In something of a departure for Oneself, I want to mention an activity I have been trying, on and off (as sometimes I feel too busy or otherwise disinclined) since about the beginning of May this year, which is maintaining a daily Stoic-style journal using the books of Ryan Holiday [3] as an example.

There might be many reasons for this, but (and this may come as a surprise to some readers) I have a long involvement in ‘philosophy’ in a wider sense. I had actually considered studying philosophy at Degree level when I was in the Sixth Form (‘high school’ as it might be called elsewhere) and interviewed at several universities before finally failing my A-levels and ending up unemployed in my home town for three or four years... but that’s another story.

Fast forward to some four years after my fateful meeting with my old GP (mentioned elsewhere), and having completed my first undergraduate course (HND Applied Biology at the old South Glamorgan Institute in Cardiff) successfully, I had reapplied to join the B.Sc.(Hons.) Cell and Molecular Science course at the old Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (now the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge). This was because, in our shared student house in Cardiff, as the end of the HND course was looming, all of us had been thinking about this, and we had been discussing which universities and (in those days) polytechnics might be good to apply (or re-apply) to.

In my own case, I had applied previously to CCAT in Cambridge and received an offer, but I had only received one Grade E (!) when re-sitting my A-levels; despite this I still received a slew of offers from colleges around the country, and this also entitled me to a mandatory student grant, and this was how I ended up on the HND course. Encouraged by our discussions in between studying, I reapplied for the Degree course in Cambridge and was offered an unconditional entry to the impending second year of the current course, and so, that September, I found myself in Cambridge. In the exams that year, I was the only student with an A grade. In what? Sociology and Philosophy of Science!

On the HND course, there had been a couple of modules relating to statistics and philosophy of science (or rather, experimental design with a view to appropriate statistical analysis of results). On the Degree course, this was Sociology and Philosophy of Science. It was here that I came into contact with the work of Paul K. Feyerabend, and I was hooked. The reason? Science and its hangers-on try to portray “Science” as a kind of rational, critical and analytical methodology which should take us on a one-way voyage to verisimilitude; Feyerabend, however, suggested that this was not the case, as the preponderance of public and private funding meant that there was pressure not to contradict existing theories but rather to undertake work which confirmed or “verified” them (a point already made by Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962)[2]; meaning, in fact, that in order to preserve this status quo, the trainee scientist needs to be “conditioned” into a certain attitude and methodology to avoid necessary change. I here quote at length from Feyerabend’s Revised Edition of 1988:

“Now it is, of course, possible to simplify the medium in which a scientist works by simplifying its main actors. The history of science, after all, does not just consist of facts and conclusions drawn from facts. It also contains ideas, interpretations of facts, problems created by conflicting interpretations, mistakes, and so on. On closer analysis we even find that science knows no ‘bare facts’ at all but that the ‘facts’ that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are, therefore, essentially ideational. This being the case, the history of science will be as complex, chaotic, full of mistakes, and entertaining as the ideas it contains, and these ideas in turn will be as complex, chaotic, full of mistakes, and entertaining as the minds of those who invented them. Conversely, a little brainwashing will go a long way in making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more ‘objective’ and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchangeable rules.

“Scientific education as we know it today has precisely this aim. It simplifies ‘science’ by simplifying its participants: first, a domain of research is identified. The domain is separated from the rest of history (physics, for example, is separated from metaphysics and from theology) and given a ‘logic’ of its own. A thorough training in such ‘logic’ then conditions those working in the domain; it makes their actions more uniform and it freezes large parts of the historical process as well. Stable ‘facts’ arise and persevere despite the vicissitudes of history. An essential part of the training that makes such facts appear consists in the attempt to inhibit intuitions that might lead to a blurring of boundaries. A person’s religion, for example, or his metaphysics, or his sense of humour (his natural sense of humour and not the inbred and always rather nasty kind of jocularity one finds in specialized professions) must not have the slightest connection with his scientific activity. His imagination is restrained, and even his language ceases to be his own. This is again reflected in the nature of scientific ‘facts’ which are experienced as being independent of opinion, belief and cultural opinion.” [1]

Add to this the tendency of both recruiters and employers to consistently direct me away from opportunities in my chosen field (biology) and into other areas for which experience had equipped me with transferable skills (chemical analysis), and after so many years of trying and failing, I felt compelled to give up; it was primarily because of this that I eventually found myself (temporarily as it turned out) in my first teaching job in East Asia.

