Being-in-the-World.
As we achieve consciousness we already find ourselves in a world. We do not fill out a form prior to birth indicating the century, gender, language and racial preference that we desire in our post-natal lives, together with a Continental Breakfast. We are not handed a "life options menu" in the womb for our choosing pleasure.
We simply find ourselves "here" wherever "here" happens to be: whether it is Beverly Hills or the Sudan, as "males" or "females," men and women (notice that I have said nothing yet about "masculinity" or "femininity"), speaking one language rather than another, rich or poor, black, white, or brown, and so on.
It may be that we find ourselves in a time and place where the prevailing values are exactly the wrong ones given our temperaments and inclinations.
Woody Allen explains in "Stardust Memories" that, if he were a native American, he would have starved to death as a stand-up comedian because that culture placed very little value on comedy. In America, Woody is (deservedly!) a millionaire. Who knew? His analyst perhaps. ("'Irrational Man': A Movie Review.")
Socrates was put to death by the Athenian authorities whom he challenged. The answers to his profound questions offered by powerful Athenians were less than impressive to the young men observing these exchanges in the Agora.
Powerful politicians, then and now, do not take kindly to ridicule. Philosophical critics of powerful people in American society -- like Professors Richard Rorty and Cornel West -- earn tenure at elite universities.
True, it is difficult to tell which is the worse fate. I tend to think that a hemlock milkshake is probably worse than sitting as a member of one of those committees pretending that you are taking notes while actually struggling with the
Times crossword puzzle.
Among the very first experiences that we all have is the uneasy sense of finding a place for ourselves in societies or social settings -- like schools or corporations, or even earlier, in families.
What are the rules, we wonder? How do I communicate with the natives?
We also discover some fascinations: I like astrophysics, you like sadomasochism. Maybe we like both of these things and a few more besides.
Some activities that fascinate us require training to be appreciated, not everyone gets the necessary training. We discover that some doors are easier to open than others in our societies. We learn that each of us is steered in one direction rather than another. We experience this as a limitation on freedom, so we rebel.
What is most fundamental about us, I think, is this indestructible freedom -- the NEED to rebel -- and the capacity to become someone different, to alter ourselves according to our inclinations and possibilities, even against all obstacles.
I grant you that the sense of freedom may be an illusion, but if it is, then it is not one that will be extinguished easily nor is it to be dismissed as trivial.
Part of the genius of the American political and legal system is the effort to allow for this fundamental freedom of human beings. This is true even though young women are encouraged to develop certain aptitudes and skills; whereas young men are encouraged to develop others. A few trouble-makers will always delight in upsetting things by asking annoying questions and raising doubts about all of these social-preference systems, developing aptitudes and interests that are socially
discouraged, becoming what they are told not to become, ignoring safety and pressures to conform in order to remain free by
thinking freely.
The vocation for free thought is universal, if more developed in some persons than in others, encouraged in some people and not in others. Philosophy can be essential to this effort to think freely, especially if we want to think well about the issues. For this reason philosophy is essential for everyone.
I will defend this view in the course of my essay.
Obsessively non-conformist and individualistic thinkers are usually (and not surprisingly) called professional thinkers, "philosophers," "artists," or sometimes even worse names -- such as "political dissidents" or "trouble-makers."
Philosophy is a life-or-death matter for a few people, ordinary and very talented thinkers alike. I probably fall into this category of the "philosophically obsessed" despite being a quite ordinary thinker. Philosophy is my oxygen.
What is unlivable and counterproductive to this project of humanity is the nihilism that is endemic in today's American culture, especially in blue-collar and urban minority communities.
The crass, brutal, sexist, materialistic ethos celebrated in some forms of inner city music, commercial advertising, and exploitative media DEHUMANIZES people -- young males and females equally -- by reducing them to the things that they "have" while making how they "get things" irrelevant. (Cornel West)
Dehumanization is immoral. It is also dangerous for society.
People are encouraged today to enter into an unreflective, pure-pleasure-seeking state, to be selfish in a crude and materialistic sense. This may have something to do with the problem of morbid forms of obesity.
We are ENCOURAGED to consume, to devour pleasures, without concern for our responsibilities to one another, to the environment, or even to ourselves. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
If you make a young person's worth depend entirely on the car that he or she drives, on clothing, t.v. sets, jewelry, how much fun is had, and so on, then you deny a person the means by which to acquire those items legitimately -- while denigrating and insulting people who lack those things through stereotypes in the media -- then you may expect to produce a walking time-bomb of a human being.
If happiness is defined in terms of pure pleasure then the recognition of the need for sacrifice or altruism as transcendent values having to do with the good of others and the true nature of love as an "other-regarding emotion" existing beyond selfish satisfactions and withstanding the passage of time -- this recognition becomes impossible.
I am not suggesting that all forms of hip-hop are dangerous; only that some lyrics -- even if musically or aesthetically interesting and never subject to censure -- raise serious moral issues for minority communities and for everyone else, too. ("Nihilism Against Memory.")
Among the great challenges for some of us in America is living on the knife-edge of hatred and revulsion for those who have tortured and exploited us by turning rage into creative effort.
I will find a place and means to write my books. I will put them out there, somehow.
I have seen far too many people lost to fraudulent ideologies. I have witnessed lives destroyed by trendy nonsense. I refuse to allow anyone to substitute for genuine thought the psychobabble (or New Age drivel) that is so popular these days then to impose such stuff on me by calling it science or theory, therapy, or "political correctness." Feministing? "#Me Too"? ("Whatever" and "Why Jane can't read.")
Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Western philosophy are all preferable to such popular nonsense -- nonsense which has very little to do with genuine science or psychology but is much more a false philosophy. Young people are being taught this politically correct nonsense at our best universities. (Again: "Whatever!" and "Why Jane Can't Read.")
Philosophy changes this dynamic of self-understanding by returning to the question of what a person "is" and of how human worth should be assessed.
Philosophy allows us to wonder why nihilism is a great mistake, why relativism is only "relatively" attractive and "objectively" false. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Philosophy is both an instrument of individual psychological liberation (not least from idiotic therapists armed with twelve-step plans and methods of behavioral conditioning), but also from the whole media-cultural-commercial-circus that seeks to manipulate and control or "program" people in (ostensibly) socially convenient ways.
Philosophy is socially useful because it is individually liberating.
Philosophy allows us to recognize that the meaning of our actions is only for us to decide -- not anyone's decision to make on our behalf -- much less to force upon us.
An action that we are compelled to take, against our will and under great pressure, is not truly ours. But the judgment concerning the MEANING of that action is always only ours to make.
Freedom inheres in interpretations, even more in interpreting.
There are people, sometimes in academia or the professions, who dislike us and our opinions for reasons that have nothing to do with any ideological choice that we have made, nor even for the contents of those opinions. This often makes no sense to us.
Even more bizarre, there are those who seek to deny us the experience of subjective freedom -- or the right to hold opinions at all -- in order to reduce us to the status of a "thing" so that they can grasp us intellectually, placing us in a little box with a label on it, making us easier to control. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Few of us see ourselves as "objects" subject to legitimate manipulation (or silencing) by so-called "experts." All of us may concede the reality of manipulation by advertisers, political consultants, mothers-in-law. These are among the horrors that we must endure in postmodernist cultures. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
"This is for your own good," they say. "These are the only opinions that you are allowed to hold."
We are informed that this person is only a "Mexican"; that other person is only a pretty "woman"; that third person is only an "African-American." These days the boxes may be marked with "politically correct" labels. The idea is the same, only the labels are different. ("Is clarity enough?")
Don't bother reading those writers because they are "White European Males."
So? Are they good? If they are, then I'll read them anyway. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
Philosophy makes this labeling game ineffective by reminding us of the inadequacy of all labels. Philosophy leads us to see that we must always be involved in the effort both to define and understand ourselves in light of changing circumstances and elements in an environment and with tools that are mostly not of our choosing even as we also try to figure out who or what others are while reinventing our social world.
We must come to terms with our world(s) and ourselves at the same time -- because we must make both selves and world(s) every day -- mastering the instruments that we are handed for this purpose which boil down to the human mind and its languages.
Jean-Paul Sartre best expressed this existentialist insight: "We are condemned to be free."
Today, being "free" must include a kind of interpreting.
Philosophy is like trying to perform surgery on yourself, in a hall of mirrors, where you see your body reflected in distorting prisms, even as you attempt to rebuild the premises and replace the mirrors. The mirrors are television sets and movie screens reflecting aspects of yourself back to you, punctuated periodically by advertisements -- advertisements reflecting the goals of forces in society which may not have your best interests at heart. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "What is Memory?")
"Have you had your sprinkle today?"
A beautiful blond asks this question with a smile in an advertisement that I see on the subway train as I ride home in the evening.
This is the sort of wisdom provided to us by our friendly society, and usually at the expense of more hard-won forms of philosophical acumen and/or political consciousness.
