the usage of the thoughts in social sciences), there is a personal need to account to myself, why I do what I do, why I enjoy it.

Some of you reading must be asking - what's the point of asking such questions? That's because I feel that there's is a need for reflexivity in life. To understand how we come into being (being passionate in certain things, having a set of what we call 'core' beliefs) because if we don't we lose a sense of history of ourselves. I already faced difficulty in recalling my personal experiences regarding this matter, and thought that perhaps another decade, I may not be aware of this part of my life history.

However we live our lives, there is value in knowing how we live it, why we live it the way we do and finally, what we can do about it. Perhaps the value need not be a utilitarian one - that each and everything we do, must have direct application in our lives. It can be an aggregate of characteristics, that then in turn shape what you do with your life, how you see the world and how we interact with others. The value of knowing how you know, affects your daily actions in less direct and more metaphysical ways. So therefore, people who scoff at the 'uselessness' of philosophy and focus entirely on the material concerns, run the risk of becoming perpetually static. Precisely because philosophy changes how we see the world and our realities (or non-realities), these manifest themselves in how we understand the world and therefore our actions. It's not inconsequential and pariah, rather I think it is so powerful, that we do not even understand the true depths of it's influence in our every day lifes. The labour of reflecting in how we think, is to make those metaphysical-material connections to somehow push the boundaries of thought.

Because thinking is really what humanises us - the day we give up thinking, reading, understanding and interpreting is the day we become an economic unit that is easily replaceable and finite.