Thoughts

My condensed thoughts on specific topics. Always well-considered but never final.

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Mixtapes

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”

-- Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

It's better not to take advice from someone like Rob Gordon. But for mixtapes, we'll make an exception. The mixtape has a long and winded history, and it has fulfilled many functions over the decades. It could be a love (or a break up) letter, a political statement, or simply a concentrated effort to make a good party a great party. It can also simply be an expression of how you feel at a given time.

In eiter case, the mixtape is in this sense a pure form of curation. When done badly, it takes a work of art out of its context, making it estrange its listeners. But when done right, it takes something that the artist might not have consciously embedded into his work, and it places it together with other works that share that characteristic, to create something new that makes you realise that it fits, that makes this new creation sound as natural as the works that it consists of.

Making mixtapes has been a passion of mine for a long time. You can find some of them on this site under "Music".

Ethics

What a silly subject of study.

When I studied ethics as part of my philosophy Bachelor, and then later as part of my Applied Ethics Master, there was an idea that this was somehow less of a purely theoretical field then, say, ontology (the study of what is) or epistemology (the study of what is knowledge). At least, I had that idea.

Largely though, students of ethics were either already set on improving the world, and looking for ways to structure and justify this activity; or equally set on carrying on about their day and ignoring any potential real-world applications of it. I still don't know which group had the right of it, but I do see ethics more and more as exactly as theoretical a field as ontology or epistemology.

We may find that a certain strand of ethics appeals to us. We may follow it to the letter. We may follow it when implementing or even shaping policy, law of other activities that affect large groups of people. But I think that the theoretical activity of creating a system about what is right to do immediately crosses into political philosophy, if not actual politics. I suspect ethics is no more than a theoretical frame of reference to inform us when conducting politics. It does affect how we think, but we certainly cannot "use" ethics to affect the world.

That does not mean it is any less important. Ethical theories have influenced the world, and will continue to do so. But we should not hold ethicists in a higher regard than other experts. We should not speak of "the ethics" of a subject as any more than a field of theoretical study. And when conducting ethical study, we should acknowledge that it is largely detached from the real world. And that if we want to "improve" the world, perhaps studying ethics is among the last things we should do.

Writing

I write as catharsis. I put to paper what I need to say. I rarely look back. When I do, I see a past version of myself. I recognise myself partially at best. When I have no urgency to write, there is an active resistance in me to do so.

I have been asked whether I have an interest in writing as a profession. I don't really, because I only write well enough to be happy with when there is this catharthic drive. This is usually caused by a pain or problem that I see and feel in the world, and where I see a potentially valuable contribution from myself.

If I was just reading, writing and talking, I would not sustain these conditions. I need to participate in the world to know what I want to say.