I turn on my television set only to be approached by a chubby stranger with a nervous smile who whispers: "Hey, let's talk about diarrhoea!"
My dictionary reports that "diarrhoea" may be spelled with, or without the "o."
Oh, excuse me, I have to run. Must have been those Chilli peppers. Luckily, my toilet paper is Scott Tissue, which is as "soft as a baby's bottom!"
By being asked whether you've had your "sprinkle" today, you are not faced with the more troublesome question: "Are you a slave?"
Ideally, for powerful forces in society, distractions, stress, anxiety, financial worries and pressures to surpass our neighbors in the accumulation of wealth may prevent us from realizing that we have become slaves. (See my review of the "Matrix.")
The great thing about America is the opportunity that we have -- provided that we aware of it -- to come up with our own responses to such advertisements and then to post them on the Internet:
"Why yes, I have had my sprinkle today. Maybe later, we can sprinkle together!"
As we cope with the "Heartbreak of Psoriasis," no matter how difficult the challenge of trying to do philosophy today we realize that to abdicate that challenge is to allow the forces of pacification to define you. This is something we must never do.
A famous thinker has described philosophy as the attempt to build the ship that you are sailing on in the middle of the ocean even as you are sailing on it. I extend this description to the task of being human (a person?) in highly developed, technological societies, where you are building not a sea ship but a rocket as you fall through infinite space. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review" and "'Star Trek 2009': A Movie Review.")
This definition of the subject amounts to equating philosophizing with being human -- with
freedom -- allowing us to think of philosophy, again, as a kind of "therapy" or a way of escaping neurosis along with other forms of mental illness
through self-interpretations, illnesses
whose prevalence is not exactly unforeseeable in Western societies uneasily developing (and shaped by) postmodernist cultures. ("'Elysium': A Movie Review.")
John Gardner's short story entitled -- I believe -- "John Napper Sailing Through the Universe" comes to mind.
I should pause at this point to cope with the difficulties experienced by persons troubled when reading English sentences:
Our nature, humanity, requires us to be free; obstructions to the realization of that freedom -- both external and internal -- may frustrate and prevent realization of our natures as "freedoms-in-the-world." (Sartre)
We are increasingly invaded by powerful forces of domination and control, coopting, pacifying us into the willing sacrifice of our freedoms, which are ourselves. I call this effort to deny freedom,
evil. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
The encounter with evil -- as in the deliberate effort by government physicians to induce psychosis or suicide through torture -- is sufficient to produce great emotional trauma for anyone.
Psychological methods aimed at such results --
designed to induce mass psychosis -- have been experimental subjects of concern to "elite researchers" in America for decades. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Aaron Schwartz, Freedom, and American Law.")
There are smart people with plenty of resources working on ways to use your wounds and pains in life -- also desires or wishes -- as "weapons" in an effort to control or manipulate you. (See "Colin McGinn's Naughty Book" and "Behaviorism is Evil," then Mark Danner, "US Torture: Voices From the Black Sites,"
The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, at p. 69 and Mark Danner, "The Red Cross Report on Torture and What it Means for the U.S.,"
The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2009, at p. 48.)
Scott Shane & Mark Mazzetti, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use,"
The New York Times, April 22, 2009, at p. A1 states that politicians from both parties were thoroughly briefed and aware of the torture methods developed by psychologists and psychoanalysts -- methods used, secretly,
against Americans well before 9/11, and still today, especially in prisons. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
A U.S. government effort to "invade" the minds of citizens has been developed over decades with the goal of depriving persons of the capacity for independent thought or free will. Inmates are the lab rats for these efforts, allegedly. This amounts to an attempt to make individuals into "robots" at the service of government power. "Combating Prisoner Abuse," (Editorial) in
The New York Times, December 21, 2009, at p. A30. (Techniques of psychological torture in American prisons.)
Please see: "'Westworld': A Review of the HBO TV Series."
The tactics being used by Israel in Gaza in 2014 seem suspiciously similar to those favored within our National Security State. "Justice For Gaza," (Editorial)
The Nation, August 18/25, 2014, p. 3. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
Compare Rebecca Lemov,
World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005) with Alfred W. McCoy,
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). (Sleep deprivation, constant assaults on the psyche by way of insults or denigration, attempts at disconfirmation of identity through frustrations are among the many hateful "techniques" favored by so-called "therapists" to destroy persons.)
For an update on America's continuing use of these barbaric methods, see Scott Shane, "American Sues F.B.I., Saying He Was Detained in Africa," in
The New York Times, November 11, 2009, at p. A19, then "A National Disgrace," (Editorial) in
The New York Times, November 11, 2009, at p. A30. Please see Scott Shane, "Cheney is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project," in
The New York Times, July 12, 2009, at p. A1. ("The C.I.A. and Torture" and "C.I.A. Lies and Torture.")
Have "enhanced interrogations" made us safer?
I doubt it: Andrea Elliott, "A Call to Jihad, Answered in America," in
The New York Times, July 12, 2009, at p. A1 and David Abel, "Amid the Shock, A Selfless Rush to Help Others," in
The Boston Globe, April 16, 2013, at p. A1. (Boston bombing kills 6, injures 130. Many more such incidents, horribly, are expected in American cities in the next ten years and, probably, most of these incidents will aimed against Jews.)
Psychologists sometimes claim that philosophizing is a kind of neurosis, a form of mental illness, best cured by joining a gym and making a healthy "adjustment" to our society.
Abandonment of thought always amounts to accepting slavery.
Since most psychologists are "crazy" (to use a technical term) we need not bother to take their claims any more seriously than philosophers' theories.
We can be
philosophical about psychological categories and, always, wary of government psychologists. Irony?
American psychology's decision to accept a partnership with intelligence agencies -- by formulating torture methods for use against brown people at home and internationally -- is a particularly horrifying and disgusting recent development. See the article that I was unable to print since my printer has been damaged by hackers:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24330863/ (April 27, 2008)
For a follow-up, see also:
"There was a great deal to be troubled by in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the kinds of torture and abuse inflicted on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. One disturbing footnote is that MEDICAL personnel were deeply involved in facilitating the abuses, which were intended to coerce suspects into providing intelligence."
"Medically Assisted Torture," (Editorial)
The New York Times, April 9, 2009, at p. A26. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" as well as "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and soon: "What is it like to be raped?" then "The C.I.A. and Torture.")
To the claim that there is no human nature (young Sartre), history and ideas provide the answer that we will create one in order to think about ourselves as political-social animals. Our "human nature" may well be this very capacity for creating ourselves (mature Sartre). We are each a kind of freedom.
Freedom is a shape-shifter, a trickster-god, who resurfaces in languages as archetypes, images, or as "drives" and "instincts," in accordance with the jargon of the age, in terms of a shared quest for realization. Evolution as revolution; revolution as evolution. To be free (potentially) is to be evil. Freedom is as dangerous as it is necessary.
Fascinatingly, this "trickster-god" (Jung, Campbell) symbolizing freedom is usually depicted as female, or a wicked child in world mythology -- examples may include the playful Krishna or Hermes, Venus, Lakshmi, as well as many others. Freedom is associated with love/eros, universally, in myths of transformation. "Eve" or "Eva" is the earliest Western archetype of freedom and a distant cousin of the goddess Venus/Aphrodite. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
One way of describing this malicious spirit of freedom is to call it "philosophy."
I am a person. I am not a "thing" or "object" to be defined, corrected, or altered by you -- whoever you are and whatever political office (or judgeship) you have purchased in New Jersey.
My rights are not and never will be negotiable.
I recognize the same rights in all men and women. No amount of torture -- psychological or physical, no censorship, no threats -- will change my mind on this matter. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" then "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "Marilyn Straus was right!")
I understand philosophy to be something much larger than anyone in the analytical school might like.
Philosophy is and must remain an activity which is inclusive of literature, psychology, and other academic disciplines such as law or physics.
A novel may become a work of philosophy. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea is one such novel while Picasso's "Guernica" is an artistic masterpiece that is also a profound (and always timely) philosophical comment on war.
There are cinematic works that I regard as philosophical essays as well as works of art. Since I have mentioned Woody Allen, please see his film "Crimes and Misdemeanors" or the equally good "Matchpoint." A treatise on Hegel and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer is "Wings of Desire." ("'Irrational Man': A Movie Review.")
For a profound exploration of themes of identity and romantic love I suggest that you see one of the great masterpieces of American cinema to appear in the nineteen-eighties that is not very well known to a new generation of film buffs "Something Wild." Among the great philosophical works of my lifetime are the Monty Python films. ("The Ministry of Funny Walks" skit -- no, not the C.I.A. -- is a dystopian classic worthy of inclusion with Orwell's and Huxley's best works.)
