In-gold

Here Ingold is referring to two kinds of toolkits: the'learner's toolkit' on his computer (which is represented by three icons: a disembodied head with headphones; a mobile phone; and a face with sunglasses) and his own 'toolkit': a pencil, a pair of glasses and a notebook.

"Comparing the two toolkits says much about the difference between the idea of learning, as it is increasingly understood today, and the idea of study I have advanced here. The iconic triptych of headphones, screen and shades paints to my mind a frightening picture of the idealised learner as currently conceived in a state-of-the-art, IT-obsessed educational environment. The learner of the toolkit appears to be an isolated individual, securely locked in and shielded from any sensory contact with the surroundings – from light by shades, from sound by phones (the head has no nose for scent, and being just a head, lacks hands to feel). This individual is completely immobile, but also placeless: indeed the blurb that accompanies the toolkit makes much of the fact that it is accessible on line, anywhere, anytime. But while blind and deaf to others, and to the world, our learner is fed with a continual stream of information, downloaded from remote sources into his head: visually, from the screen of his smart-phone; aurally through the phones that cover his ears. What kind of learning is this, which calls for no productive effort on the part of the learner, nor even for his presence, which replaces the teacher by a programme, which severs head from body, mind from world, and immunises the learner from the potentially corrupting effects of any disturbance from outside by means of a protective shield? In recent decades it has given rise to an entire industry, complete with its legions of providers, brands and watchwords. Biesta calls the industry ‘learnification’, a word whose sheer ugliness reflects his abhorrence of that to which it refers."

To affirm the wonder of pencils! That makes me feel ancient but also realize that I don't care. 

K-punk

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Love this little clip...

Capitalist Realism

"Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-honoured teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.

On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche."

Some very interesting thoughts on burn-out, the future and the conversion of culture into museum pieces (which is reminiscent of Agamben's great essay).

--Mark Fisher.

Well, that's how it is. The book is over, as are slow reading (Haldane) and slow food. Cut to the chase, get to the bottom dollar.

Defeatist? Maybe. It's not a question of pessimism or optimism though. Just about thinking, in a cool and calm fashion: if that's the way it is, then what next? What next for you?  De-linking, withdrawal- as much as possible? Illich's question haunts you: what would it be to live a life that wasn't so structured?

I don't think 12,000 years of neolithic logic can be upturned. If history is cyclical-as the great traditions teach- then isn't there a point where the wheel stops turning? The Kali Yuga? 

Last Word

A strange sort of meeting with a Yale professor. Think I was out of sorts because of the fast and in the absence of tea or coffee it's not easy to have a civilized conversation. But something else..you can't quite put your finger on it. Of course, the overriding sense that we're intellectual pygmies here. A sense of embarrassment, I suppose, at being shown up (no-one here would really count as an academic or intellectual outside the land of the pure). But it's not that either since what's left of your ego has been deflated a long time ago. 

Not, it should be added, out of a genuine sense of humility -which at least would have been something-but more as a  result of a listlessness, a stupefying indifference to (academic) success. In the final analysis you can't be bothered with a final analysis. Dress that up as a holier-than-thou turning away from institutional determination but, no, it's more like plain old incompetence and laziness. A self that doesn't strive for movement and that simultaneously cannot rest in itself. Out of sorts, sort of. 

Okay, since therapy here is so expensive Herr Roxana I'm going to carry on with a bit of more self analysis (apologies to long-suffering readers).

For a civilized conversation one shouldn't care too much about having a civilized conversation. Your lack of humour bothered you more than anything. Nothing worse than a clown who can't make people laugh. And so we were stuck in this humourless conversation for over an hour with no cultural affinity between us (I read that as a fundamental difference between British and American humour). But more than that it's that academics always have to show off, demonstrate their intelligence, have the last word. As opposed to intellectuals who can have their cake and espresso and not say anything (yeah, you can see where the real problem lies here!). 

You do wonder if things would have been different if the professor had been a woman. Maybe.  

Increasingly you're of the opinion - see the false notes here?- that universities produce dour specialists when what you enjoy most is intelligent banter. Daniel Bell, when asked what he specializes in responded: "in generalizations". 

So, there I was, reeling off names of authors and books. Not that I could remember a bleedin' word of them if pressed. The artificiality of the conversation reached breaking point. "Where are you from? Who are you?". The kind of personal questions that cannot be admitted (we're back to Turing again). No, just blank ideas, opinions, posturing. 

