I recently listened to a retelling of the Greek Myths. They are fun.
I’ve been enjoying listening Dreyfus. He is energetic about his topics, he is humble and curious, and has an perspective on western thought that resonates with me (or maybe its just that his energy is contagious? either way, his ideas and opinions seem constantly relevant to my gamedev/creative/art thoughts). I listened to maybe half? of his lecture series on Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was still a lot, and though I sometimes lost the thread amid the philosophical weeds and arcana, I generally could follow along and glean interesting insights from the series.
I started listening to a new lecture series of his though. It is a philosophy course that does close reads of great works of literature – books chosen by Dreyfus for their ability to ‘articulate a world’, and more specifically the real contemporary worlds of the authors, in a way that helps those communities better understand themselves and live in their world. Books that sustained a culture for hundreds of years, that were quoted again and again in everyday life as a way to remember that ‘yes, this is the way it is’. He starts with Homer’s Odyssey, and ends five books later with Melville’s Moby Dick. I am on lecture 4 out of 6 on The Odyssey, and it is great. I think you will like it, if you have the patience for a lecture series littered with some student questions you often can’t hear.
Here is the playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm1Xy4zHBXgBp3NAAK2CPj5ASOoQfF59X
“Yes, this is the way it is”.
– droqen in Yes, this is the way it is.
Such a serendipitous series to have started now… as we were discussing this feeling. As Sylvie was discussing Worlds with a capital W again, and the ways we find meaning in things. As we were wondering about our self-serving holes of curiosity and how we should treat them. Dreyfus’s investigations of these texts strike me as a well-trod adventure towards understanding ‘Yes, this is the way it is’ for different cultures in time, and treating them as different perspectives on human nature, rather than some ladder that humanity has been climbing. Dreyfus is always eager to point out the ways that the perspective of enlightenment thinking intentionally overlooks things that are actually very important! He applies Heidegger’s theory of moods as a tool to understand the ways that people find meaning in their actions. I’m not always convinced by his arguments on how he is reading certain passages, but it is always interesting to consider what he is saying. It is way more fun than the dry philosophy of Being and Time, and still hits on the most interesting themes from it.
it must become normal and ordinary, but someone must do the work of making it normal, of understanding what normal even is, of discovering the information “what is a haiku game?” from the context of not what it means to a creator but what it means to an explorer, an appreciator, a recipient.
– droqen in fear
Do you think these are all necessary to answer before doing the work? It must be that doing the work will help to answer them… not that I am doing the work either 🙂 But I think that it is okay for it not to be ‘normal’ for a bit, until it there is enough there to draw some lines between, and then erase.
I am still convinced that the formalism of my puzzle work is connecting me with my world in some way. I was asked by my Dreyfus recommender about my experience with puzzle games, if I felt like playing puzzle games enlightened me about my life at large. I said I have been struggling with that question for a while, but I think it must, otherwise I would not keep doing it, not feel so whole when I am in the right mood for it. He suggested I just have an energy to do these things, and if it wasn’t puzzle games, it would be something else, something else I felt a need to organize. It’s an interesting thought, treating it as a soothe for a fixation. But I’m not convinced that is all it is. It is not engaging with a cultural world as literally as Dreyfus’s great books, but I do know that puzzles are continuing to reveal clarity in forms to me that feel true in the largest way, in a way that does give me new perspective on my interactions with my world. They are just very, very abstract.