I wish to discuss three concepts that I find useful in this always unfinished -- and maybe impossible -- task of "doing" philosophy in postmodernist "social spaces" or on "You Tube": 1) "intentionality"; 2) "transcendence"; and 3) "love."
The most important of these concepts is love.
Intentionality.
The most fundamental characteristic of human beings is "consciousness." As far as we know, we are the only conscious beings in the universe. It is possible that there are, or will be, other conscious organisms or entities in the universe. However, we have no way of knowing that until such an encounter of the third kind takes place. It is self-awareness, consciousness, or mind that makes us unique.
We tend to think of the mind as akin to a refrigerator in the brain where we keep memories, hopes, ambitions, fantasies, and so on "on ice," or in storage, for when we need them like frozen burgers in case friends come over for a barbecue.
Consciousness is not like that at all. Consciousness is always "of" something. It is impossible to think of consciousness apart from its contents, in other words, which gives those contents a kind of ontological status or REALITY.
Do the contents of consciousness "exist"?
The literature on this issue is voluminous and the matter remains unresolved. The discussion of these issues dates at least from the Middle Ages, that is, in terms of intentionality and the ontological problem. ("Ontology" is the study of what "is" or the "science of being.")
During the medieval era theologians developed proofs for the existence of God merely on the basis of the human capacity to think or "conceive" of the concept of God. In the aftermath of G.E. Moore's critique of idealism these proofs seem less persuasive to many people.
Hold off on any judgments concerning this matter since rationalism and idealism are in the midst of a comeback thanks to quantum physics and the new math of manifolds and multiple-dimensions. (See "Is it rational to believe in God?" then "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism," and "Is this atheism's moment?")
There were debates lasting for millennia over whether my conceiving of a unicorn means that the unicorn "is" or "exists," in some sense, as an "object of consciousness." These debates are by no means resolved.
Think of fictional characters: Santa Claus, Sherlock Holmes, or Daisy Dukes. Are they "existing entities"? For that matter, how about people like George W. Bush? How can we be certain that Mr. Bush (Donald J. Trump?) really exists? We only see Mr. Bush on t.v., like Homer Simpson? And there is a suspicious resemblance between those two "screen" characters. ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
How can I be sure that I exist?
I must exist because I just received my cable bill.
Markus Gabriel claims that the "world does not exist."
If Markus Gabriel exists then he must be located somewhere and this place where he is, presumably, is in the empirical world.
I am confident, for example, that Bonn, Germany is in the world.
I understand that Professor Gabriel defines "world" to refer to the totalizing meaning attributed to life or the "worlds" of meaning that we inhabit as persons.
The denial of the 'reality" of such constructs by Professor Gabriel, however, may only amount to another postulated "construct" or reading of the world of meanings in which we are and must be even if we are philosophers.
For those who are highly curious about these issues, a good place to start is with Bertrand Russell's argument concerning "golden mountains" and whether the non-existent "king of France" is bald. There are realist, idealist, nominalist, pragmatist and skeptical answers to these questions. I will set aside that discussion for now. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
I wish to focus on psychological issues associated with this quality of directedness or intentionality that, philosophers contend, characterizes consciousness.
Analytical philosophers usually prefer the terminology of "reference" and "meaning," ("sense" and "reference"), shifting the discussion from ontology to the metaphysics of language, by asking whether objects in the world somehow "cause" our perceptions or representations of them. This causing could only apply or exist for creatures capable of detecting or perceiving or representing "reality."
Even with regard to empirical reality, however, this issue is far from clear. An analogy to the mathematics of objects in fictional spaces is obvious: John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, "Holographic Observer Maths," in
Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 255-291, then Michael Talbot, "The Quantum Potential Field," in
The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 39-40 ("... unlike other fields ... its influence does not diminish with distance.")
Finally and most poignant for me is the mathematical description of entanglement relations in Amir D. Aczel, "John Bell's Theorem," in
Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2003), pp. 137-148.
These are crucial ideas for persons living in the "Age of Entanglement." Peter Galison, "Sons of Atom,"
The New York Times (Book Review), March 29, 2009, at p. 16 and Louisa Gilder,
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Born (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
In light of the foregoing comments compare Stephen Hawking, "The Unification of Physics," in
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London & New York: Bantam, 1989), pp. 171-177 with Roy E. Peacock, "An Ocean of Truth," in
A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' (Suffolk: Monarch, 1989), pp. 145-153, then consider Claudia Springer,
Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas, 1996), pp. 46-49 ("Ideologies of gender enter into the most unlikely areas of scientific inquiry ..." quoting philosopher Sandra Harding.)
You know where this leads: Roy Bashkar,
Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (New York & London: Verso, 1993), pp. 250-258 (" ... this takes me directly to the non-anthropocentricity of space, time, tense and process and the causal irrealism of any position that denies the IRREDUCIBILITY of the A series to the B series, or the reality of tense or process.")
Hilary Putnam's defense of "internal realism" begins with the remark that "... the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world." This is about as correct as we can be on this issue. Human beings are shaped by consciousness and its objects and/or "relata." Notice that the "aboutness" of consciousness is always "free." Intentionality is a
choice within boundaries. (Again: "Is the universe only a numbers game?")
We find ourselves in an environment which is never perceived in an unmediated way by us, but is always filtered through conceptual and perceptual mechanisms which play a
constitutive role in the construction of human social reality. Whatever the world is like "in itself" must always remain beyond us. This is the gist of Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism (or constructivism) developed more than two centuries ago.
Compare Hilary Putnam,
The Many Faces of Realism (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), pp. 63-93 ("Reasonableness as a fact and as a value") with Stephen Hawking, "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?," in
Black Holes and baby Universes, and Other Essays (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 69. ("Steven Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Hilary Putnam is Keeping It Real.")
We can never step out of our minds and faculties to examine reality as it is "in itself," apart from us as perceiving agents. We still have truth and objectivity in propositions, however, even as knowledge remains "real" for all rational agents. Thus, consciousness is always defined by the
contents that come from outside of it.
Consciousness is directed towards those contents, or what are called the "external source(s) of knowledge."
What we know of human reality is an empirical world mixed with our consciousness where the boundaries between the two are never clear (or solid) except that they are found in language. Human experience is Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This term describing the encounter between art works and their recipients, "the fusion of horizons," defines movies or all televisual and cinematic experiences, for me, as "places of encounter."
A movie is the shared territory between observers and what is observed. Real movie and t.v. drama always is (and should be) about you as the recipient of the work. ("'
Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
This conclusion follows from Ricoeur's and Gadamer's hermeneutics, but it also describes our quantum realities in a world of entangled uncertainties that are mutually-generated and multidimensional spaces of self-becoming-with-others. The boundaries between us have begun to evaporate. I find you within me; just as I am within you. We must live within overlapping boundaries of selfhood. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
This realization makes hatred difficult for rational persons in the world. Hence, it may be a good idea to help as many people as possible to be rational and educated. Mr. Rubio, you are implicated in the life of Fidel Castro and he is a part of your life. (Compare "'Oblivion': A Movie Review" with "'Elysium': A Movie Review.")
Think of chameleons whose color and shape alters depending on the environments in which you place them. This variability is a form of camouflage emerging as an evolutionary defense mechanism.
Conscious human beings are like chameleons, some more than others -- artists, especially -- are like Woody Allen's "Zelig." For explorations of this theme in important novels, compare Nicholas Mosley,
Hopeful Monsters (New York & London: Vintage, 1993) and Nicholas Mosley,
Inventing God (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2003) with Macolm Bradbury,
To the Hermitage (New York: Overlook Press, 2000) and, I hope, my forthcoming "Writings in a Torture Chamber." ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
The world is changing along with us, as perceivers of the world, through a mutual process of alteration or invention. If you grasp this idea and understand that empirical reality is not an inert and lifeless "other" that is static "but for" our manipulations, but instead is a dynamic or fluid entity
participating in our subjectivity -- this is true even of something like a stone -- then our disdain for the environment and destruction of nature becomes a kind of suicide.
All that we are doing to the planet is being amplified and will return to us in decades to come. This should worry you. I have described this interaction or movement of subjects and environments as a "dance to the music of time." (Yes, I am alluding to Anthony Powell's novels.)
The philosophical sources here are Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, but also, "emphatically," Albert Einstein and the quantum revolution or even philosophers as diverse as Keith Ward and Markus Gabriel.
We are all the children of Immanuel Kant after philosophy's "Copernican Revolution." Thank you, Thomas Rockmore.
We can never really have an identity or be "selves," in isolation, or apart from our environments, especially our social and linguistic environments when it comes to such fictions as personal identities. And this leads to the development of "faculties" and "capacities" of the mind that are said to be "constitutive of consciousness" or of human being-in-the world -- like sense data, emotions, and imagination. Bernard Williams, "Identity and Identities," in Henry Harris, ed.,
Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1-13. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Bernard Williams and Identity.")
