Warning to Bassists– You are Philosophically prone

December 27, 2019

Blog 2: Warning to Bassists– You are Philosophically Prone

Get out while you can, young one!

Ever thought about playing bass? Or perhaps you already do play bass. Either way, I must warn you: playing bass can lead to a lifelong struggle with philosophy. Of all the music practitioners (save for composers perhaps), bass playing can lead to becoming a philosopher, one of the most "useless" professions to pursue (even more than bass playing!).

Bassists are particularly prone to philosophy because it's considered a relatively simple affair. Many guitarists and drummers will say bass is the easiest of the band to play (usually in defense of their own instrument's superiority); and most of them probably pick up bass since it's "easy". But even if you ward off the external pressures and consider bass a good in itself (of course it is, you're a bassist!), the internal pressure can get to you. Your counterarguments pointing to "bass gods" (probably John Myung or Billy Sheehan or if you're really bass-ic– Flea) will lead to this thought that those players are really just guitarists in disguise. Maybe you'd start asking yourself "am I really just a guitarist?". Maybe you'll point to the virtuosos of bass before it morphed into a bass guitar (the double bass in classical music). More refined thought into this will lead you to realize "shit, I'm becoming a philosopher!". Am I leaving out Victor Wooten? Of course not! He's a philosopher himself, check out his Ted Talk.

He even dresses like a philosopher too!

What is the main function of the bass anyway? In classical music and in popular dubstep, the "bass drop" is meant to add depth, to stimulate the heart and to establish a greater sense of grounding with the music. Many times, a bass player plays whole notes, half notes or consistent repeated notes (or playing repeated bass lines); with such a simple part, bass players can get lost in thought which is another gateway into philosophy. Nowadays, modern bass players (compared to classical bassists) have the task of making their own bass lines! They have to synthesize their knowledge of bass in music to make new music, so where do they draw upon? Let's take Fleetwood Mac's famous song Dreams, bassist John McVie plays a relatively simple bass line, alternating the notes F and G. Some people may think it's just following the chords and playing the "root notes". And they are correct in one sense but rude and unimpressive in tone. 

But let's take their point: the bass' role is to mainly play the "root notes". Or perhaps we can call them "fundamental notes". All these terms: "root", "fundamental", "bass-ic", all point to the beginner. The thing about philosophy is that it is also a "beginner" subject. Putting aside the demeaning interpretation of "beginner" qua n00b, philosophers are the most radical. They challenge our colloquial notion of things by uprooting the ground of common understanding: concepts! 

While guitarists, pianists, drummers, violinists, flutists, clarinetists, etc. are focused on their "craft", the bassist is at the most risk of leaving their craft behind to unwittingly pursue philosophy. The bassist can certainly follow heed, practicing their scales, learning jazz, metal, or other "innovative" bass fields, but at the end of the day, there's a nagging pull of external and internal pressures of bass that leads bassists to have the most refined defenses of their instruments that go beyond ignorant "fastest note" punks to the more ideal understanding of how music functions. Let's tap into some of these defenses to show how they've (unknowingly) become philosophers.

1. Bassists are the ground for which other instruments build more complex ideas from, without it, it would just be a mess of notes.

Here we have the bassist reflecting on the philosophy of music. How do we normally recognize music? With an anchor point (and yes, most composers will probably be reacting to this common understanding by withholding this run-of-the-mill "plug-and-chug" formula; I see you 20th-century composer and neopostmodern composer punks). 

2. When a bassist makes a mistake everyone will notice it, they are thrown off, making the role of the bassist more important.

Beside the egotism of wanting to be the most important in music, this criticism makes a point similar to point 1. The foundation of music interpretation has certain expectations (the bass plays in time). Why does the bass have such a role?

3. The bass is the heart of the music, it's how you feel it. When the bass drops out, things feel empty and hollow.

This is just waxing philosophy poetics! If we agree with this, why should we associate lower pitch frequencies with "feeling" music any more than others? Continuing this train of thought leads one away from bass-craft and towards philosophy. 

