Stuff du jour

ca. 06:30 this morning, I set out to exercise. The temperature in my driveway was 0 degrees fahrenheit. As I drove toward White Plains, the temperature dipped for a while to -1, and then, as I got nearer to North White Plains, it rose a bit above zero (it was 4 degrees in Whate Plains @ 06:50AM).

My 2nd line manager gave me a US$10 gift certificate to Borders Book Stores for Xmas. I recently got a 25% off one item coupon from Borders in my email. There is a Borders less than a block from where I work. Yesterday (Friday, 21 Jan), I determined to buy *something* to use the certificate and the coupon. The day before, I had gone thru the store and found nothing to buy. But one "graphic novel" had sort of caught my eye: "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth". ["Graphic novels" somehow have been attracting me, recently, "as an idea", although I was not succeeding in finding one that actualized my hopes for them and I didn't know clearly enough what I hoped for to make it for myself....]

"Jimmy Corrigan...." was still there Friday. I bought it. It looks interesting, although my presbyopia [aging eyes...] has gotten bad enough that I'm having trouble reading the small print and the low-color contrast print. [I have reading glasses which I leave at work, but now I'll have to keep them with me to be able to read this book...].

More on "Jimmy Corrigan...", to come....

I am reading and studying....

Since about 01 December 2004, I have been slowly reading _Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and ends in phenomenology 1928-1938_, by Ronald Bruzina (a new Yale University Press release). For several months previously, I had not read any book because I could not find one I felt would engage me sufficiently and feel worth reading.

I readily admit that I cannot understand everything in this book -- since I have no community of fellow seekers with whom to try together to help each learn better than they can accomplish unaided.

But I feel this book is worth my time to read to the best of my ability, because it is about what I think is important philosophical work of the 20th century, which leads to a new and -- to me, at least, appealing -- way of understanding the individual in society, and, on the basis of that new understanding, restructuring society and the individual's life in it.

I have posted a text in which Husserl summarized his vision for a humanity renewed in philosophy: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.

Some 75 years have passed since Husserl's lecture, but we have not not even begun to achieve what he envisioned. Painfully, in the recent ever increasing shift in focus from persons finding meaning in their work, to finding the cheapest workers (etc.), we are hastening toward lowering, not higher life goals....

If one doubts that in the early 21st century we [at least in the U.S.A.] are losing ground, consider the following quote from President Richard Nixon's 06 September 1971 Labor Day address:

"In our quest for a better environment, we must always remember that the most important part of the quality of life is the quality of work, and the new need for job satisfaction is the key to the quality of work."

In the New Global Economy (offshoring work, the Walmartization of America, etc.), ever fewer can afford to be concerned about the quality of their work (or of their life) -- and even if they might be able to afford it today, threat of losing their job and not being able to find a new one with nearly as good pay and benefits does not provide fertile soil for such thoughts and aspirations to flourish.