Author Topic: The Incommunicable Awkwardness of Being Hentrich  (Read 555 times)

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The Incommunicable Awkwardness of Being Hentrich
« on: September 11, 2016, 11:09:11 am »
I can only approach tinkering with mathematics as though I were a mental patient in an asylum.

I think of Van Gogh and his paint brushes in the hospital.

While there is no comparison to developing algebraic skills to painting, what I am looking for is a state of mind where there is no longer any concern with explaining to anyone why I do what I do.

I'll be meeting with my dad tomorrow where I will be prying open several dozen clams.  As I have mentioned, he is 75 years old and still constructing walk-in freezers, which is very physically straining work.  While I am under no obligation to discuss my "progress" (we both suspect that there is most likely no such thing as progress), there is no denying the awkwardness of the encounter (for me).   He still encourages my mother to get a part time job.  He never encourages me to get a job, and I really wonder what he REALLY thinks of me, although Schopenhauer strongly advizes against such concerns.  He said it would worry us to death to know what people really think of us.

So, I suppose I will play the role of lazy deadbeat lunatic who can't handle the demands of holding down a job.  There is no other role to play.  Neither of my parents have any interest at all in mathematics, and I could not begin to explain how much discipline and dedication is required just to stay engaged with it.

This may go to the root of just why it is so rare for people, after they reach a certain age, to devote themselves to working through exercises in mathematics textbooks.  It may even be perceived as something shameful, as though this is commendable in children, but, well, a real man drives a tank or flies an airplane ... or, at the very least, builds walk-in freezers.

Oh, Kafka, where are the words I am looking for?   Using search engines is of no use when it comes to helping me articulate how I feel.  Just like when I was a maintenance worker for the state, there is this feeling that, when working through textbooks, I must do so to be true to myself.  There will never be a satisfying explanation as to why or what for.

When I stopped, all I wanted to do was stay drunk.

When I am feeling a little depressed about the level of mathematics I am currently focused on, perhaps wishing I were further along, I have to remind myself that multitudes of youth are pushed into advanced areas of mathematics without ever having developed substantial skills in the foundations of the fields they make careers out of.

So I have to be content living in an orbit that makes communications about what I am up to kind of awkward.  Oh, this world is so full of shiit.  If one's life does not involve employment or money or "certification", one could study from morning into the night every day, and still be considered a lazy and useless deadbeat.

Thank you, Holden, for encouraging me to sustain my interest.  To this world, I must forever remain a clown.  What does it mean to be true to oneself?   When one is studying something, in order to be true to oneself, one would patiently work through the exercises to develop some skills and techniques.

And how does one explain that this is not really mathematics I am studying, but only techniques and algorithms?   It's like when I studied computer science.  There are many people who think that learning how to use Microsoft Excel is studying computer science.  I am not kidding.  It is gut wrenchingly frustrating to be judged by those who are simply incapable of knowing what you are about.

In my hometown, I notice that some sons manage their father's service station, which was inherited from the grandfather.  Another son takes the family orchard (farm) and works it for his entire life.   Still yet another pair of sons take on the family pizza restaurant (great pizza, by the way).  Some may be critical of me for not taking on my father's trade: "He's 75 years old and still working like a horse.  What are you doing laying around with books?  You should have learned his trade, refrigeration, years ago.  What a disgrace to your father.  He must be secretly ashamed of you."

Oh, I can just hear my long deceased ancestors cursing me as a major disappointment, the end of the line for this family ... the one who dropped the ball ... the one who read Schopenhauer and decided to end the absurd comedy of reproduction.   Yes, it is me.  I'm the biological hoax that is to blame.

But I am not my father.  I am not my ancestors.  I'm just me.  Some people respect me, while many do not.

Let us feast on clams tomorrow anyway, and share a couple awkward laughs at my poor mother's expense. 

"Do you want to see my notebooks?     I didn't think so.  Do you want to see the tomato garden.  The plants are nearly finished.  Let's go."
« Last Edit: September 11, 2016, 05:57:39 pm by {∅} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Holden

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On Mathematical Meditations of Herr Hentrich
« Reply #1 on: September 11, 2016, 01:57:09 pm »
I think when you are studying math the world of senses starts to appear to you in feeble colours.You act in accordance with the "better consciousness",you are blissful in it.The sublime does not reside in mathematics,your inspired mathematical activities are the signs of the awakening,the stimulation of the better consciousness,its liberation from your subjectivity,you must be experiencing moments when your contemplation/meditation of mathematics before you becomes so intense that for some moments subjectivity & thus the source of all misery vanishes.In those moments you are free & the consciousness of the material world of the senses stands before you as something strange and foreign which no longer wears you down.In those moments you are no longer involved in considering the nexus of space,time & causality(useful for our individuality).This liberation from temporal consciousness leaves the better consciousness behind..

Your love for mathematics is the experience of the better consciousness as it shines through the veil of your subjectivity constituted by the interests of the empirical individual,the subject that is wretched,always in need and limited to a narrow sphere.

Now if you were to share this experience with your parents of course they would not understand,you would appear to them as someone who has lost his marbles.Why? They only think of your empirical well being.Unlike you ,I think Kafka wanted to be worthy of heaven & at the same time pick up the flowers of this earth,hence his life long employment.But this does not work,for as we set foot in the one sphere,to the same extent we have deserted & disowned the other.It is not a case of recoiling & uniting,it is not a case of installing refrigerators in the day & studying math in the evening,but only of choosing.

