Misconceptions

There is a strong chance that Friedrich Nietzsche might be one of the most misunderstood thinkers we’ve seen in the philosophical enterprise. What’s interesting about it is the fact that these misconceptions are almost entirely not his fault. This is not an example of vague or overly complex prose leading to a misread of a text (I’m thinking along the lines of Hegel here, whose prose is so dense that he’s easily misunderstood due to confusion more than anything). Far from it. Nietzsche’s text is clear. Some would say too clear in certain situations, bordering on polemic (or, in the case of On the Genealogy of Morals, it’s actually subtitled as “A polemic”). Even Thus Spoke Zarathustra and some of the aphorisms from The Gay Science that are designed to be parables (or parodies of parables, which might be a better fit) still have a clear topic of focus and are easy to understand philosophically.

I’m also not trying to say that some of the controversy concerning Nietzsche’s thought is unwarranted. There are moments, especially in On the Genealogy of Morals sections about the good/evil and good/bad distinction, that sound pretty scary from a Third Reich perspective (thanks, “blonde beast”). His thoughts were radical and challenging, and made many uncomfortable. Two things certainly didn’t help: 1. His sister’s involvement in his work and the publishing of The Will to Power, and 2. his eventual co-opting at the hands of the Nazi regime. These two things go hand in hand considering Elizabeth Nietzsche’s political outlook was strongly pre-Nazian, and she made obvious edits to his unpublished work.

Nietzsche’s philosophical outlook was always confrontational. I’ve long held the belief that there are two major histories in the Western philosophical tradition. The positive history of philosophy charts the progress of thought from its origins in the pre-Socratics and Parmenides through the holy trinity of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on through DesCartes, Kant, and so on, with its apex (in my opinion at least) found with Hegel. In nearly all cases, these were philosophers that argued for the ability to understand knowledge rationally as something supersensible beyond the sensual realm. You could easily refer to it as the rational history of western philosophy, but I think that designation lacks sufficient punchiness. On the other side of the coin, you have the negative history of philosophy, which begins with Heraclitus, moves through the Greek skeptics and Protagoras, other scattered thinkers through the ages like Pascal, Hobbes, David Hume, and Kierkegaard, and finds its apex in Nietzsche. In some ways, this negative philosophy is more concerned with the sensible. Perspectivism, relativism, and skepticism are strongly rooted in this history. In many ways, the negative history is a systematic response to the positive. It builds on its predecessors in a similar way, but often takes the role of refutations or devils’ advocates of the popular positive philosophers of the time. It’s not something as simple as the division between analytic and continental philosophy, as continental rationalists certainly exist and are quite popular. Either way Nietzsche was there. And he changed a lot of things just based on how he wrote. He would call out specific philosophers in sometimes mean spirited fashion (Socrates being referred to as a demon, John Stuart Mill as a flathead, and so on). He would write aphorisms that were specifically design to elicit a response. Zarathustra as a work was a carefully constructed parody of Christianity. He was ruthless.

Because of this, Nietzsche is often considered by scholars to be not worthy of philosophical examination. He’s seen as a gimmick, a thinker who was more concerned with getting a rise out of his readers than making any real philosophical progress. While I would certainly argue that this isn’t at all true, it has led to a lot of backlash. When Nietzsche made his famous proclamation in The Gay Science that “God is dead,” he made enemies. And this was intentional. Nietzsche was constantly using such language to fend people off, to force them away. He didn’t want everyone to read his philosophy, because he was actively aware that his philosophy is not for everyone. Indeed, the “God is dead, and we have killed him” phenomenon is less about religion itself, than the values (specifically Christian values) that these religions hold have lost sway on the modern man. Science has put religion on decline. It is no longer needed by modern man. It has been overcome. It is an incendiary saying, obviously, but its design is to show us the world as it actually is. It is simply done through invective, because this is Nietzsche’s way.

What I can say is unequivocally the greatest injustice levied on Nietzsche’s thought and works is the proto-Nazi anti-Semitism that is constantly used as an excuse to pigeonhole his philosophy. What’s so annoying about it, and the work of scholars like Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale has helped allay these conceptions immensely, is that it’s completely opposite to Nietzsche’s outlook. From his first work in 1872, he warned against German nationalism. You see it again as late as Ecce Homo, one of his last published works in 1888. If anything, he was an anti-German, which is ironic considering his eventual co-opting at the hands of National Socialism. The only part of his philosophy (and when I say philosophy, I mean the works that he actively published during his life) that could be considered anti-Semitic is portions of On the Genealogy of Morals, and that was more about Judaism as a herald of Christianity than anything else. He does say that Judaism is the cause for the creation of the master/slave morality (the infamous “slave revolt of morality” that probably had some deference to Marx) that he thinks is one of the key changes in thinking that leads to the necessary revaluation of all values (i.e. nihilism), but he is also very clear that the true problem of the master/slave morality is the Christians coming in, taking up the cause and making it the dominant religion and value system of the western world. He never talks about any kind of hatred for the Jewish race or Jewish people in themselves. He simply disagreed (violently) with their values.

The will to power, the overman, the more radical nationalism that you see in his later posthumous works was not anything that anyone should legitimately take seriously as paramount to Nietzsche’s thought as such. His sister, who he actively criticized during his lucid years, took control of his works and published them with reckless abandon, actively editing his words to fit her own nationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies. His reputation unfortunately goes hand in hand with this period, as it happened so soon after his descent into madness and death, and that period was also the beginning of his rise in popularity in the early twentieth century. One wonders if Nietzsche’s legend would even be as large as it is today (for good or ill) if he had not been turned into post-hoc Nazi propaganda. What really matters, what people constantly overlook when studying Friedrich Nietzsche, is his educational roots. The man was a classical philologist. He went to university to study Ancient Greece. I still contend (and this may be controversial in its own right, but the evidence is there) that the single most important idea in all of Nietzsche’s thought that colors everything he does is the dichotomy he talks about in The Birth of Tragedy between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces from Ancient Greek culture. Above the eternal recurrence, above the overman (heh), above the will to power, above perspectivism and nihilism. He’s a Greek at heart, born in the wrong decade. It’s a shame he’s been dragged through the mud on so many occasions. I wish it would stop.

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This post was written to the tune of Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Nietzschean Metaphysics

A proviso:

I’m currently taking a class about Heidegger’s unique understanding of history as it relates to his later philosophical writings. One of the texts we are reading is Volume 4 of his Nietzsche lectures, entitled European Nihilism. I began this little thing as some free form notes about some of the things Heidegger brings up in the first 70 or so pages of the work (specifically that the will to power is a metaphysical concept that arises after nihilism wreaks its havoc) combined with my own personal knowledge of Nietzsche’s life, times and philosophy. It morphed into something altogether different. There is a good chance I will write my term paper for the class on something relating to the topic, but I don’t think I could really use any of this considering its persuasive and not at all cited nature. It was a good thought experiment and a way of attempting to understand what Heidegger was saying. Unfortunately, it’s a little heavy on Nietzsche and light on Heidegger. This, too, shall pass.

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Is it accurate or responsible for Heidegger to talk about the will to power and the historical nature of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism as a kind of metaphysics when Nietzsche rejects such terminology? Nietzsche is very clear about nihilism arising and occurring due to a rejection of past values (from the perspective of the “God is dead” statement as a tipping point to the old values becoming meaningless) that leads to a necessary rise of a new value system in the form of will to power, but he is not clearly tying these new values into an explication of beings or the makeup of the world as such. Heidegger’s claim is that even though Nietzsche’s nihilism and will to power are expressly designed to move away from the values of the past and does not conceive these values as the definition of beings themselves qua being, what he is actually doing is creating a new conception of metaphysics (and, really, the last conception of metaphysics, as he refers to Nietzsche’s thought as the end of Western metaphysics) as evidenced by the way that other philosophers and thinkers during and after his time period begin to understand and approach metaphysics from a valuative perspective. Is it fair to discuss Nietzsche as a sort of metaphysician based on the thoughts and works of those that followed him, even if many of those thinkers may not even reference Nietzsche himself? Is this a case of Nietzsche overthrowing Western metaphysics through this perspectivism and subjective thinking that values themselves contain no meaning without relation to beings without realizing (or perhaps specifically deflecting or ignoring) that this new understanding of the world in respect to beings is in fact still a metaphysical system? Is this a veiled ontology? Are these values, especially considering that they only have any weight or understanding in respect to beings, simply an outward projection of the nature of beings themselves and as such a different way to approach the metaphysics of beings?

