John Stupart.com

When I was a young undergraduate, and my head was filled with heady intellectual juices of Marxism and John Rawls, I use to relish getting involved in philosophical discussions, both in class and with colleagues. I had studied Political Science and Philosophy, amongst other things (ie Psychology, German and so on) and was thus exposed to all manner of philosophical writings, ranging from the existentialism of Descartes – who still has a special place in my head – to the brutally-frank realism of Hobbes. One of the last courses I did in my final year was the notion of philosophical agnosticism, triumphed by one Richard Rorty; a philosopher of no major renown outside of the United States I believe. The point was not the vanilla agnosticism the religious confuse it with, but rather with this persistent mindset to essentially dismiss nothing, but doubt everything. To always be challenging your views and beliefs and continuously trying to hone one’s knowledge on everything ad infinitum.

However, I stopped philosophy and political science and veered towards Strategic Studies, opting to leave the philosophy at the door and involve myself in what is essentially analysing very current phenomena in very practical, nonsensical terms. There’s no room in the study of war for existentialism, or even Hobbes. Although they both factor into the field of International Relations, they’ve normally paid a face value ‘nod’, if that, and left at the door whilst we stick our noses of inquiry into the relationships between country A and country B, or in my case, Pirates and Modernity.

The point is, I miss philosophy. It was great to come out of a lecture or seminar with my head reeling with new ideas and reconceptualisations of what I had previously thought to be the status quo. Having one’s worldview challenged on a daily basis was insanely frustrating and yet immensely satisfying at the same time.

Reading Jon’s blog often makes me wish I could still continue with pure philosophy. The spirit of inquiry which is almost indistinguishable from the discipline as a whole is something which is very easy to lose track of outside of departmental corridors. Sure, my own realm of strategic studies requires all manner of questions be asked, but there exist very well-defined precedents essentially written in stone. Warfare is, if nothing else, a patterned exercise in human politics. It’s about as well-defined a field as one can find, if one can stomach the obvious distastefulness of the subject matter. But in philosophy nothing is sacred, and everything is up for question. It’s something very valuable that I gained from studying philosophy for 3 years. I might not have ever been very good at a lot of the authors, and I often came out severely dissatisfied at the fuzzy obscurity of some of the shit we had to read, but at the end of it philosophy equipped me with a toolset designing basically around the question “Why?” which has served me well ever since. I resented it’s lack of permanence in any one discourse, as everything, even the big guys like Kant and Foucault, was up for critique, but I always relished the manner in which philosophical enquiry was able to break down norms in thinking and analysis and basically stick the intellectual finger to establishment.

I miss that, because in International Relations there are very well-established SOP’s for approaching one’s theoretical frameworks, and they’re especially unhelpful in the field of strat studies. Philosophy is like the intellectual pit bull of universities; they’re abused, beaten and treated like dirt, but eeeevery once in a while, they’ll be let out to publish something, and it generally ruins the academic pant-legs of departments around the world. That’s awesome, and I miss it.

Music for the post: My good friend Jo (who also loves philosophy I might add) showed me the awesomeness of The Gaslight Anthem, and they rock… metaphysically and awesomely.

… is mostly what I’ve been up to in these many days hence! This is mostly because I tend to really dig listening to metal, yet this taste makes for unhealthy social conversation outside of the sub-culture. Aside from name-dropping ‘normal’ musicians and generally trying not to dress like Satan I have found the easiest way to show that I’m not completely mono-musical is to simply shove my ipod into doubters’ hands and make them browse through the library. (Album)pictures really do speak louder than words! Given how folks seem to take music so personally, yet become irked when you don’t appreciate their tastes unconditionally, it’s important that I fit in, lest I lose all my friends. Well, except the ones who also enjoy the soothing ballads of Bodom, In Flames and suchlike…

… yet at the same time I’m also trying to crawl back into some old habits. Snowboarding, for one, is something that I’m hoping to resume at the end of the year, if I’m able to get all my ducks in line. The financial duck is currently uncertain, and so too is the flight price duck, but the friends duck is definitely in line and eager to help out, which is nice! Along with this, I’m once again back in the debating pigeonhole with the ‘Jozispeak’ competition coming up in July, with ‘Jozispeak’ being the hipster version of National Championships. I make no pretence of my chances at winning the thing, but the event as a whole promises to be pretty damned ninja.

