Those Chewing gum works, Free will and Football

Chewing (and bubble) gum are usually derisory terms - not so in my book the works of Chewing Gum artist Ben Wilson.

Gallery Ben- he's  a philanthropist of Gum 

Ben makes a virtue of the poor behaviour of some in disposing of their gum on the ground and creates little works of art from the detritus of their mouths.

It's not only the act of reforming waste but he even has a philosophy for it - aiming to create a social cohesion from the waste (albeit a sticky one) - when your traversing London's Millennium bridge cast an eye downwards and you'll see what he's done - Thanks Ben.

He does it for us

Who is free?

What Choice?

Just listened (probably again) to a very good  BBC radio programme In Our Time on 'Free Will' it's odd that at the end of it the conclusion (for me) is more or less the same as at the beginning.



But having said that I do now think about the topic again and reckon that the way we (I anyway)  handle our life/lives is by believing that we can (and do) have some free will (even if intrinsically we know there isn't/it doesn't much matter).



I have done a few Philosophy classes at a fairly rudimentary level and been introduced to thinkers the world acknowledges as worthy of consideration - what I got from this is that is that to reach some level of contentment  find something and do it  - you'll pretty much know when you've got it  - and the 'thing' can be God or just be the search for the thing  for example.

Football

Soccer springs to mind as I reflect on life - it used to be in early years a real passion and for a while nothing seemed so important (it was superseded  by all sorts of things) - well when you're playing particularly at the start you're not concerned with time and it's the focus of your attention  -in fact the only way you can play it is if you're in the moment and other stuff is excluded - later you realise it's just a game but that doesn't necessarily detract from it.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Conan Doyle and Albert Camus were players of the beautiful game and both (I think) goalkeepers.

Looking at Carl Jung and Red 252

Yesterday the Philosophy and Psychoanalysis session was centred on Carl Jung and the course leader Scott made clear that his own view of Jung was more limited than his of Freud.

Being self reflective, a critiscm of myself in looking at the history of ideas is that I'm easily drawn to the personal circumstances of the players in a way this is perhaps excusable when looking at  Psychoanalysis.

There are a number of books on Jung

What I had gathered from the preliminary reading ahead of the Monday session was that there had been a painful acrimonious split between the Austrian Jewish Freud and the younger Swizz Gentile Jung - it seemed like a messy divorce where long buried differences were probed and agonized over.

On listening to that (for me) reliable source of background information the BBC Radio's In Our Time I found out far more on the story around the split between the two.

[There's also an extensive interview with Jung on YouTube]

Jung became something of an anointed (by Freud)successor to him as leader of the 'Freudian school of Psychoanalysis - Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud  formed a strong personal and professional relationship. It's said that when they first met (they had communicated ahead of this meeting) they spent 13 hours together without break such was their 'meeting of minds'.

What plays out strongly is the (perhaps) father fixated Jung's disenchantment with what he felt was an overly emphasised take on the importance of the sexual drives within the field.

Since the personal split there has too been a divergence between  the two schools that there names have headed up.  Jung is considered by many as a more optimistic figure and he is often associated with positive outcomes.

Jung too is (in hindsight) viewed as having expressed some views on what is now termed as the  'developing world' that are perhaps  anachronistic in what is now accepted terminology and many critics consider him exhibiting anti Semitic attitudes.

Aside from the personal split though there are differences that give Jung's school a more mystical approach to the human condition with the idea of  the  collective unconsciousness - Jung is also associated with the use of archetypes.

Red 252

Well it's a shop with red connotations..

Eyes left for a bit of 'Red' shopping.