I find it necessary to change my topic of study. I am interested in the exploration of climate change as an economic opportunity, and I will likely return to it at some point, either this year or some future year (although next year I already want to do my EMC2 project on chronicling the history of economic thought from the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economic). But I think that if this project is going to be meaningful, and compelling, I need to be really motivated to put in quality work and not just bullshit my way through, and the necessary next part of my project, research on changes in the environment from climate change, doesn’t motivate me enough. So, to keep going, I need to change focus a bit.
Now, it seems like a very late date to be changing topics. But, in fact, I changed topics a long time ago. It just took me until now to recognize it. My journals have been loosely relating back to the environment and climate change but, really, those aspects were really just implications drawn out of what I was really exploring, which was economics, the nature of economics, the human mind, human will, human nature, paradigms, and purpose. And for all the writing that appears on my site, there’s twice as much writing in my notes about education, morality, and epistemology. Whatever I’ve been working on, it’s not about climate change. It surely has implications for climate change, but I think it would be a mislabelling to say that this project is about climate change.
The big problem I’ve been struggling with for the past couple months has been trying to see a connection between all of the students’ projects (which I sense exists because I spend just as much time on each of their projects as I do on mine). I expressed this struggle of mine in an email to the other coordinators at the beginning of the month: “This past month I've been catching glimpses of something, flashes of insight into an idea that is really big and really complex and somehow connects a lot of these projects. I've been doing some research into epistemology for Jonah [whose project I now know connects back to purpose and ultimate ends], and Alex touched upon epistemology in his attempt to bring morality to a human level [and now realizes that morality is a social issue], and my project has been centered on the relationship between man and the external world, and...I don't know, I just keep feeling like they're all connected. But, more than those, I feel like our new focus on argument and questioning is connected, too, and that these beginnings of thoughts in my head wouldn't exist without this last ingredient. But it's been difficult to pursue these thoughts because I don't know what this theory that I'm crafting is a theory of, exactly, except maybe some kind of theory of being human, and this lack of direction leaves me just waiting for more flashes. Still, I feel like if I could put all of it together, it would move us all forward a hundred paces.”
This is what I’ve really been working on. I’ve been trying to test the theories of my students by questioning them in my own notes, and doing research on their topics, and building an underlying theory that could support their arguments or reveal their flaws. It seems, indeed, that this is a “theory of being human.” An exploration of the human condition (scarcity) and its implications for human nature. The results of this exploration will obviously have tremendous implications for Jonah’s project on education, and Alex’s project on morality, but I think it will also have implications for all the projects. Noah is doing his project on comedy...Bergson points out that we only really laugh at humanness; we find animals funny when we recognize ourselves in them, and a landscape is never comic. Moreover, jokes, like every other product of man, are purposeful. So, his project is connected. Ved’s project is about robots, which are built by man for a purpose. Mikayla is now critiquing consumerism, or human nature. Silma is exploring dreams, and how our actions impact our dreams and our dreams impact our actions. It’s all connected. And I know it’s connected. And sometimes I can see how it’s all connected. And these days all I want to do is actually connect them and make the connection explicit.
So, that’s what I’m gonna be working on through this project, now. Again, I’ve been working on it, both here under the guise of climate change implications, and in my notes and private correspondence. But I want to develop this theory I’ve been constructing and make it explicit, and test it against the world, question it, improve it, and use it to make my students’ projects better through testing, questioning, and improvement. This is what I’m motivated to do. This is what I want to work on now.
My project is now the development of a Theory of Being Human.
No comments:
Post a Comment