At this point, we should perhaps fast-forward to today, where I find myself approaching ‘retirement age’ but still in possession of all my faculties, not understanding why I should ‘retire’ when I still have bills to pay and am factually thinking about yet another career change. If I had stayed in the UK then at this point, I might have found myself considering my retirement options, possibly with several rather meagre pensions in the offing, but instead I left the UK and became semi-peripatetic in terms of the stability of employment. As it turned out, this was for exactly the same reasons as in the UK - job contracts in East Asian countries are generally one-year and renewable, some places I didn’t want to stay, some places didn’t like me, etc., but it kept me alive, I saw places, I had a series of ideas and experiences that came to me and I learned new things; I grew somewhat as a person.

The problem here is that there was no underlying ‘philosophy’ guiding what I was doing and experiencing; no structure or system for the interpretation and understanding of it all. Not only back in the UK but also in the places I have been living since leaving in 2002, there was this constant dissatisfaction with how everything was turning out. I was never able to enter the kind of career that I had actually planned; it seemed like everything was against me. Additionally, I had been experiencing a long-term disillusionment with society generally; for example, what was the point of being an enfranchised citizen, voting repeatedly in the UK, when the system was set up (by its controllers) to avoid change? As a working class son of working class parents, I had done everything I could to educate and improve myself but in the end, life was a grind and the areas into which I had gravitated (chemical analysis and metal finishing) appeared to be dying in the UK; there seemed to be absolutely nothing in the medium-term future between my current position and retirement. Everything appeared to be random and leading nowhere.

Truth to tell, my experience in East Asia was not, at the beginning, any better; I was being shuffled between jobs in Taiwan every three months because (unfortunately) I had not signed an employment contract with a school, but instead with a recruiting company which seemed to be in the process of falling apart, and after ten months, I left. In the new job after that, however, I re-signed for five successive years, staying with the new employer for almost six years, until “problems” started to set in, so I left and went into public school teaching, eventually (finally) breaking into teaching adults. That, however, is another story...

Our point here is that there had to be a return to philosophy, but not just to the philosophy of science, but to start exploring the wider historical philosophy that had become available over the ages. However, what stimulated me into writing today was not this specifically, but rather the memory of a comment cast on one of the many male-related video channels that I watch regularly on a variety of platforms. In this, an obvious feminist/leftist (overweight, entitled, dyed hair, with multiple facial piercings) raged for a moment about people who would write bad language in their journals to express their emotions and then be quiet in their daily lives. Several thoughts flow from this:

1: I myself used to do something very similar as a teenager at school; but my experience and understanding of life were shallow, and my judgements were therefore emotional and misguided. I used to write extensively, but after leaving school, I basically broke the habit. As she herself mentioned it, I assume that this was also her own bad habit - people who do bad things often decry it in others to distract from themselves.

2: In daily life, decisions based upon instantaneous emotions rather than considered reflection are usually not good. The more serious the implications of any decision, the longer and deeper the consideration needs to be before finalising it. You need to know that it is the right decision before executing it.

3: Emotions are shallow and vapid; they come and go and have no real meaning, as they represent merely an irrational momentary reaction to a stimulus. They cannot be used as a basis for any decision, and are usually intrinsically destructive. The person in the video was clearly still shallow, relatively immature and guided by her emotions and, therefore, inherently self-destructive.

4: There is a tidal wave of emotional, reactive videos being made on platforms such as TikTok with no depth and often simply being expressions of seeking validation and virtue-signalling to like-minded, emotionally unstable people - effectively presenting a normalisation of their instability. These platforms represent bad behavioural exemplars and need to be curtailed or removed, or - at the very least - have their user rules changed to prevent this.

5: Videos of a more ‘philosophical’ nature tend to be slower in pace and more sober. Reflection is important before either writing or recording; writing a script before recording is, in my experience, good practice, as it provides a better pace and avoids constant errors. It can be edited, and can therefore also have a better structure; a point to remember if you are thinking about translating written work into video.