Is Mayonnaise an instrument? Bassist-Philosopher Davie504 offers us his thoughts

Anyway, you get my point. People eventually learn to respect the bass player. They are wise in their execution of whole notes not as a joke but because they understand fundamentally that music need not have the pressure of complexity to be interesting but must start with common ground that listeners can interpret, which can then build on a bigger dialogue with complex/simple ideas to circulate in the mind.

Bassists, while you can get as "virtuosic" as other instrumentalists, your position as the foundation of whatever music you're playing in leads you to a couple of attitudes that is aligned with those who think philosophically: reflecting on the concepts of simple/complex in what is "beautiful"; being the typically understood "ground" of music, you will undoubtedly think about the function of music and its use and your role in it. Being bashed by other instruments you mainly play with (when in amateur settings primarily), you will come up with more thought-out defenses and tend to ponder more than others. The notes bass players play involve depth, which is a pre-requisite for philosophers: they need to recognize depth. 

Note: Ignore those posers who hear profound things and comment "wow that's deep". They are merely voicing their inability to tread in the pool of thought, preferring to stick with the "mainstream" shallow pool of unquestioned assumptions. 

So take this as a warning bassists. If you go any further in your bass journey, you will be exposed to a threat coming from seemingly out of nowhere. No one will lead you to philosophy, but you will feel a pull nevertheless. There's something about playing bass that will tempt most of you to shy away from practicing your craft (art) and focus too much on the philosophy of things (knowledge or "sophia"). For some reason, to be really good at the bass also involves becoming a philosopher, which is a lifetime worth of work on top of having to practice! If you don't work on philosophy (again, not the formal philosophy but the sense of carefully examining your assumptions/foundations), you'll end up a pseudo-philosopher and probably a pseudo-bassist (let those notes rippppp quick!– RIP). Really think about what you're getting yourself into when you pick up those four strings. Long before you know it you'll be thinking about Ethics, Aesthetics, Dogmatism, and German Idealism. Eyes will roll. Trust me, I'm a bassist too. 

-Elijah

P.S. no regrets though lol :P

On Love

December 21, 2019

Blog 1: On love?

On a very personal level, there is an explanatory gap in which I think about whether I love my significant other; and what I mean is on a philosophical level– that is, on the conceptual level. For I feel very strongly that I love her. But also I come to question whether I can?

Certainly I trust her, and when I'm with her I feel many feelings about her, which I interpret as positive and ecstatic. But the gap which I am noticing is that which is filled when the intentions I give are unmatched or unmet. The usual explanation that makes me fine with this gap is that "I love her" or that to love someone is to be understanding.

While I admit this is theoretical, and I say this because this doesn't affect my actions or feelings but certainly underlies the familiar ground on which I act, I am led to try and understand what love is more.

I have up to this point thought of love the way Iris Murdoch puts it– love is a special kind of looking (to see the good in the person). But I'm led to think about what makes me look at the beloved in such a way. There is a good love and a bad love. Reading Kierkegaard's philosophical fragments, he says there is a happy love and an unhappy love.

The unhappy love comes when the "king who loves the maiden" brings up the maiden to his castle and the maiden is eternally grateful– the maiden can't come to love the king because of the blinding elevation she got, the superman sweeping. The happy love comes from when the maiden loves the king as equal, which is analogous to the believer consummated with faith.

whereas having every slate wiped, it prevents redemption, it perturbs nature. What drives my love qua looking? The platonic good can only go so far as to promote transcendence. To go beyond what is human brings us to the unreal, but also the more real; we are brought to God. The floodgates are opened! Agape. The brotherly love for another. But the passion from the union of human lovers, how can that be called love?

I love my significant other's character and attributes, she is pleasant and she is useful. In decreasing order, this is the importance of kinds of friendship all joined into one. But this is friendship, wishing the good for the other because of their goodness. What leads to the love that makes marriage? or to go more with the times, an actual relationship? For I have my own faults too, faults that strain my relationship with her.