Nihilism begins necessarily from a point of negation. The philosophical understanding of the world has passed out of favor. It is no longer accurate; it no longer holds any meaning to beings. Nihilism arises because the old values held in high regard have lost their influence. From Nietzsche’s perspective, the old values of valuing those things beyond the self, above the self cease to impress, and it is necessary to overthrow that perspective, to negate it. Nihilism is the transitional moment that occurs when this negation happens. There is, for a moment, a life consistent entirely of no values or meanings, because they have been torn down, overthrown. The danger lies in stopping here. Nietzsche is quite clear that while nihilism taken as such would terminate once the values and metaphysics of the world have been negated, leaving the world a cold and empty place to be taken up by the existentialists of the twentieth century, its true purpose is to pave the way for a new viewpoint. A new set of values places the emphasis lower, closer to the ground as it were (if we’re thinking in terms of Aristotelian astronomy and its relation to the metaphysics of the age). The will to power, as the overpowering drive for the overcoming of the self to achieve greater things, the push toward the Overman, the understanding of will to power as a condition for self-preservation and the denial of the influence of the theological or spiritual realms, this becomes the source and relation between man and his values. It is a more organic, earthy, or instinctual perspective. Perspective itself becomes king. The objective is struck down. Nihilism is, in a sense, defeated, and the world regains new meaning and can move forth with an emboldened sense of personal purpose. Nihilism is a stepping stone.

The question, truly, is whether such a system that both requires a nihilistic destruction of the past and leads to a perspectival foundation of the future can be considered a metaphysical system. Heidegger certainly thinks so, and the arguments he makes are at the very least logical. While Nietzsche’s new conception of the world, and how beings interact with it, and how beings themselves are defined in relation to it is radically different from classical metaphysics, his system still is a conception of beings and the world and what they are and (in this case, due to the transition point brought on by the advent of nihilism) what they become. Is this not metaphysics? The significance of Nietzsche’s system is placed on values, but the values themselves are completely predicated on their relation to beings. You reach a point where the values and the beings themselves become indistinct, and even though the system is about values, the values are about beings, and you could make a syllogistic claim that as such the system is about beings. Is this also not metaphysics? It may be the case that this would be the first metaphysical system that completely and totally rejects any absolutes, objective truths, or a priori knowledge of the world (some systems may have rejected one of these propositions, but surely not all of them!), and as such, Nietzsche would have been hesitant to refer to a subjective metaphysical system as a metaphysical system. One can also think of things from the angle of Nietzsche as a sort of radical philosopher, and as such he would not want to think of himself or his system as a metaphysician or metaphysical because this would be too much of a reference or a calling back to the old ways he is trying so hard to destroy and overcome through the revaluation of all values that nihilism projects. What arises from the wake of nihilism is in a sense above and beyond classical metaphysics, and as such above metaphysics itself entirely. It is something new and wild, and heretofore unimaginable. It is the will to power.

Something else to consider, and it is a question to which we will most likely never know the answer, is why Nietzsche did not consider himself or his will to power to be metaphysical. There are numerous possibilities. Perhaps it just didn’t occur to Nietzsche that what he was doing in this post-nihilism world was metaphysics. This seems unlikely, considering that will to power is so heavily tied to the understanding and defining of the new valuation, and that it is an active trait that can be applied to any organic being in the world. The will to power is a concept that encompasses an understanding of both beings and the world. It is metaphysical to its core. It is exceedingly unlikely the Nietzsche could passively forget or overlook this. It’s far too blatant. What is more likely is the active choice to eschew the term metaphysics. And why wouldn’t he? The whole reason Nietzsche preaches the necessity of his particular brand of functional nihilism is to bring metaphysics back to earth. The etymology of the word meta (beyond) physics (nature. Beyond nature) must have been revolting to him. What can be beyond nature? All that we see, all that we interact with is within nature. Why would we even want to move beyond nature? It’s an empty proposition. It necessarily leads to nihilism! The will to power is instinctual. It is based in nature as this sense of overcoming and survival. The only reason man is considered paramount and the potential for an Overman even exists is because man has the unique faculty of being able to actively pursue the actualization of will to power. It is not metaphysical because it is entirely physical in its nature (pun intended?) and revels in the physical character of the world. Abstract absolutes like “Being,” “truth,” and “unity” are a waste of breath. Nihilism is the active death of metaphysics. It brings the whole enterprise to a close and builds something new out of its ashes.