What really got my goat was that he kept on saying things like "we __" or "Ah, now this is where __ would say..".  A bit like me saying, "As an economist I'd say...". Know what I mean, anton? Don't blame him to be honest. That's all part of what being a professional academic is. And you ain't one so get over it, already. But there's nothing ventured here. Same old, same old. 

"Why are you interested in this topic?". I find that kind of question much more revealing. "What drew you to it?" 

The first time I met N, now deceased (may God grant him peace), he said to me, "What's your story, then?" Typical bluster and showmanship from a northerner.  Most people when they ask that- if they ask that- really mean, listen to my story. [He says writing to himself on his own blog!].

~~~

Later today a meeting with an old friend who I haven't seen for ten years. Bound to be a bit awkward since the last time we met he threatened me with physical violence. But maybe that's par for the course since "as a mathematician..       

Moral education and the neo-liberal university

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In the time that remains

The wheels have come off. Time is out of sync. No terrestrial ebb and flow. Isolated moments without duration = fleetingness = a sense of acceleration. But directionless, therefore 'endless'. The end of time means no time.

We work and then we die. Actually, death doesn't exist. "Afraid that if it did it might cause the robots to stop working for a bit and to start expressing themselves, falling in love, wondering what it all means. --S. Collini (more or less)

The sun returns; the old light warm on your hands. Stand next to tree and listen to the crows. The black and the green. Better than listening to the students! Time moves in spirals: Always the same, always different.

Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it. --Nico Walker. (Walser syndrome: asylum=peace=books)

"Inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship. The comparison [is] to the Venetian Republic, a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed." -- H. Gray

~~~

So, there you go, R, reduced to isolated sentences, fleeting thoughts- precisely the thing you're criticizing! Cut and paste, stitch it together, the way our mam did with the Guy Fawkes man all those years ago, wearing my yellow jacket, carted along in a makeshift trolley before being flung into the flames for reasons beyond him.

Pascal, it is said, stitched the few things worth remembering into his clothes, so that they'd be a living word.

Strange to think that after all of these years I still can't bring myself to thinking much of academia. It really does strike you as the most awful fraud. You're a stowaway on board, waiting for your moment to jump, just before the whole damned thing crashes.

It provides a space, though, and one is grateful (to God, of course. Becket: fidelity to what or who?). I'm in purdah. Safely -one hopes! - left alone for the time being..in the time that remains. So out of touch and out of date that I'm almost a museum piece. Which is good since it saves me all the small talk and from engaging in questions of 'success'.

What is your next 'project'?, a colleague asks

I think less about the future. Not that I ever did. Now where? Nowhere, as before ?

He lit a fire and all there was was smoke in his room.

He left the room, but nobody noticed. It stung his eyes, blinkered him. But there was warmth. The smoke lingered on his clothes for two days and then Spring came all of a sudden.

~~~

Are these posts generate by an algorithm? Question to self.

Misc.

"But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed."

--Hannah Gray.

“There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water." --Eagleton.

"We do not hear the murmur of God's song, we hear it only when it ceases." -- Hans Carossa via Gadamer

"Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it." --Nico Walker. Walser syndrome: head for the asylum to get the time to read.

morality and the university

The victory of specialized scholarly methods over scholarship.

Twentieth-century universities separated the education of the mind from that of the soul.

Within the classroom, universities and colleges increasingly understood their role in moral education as one of developing liberal moral agents—that is, helping young people develop capacities (critical thinking, reflection, understanding, self-awareness) they would need to function as self-aware citizens and make moral decisions on their own. 

More:

Specialized scholarship, and thus the university, offered no answers to life’s ultimate questions. Wissenschaft (scholarship), he famously wrote, was “meaningless” because it could not answer the most basic questions: “What should we do” and “How should we live.

--Chad Wellmon, Melancholy Mandarins.

The moral maze

How Professors Ceded Their Authority | Chad Wellmon 

"The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments, and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally penalized, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and insisting that the system’s overseers turn the cant of diversity and inclusion into real change. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file a complaint by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and the office "notifies" the parties of the "outcome."

These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire, and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalized, opaque procedures to produce an "outcome." Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos, evil, or justice have at most a limited role. American colleges and universities speak the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation, and complaint that dominates American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination. My students have adapted the old Protestant college’s moral mission to the demands of the institutions in which they now find themselves.

The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of "resources" — counseling centers, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management save lives and inspire students, but they do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.

It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched, or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities, and student-activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff members who, for many faculty members, seem to work in a wholly separate institution. The rationalization of colleges and universities has led to the division not only of intellectual labor (through academic specialization) but also of basic educational functions."

