The Philosophy of a Pill!

Rosie offered me two pieces of advice, love your chemo and make sure you have a fuckit list! As I try to make sense of my world, I'm really not sure what Aristotle would have made of this, after all, there is a logic and a sequential order to his thinking and writing, an order which has determined the function of Western and Christian philosophy for two thousand years. Even Marx's philosophy observed the same strict discipline of action, reaction and consequence, often ending in the exploitation of some by others, and the consequent violence that endures before a new and still mis-equilibrium is seen by many as a resolution of the issue.  Is it hell a resolution!

As I wander through my chaotic musings this morning, I'm less Aristotelian than ever. His focus on balance in nature, on the inter-connectivity of thought and action, of ethics and politics, of classification and the need for order does not match my current mood in which disorder reigns. There can be no plan for a future when the forces of nature have a mind of their own, unregulated or is it deregulated by the consequences of a lifetime of dietary excesses.

To divert for a moment!  The Roman church, anxious to confine and destroy the 19th Century Marxist materialist philosophy, used this very same model to critique the social and political order of Europe. The Church was (and is?) trapped in the very analysis it opposes. So it is for me, trapped in a mortal body which is not as I have always believed, indestructable! This revelation demonstrates just how much up my own arse I have been, not accepting or realising the frailty of my confident claims about fitness and visits to the gym.

This seems a long way from poor dead Aristotle! Would he have put his faith in those orange pills? Would he have trusted the medics of his day? What they tell me at The Christie on every visit is that the treatment is always evidence-based, informed by observation of action, reaction and consequence. And while Marx's dialectic throws up the violence necessary to resolve disorder, Aristotle's search for order in the universe is mine too.  I love those little orange pills!