The explanatory gap perhaps is supplied by God's love, the source of the givenness, of believing in anything at all. I'm still at a loss and this is not an essay for sure. But I don't want to be the hyper-understanding person for I do get jealous, and I do get angry, i just try not to show it. This love is perhaps incomplete, despite that which love has filled. There is more to be done. And I really can't see anyone else in mind to express this kind of love to; am I delusional or is this really love? I can be wrong or I can be right but I don't care about that. For I care about good or bad.

The same music sounds different

10/22/2019

The Same Music Sounds Different

I turn on my computer, start up google chrome, go on Youtube and click on a link

I hear your voice, your singing voice, your lovely singing voice,

which I haven't heard in so long, since we've said so long.

I can hear my beginner guitar plucking, in my amateurish polo, trying to fit in your presence

I see that I closed my eyes, to see the beauty in your voice, your subtle movements,

to play along, in tune, attuned to your vocal cues.

Music and Interpretation

Music and Interpretation

The most humbling take away from listening to music is its unique interaction with language. It is unlike regular language in that it can utilize it (as in vocal music) or imply it (as in instrumental music). While there are many metaphors saying that 'music is a language', I would like to offer a different approach to thinking about music. For there are many who say music is a language and that it 'speaks' to you but this metaphor, I hope to show, only scratches the surface. I will argue that music is a kind of 'skillful coping', a term coined by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus to describe Heidegger's philosophy of authentically being-in-the-world. 

To "be in the world", for Heidegger, is a concept in his description of human being's existence that primarily posits that the human being and the world are connected and inseparable. To be in the world is to be born into a culture, this is the history of all human beings. To be in the world is to always be projecting oneself forward towards a "for the sake of which"– I build a house for the sake of sheltering myself. To be in the world is to care about the world and those that one lives amongst in the world. To be in the world is to interpret one's world so that there is always meaning.

This brings me to music– how does music showcase a unique form of being-in-the-world? Music is a humbling phenomenon; while we hear these sounds, we interpret them, and, in doing so, evoke different feelings about them, most of the time without the explicit use of language. And music is this organized form of sounds, presented with intention by an composer, himself an interpreter, for the listener to make sense of what may as well be noise without context. It is of no surprise that context delineates whether sound becomes music or noise, for the greatest piece of music ever made being played on the elevator will still be elevator music. 

The context of music is key to showcasing its privilege as a unique form of "being-in-the-world", as a kind of skillful coping. When the context fits the music appropriately, we do not assume anything else. We do not question whether the music is appropriate because we have already made space for it in our world. When we welcome music, we feel at home in the world and engage in it. This is why unfamiliar music to us, especially those that do not match our taste, feels uncanny and sometimes unlistenable. 

The Trap of Philosophy is All the Same, No Matter the School of Thought or An Apology to My Best Friend for Being an Ass

10/19/2019

The Trap of Philosophy is All the Same, 

No Matter the School of Thought

or

An Apology to my Best Friend for Being an Ass

It has been brought to my attention that I've been living in a cult, with a philosophical framework so esoteric that only the true-blooded followers could appreciate what I'm trying to do (or worse, even they don't know what the hell I'm talking about). It is as if I were speaking Klingon but more flowery, its poetry only making sense within the language it was constructed for. This is what is called "Heidegerrese". Its main proponent was none other than the philosopher Martin Heidegger himself, who tasked himself with providing a description of human nature. He felt that language, at the time, didn't have the words for his interpretation– so he made up his own (kind of). What arises from the kind of word-building games he comes up with boasts a high barrier to entry to understand him. When I first read Heidegger, I had no idea what he was talking about, but such a challenge was so intriguing that when I finally got to understanding a bit of his thinking, I began to speak the language itself. The appeal of Heidegger's philosophy has made me apathetic to being comprehensible to others. 

Many of my written compositions regularly feature the word "disclose", "unveil", "unconceal", "Dasein", "being-in-the-world", "being-towards-death", "being-x-y-z" (insert words in variables), and many more. I've come to reflect on how language in this way has affected my thinking. Because insofar as I have gleaned upon numerous insights into what it means to be a human being, I have impoverished myself with communicating them. Perhaps only the illusion of knowing what I'm talking about is what I have going for me. Or maybe even just laziness.  I imagine that back then I would think: 'If I could figure out what the hell Heidegger was saying then others should be able to as well!'. 