~~~

Those in any profession usually inflate its overall importance to society. Academics are masters at this, often claiming that the university or the liberal arts or "critical thinking" will:

save humanity

lead to enlightenment

enhance democracy

help rationally order our lives
further research, creativity, productivity and, consequently, economic growth
weed out prejudice/superstition/tradition.

The truth, though, is that the university is just one institution among others and that it has been rolled over by neoliberalism. It is hard to imagine how it could ever be immune from cultural, political, economic and technological changes in the wider society. 

What is the main aim here (and is it governed by methodology)? Break down, analyse, deconstruct, historicize and problematize. In short: "Truthfulness" rather than the Truth. What, if anything, could unite the various disciplines into a comprehensive whole (Newman's question..which is not a question any more because the ideal no longer remains an ideal).

To talk about the moral or spiritual purpose of education or the university would, I suspect, appear to be some kind of joke to most students (and faculty too no doubt). Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or to get a job; those seem to be the only two options left: esoteric, arcane, partial and trivial pursuits ("the life of the mind") or the furthering of materialism.

Morishima: 'The Good and Bad Uses of Mathematics':
       

Old School

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When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’

--Hanna Gray.

The other Foot

"Human nature is a complex thing, and understanding it will take all the resources of the sciences – natural and social – as well as history. But the significance of those enquiries will lie ultimately in what they can say about the kinds of lives that might be good for us. And to know that, we must ask: who are we? What do we need – for ourselves, and from each other? And what must we be like to get it?"

From a lovely short piece on Philippa Foot (aeon).

This was from an excerpt from Mary Midgley's memoir:

Rings and Books’ focuses on bachelorhood and the concept of adolescence, but her real concern is with the kind of isolation from close community with others that has been a feature of many philosophers’ lives. Such isolation, she suggests, generates philosophy which is egoistic, fantastic and solipsistic – ‘flight from the world’ is typical of adolescence but usually people are forced to, or choose to, return to the world through the close relationships, friendships and community they form with others. In such a context, she suggests, the unreality of adolescent thought might give way to a more practical, imaginative and realistic way of thinking.

Now, there's something I'd really like to think about here: women writers/thinkers...

From a Guardian article, 2005, she writes,

"I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder."

Which planet are you on?

This is from Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet:

"She [his daughter] turned up in a miniskirt of billiard-table green, revealing legs sensual in outline but without inner sensuality...But who knew how many sexual difficulties and complications were associated with Shula's hair." 

Is it me, or is there something slightly creepy about those lines? And inner sensuality? What on earth could that possibly mean? Of course, it goes without saying that you do like Bellow (a lot) but does it follow from that that you leave all scepticism behind? I know this has been a theme from the 1960s onward and that it has sometimes been accompanied by a somewhat hysterical denouncement of hierarchies but, once the shouting stops you do have to ask: white male dudes?

~~
The four richest people (in terms of assets) in Indonesia are apparently richer than the poorest 100 million according to a new Oxfam report. Nah, let's stick with the old story (all together now: I've got some wheat, you've got some potatoes. Let's trade!)

The HEC 2025 is yet another example of the pandering to the rich (who are now called "entrepreneurs"). They are to play a role in the development of 'Tier I' universities. Tech. entrepreneurs are supposed to work with faculty to develop solutions for the "overall" problems of higher education institutions. Perhaps I''m going mad or am on a different planet but it appears that no-one here sees anything wrong in that-or if they do they're too scared to say so. 

And in the same way we call those who sell their wisdom to anyone who wants it sophists, just as if they were prostitutes.

I've already been told to "clam down" or "ignore it"..to "think about my family". Criticism of these clowns will only end you up in trouble. Part of me wants to press on, to burn all the bridges.  

What's higher in 'higher education'?

"The rich cultural traditions in these areas [arts and humanities] need to be nurtured further to create an enlightened soft global image of our society, add value to our economy through creative and performing arts and design, tourism and highlight our ethical and aesthetic values."

