And so it begins. I have finally caved and decided to set up a blog for several reasons. Several seemingly unrelated reasons. I think the tipping point was really when I installed Ubuntu on my laptop; the number of useful tutorials I was able to find on linux user blogs has compelled me to contribute and give back to the community. The linux support, in combination with other things I can be rather long-winded about (music, Facebook and other things tech, religion, politics at times) and the acquisition of my own domain – http://blaise.ca – have all contributed to my humble entrance into the blogosphere (I don’t think there are many words that I hate more than ‘blogosphere’… maybe ‘indie’… but that’s for another post :P).
The working title I have now – “The Unity Behind a Diversity: Searching for beauty in the dissonance” – is a reflection of the wide variety of topics I plan on blogging about and the sometimes unapparent things I believe they share in common. I’m not sure if I like the wording of “The Unity Behind a Diversity” as a title, but the idea is central to nearly all of my thought. The articulation of the idea comes from my philosophy class this year (PHL200: Ancient Philosophy) where Plato’s idea of the Good was described (here – though the explanation was more from lectures) as a unity behind a diversity, something which is necessary for all understanding. Essentially, the act of understanding was described as seeing the unity behind a diversity. This is one of the reasons why Plato prescribed harmonics, arithmetic, geometry, mathematics, optics, etc. as necessary for the study of philosophy in order to understand the patterns upon which knowledge can be formed, the patterns which are consistent throughout nature that connect things in apparently unrelated subjects. In short, this paragraph is a messy attempt to say that the concept of an analogy is fundamental to any form of knowledge, and I think that knowledge expressed as a “unity behind a diversity” is rather poetic and, at the very least, a decent starting point for a blog title for someone who is usually terrible at coming up with titles.
The subtitle is a reference to Schism (lyrics) by Tool. (If all understanding is essentially mathematical in nature, as is somewhat suggested by the Platonic approach to philosophy, then Tool must be the pinnacle of musical understanding.) “The poetry that comes from the squaring off between and the circling is worth it; finding beauty in the dissonance.” There are many more themes in the song that the subtitle alludes to, and many more themes that I probably have little to no understanding of, but the unity behind this diversity is that I think there is something beautiful about knowledge, something beautiful about discovering the connection between songwriting and programming, between God and sex, between Facebook and lunch table conversations, between object-oriented programming and Aristotle’s Categories, between friendships and grade 12 chemistry…
At any rate, it’s a starting point. *shrugs*