6: ‘Journalling’ should entail a process of reflection, perhaps in response to (or with the assistance of) a ‘prompt’ of some kind so that there is at least a starting point for the reflection. The purpose of a ‘journal’ is that it is (a) private and personal and (b) practised regularly (in French, the term journal means ‘daily’) so that it represents a continuum of private thought which is unique, owing to the singular combination of social and/or religious background, experience and interests of the writer. Unlike the trainee scientist discussed by Feyerabend above, you are not limited either to a discrete and disconnected domain or in the language that you can use.

7: The writer should therefore be calm and mentally prepared before journalling. Not being properly settled and emotionally less disturbed will lead to ill-considered, emotional writing which leads nowhere, as it only reflects the momentary distraction (precisely the problem of the aforementioned feminist video maker) of the writer rather than representing any consideration of possible future behaviour and actions to be enacted.

8: Many written works now considered to be ‘literature’ had their origins as personal journals or diaries; some, such as (for example) Bram Stoker’s Dracula were written as fiction but at least partly in journal style, as a means to indicate both the progression of the story and a particular personal viewpoint of the character concerned.

I would have to admit that it took a long time before I was able to start Stoic journalling. It was very hard even to find a suitable folder or book for it; right now, I am using a Chinese folder purchased by mail order and I am still not satisfied. The reason for this is that space in a book purchased for ‘journalling’ probably does not have enough space for extended single entries; loose leaves, which can be replaced and removed, are better for this. This May, however, I finally started. Sometimes I am able to write long entries, but often it is rather pithy, which is a reflection of my current situation, as some important decisions are impending even as I write this.

What I can say, however, is that by insisting that I should be settled and calm before starting to write is helpful. I also avoid the expression of negative emotions by deliberately not using simple, emotional language. This is because, in a journal of this type, where a philosophical question is answered at the personal level or a philosophical statement is challenged or otherwise commented upon, a harsh, irrational and momentary emotion has no place in the flow of thought. Think of it like this: Yes, you had an emotion; but how did that help you? Is it not better to ask why you had that emotion and what you must do to avoid it in the future if its effects on your life were negative? How, exactly, would a succession of wild daily comments, as recorded in your journal, be helpful if you have serious daily decisions to make? What state of mind would you be in all the time? Destructive, probably.

To put this idea into context, think about how you react to things each day in wider society. You may have to interact with annoying people who may or may not agree with your ideas and the things you say (including members of your own family, as well as work colleagues and others); your job or workplace may make you angry and/or stressed; news media are predominantly forms of propaganda intended to mould your thoughts into agreement with and support of your controllers, and TV drama in particular is intended to be divisive and stressful; they then want you to support them by voting, which only ever legitimises their rule and only ever makes your life worse. After just a single day of this, your wisest choice would be to make sure the TV is turned off, play some calming music and rest before trying to write: a reflection in the morning before you expose yourself to these malign influences; and a reflection in the evening when you have calmed down.

My experience of this is that, when everything is working properly, I am generally calmer during the day. It is helpful to relax in the late evening and reflect upon what happened during the day, what I should do about it in the future, what decisions need to be made and why. I also feel firmer and more comfortable with which decisions I do make. In journalling regularly, I am taking the ideas about which I have read and having absorbed them, incorporating them into my greater schemata and writing with them in mind, as in the earlier quotation from Feyerabend or the unpleasant experience of the ranting feminist videographer.

As a final thought, perhaps journalling (at least in this particular form) is not for everyone, and there do seem to be a number of different forms that it can take; creative workers, for example, might opt for a graphical journal to experiment with different visual ideas, or you might try the Bullet Journalling style; there is plenty of material available online, and plenty of books available, to get you started. As a means of focusing and bringing thoughts and ideas together, however, it is clear to me that journalling has many benefits.

References:

[1] Feyerabend, Paul K. (1988): Against Method. Revised Edition 1988. Verso, London. ISBN-10: 0-86091-222-1.

[2] Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science Volume II Number 2, University of Chicago Press, Chicago USA.

[3] Holiday, Ryan and Hanselman, Stephen (2017): The Daily Stoic Journal: 365 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living. Portfolio/Penguin, New York. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0-52553-439-3: ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0-52553-439-6. See also: Holiday, Ryan and Hanselman, Stephen (2016): The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Portfolio/Penguin, New York. ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 0-73521-173-6; ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-73521-173-5. These can be purchased together from e.g. Amazon.