That was from the "vision 2025" document, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. Cracked me up. In fact, the whole document is riddled with corporate bullshit: "knowledge economy," "productivity," "entrepreneurs,", "innovation," etc., etc. Universities are supposed to make the land of the pure the "next Asian tiger." There is also a lot of tosh about the "fourth industrial revolution" and "embedding technology" in classroom teaching. I suspect that by now you can probably guess that my views are opposed to nearly all of this tripe. The philistines are quite good at cutting and pasting. 

Of course, what no-one wants to address is the startling mediocrity one finds in these universities (not to mention the fundamentalism or half-baked conservatism). Also, the financial corruption that has seen the mushrooming of "franchises" and "distance learning". All that goes unmentioned by the HEC clowns. The bureaucrats and their fantastically paid consultants are a joke, beyond a joke, even; spewing out their vacuous drivel will do nothing but ensure years of gaming and posturing.   

But the passage above in particular had me reeling (the VC didn't see the funny side of it, of course). It's hard to single out what is the most ridiculous aspect of it. But if pressed I'd say it is the idea that we should highlight our ethical and aesthetic values.

Excellence in Leadership, Governance and Management of HEIs, 

Strengthening systems of Research, Innovation and Commercialization and and linking the ingredients of triple helix of Academe, Government and Business Entrepreneurs, Use of available and evolving Information Communication Technology resources in Teaching and Research, Technology Embedded Academic Programming to prepare scholars to participate effectively in the emerging “Fourth Industrial Revolution”

Good grief!

Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

---G. Monbiot, The Guardian.

~~~

I cannot without deceit and corruption love a self abstracted from the vision, involvement and investment of others...there is an interiority that is hidden from me.

--Rowan Williams, Lost Icons.

I survey the world from my lofty heights, am detached from it. I have nothing to say about -for or against-the violence all around me..I am not a part of it..(the delusions continue)...I appreciate art/poetry/nature, have seen through the shenanigans of the experts and the politicians. I'm even quite spiritual (even though I say so myself). 

I'm not sure about the two-state solution. I'm not sure about any state solution. The truth is within (says the modern-day Gnostic). 

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle

~~~

"Connectedness or recognition are fundamental to any position that can reasonably be called human." 

What would it mean, for example, for an American to recognize the atrocities against the Red man? Or the violence that lies at its origins (slavery and segregation)? Or for the Pakistanis to bear witness to the horrors committed against what was then East Pakistan?

Without a sense of shame is there only the posturing of the isolated ego and its defence mechanisms? (Of course, 'shame' itself has often been shameless..honour killings are just one example).

Mc University

I think there are three or four versions of the university and these can be distinguished in terms of their ultimate goals and purposes. So, the university has at various times aimed to promote pure research (from the late 19th c. onward); it has been animated by the deeply humanistic impulse to foster cultural understanding and individual awareness (sometimes this has been about the appearance of culture, as in the production of the gentleman who is supposed to administer the empire or his-and it is usually men we're talking about here-personal assets); it has been about civic engagement, making better citizens. There is the older, religiously-inspired goal of hooking up academic scholarship with religious functions (the training of the clergy). The disinterested pursuit of truth may have resulted in religion and thought eventually going their own ways (K. Minogue). 

In recent times there's been another transformation and it is determined by the imperatives of the 'knowledge economy'. The neo-liberal university is useful to the extent that it can help people get better jobs, promote economically useful research and boost economic growth. Attending this development has been the growth of a business mentality, accounting and management practices, a pathetic show of accountability and a transfer of power to administrators and bureaucrats. As the last bastion of resistance to capitalism, it was obvious the university had to be worked over. And the teachers were not just passive witnesses to this change but in some sense active participants in it. Gamesmanship and one-upmanship, pettiness and political maneuvering taken to the next level. 

~~

Science as the only mode of knowledge and experience. Other, older forms of experience must be denigrated as either useless or untrue. The practical experience of doctors, judges, nurses, teachers doesn't really count. An individual's own personal experience cannot be a source of knowledge, a way of knowing(far too crude and unsystematic). The whole body of inherited and transmitted knowledge that is the arts: poetry, music, paining cannot be allowed to count (mere aesthetics and therefore irrational, unverifiable). Tradition and religion, too, are mere remnants of faulty ways of approaching reality. No, it's scientific analysis or it's nothing.   