I mentioned the film "Something Wild," not "if" but "when" you see it, consider the difference in the person it is possible for Lulu to become when her primary relation shifts from Ray (Lulu) to Charlie (Audrey). What makes that transformation possible for Lulu (and for Charley) is
love.
Compare David Z. Albert & Rivka Galchen, "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity," in
Scientific American, August 12, 2013, p. 94 with Dennis Overbye, "Einstein and the Black Hole: Which is Wrong, General Relativity or Quantum Theory? -- A Paradox Tests the Limits of Freedom," in
The New York Times, August 13, 2013, p. D1. ("Science Times.") (Mr. Overbye errs in his hypothetical because he fails to see that there are not three distinct particles, but only a set of triadic relations/entanglements that is INCLUSIVE of all "particles.") ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
"Poetry or imaginative literature is our most fundamental mode of inscription of reality, and it is imaginative or imagistic concreteness that we need for this purpose, rather than the abstractions either of the intellect or of the traditional systems of religious symbolism. Blake was right when he said that the artist paints 'not Man in General, but most minutely in particular' ..."
Colin Falck, "Towards a True Post-Modernism," in
Myth, Truth, Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 151. Compare E.P. Thompson, "Mary Wollstonecraft," in
Making History: Writings On History and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1-10 with E.P. Thompson, "The Benevolent Mr. Godwin," in
The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 96-106. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")
It was this concern with freedom which prompted Romantic thinkers and later the existentialists to concur in the sentiments of S.T. Coleridge that were said to be "realized" in Marxism:
"The daily toil of the working poor ... sinks the rational being in the mere animal. 'It is a mockery of our fellow creatures' wrongs to call them equal in rights, when by the bitter compulsion of their wants we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart, or dignify the understanding.' ... " (Thompson, "Romantics," p. 15.)
sense-data.
One of the most obvious ways in which we are aware of our environments and exist in relation to them is in terms of our biological needs.
We need food and water, shelter, and so on. We must perceive accurately an empirical reality that we inhabit in order to shape that reality to our purposes.
Sense-data and the correct interpretation of such data will be crucial. This vegetation is edible that one is not; this is drinking water, that liquid is not. It is too cold or too hot for life. Such decisions (or judgments) are crucial to survival.
Notice that what science tells us is the "reality" of an object perceived by a conscious subject may not comport with our commonsense (or realist) understanding of that object based on sense data. It is by no means clear how much of the reality of that object is "projected" by the knowing subject on to it as opposed to existing in the object like a "power" demanding to be perceived. The table that seems solid to us on the basis of sense-data is "really" electrons in motion scientists say.
Among the items recently challenged in philosophy is a rigid division between subjective and objective domains, a division rooted, ultimately, in Cartesian dualism and the notion of "powers" or tendencies in objects dating from early modernity.
Whatever scientists say, in other words, even science-loving empiricists will treat the table as solid rather than trying to walk through it given what we know of the physics of larger "material" bodies.
Subjective perceptions of reality, wisely, are privileged over objective knowledge. Values color our perceptions of what remain facts. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")
We exist in an empirical world which must be known if we are to survive. Yet we also inhabit a social and linguistic world of meanings -- a
Lebenswelt -- that is shared with others. The point is that these two "realities" are always really one world in its various aspects. ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
We are citizens of nations, members of communities, linguistic, religious and political, or informal communities and associations of many different kinds.
Human meanings are derived from this complex social reality. Meanings are the products of this effort to live in
dual realities, to live with and accept our dual natures as subjects that are also objects.
We are animal and spiritual. We live within the various layers of culture that are developing all the time. A subject or self is always -- especially these days -- a moving target.
At this point, emotions and imagination become very important. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
emotions.
Sartre said: "emotions are magical transformations of the world."
The world of the happy person is a very different place from the world of the unhappy person even if the two persons share the same apartment. Perception becomes reality.
Emotions shape the social world in which we create our meanings to understand ourselves by coloring with a certain "affect" all of the events that occur to us: Felix Unger lives in an orderly universe with fixed rules; his friend, Oscar Madison, lives in a chaotic mess of a world.
How many of us recognize these two characters as aspects of ourselves dramatized as independent characters? ("Magician's Choice.")
We should realize that it is possible to characterize reality in either of these two characters' terms. We must choose between perspectives, opting for one or the other. Yet without destroying or denying either one, shifting from one perspective to the other depending on the context and needs.
No, this does not mean that "everything is relative." We must choose which we will be on any given day, whether Romantic or Rationalist. Perhaps it is wisest to be a little both. It is no coincidence that Iris Murdoch's book on Sartre is entitled, "Sartre: Romantic Rationalist."
"Happiness," Gore Vidal said to Elaine Dundy, "is a satisfactory bowel movement."
No doubt for other writers -- Norman Mailer perhaps! -- the very same physical process would constitute
unhappiness.
One shudders to think of the views of other notables on this matter. ("A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")
Emotions can be compensatory; usually, they are. We are sad or unhappy. We choose to be funny and find absurdity in life, making our situations bearable. We live in an absurdly laughable world. This can be fortunate. A world that makes us laugh is no longer dangerous or frightening. Suddenly, we are happy again.
Laughter is a child's solution to life's troubles. Preserving a childish power of imagination and laughter can be essential to survival in a torture chamber -- for ourselves and for those few others whose childhoods are lost too soon and in far too brutal a fashion.
A sense of humor can make the difference that allows for survival in a mental Auschwitz. Perhaps this is less true for the clown than for his audience. ("Serendipity III" and "Richard and I.")
Notice the importance of the word "survival." We choose the interpretations that we impose upon (or apply to) what occurs to us because we must. This is to say that we choose our emotions. In this way, we make our lives both more comprehensible and meaningful, also (this is the point) more controllable, making us responsible for our world.
We dream to ease our pain. Jung over Freud.
Sometimes we share our dreams by placing them on canvas or celluloid, or by capturing them in words, again, to ease the pains of those we love.
All creative work is a performance and request for attention and love.
Creative achievement may also be offered to those we love as a distraction from their pain. Emotions do not merely "happen." Emotions are aspects of our selves that we encourage -- or
choose -- because we need them. (Robert C. Solomon.)
It is those needs which we may not necessarily control. Nor, sadly, can we wish away inconvenient truths, morality, or the presence of evil. The most important of these emotions and the one that can spell the difference between life and death is, of course, love. Emotions color our needs or humanity in aesthetic-moral terms.
Love is our greatest spiritual need; just as sex is a physical need. We choose loving because we need love in our lives. Other emotions "color" the world for us, sometimes with truly frightening consequences when it comes to hatred, envy, resentment or despair.
The world of the racist or fascist, terrorist or torturer is also not the world of the lover, nor (I believe and hope) of the creative artist and philosopher or scientist.
There is no person who hates another without also hating and suffering him- or herself; there is no person who loves another without also loving him- or herself. We must choose between love and hatred. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
The world of the nihilist is not the world of the moral subject. This leaves us, once again, with the task of choosing one of these worlds and rejecting others. It leaves us with this Kantian freedom (which comes down to Sartre, by way of Hegel), "the freedom that we are," which expresses itself, for example, in philosophical activity against all forms of conditioning and oppression. Freedom is our necessity. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
"Every man [or woman]," Antonio Gramsci says, "is a philosopher."
This is because philosophy is inescapable -- even for those who reject it. The rejection and dismissal of philosophy (metaphysics) is also a philosophy (metaphysics).
Rejection of philosophy is sometimes profound; at other times, this rejection is quite shallow. Much depends on the reasons for the rejection and what understanding of philosophy is rejected. In my understanding of philosophy, all such "moving beyond philosophy" must itself be philosophy. (Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Rorty, Grene.)
I recommend the excellent introduction by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer,
The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition From the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 1-54 and Hans-Georg Gadamer, "On the Contributions of Poetry to the Search for Truth," in Robert Bernasconi, ed.,
The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 105-115 with Christopher Norris, "Derrida and Kant: The Enlightenment Connection," in
Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 142-172 and Arkady Plotinsky,
Complementarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 191-271 ("Complementarity and Deconstruction").
A BBC (or ITV?) television series entitled "Lost in Jane Austen" features the adventures of a modern British woman who discovers herself trapped in Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."
A similar experience has occurred to
me as I have wandered through "Northanger Abbey." These pieces are dramatizations of ideas articulated in the eighties and nineties by philosophers like Gadamer, Derrida, and Ricouer -- ideas that are now filtering down to popular culture. ("The Northanger Arms on Park Avenue.")
I was admitted to a Ph.D. program in philosophy at New York University, after earning a J.D., and I attended lectures at that university by distinguished philosophers, including Derrida. I was unable to complete that program for financial reasons. I made up for this misfortune by reading far more than would have been necessary for a degree in that program and publishing articles in philosophy journals.