Academics-wise I’ve discovered that I don’t in fact have a holiday, unlike those damned honours postgrads. Bastards. No, instead I finish assignments in order to clear the month of June to complete my proposal for the school at large. While pirates are indeed fucking rad and I’ll be damned if I hear a convincing argument to the contrary, the humanities department at Wits can often have an unnatural leaning towards papers that have words like “discourse”, “narrative”, “identity” and other woolly inanities which the study of war neither encourage nor tolerate. I intend to tread carefully; saving the wrathful and fiery inspection of Abdi McSomali and his merry band for my paper proper.

Aside from all of these things, I have recently begun a quest to find these fabled peanut butter M&M’s which have recently emerged in SA. Americans would likely scoff at this, given how retardedly superior their ‘candy’ is to our apartheid-like selection. But for us, or rather me, peanut butter M&M’s sound delicious. Japan had a million different KitKat flavours and Wasabi-flavoured Doritos and America may have… well… everything… but in SA these M&M’s herald the coming of modern candy to SA. Or perhaps it’s because, like starved and abused children locked in Joseph Fritzl’s basement, South Africans perceive any new chocolate-like goodie to be awesome until proven otherwise. That being said, I am glad that Chomps are back, albeit in tiny pocket-sized portions.

Music at the moment: Children of Bodom – Lake Bodom

Or perhaps I’ll simply come back to this world as something cool, like a dolphin or wombat… Who knows; that was just the title of the song I was listening to while writing this. It seemed appropriate.

Spending so much time on campus has made me fully aware of just how shitty the catering is. From the plethora of Greek-owned franchises on campus one can choose from an array of equally-expensive stores where you can buy stupidly-overpriced coffee or, in the case of the Senate House’s store, serve it yourself from shitty containers into cheap Styrofoam. I’ve recently begun the trek to a more upmarket coffee shop which is part of the Origins centre principally because they treat their customers like human beings.

The converse of course is a stupidly cheap Indian joint that sells what is theoretically authentic cuisine for stupidly-cheap prices. However, their samoosas taste like saturated oil, their biryani is a yellow mass of congealed fat and cheap-ass rice, and the rest just looks inedible. Needless to say, John’s lunch consists normally of a packet of chips (crisps) and a bottle of flavoured mineral water. When those Greek sheisters stop being so bloody mercantilist I might return some form of patronage to their horrid establishments.

Food has been a primary thought of late, as last weekend saw my speaking partner and I taking part in the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Gauteng Provincial Debating Championships. Sounds grand, except it was run by a single, incompetent student and they fed us one slice of cold pizza for the weekend. The tournament itself was a joke, and I kinda want my weekend back, returning to Gauteng in truly miserable spirits. To celebrate this horrid weekend my brother and Irene, a small-but-potent pixie who happens to be in the debating union as well, had some truly excellent pizza in this arb Italian restaurant in Emmerentia. My emaciated frame truly reveled in this decadence.

Justifiably angry at the tournament fail-cake

No matter. July sees Wits hosting the National Championships, which promises to be truly awesome, thanks largely to a ridiculously-large amount of sponsorship from Standard Bank. No matter how badly we might do in the actual competition, the entire tournament promises to be truly epic.

On a more housekeepingish note, I have once again tweaked the blogroll, adding one Sarah Richmond’s Yosh! site to my illustrious pagentry of amazing co-bloggers. Sarah has the unfortunate tendency to change blogs every couple of months, but this one seems to have been hanging around for a while, and she writes rather prolifically about life in Sapporo, Hokkaido. In some of my early posts I mentioned being one of only two South African ALT’s living in Hokkaido. Sarah is the other city-dwelling one. Aside from taking roughly 5 hours to find her apartment the first time I drove the six hours to her city, we never really had much contact. Nonetheless, you’ve heard my tales of the countryside, now read about her exploits in the city.

And lastly, on a geekier note, I play a PC game called America’s Army, developed by the US Military funnily enough. That’s irrelevant though. My clan has won the latest and largest tournament in South Africa, meaning that I am in fact fucking awesome! Of course there’s no prize money or anything, but it’s nice to be on top of something .

Music today: