When I was studying Philosophy, I remember proudly proclaiming that I loved living in a world of ideas. I wanted to stay in that world forever. I believed that that’s where I belonged.
Today, the first of my orders arrived. I ordered one-and-a-half gallons of epoxy resin from Magic Resin. I haven’t used their resin before but I wanted to support a Canadian business. I got their two-inch deep-pour resin and there is a list of ideas growing for how to use it.
Nowadays, I find myself looking for more practical approaches and solutions to problems. Simply having an idea seems fruitless. It’s best to create a plan to help materialize an idea and see how it is born and survives in the world. There are unforeseen occurrences out there, mitigating factors that impact the outcome of the implementation of an idea.
The resin is part of a larger plan for the summer. This summer is about experimenting and creating for me. I started a document to record the ideas because I was forgetting too many of them. This afternoon, I was thinking through how to use the off-cuts from the pen blanks to create a pencil holder. I need a mould to hold the off-cuts and to cast them in. The pieces need to be arranged either neatly or randomly. I don’t want to add anything unnecessarily, such as the middle that’ll be turned away. I also need to think about the cost of the materials.
What started off as a simple enough idea has turned into something that I have to think about and plan. I’m sure that there is some overthinking going on on my part. Even still, simply having the idea and thinking it pretty cool wasn’t enough for me.
That’s just one idea.
Philosophy does deal with the real world but a different aspect of it. The approach is similarly systematic but the questions it asks are different. The subject matter can’t be held so much as thought or felt. A good argument can be self-contained and must be worked from within to discover the faults. Perception and understanding form the tenants of the argument. Positionality matters. The focus, too, is narrow and specific, pertaining to one particular attribute of knowledge.
Perhaps the two worlds aren’t so wholly different. The problem I’m trying to solve by casting off-cuts in resin is, ultimately, impractical. Purchasing a pencil holder from the dollar store would be easier and more fiscally responsible. The job it’ll do will be the same. No careful or random arrangement of pieces will be needed and nothing extra will be included. Still, there’s a difference between the two approaches. The impracticality of the one I’m undertaking is, possibly, within the realm of the philosophy of art and aesthetics.
I also want to try casting pencil crayons in resin and then turning the resulting blank into a pencil holder. This might be a venture into metaphysics.
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