Is my ethnicity a contributing factor in this tragic problem of New Jersey's "misperception" not only of me, but of so many others? ("Have you no shame Mr. Rabner?")
How many others in the world are "misperceived" by U.S. government officials in their shocking ignorance and ethnocentricity, xenophobia and militarism? How many persons -- including Americans -- will DIE because of such misperceptions? Are many of America's political officials as stupid and wilfully ignorant as the judges and politicians I knew in New Jersey who are responsible for these continuing censorship efforts? ("Is Senator Menendez For Human Rights?")
imagination.
Imagination enables us to project ourselves into the future, by "nihilating" (Hegel, Sartre) our present circumstances. This is how we choose ourselves and the world.
We become the authors of our future selves.
A great source of philosophical wisdom is the film "Gladiator." Just before the first battle scene Maximus says to his troops: "Think of where you will be and it will be so."
Taking him at his word, we imagine ourselves on the beach having a laugh with friends, say, Kate Winslet and Melanie Griffith. And while it is extremely unlikely that "it will be so" nonetheless we find ourselves "nihilating" the miserable weather in New York today and the thought of cabbage soup for dinner not to mention other "absences" or "missing persons" in our lives. (Kudos to Ms. Winslet for her award-winning recent performances, see "'The Reader': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
We are transported to an alternative reality. We have re-made the world and ourselves by projecting ourselves into the future. A whole new set of emotions become possible for us.
Whenever I think about myself in the future I am always wearing a new outfit, preferably Armani. "Residual self-image," Morpheus says to Neo.
If you will be spending time with Melanie and Kate, then you should look your best and be your best. Despair, suicidal depression,
anomie (look it up!) are not possible when one is sharing a laugh on the beach with Kate Winslet and Melanie Griffith -- until their husbands appear of course! -- but then in our imaginative efforts both women are always single. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
Other social settings may be in need of imaginative alteration, like the neighborhood life that feels too small for who and what you are or want to be, not to mention the bad ideas or thoughtless people telling you what you should not seek to become.
What you decide matters does in fact matter to you. Philosophy tells you that you are "a freedom" and that the freedom that you are is philosophy itself.
"That's circular!" Yes, it is circular. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" then "What is Memory?")
Philosophy is great for spotting bad ideas allowing us to exercise that "intellectual sanitation worker" function.
Philosophy tells us, again, that racism is one very bad idea, that social injustice is unacceptable, that right and wrong are meaningful terms, that there is truth and beauty.
Best of all, philosophy tells us some important things about love. I will save that point for later in this essay.
Philosophy tells us that the freedom that we claim for ourselves we must grant to others. Hence, from individual freedom we arrive at social equality.
Emotions and imagination are instruments of transcendence. For we are not only empirical selves, as I say, but also "transcendental egos."
Sting and "The Police" sang this for us way back in the eighties: "We're spirits in a material world."
It is no surprise that "transcendence" begins as a theological concept.
For a shocking set of associations, please see Stanley Rosen, "Are We Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On?: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes," in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, J. Kertscher, eds., Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Has-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 257-279, then Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), pp. 73-99, the section of Taylor's book -- entitled "Strange Loops" -- is amazing:
"In Derrida's reworking of Godel's theorem, every system or structure includes as a condition of its own possibility something it cannot assimilate. This 'outside' which is 'inside,' exposes the openness of every system that seems to be closed. Unlike the exteriority that Luhman attributes to autopoietic systems, this openness is not extraneous, but is WITHIN the system itself." ("Ethical/Unethical?" "Me-and-You?" and see my essay "Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'" then "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and finally: "'Westworld': A Review of the T.V. Series.")
Hegelian-Kantianism can now be restated entirely in the language of quantum theory and mathematics. Curiously, the work of biologist Humberto Maturana was not quoted in this passage nor theological passages "mirroring" these conclusions in the work of Gustavo Gutierrez.
Latin American scholars, Gutierrez and Maturana, stated similar ideas well before Mr. Taylor. If this reasoning is correct good
necessitates evil as life necessitates death. ("Faust in Manhattan" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Concerning Humberto Maturana, see Briggs & Peat, "Founding a Science of Spontaneous Order," in
Looking Glass Universe, pp. 191-193. (I believe that Professor Maturana is a Nobel Laureate in biology, others developing similar work and ideas include Francisco Varela, of Princeton University, and Ricardo Uribe who teaches in Chile and the writings of Rupert Sheldrake are also highly recommended.)
Italian scholar Omar Calabrese discusses these themes in "Complexity and Dissipation," in
Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, at pp. 144-153. Latin American theologian Leonardo Boff (sometimes listed as "Bosh") is said to offer a socially conscious, quantum-like reading of the gospels for our time.
Objectivity may "emerge" within all systems as a form of evolution. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
The American academy is much too insular and parochial in discussing these matters. These scholars may be dismissed by New Jersey officials as "little brown persons" whose writings may be defaced, repeatedly, to the indifference of the authorities.
Transcendence.
My discussion of transcendence is also a synthesis of ideas provided by a diverse and eclectic group of thinkers, including Rollo May, Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch, Paul Ricoeur, Cornel West and Roberto Unger and many others.
Philosophers -- along with anybody who reads their books -- are licensed to take ideas and use them constructively. Philosophy is a form of intellectual socialism. Ideas are
communal property. All I ask is that the appropriate acknowledgments be made. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" then "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Transcendence is a word and concept derived from the Latin "trans" and "sendere" -- meaning literally "to jump over" or "leap beyond" -- and is originally used as a religious term for our escape from this "world of shadows," or earthly realm, to the contemplation of God, or holy things.
As used in the modern Continental school of philosophy the concept designates the most natural and normal human capacity. It is what all of us are doing, all the time, that is, getting from point A to point B in our lives. We all have to move on.
For science-lovers the best analogy may be to photosynthesis in plants and the similar human tendency to move towards the "light" of love and goodness away from the cold and darkness of evil. ("Out of the Past" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")
Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" says, "And this secret spake life herself to me, 'Behold,' said she, 'I am that which must ever surpass herself.' ..."
Rupert Sheldrake, again, and many others have become interested in the "biology of transcedence." See Looking Glass Universe, pp. 227-253; also Robert C. Solomon, "Spirituality and Erotic Love," in Spirituality For the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 28-44.
"Love of life" may be another way of speaking of ethics and community, or God. The more we know of ourselves and the world, the more we recognize the possibilities available to us at any given time. Like Whitman (or was it Elvis?), "we dwell in possibility." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Being future-oriented creatures, living in time, we are required to look ahead, to envision what is to come even as, Janus-like, we cast a backward glance.
We are trapped between past and future because we are required to interpret our lives in order to move forward. This process of interpreting the past in order to propel ourselves into the future can be a form of rebellion through self-knowledge. We are involved in a dialectical "mambo." ("'In Time': A Movie Review.")
It is no solution to suggest that we "live in the moment." We have no choice about doing so. We quickly discover that the "moment" is always disappearing into the past as consciousness is absorbed into the future. We must choose the significance (or meaning) of our moment in order to make it meaningful. This involves coming to terms with the past in order to create the future. Affirm this moment, now, because it's all we've got. ("Faust in Manhattan.")
I
choose struggle -- never to give up -- until I find those I need to see in order to achieve justice. The trajectory on this question of transcendence is best traced from Hegel's account of the journey of Spirit and Faust's dialogue with "Mephistopheles" (Boito's spelling) to Beckett's and Pinter's blasted psyches in a wasteland of Western culture. From individual freedom to community in society.
As Che once said to Fidel: "This is called dialectics!" (See "Che" and "Sartre or Guevara?")
Two essays by Derrida should be discussed (Eagleton and Norris are my best sources on these issues): Jacques Derrida, "
Devant La Loi," in A. Phillips Griffiths, ed.,
Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and "The Retrait [Retreat?] of Metaphor," in
enclitic, vol. II, no. 2, (1978), pp. 5-34, then see "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Metaphor is Mystery."
In light of the first Derrida essay, see also Franz Kafka, "Before the Law," in
The Basic Kafka (New York: Washington Square, 1979), pp. 174-181 (" ... 'It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' ... 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K, 'It turns lying into a universal principle.' ..."), then Philip Roth, "Looking at Kafka," in
A Philip Roth Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980), pp. 147-169.
To recognize a talent for nurturing a child, for example -- even if we are men -- is to see that whatever tells us that such a thing is not for us is mistaken.
The same is true when we discover an ability to write or paint; or when we see that we can contribute to philosophical discussions, or make people laugh, or that we have interesting things to say about literature or other forms of art, or that we can create art. Being an attorney need not preclude a person from writing works of philosophy or literature nor from standard displays of emotion and compassion.
Self-knowledge is a kind of freedom which is also transcendence.