Now I fully realise that all this talk would sound like a lot of hazy mysticism to the uninitiated but not to you.You will understand.While I can separate the better consciousness from the empirical one in theory,you do it in practice.
The folks around you understand the language of the faculty of reason-with its illusions,the language which positively aims at making the world of experience into an absolute,into something at rest,complete in itself & at deceptively setting up phantoms as the ultimate &  only existence.
But your way of life is death to all this.Your mathematical meditations, they facilitate the vanishment of the material concerns like the morning dream or an optical illusion.For them matter is real,immovable,eternal & infinite,for you only relative-dependent of the appearance of consciousness as subject.In your mathematical meditations you demonstrate that conscious can appear otherwise than as subject & here is freedom.
« Last Edit: September 11, 2016, 02:02:07 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: The Incommunicable Awkwardness of Being Hentrich
« Reply #2 on: September 11, 2016, 04:28:34 pm »
Have you ever sat down to begin solving a problem that you think should not be very difficult for you, and your mind goes blank?

There are moments when I don't know my own mind, where I truly feel I have lost whatever I might have thought was stored in what we refer to as the mind.   :-\

By the way, have you seen where I placed my marbles?

The only way to transcend the frustration that feels like "mental impotence" (a term I just made up today) is a huge dose of humility.  I am talking about the willingness to return to "lessons" one might have been first introduced to at 12 years old.   Ouch, it's a bruise on the old ego, I know.    :-\

But this is what I mean by being true to yourself.  There is no need to be contaminated by the egotistical posturing of academics and the ass-licking PhDs.   ;D

Arrrrr, now that's bringing the Schopenhauerian spirit into the 21st century!

I think some of the drills I put myself through are exercises in humility, and that, in a sense, I am just relaxing ... It's a kind of experiment to see what the outcome will be.  I'm killing time, yes, but I am curious to see if some kind of transformation takes place.   I was a nervous wreck as a youth (in high school), and I was on medication when attending university later in life (at age 30), feeling disoriented and kind of awkward about my age.

There is no one who can tell me I am not allowed to go back in time, knowing what I know now, to reintroduce techniques I would use frequently (in later subjects).  I am curious to find out if I can learn some useful tricks (from less advanced levels) that I can apply to more advanced levels.  The cool thing about this kind of math is that the so-called elementary levels are quite essential and are constantly built upon. 

If nothing else, my interactions with mathematical realms can become a private world in my imagination where I congregate with old friends.   

Fortunately there are no laws against such academic regression.  I am sure there is a method to my madness.   
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 12:50:20 am by The Former Student »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: The Incommunicable Awkwardness of Being Hentrich
« Reply #3 on: September 15, 2016, 12:46:29 pm »
It may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2016, 12:48:22 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: The Incommunicable Awkwardness of Being Hentrich
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2016, 12:19:17 am »
Yes, as though everything I had ever learned or "mastered" was all in my imagination ... kind of like some kind of Ligottian horror tale, where I don't really know who I am. 

We can even joke around about it to get closer to what this implies.  One could wonder if maybe they were hit by the ice cream truck as a child and that everyone kept this from you.   It's called paranoia, right?

I don't know who I really am.  I don't think I am who the police and courts think I am.

I am not sure I am the guy who did well at the university or the guy who cleaned toilets like a monk polishing a shrine or both.   Am I the guy who drank in the woods and screamed like a madman?   What kind of knowledge and wisdom survives?  What kind of knowledge evaporates over time?

I am enjoying reviewing things.  I especially like when I don't remember every learning something one would think I would have had to have mastered at some point.

Do you think identity crisis is common among very honest thinkers?

As far as the suspicion that all the axioms are wrong, I have a great deal of faith in the foundations of what I am studying.  For me, it is more a matter of being determined work through texts in an honest manner.   Even if I studied something intensely last year at this time, like the stuff from Number Theory, I still have to think very hard to remember certain things, even if I wrote code for it and filled a notebook solving problems ...

The thing is, I can study something, understand it, and even solve many problems using what I have learned, but then I move onto another subject, and perhaps forget details of what I had hoped to "master".   

I suppose I expect too much of myself and I ought to be more impressed with my honesty and determination. 

I think of prisoners all the time.  If I were in some kind of jail, certain mathematics texts would be such treasure ... and any of Schopenhauer's works; but such things are difficult to acquire in such a place.  If I were a better man, I would campaign for more educational facilities in local jails ... but I really don't want any trouble ... (like Winston in 1984?)   :-[
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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"the infinite" = "a procedure"
« Reply #5 on: January 24, 2017, 12:42:52 am »
" ... the infinite is not a thing but simply the procedure for constructing a series of things ..."

This little gem was hiding on page 92 of Weltschmerz (the chapter on Dühring) ... I hate to keep using the word "uncanny" as I have noticed since you pointed it out to me that I use the word constantly.   I don't want to wear it out, but, well, I have been very disciplined and determined, currently focusing on Infinite Series (power series, Taylor's/Maclaurin's series, etc), so that line hit me.

And it's after midnight, my time for the purely philosophical - and yet mathematics still creeps into the brain.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 12:48:32 am by The Former Student »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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The more I read Duhring,the more convinced I get that Schopenhauer was absolutely correct.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.