And so I've written numerous reflections, many of them in this blog, engaging with Heidegger or using his philosophy as a medium to express my feelings in poetry or journal writing. What I found ironic in all this is that while Heidegger's major work, "Being and Time", rails against Cartesian solipsism, he leaves this one guy who followed him, all alone– effectively solipsistic, but perhaps not by radical choice.

I write now not to describe the state of Heideggerian scholarship. There is already a great deal of philosophers now making Heidegger's thought much more accessible. I am instead talking about how my writing has been self-inflicted with obscurity. Rather than finding my own voice, I tried to embody that of Heidegger's. While it is the task of many philosophers to think more about reality than we take granted for, the task of making it intelligible for your average educated mind may take the back seat. 

This kind of self-indulgence is a parallel to my own. I have largely ignored ethics, afraid of taking a stance on anything. It's hard. Whereas, the reading of Heidegger's lack of any explicit ethics gives me an excuse to work through the "descriptive" writing of everyday existence without any kind of value judgments. This leads to a mild form of egocentrism in the form of idealism (thinking to myself: 'with all this knowledge, I must be able to embody the "authentic" human being'). And when this kind of pretentiousness seeps into personal conversations, I tend to become incapable of even being aware that I've grown defensive or stand-offish. And that feeling after the misunderstanding is over, after the dust settles, is a feeling of stupidity. On the onset of reflection, a quick defensive turn would be to make the excuse of being "unaware", saying to myself "I didn't know". But ignorance and stupidity have a fine line between each other. The former is permissible when it is appropriate and excusable (i.e. experiencing doing a wrong deed for the first time, or being a child who didn't know any better), while the latter connotes an active resistance to making up for and improving on the former. 

There is a difference between Socrates' famous statement "wisest is he who knows that he knows nothing" and the cliché that "ignorance is bliss". Socrates embodied humility and a passionate commitment to the truth. Those that equate ignorance with the joy of innocence are committing the sin of hindsight, conflating lacking knowledge with the lack of desire for knowledge. And I cast the stone only to myself, for I have been wrong, especially to my best friend. 

I have been wrong along these veins many times and the frequency of this occurrence has been swept under the rug in efforts to save my ego, excusing a mere 'lapse of judgment' and a promise to 'do better next time' without any action arising from these passive intentions. And now I think that it has something to do with this tendency of mine to speak in "Heideggerese". It leads to a flight from accountability, for there is nothing wrong in providing descriptions for phenomena; but neither is there anything right in doing so either. 

To take on the reformed task of integrating Heidegger's philosophy with common discourse is to make explicit the fact that I am making an interpretation, translating his very specific word-building to make a point. This calls for speaking for myself based on engaging with his thought (as an interpreter) instead of trying to revive Heidegger in speech (as a rhapsode). The distinction here is subtle, but I think it has a lot to do with the distinction between Socrates and that cliché. I think it best that I acknowledge my viewpoint instead of remain a happy ignoramus who merely appreciates reading Heidegger. And I posit this particular to be universal as well. No matter the school of thought, it is unwise to fall into the trap of hubris clad in brutish armor and thick skin.

The change is to be active rather than passive: in listening, in speaking, in living. It is the switch from the mere speculative to the contemplative– and that means to import the political, ethical, logical, existential, rhetorical, etc. The task of active interpretation is to engage with the world (to be-in-the-world, as Heidegger would put it!), and to be aware of the assumptions that I take wherever I go, to live up to this heritage and to gain insight from it; and, if appropriate, transcend it, branch off of it, and reveal what has remain hidden in plain sight. I put myself up to this as an ethical imperative, to do so with the task of virtue in mind, and to put it in practice (I have been reading the Nicomachean ethics but have yet to put it into practice, and thus have been wasting my time). 

And to you, my best friend, I am sincerely sorry and hope to make amends. I am also grateful to have learned this from you, I would have been blind if it were any other. Thank you for your patience and your straight up honesty with me.