Mathematical theories that seem difficult to many others appear (to me) like beautiful constellations of images. Everything becomes easy when we just "play" with ideas and concepts. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
We live beyond confining stereotypes and labels. We escape all of the categories and classifications by which societies and establishments seek to imprison us ("you are retarded," I was told -- perhaps accurately!), making us easier to control, in order to "become the persons we are" or just to become persons at all.
Being insulted by powerful officials places me in very good company among the "multitudes" (Antonio Negri) in our world who do not matter to Washington's "movers and shakers." ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "New Jersey's Filth, Failures, and Flaws.")
All genuine thought is -- and should be -- dangerous. True thinking is dangerous to stupidity and ossified reasoning, or corruption and evil, especially to the complacent forms of such horrors:
"You are not a gentleman. You are stupid. You can't write. You are not worthy of being taken seriously because you did not attend this university. Your book is not worth publishing. It is permissible to deface and destroy (or
steal) your writings because you have no human rights. We are ethical; you are not. We can torture you. We are your 'superiors' ... ." ("How Censorship Works in America.")
Powerful forces in ANY society will always seek to destroy individuals who question cherished and convenient notions of "normality."
It is the philosopher's and/or the artist's -- perhaps also the scientist's -- responsibility to question notions of normality and truth.
Philosophy is always a dangerous calling.
There are many behaviors that exemplify this fundamental and universal human freedom "to be." For example, how we live in time through constructing narratives (or stories) making use of symbols; also, how we construct and work at relationships, especially by loving others who are called "unlovable" or "abnormal," "stupid" or "sleazy."
In the eternal human drive to project ourselves into the future -- thereby changing ourselves, paradoxically -- "we always are what we are not; and we are not that which we are." (Jean-Paul Sartre) (Again: "'In Time': A Movie Review.")
I recently enjoyed "The Globe Shakespeare Company's" production of "Love's Labour's Lost." The Bard's witty anticipation of Derrida features masked gentlemanly lovers courting equally masked ladies to whom love is made as "signs" of the maids they would "designate." Letters go astray; masks become identities; freedom and "terms compulsatory" compete against necessity. Not to worry, "all's well that ends well." Colin McGinn,
Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
time and narrative.
Your wristwatch is a text and by "reading" it -- that is, by interpreting its symbols to decide "what is the time" -- you are coming to an objective conclusion. It is three o'clock because the little hand is on the three and the big hand is on the twelve. This seems as clear and objectively true as anything can be. Yet we might live in a culture that measured time in totally different increments, using different symbols, a glance at my wristwatch would then reveal a completely different "reading" of the time.
The time being designated by symbols is a pretty independent factor in all of our lives -- setting aside the possibility that we are travelling at the speed of light in a space ship, or that we find ourselves falling through a black hole, which slows down time, so that, "eventually," time runs "backwards" in a black hole, according to physicist Stephen Hawking. (I believe that Hawking has now changed his mind about this possibility.)
Death will make this point for us convincingly. Memory and time are related concepts for each of us. Bob Harrison, "Personal Identity and Time: A Question of Identity," in
Philosophy Now, July/August 2007, at p. 6. (" ... if the person, the psychological being, cannot remember one atom of it, [a crime,] then he [or she] is not guilty.")
Many persons have been charged with crimes which they could not have committed; while others are not charged at all for crimes which they clearly
have committed. This is called "legal justice." An "event" that is not recalled is outside of lived-time,
not a memory. ("What is memory?" and "Out of the Past.")
Time as duration (as it is lived) sure is real, measuring out our lives in tea spoon-like installments, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, until those lives come to a full stop.
We have invented a language and a way of measuring lived-time encoded in that language and its symbols which can be discerned from your watch. This is an entirely subjective, culturally-specific, historical language of time measurement.
Other cultures have measured time differently. Before (I believe) Pope Gregory VII disagreements concerning date and time -- both were measured differently by the ancients -- were much more common in European civilization to say nothing of Asia and Latin-America, or Africa.
We now may agree about the objectivity of our "readings" of time given the mastery of the language in which we Westerners have chosen to express our "time-sense."
Analogies to objectivity in ethical discourse should be obvious. Global civilization should now agree that torture, for example, is always evil. Bob Brecher,
Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). ("A Review of the T.V. Show 'Alice.'")
When asked for the time a great philosopher and former member of the Yankees answered: "You mean right now?"
There are many forms of ethical expression(s) and/or languages. They all point at a single lived-sense of the Good. Good is found at the most fundamental level in human social reality because the concept always has something to do with (or combines) freedom, equality, and (ultimately) love. John MacMurray writes:
"All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action is for the sake of friendship [love]."
For an application of these ideas in the realm of politics and jurisprudence, see the writings of John Finnis and Roberto Unger.
We will settle only for a
mixture of Right and Good -- motives and consequences must be weighed in assessing moral actions in a "timely" fashion. Oliver A. Johnson, "The Impasse in Ethics and Blanshard's Way Out," then Brand Blanshard, "Reply to Mr. Johnson," in P.A. Schilpp, ed.,
The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (La Salle: Open Court, 1980), pp. 267-297.
A master-theorist of the time-sense in language and patterns of conceptual relationships unfolding historically, is Hans Blumemberg in
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. For a painless introduction to this thinker's work, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Review of Legitimacy of the Modern Age," in
Philosophische Rundschau 15 (1968), pp. 201-209.
One of the ways in which we "locate" ourselves is in terms of a trajectory in time that is measured in language through story-telling.
The adventure story of time's passage is a chronicle that we read more frequently than our Bibles every time that we look at our clocks.
I once purchased a necktie that duplicated Dali's famous liquid-like clocks, but everyone hated it for some reason: "Make your judgments if you must."
Language is a powerful device that allows us to freeze, magically, a moment on the page by simply using the word "now." We live "in time," planning meetings, vacations, marriages, graduations, retirements. Actually, of course, it is not time that passes, but all of us sure do. Compare David Wood, ed.,
On Paul Riceour: Narrative and Interpretation (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 140-160 with philosophy professor Susan Griffin's, "Daring Witness: The Recovery of Female Time," in James Ogilvy, ed.,
Revisioning Philosophy (New York: SUNY, 1992), pp. 49-61:
Philosophers, we are told, are "hopelessly impractical, abstracted eggheads, who serve as cultural scapegoats for the neuroses of privilege." Time and mood are among the crucial ingredients of cinema. No wonder cinema is described as a "feminine" art, for women are the experts in "lived-time." Bob Breeze, "Transcending the Moment," in
Philosophy Now, July/August, 2007, at p. 14.
Are all philosophers "abnormal" Professor Griffin?
In terms of female time, see again Blumemberg's questions concerning Modernity then the grounds and categories for confinement in Bedlam during the 18th and 19th centuries:
Is being a woman a kind of "madness"? Were women natural "Romantics" even as illiterates? If so, why? Are women more than men "natural philosophers"? Why were women at Bedlam classified as "dislocated in time"? Robin Morgan,
The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York: Anchor, 1982).
We will put this final question to Professors Griffith and her colleague, fellow psychologist, Ms. Winslet. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 55-81, pp. 159-181 ("Child Abuse" and "Gender," then "Doubling of the Personality").
Mary Wollstonecraft's flirtation with suicide, despair, accounts of "periods of madness" were dramatized in her fiction, including:
Mary (1788) and
Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), chronicling a woman's stay in Bedlam and a kind of romance with another female inmate at this mental institution. Marilyn Butler,
Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 94. The standard biography is Janet Todd,
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Phoenix Press, 2000). ("Mary Midgley and Philosophy as Plumbing" and "Mary Warnock and Women Philosophers.")
Wollstonecraft is not alone in pondering the "abnormality" of women philosophers or thinkers and their different experience of time's passage.
Mary Wollstonecraft was among the first thinkers to recognize the "strangeness" of feminine "apprehensions" of the world. She emphasized that women
experience life differently from men and did not simply "disagree" about important political questions since they first pondered whether political thinking was somehow not for them as a so-called "unfeminine" activity in her world.
Wollstonecraft also wondered whether women were "permitted" to think at all or about anything in her society.
Wollstonecraft is an early Romantic and philosophical, literary genius, and psychologist.
Wollstonecraft asked, ironically, why a woman should presume to be regarded as a "person"?
For attempts to answer Wollstonecraft's question see, for example, Mary Hays,
The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796).
John Updike imagines himself into the life of a woman (who is a near contemporary of the author), an author who becomes, mysteriously, a feminist through his character, the same character becomes "herself" through the "shedding of skins":
" ... it is Kali, dearest, TIME undoing and destroying so that a new weave can be begun. Kali who moves through all our passions, momentous as they seem, and tugs them towards the wheel's next turn."
S. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), pp. 168-169. ("Master and Commander" and "What you will ...")
Compare Emma Donohue,
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2010) with Lillian Faderman,
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981).
