Wednesday, March 30
To all!
A little excerpt I read about Practical Thinking.
I was blind-sided the other day when someone commented that although my so-called plans for my future were "nice", I wasn't being practical. Very much true. Maybe in some respects, I was thinking the same thing, but just chose to ignore that doing what I want to do and being able to do them are on two different parallels.
Going back to school is starting to feel even more pressure-filled as 1) I need to finish, 2) I'm behind all of my peers, 3) I have to stick with my change of major this time around, and 4) I'll need to get a job with my future BA in order to secure my future – thus being practical for once.
Ugh!
Can't I be a kid again? Can't I go back to the time when I didn't have to be practical? How about I just become a practical joker instead? That seems more fun.
Practical reason defines a distinctive standpoint of reflection. When agents deliberate about action, they think about themselves and their situation in characteristic ways. What are some of the salient features of the practical point of view?
A natural way to interpret this point of view is to contrast it with the standpoint of theoretical reason. The latter standpoint is occupied when we engage in reasoning that is directed at the resolution of questions that are in some sense theoretical rather than practical; but how are we to understand this opposition between the theoretical and the practical? One possibility is to understand theoretical reflection as reasoning about questions of explanation and prediction.
Looking backward to events that have already taken place, it asks why they have occurred; looking forward, it attempts to determine what is going to happen in the future. In these ways, theoretical reflection is concerned with matters of fact and their explanation. Furthermore it treats these issues in impersonal terms that are accessible (in principle) to anyone. Theoretical reasoning, understood along these lines, finds paradigmatic expression in the natural and social sciences.
Practical reason, by contrast, takes a distinctively normative question as its starting point. It typically asks, of a set of alternatives for action none of which has yet been performed, what one ought to do, or what it would be best to do. It is thus concerned not with matters of fact and their explanation, but with matters of value, of what it would be desirable to do. In practical reasoning agents attempt to assess and weigh their reasons for action, the considerations that speak for and against alternative courses of action that are open to them.
Moreover they do this from a distinctively first-personal point of view, one that is defined in terms of a practical predicament in which they find ourselves (either individually or collectively people sometimes reason jointly about what they should do together).
Sigh, I hate sometimes being practical in life, but sometimes it is best that we be practical. So to all out there! Forget about being sentimental or emotional whether with you family, loved ones, work or your social life. Strive to aim at your goals instead of wasting time and "acting cute", "Mushy", "angry", "upset"...etc. Just a suggestion. A little practicality goes a long way!
Cheers,
Tunitha
|3:13:00 pm|
~*@GoSSiP_CoLuMN@*~