An existential reflection on my heart

09/26/2019

An existential reflection on my heart

The world that is, now appears constricting. It's been awhile since I remember the scars on my heart. I had relapsed into an illusory rekindling. The space that was reserved for her but began to fade was sneakily occupied again, albeit briefly– a false sense of a restoration to feeling at home in the world. The closer the illusion was coming to a close, the more the uncanniness came into being. 

Serendipity at one instant, saccharine for the rest.

It is now the aftermath; the return of quick texts of longing suddenly retreated, ushered by a filling of the space she needs, but does not reserve, being taken up by someone else, a physical proximity– the danger– the reason for this destruction, which clears the ground for this inquiry; the clearing presences the event for authenticity. With such blinding, however, my eyes must close, the world in a shroud.

I walk a lot now; to school, to travel, to walk. My gait, when I take it as such, presences this tight wound body, steps trying to break free. I imagine the same space with people I interact with– that reservation– both the withdrawing and the holding place– brings to mind in memory, holding close the nostalgia and withdrawing from the present. But in doing so, my world is restricted by my own distancing; I am no longer absorbed in the world– the forest I tread through, the classroom I take a seat on, the seminar I am situated in. All these are distant and cloudy by my mind's hyperactivity; its incessant claims to priority. I feel a dissociation but no split between these modalities (I'm aware my thought has tyrannized my everyday being and its ability to relate to the world). My focus is on the sutures, put on a pedestal of power. But that's what's called for in a heartbreak, to call to mind that which opened up a world, overflowing with love, found in places I never thought to look.

I wrongly conceptualized these stitches as re-strains. As if to be taken out of Plato's cave and see the light as being-in-love, and to be re-strained back in the cave after the enlightenment is being-out-of-love. But that is a false dichotomy; a reviling romanticism! Now with the ground cleared, the soil is fertile to cultivate the earth once more. What must be done? I am a founder, a builder, and an architect. To edify this clearing is to design the Dasein– that is, to be (plan, understand, interpret) the human being-in-the-world. From, by and through the world, we may disclose, unveil, discover new ways of being in the same spirit as it was when the heart opened up the world through an overwhelming love fixated in the other becoming home. The space left behind should not be a fixed distance, rather, the space left for her presence should be freed up in the horizon of being– given its due as part of new horizons to be disclosed. Because to free oneself is to emancipate the fixated love and take it in stride, to heart, and with-being. As the world you're in can never eradicate what's in the world, you must look again with new eyes, an open heart and a free being. 

Cloudfold

September 20, 2019

Cloudfold

I find myself writing again. I got discouraged after an auto update deleted all my data. But while on a flight to see my dear baby sister,  I was looking outside the window and saw that we were flying through a cloud; a translucent veil of cloudy mist reveals only more clouds below. The sky sovereign above our aerial cruise. 

I am cloudwatching. The last time I did was with Renzo, a dear friend of mine. We would jam outside the music room beneath the sky in the key of D: just two classical guitars in dialog with the sky. 

The philosopher Martin Heidegger describes existence as coming to presence through the "fourfold": earth, divinity, mortal and sky" (See Building, Dwelling, Thinking). Through this quartet manifold do we relate to the world poetically. We are above the ground, beneath the sky, among others and, most difficulty, relate to higher powers/beings. 

And here I am, engaging with the vast openness of the sky, with more above. The horizon not merely a straight line, but a cascade of cloud ranges; air and water taking such detailed shapes yet can't be felt as we imagine them. The world indeed is opening up, but in what capacity? Flying is such a unique privilege. The window presents quite an unusual view to the land-dweller. The sky is no place for dwelling; the land beckons; the divine calls forth. 

I write, hundreds of feet from the ground, streaks of clouds pass me by; the occasional jet zooming through. Some clouds look like giant floating islands, or look like they're becoming one. They are so vivid; below only vague miniature depictions of the earth lived on is seen-- from afar.

I close my eyes and think of my body, I don't feel like I'm moving at 300 km/h. I'm stationary in myself yet my mind extends space: I am here but also becoming there. I find my breath; we are united in flux – the saving power of technology: this flying metal bird; the life giving breath. This givenness: in and out– this is the presencing of the divine.