Time is represented as a
female divinity in many mythological narratives, usually a goddess of destruction and renewal, the "Keeper of the Cosmic Wheel" (dancing Shiva), whose dance both ends and creates the world --
our world.
The problem of "dislocation in time" has spread from the category of diagnosis of mental illness to general social condition, i.e., in the writings of Jacques Lacan and his followers. Mario Vargas-Llosa's "Aunt Julia" measures the time ticking (as eros) for the "script writer." We are all "dislocated in time" as "postmodernists."
Time is different for persons afflicted with severe mental illnesses embarking on special journeys that only such illnesses make possible. This idea is a fitting topic for an essay.
Begin with Foucault, try a good biography of Charcot, then Jung and the Jungians, finally Ian Hacking's research will be helpful.
Charcot was a French psychoanalyst and philosopher before Freudian psychoanalysis existed, a pioneer in mapping the subconscious whose use of hypnosis impressed the young Freud.
Charcot's "victims" were mostly poor and powerless women placed on display for his audience of admiring male doctors, for some reason these women were often left in an unclothed state when placed under hypnosis before young male doctors.
No doubt some of these poor women were undressed, involuntarily, for "scientific" purposes.
Witches? Women tried as witches were kept naked during their interrogations and imprisonment by male inquisitors, no doubt for similar "scientific" reasons that were unknown to Dr. Charcot. ("'Westworld': A Review of the t.v. Series.")
America's greatest literary scholar and one of the foremost critics currently writing about these issues says:
"Sincerity has no royal road to truth, and imaginative literature [perhaps all of the arts] situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning, a somewhere I once compared to what ancient Gnostics called kenoma, the cosmological emptiness in which we wander and weep, as William Blake wrote."
Harold Bloom, in
The Western Canon, p. 57.
E.P. Thompson quotes Northrop Frye in discussing Blake's visionary poems: "... his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning."
Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. xi.
Does this describe quantum physics? Cinema? Hermeneutics? Identity? "Speculative realism"?
Consider this passage from Gore Vidal's (deliberately) politically incorrect and revealing satire of American society in the Reagan era:
"Duluth! Tricia taps, love or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it because no matter how blunt with insectivorous time your mandibles become those myriad eggs that you cannot help but lay cannot help but hatch new vermiforous and myriapodal generations, forever lively in this present tense where you -- all of you -- are now at large, even though, simultaneously, you are elsewhere, too, rooted in that centripetal darkness where all this was, and where all this will be, once the bright inflorescence that is, or -- now for the terminal shift, Tricia; press the lever! -- was present day human Duluth has come into its predestined, articulated and paginated end. Yes. Duluth! Loved. Loathed. Left. Lost."
Duluth (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 214.
The Oracle in the "Matrix" says: "Everything that has a beginning has an end." She does not explain that it is sometimes best to start at the end of the story, then to shift back and forth in time, until arriving at the beginning. ("What is memory?" and "'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")
"Quantum mysteries" is another way of describing persons' identities as well as the universe in our "time."
Is there anything more mysterious than the inner-lives of others?
The subject of this paragraph by Vidal is literary communication, fictions of linguistic time, community(ies) of the text, the social nature of the authorial mind -- also many other things. Vidal's beautiful prose reveals his literary genius burning on the page ticking away his life and yours.
I invite you to read this wonderful novel which will succeed -- as literature -- whether it angers or amuses you because, either way, you will be forced to think. Recall the old t.v. show "Dallas" as you read it, and you'll have a better sense of what is being satirized.
In a review of Helen Vendler's
Invisible Listeners (Princeton: 2005), Professor "Langdon Hammer" (pen name?) writes:
"In this book [Vendler] explores how the 'tones of voice' by which a speaker is created imply a relationship between the speaker and a listener or reader, which she sees as ethical in nature. A poet's manner, his verbal style is a set of manners, a way of being with the reader. Nothing is more time-bound, more subject to social definition, than our manners. But Vendler is interested in a 'Utopian' kind of poem that, rather than confirming current social expectations, wants to 'redefine them.' Such poems look into the future or the past to forge a bond -- spiritual, erotic or artistic -- that is unavailable in the present. They create an uncanny intimacy, inviting us into a space outside ordinary time, somehow within the language of the poem itself."
"Overheard Speech,"
The New York Times Book Review,, Sunday, October 16, 2005, at p. 8 (emphasis added) and Marjorie Garber, "The Impossibility of Closure," in
The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Anchor, 2012), pp. 282-283. ("What you will ...")
This is to describe a unique form of aesthetic attention to ourselves and the world that seems to be called for today.
We make sense of our lives only in terms of
narratives describing where we have been, how we understand or interpret our memories, construing what has happened in our lives "to us." We imagine what will happen, where we will be, how we will arrive at the future. We create stories with plots that are more or less coherent and plausible to come to terms with our lives. We do that "constructing" of our "selves" as "stories" especially when we are being utterly factual. Narratives are connective and corrective devices. Narratives are clocks. (Once again and for the last time: ''Westworld': A Review of the T.V. Series" then "'Blade Runner 2049': A Movie Review.")
Modernity began as a progress-imbued, future-looking project of perfectibility for individuals as well as for an entire civilization. Modernity began, in fact, as a "plot" involving "humanity" as the central character heading towards a happy and everlasting state of utopia.
Modernity is a philosophical myth. It may be time to create another myth that better suits our needs or to revise our "old" Modernity. Hans Blumemberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," in K. Baynes, J. Bhoman, T. McCarthy,eds.,
After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 431-462.
In the aftermath of the horrors of the twentieth century we are not so optimistic about the future. We are much more skeptical about the possibility of progress. Yet narrative creation may be unavoidable. This may be fortunate because story-telling is inevitably a hopeful act.
We cannot evade our need to invent stories out of our individual and communal lives, enabling us to make sense of those lives in terms of values or goals, and providing us both with the means of organizing the events in the past together with a way of transcending our present situations in order to point us towards the future.
We are myth-makers. We are dreaming creatures. The best possibilities exist for us only when we dream or "play" together, in art, science, philosophy or law, even in religious worship.
Many faiths make dance or song a part of worship. Why?
In telling a story we are always led to ask: "And what happened then?"
I remember my daughter falling at the playground and scraping her knee. I "took the hurt away" by washing her knee at the water fountain. I explained that I would put her pain in my pocket and keep it for myself so that she would not feel it anymore. I told her a story. She placed her arms around me as I carried her home. By the time we reached our home the pain was gone and she was asleep.
I think Shakespeare is doing much the same for all of us in "Love's Labour's Lost." Taking away the pain.
Brian Greene speaks of science as a "story." He comments on his own sense of understanding which is satisfied not only by learning the mathematics of a solution to a physics problem, but also by an
intuition of how that solution "fits" (Richard Rorty) into the larger story of science. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
History is a saga. Psychoanalysis is a fable. Politics is a story which is often repeated like history -- "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." (Karl Marx.)
Sidney Lumet's underappreciated gem of a film "Stranger Among Us" explores themes of aesthetic and spiritual "bliss" in a Jewish tradition of mystical celebration set against obligations of community and fellowship among New York police officers. Lumet sees analogies between these various communities (and others) which are (we hope) or were once unified in America.
The constraints that we face at any given moment may be surpassed, in other words, provided that we know where we want "to go" in the future. To know this, in turn, is to know what our lives are about, what they aim at, as a fulfillment and resolution of the conflicts and tensions that we struggle against. Thus, it is also to know what will constitute "success." We must struggle.
The most important or needed insights about ourselves today are literary or cinematic much more than derived from the social sciences.
Our task is to "understand" (think of what that word means) a project in time or to see ourselves -- perhaps the species as a whole -- in terms of "emplotment." (Paul Ricoeur). Time is narrative. Again: Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
We are involved in larger political and cultural or even biological narratives. These narratives are essentially literary or artistic projects made up of symbols and metaphors. Accordingly, philosophy becomes literature. In the U.S., we are living an action adventure called: "The United States of America Fights Terrorism." Mr. Bush said to Al Qaeda: "Go ahead, make my day!"
The Bush-Cheney program is to transform America into a "Dirty Harry" cop in search of terrorists throughout the world. Perhaps this fondness for war and power explains the "madness" of many women
un-attracted by such objectives or to those who pursue them. We may no longer be able to afford this military "adventure" or brutal and simplistic ways of seeing a very complex reality. ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")
Does this hostility I feel for torture and war make me a "woman"?
If so, I am happy to accept the label. "Toughness" does not impress me as a sophisticated strategy for American foreign policy when it involves a kind of retreat from the world combined with an effort to force every nation to bend to our will.