"All I'm armed with is research"

I read that on someone's application. Their research statement. If I don't do research I will stop being. I kid thee not. In the teaching statement there are choice quotes by Hubbard, Einstein and Gandhi (cue vomit). Still, after looking at the other 18 robots that applied this one still has something left of a human sensibility..ah, almost became a bit nostalgic there for that old-world word: the human.

The robots: technically brilliant, you're sure. But so what? Really, it's that simple. Trust me, R-ko.

The life of the mind! I've never seen a greater collection of sorry losers. It is never asked whether thought delights the mind, or how this terrible hypertrophy of technical 'knowing' and pseudo-scientific intelligence can be brought back to the most basic and fundamental question: how can I be a good person, how do we lead good lives? Still think that what we learn from our parents and from religion outshines this baloney produced by the university. By some orders of degree.

I've also become somewhat irritated by bookish people. Not just the book club type of adolescents. But book people in general. The type who think that they must swoon over Proust or Penelope Fitzgerald or whoever it may be (art as a substitute for religion?). The 'divine' Ms Fitzgerald. Everyone's got to believe in something so don't knock it. But their addiction to books, the fascination with other people's lives, the desire to not live oneself or find one's own way but instead be absorbed by the details of a fictitious character. 

Over the holidays you met a grown woman (yes, I know, it is hard to believe) who traveled all the way down to London from that forgotten country, the north of England, just to see the studios where some of the Harry Potter films were shot. She was almost bouncing in her seat when she explained to me what this meant..no, do you really understand what this means? Why her husband, a mellow looking maulvi, indulges her is one of those mysteries that are best left unexplained.  

[Writers] gave their blood to phantoms, and they incited their readers to do the 
same: to waste their lives by burying themselves in the lives of others, 
with the aggravating circumstance that these others were neither heroes 
nor saints and, besides, never existed. These remarks can be applied to the 
whole of that universe of dreams which is called "culture": flooded by 
literary opium, siren songs, vampirizing and — to say the least — useless 
production, people live on the fringe of the natural world and its 
exigencies, and consequently on the fringe — or at the antipodes — of the 
"one thing needful." The 19th century — with its garrulous and 
irresponsible novelists, its "poetes maudits ," its creators of pernicious 
operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries 

and all of its blind alleys leading to despair — was bound to crash against   a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity; thus the First World War .

Harsh stuff, Frithjof, but, yes, I can see where you're coming from.

The consolations of philosophy

'My own eyes know because my own hands have felt.

'--quoted in Stephen Marglin, Losing Touch.

At the university the dominant way of knowing is via abstraction. A theoretical, epistemic approach that is detached from history, tradition, the passage of time, experience, an inter-action with other people; it is negligent of both specific places and the lived quality of time.

It is analytical, technical, dressed-up (or down) in mathematics which give it the illusion of complexity, the prestige of being 'scientific'. Cerebral and apparently universal, it offers little scope for judgement and plurality. This is what counts because, well, because it counts. Which is not to say that a system of knowledge comes to the fore because of its own internal coherence or its ability to explain things; quite the opposite! It is given prominence because it chimes with, and gives support to, the dominant forces in society (Keynes's point).

Is this just another version of the ancient war of philosophy against poetry? Religion can be poetical but it can also be philosophical. To the extent that it resembles the latter it can often assume the role of a system that stifles human creativity. Religion as a lived experience, away from the scholastic frame of mind, tends to be sceptical ("I don't know", "I'm not sure") and encourages discovery. 

Of course, this is too extreme: techne and episteme can also interact with one another (the one doesn't necessarily have to crowd the other one out)  

What do you actually know apart from a few tricks? A head stuffed with quotes and fragments, some slight technical understanding but in the larger scheme of things only a shallow understanding of human psychology (your own and that of others), only a dim awareness of what goes up to make a good life. there is no or little habitual reflection at the university on what the ends of knowledge are (beyond a stepping stone to even more useless knowledge or a certificate which allows you to make money). 

Can philosophy console in the face of so much uncertainty, tragedy, suffering or is it really like a false idol, offering what is in reality a tawdry consolation to the vagaries of life but that is often in practice taken to be a superior kind of awareness?

What kinds of problems does philosophy address and with what methods?