Much of what I am about to suggest is better expressed in Richard Rorty's writings since
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Those seeking an accessible and helpful introduction to Rorty's work, may wish to consult the review by Richard J. Bernstein in
Philosophical Profiles. Among novelists, I suggest a reading of Malcolm Bradbury's books as well as works by Gilbert Adair, David Lodge, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes or Michel Huellebecq. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
We can point to a crucifix or to the fossil record to explain our lives. The purpose is much the same in either case. Selection of a personal "plot" necessarily involves us in the "stories" of others -- and in the stories that are
shared with others -- in which we each have a part. For example, the story of the United States of America, or "evolution" of the human species on the planet. Hence, we find ourselves moving from the individual to the social, then once again discovering that the boundary between the two is not so easily established because it seems to disappear just as the line separating objective and subjective, facts as distinct from values, blurs into the horizon. Our global stories today are mostly created by women. This is probably because women, like children, are permitted to use their imaginations in creative endeavors. For many American men imagination is a suspect quality. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.")
I like to use examples from films, consider "Crazy in Alabama." The obscure director of that film explores the struggle against evil within the psyche of his troubled protagonist and her world even as the fight for civil rights and social justice explodes exactly as his protagonist accepts her life.
My earlier discussion of emotions is relevant to the ways in which we approach the "narrative reality" that we simultaneously construct and inhabit. In anger, the social world "presents" itself to us in one fashion; whereas in (or with) love, the world presents itself to us very differently.
The point to bear in mind, again, is that how we choose to color the world, in terms of our emotions, will have a lot to do with the nature of the world in which we live -- more so than anything that happens "out there," empirically, assuming that we can tell the difference. Mirrors and doors always confront us.
If we tap into sources of frustration and anger in ourselves we can become only one sort of person; we will live in one, very ugly, world; but if we make an effort of the will, sometimes a heroic one, to force the attention in the direction of the Good and towards love, then we may become very different persons, while always insisting on and struggling for justice.
I am sure that any actor will understand these thoughts.
To take away the person for whom such loving emotions are felt is to
destroy the possibility of positive growth and alteration for many persons. Such separation is a way of killing persons. It is to deprive a rose of all light and water. ("Magician's Choice.")
Anger at injustice and cruelty are entirely appropriate emotions, emotions that are not to be discouraged. And yet, there is much that we can do to guide the "moral faculties" (Iris Murdoch) towards a kind of homecoming in and through love.
Duncan Kennedy calls this homecoming the achievement of "intersubjective zap."
No matter how difficult or desperate love may be, we must still hope and strive or fight for it. In that very hoping and striving we achieve or demonstrate our love by affirming our freedom and humanity.
"I can't go on," one of Beckett's characters says, "I will go on."
We will always go on.
We will never give up.
The thought that someone needs me, for instance, is enough for me to say, "here I am." (See the film, "Taken.")
Love.
Iris Murdoch writes:
"If, still led by the clue of art, we ask further questions about the faculty which is supposed to relate us to what is real and thus bring us to what is good, the idea of compassion and love will be naturally suggested. It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist [think of Shakespeare again] sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love."
Roberto Mangabeira Unger comments:
"Our experiences of love and hatred are never exclusively concentrated upon the loved or hated person. As these experiences intensify they broaden into a hateful or loving orientation (towards the world as a whole). This broadening does not prevent hate and love, addressed to different individuals, from coexisting in the same agent. Nevertheless, the orientation involved in any moment of love or hatred does not remain focused solely on the loved or hated person; it is rather like a beam of light that extends vaguely to the object to which it is directed."
These authors suggest that we cannot hate and love at the same time with equal intensity.
It is always preferable to concentrate on the loves usually of many different kinds that we feel. This concentration allows constructive, creative talents and aptitudes to emerge and thrive in ourselves and in the persons we love.
A loving orientation to the world is the best form of transcendence of conditions that we experience, sometimes with good reason, as unjust, or even evil.
What is that light that we call "love"? ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
I am aware that to choose love is to opt for pain. Again: to take away any object of love -- or the possibility of the emotion -- is to
destroy positive spiritual options for persons or any capacity to achieve transcendence often for persons desperately in need of such a capacity.
The serenity of love, its capacity to bring peace as well as joy or agony, was detectable even in concentration camps, according to survivors. Love, not physical environment, often determines survival as a person.
Your mere survival, after the removal of your love, is a kind of miracle that is made possible by the realization that your love is searching for you.
Real love can never be lost or destroyed.
There are persons -- many morally hideous and disgustingly greedy "colleagues" in New Jersey's legal profession and politics are excellent examples of this -- who resent or hate expressions of aspirational (or "ideal") views of human striving or self-giving to others.
Love is a dirty word for these persons. "Sex" is scientific and acceptable. "Eros" is sentimental or aesthetic; therefore, "eros" is unreal for such persons. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
Disdain for the high values of Western culture is not only an attack on the greatest works of art and the values embodied by the art of OUR civilization, but a kind of recoiling in horror from persons' humanity, perhaps this recoiling is one legacy of the Holocaust which involves (ironically enough) rejection of the core values in Judaism. Hebrew humanism is expressive of the very aspirational values rejected by the "school of resentment." (Harold Bloom.) ("Ronald Dworkin Says: 'The Law Works Itself Pure!'" and, once more, "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
I refuse to accept any and all labels imposed upon me. I also refuse to surrender to my feelings of rage, or to a desire to inflict harm on those who have harmed me, and who continue to do so.
I refuse to allow myself to be reduced to the level of such persons, sometimes powerful persons in society.
I prefer to work for justice in my own legal and constructive, possibly unimportant ways, while also concentrating on loving a few others, finding ways to be creative and helpful to them, while allowing emotions of care and concern to spill over into my dealings with all others without foregoing my demand for justice.
I will continue to struggle, peacefully, for truth and justice in my life. This is what I understand to be Dr. King's lesson to all of us: "The arc of the moral universe is long," Dr. King said, "but it bends towards justice."
In my recollection of the black-and-white film of the speech by Dr. King where he uttered those words there is a hint of a smile on his lips and a confidence that had nothing to do with his personal fate. I am sure that Dr. King was well aware of the dangers that he faced.
Dr. King possessed the indestructible power of love. Dr. King taught by example as few philosophers do. In addition to all of the other things that he was, Dr. King will always be (as evidenced by his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail") a great philosopher even about the laws that placed him in a prison cell. ("Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")
The presence of persons who can inspire such emotions in us is vital in a healing process and in terms of helping us to lead good lives. We must SEE the persons that we love and be SEEN by them. The forced physical separation of persons who can provide such healing power to one another is a terrible tragedy because of the harm caused to victims, individually, but even more because of the loss in productivity and love for the community.
Genius is a kind of loving. Love is a scarce resource. There is never enough love in a community. Never destroy love in your life or for others. Doing such a thing, in mythical terms, amounts to "killing the unicorn." (See the film "Legend" and the medieval "Unicorn Tapestry," found in the Cloisters Museum in New York.)
The destruction of loving relationships which do not meet the tests of an ephemeral "political correctness" or of trendy therapeutic pieties is dangerous and evil. It will produce only anger and frustration in response. I mean suffering, not violence. Destruction of love is a kind of violence. And, again, it will deprive people of the means by which to transcend the obstacles and limitations against which we must struggle. It may even cost lives not only to suicide, but to alcoholism, drug use, and other forms of gradual self-destruction. (''The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
How is it possible for a person to set out to
destroy love for others? Sadism? Envy? Self-disgust? All of these words seem appropriate to describe such a person. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "Marilyn Straus Was Right!")
Love is the ultimate mystery in our lives because -- however desperate our situation -- it brings us hope. To clarify what I mean by this, I turn to Shakespeare:
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet #29.
Love is the ultimate source of hope because it transforms the world into a kinder and gentler place.
The mere existence of that emotion and concern in human beings -- focused upon other persons -- is incompatible with despair and gives a final direction to one's moral efforts.
Love "such wealth brings," according to psychoanalyst William Shakespeare, that we will endure any torment in the struggle to realize loving relations that are also the only genuine self-realization or "success" possible for persons.
Love is what allows us to go on.
Whoever is without love or lacking in the capacity to experience the emotion is deserving of our deepest compassion. A "loveless" person (usually unknowingly) is, and will always be, a suffering soul who is no longer fully human. Mengele? Eichmann? Trump?
It should not surprise us when such loveless persons lash out at others, especially those whom they secretly envy, or desire, and (therefore) must hate. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")
A concluding unscientific postscript.
No human situation is perfect and no one is fully in tune with his or her environment. Identity, for moderns, is always a problem; for postmoderns, identity may not exist.
Everyone is a "freedom" existing beyond all names and categories imposed upon us in societies. All of us are "unfinished persons." All of us are morally flawed. As a result, we need to "reimagine" or perpetually to interpret, freely, our circumstances, making them more amenable and appropriate to who we are and what we will be, together.
We must "reimagine" (reinvent) ourselves every day.
Doing this "reimagining" is philosophizing. Philosophizing, therefore, is a step towards human completion; and hence, philosophy is for everyone.