So what we have is a situation where the classical definition of metaphysics both applies to the will to power as a system and is also defeated by it at the same time. Philosophically, metaphysics as the creation of a kind of world view that encompasses what it means to be and understand the world can contain Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power. This is where Heidegger’s point is made. He understands the will to power as metaphysics. But, if the arrival of the will to power is supposed to signal the death of metaphysics through nihilism, and it itself ends up also being a metaphysical system, is the will to power too destined to fail? Will it too become bloated and otherworldly, eventually valueless and require a new nihilism to break it down and build something new in the vacuum caused by its absence? Is this its own kind of eternal recurrence? A beautiful cycle of birth, maturation, decadence, death, and rebirth? A grand cosmic cycle? I certainly don’t have the answers. But it’s interesting to think about it.

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This post was written to the tune of The Who’s Quadrophenia

Existential Angst

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’ve always read, and especially since I picked up the comics hobby I read constantly. That’s somewhat necessary, since I get a twice monthly shipment of comics from Discount Comic Book Service that usually ranges from about 14 to 19 books, and those things have to be read because more of those suckers will be coming in fourteen days. But beyond the comics, I’ve been reading a lot of novels recently as well. I’m on a Neil Gaiman kick at the moment; I recently read all of his Sandman comic series, as well as Neverwhere and American Gods. I mentioned American Gods in “Storytelling and Religion” in passing, and I’m constantly amazed at the mastery that Gaiman can show with a wide variety of characters at his disposal. On Free Comic Book Day back in May I picked up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, a really enjoyable story about two comic creators that works as a corollary to the hell that Siegel and Schuster went through after they created Superman. I’ve said before that it’s the type of book that has the potential to be turned into a really bad Oscar bait movie like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or Cinderella Man, because it is very much just a book about people living their lives, and there’s no real unifying theme, plot or conflict, which has a tendency to work a lot better on the page than on the screen. The second book I grabbed on Free Comic Book Day was one that was getting a lot of press in the geek circles, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s a simple concept: take Jane Austen’s seminal work and spice it up some by having it take place in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The idea seems to work quite well in theory; Jane Austen is certainly the type of author that needs to be spiced up, especially in this day and age. I must say, however, that the book was a complete failure in my eyes. Granted, I did not finish it, but when the reason you can’t finish a book is because you just can’t bring yourself to keep reading after less than 100 pages, that is not a good sign. The problem with the book lies in its strict adherence to the source text. This is completely written in the style of Jane Austen, and as such the novelty of these characters being beset upon by “unmentionables” loses its luster quickly, and it’s just as slow and uninteresting as an actual Jane Austen book. I guess if you’re a fan of Austen and zombies, knock yourself out, but it wasn’t for me.

What I’m focusing on now is a slow and measured reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. I’m working through the first part at the moment, and even though I’ve read sections of it in the past for a 19^th Century Philosophy class, I’m practically reading it again for the first time. It’s somewhat slow going at the moment because the section in which I am currently embroiled, The Immediate Erotic Stages, is an explication of aesthetics through the lens of a careful analysis of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which I’ve never heard, nor do I know much about. So there are some particulars that I can’t quite follow, but in general it’s a very interesting read. What it does lead me to talk about, and this is something I said I would get to in “Memory,” is existentialism. The two forebearers of existentialism in the 19^th century happen to be two of my favorite philosophers, the aforementioned Kierkegaard, and the guy I just can’t stop mentioning, Friedrich Nietzsche. These men were not contemporaries; Kierkegaard wrote predominantly in the 1840’s and Nietzsche from 1873 to 1888. These were two philosophers that oddly enough had similar ideas from entirely different spheres of perspective. They overlap in many ways, especially when it comes to their opinions about music as one of the highest forms of aesthetic art, and while they may have shared opinions about the weaknesses of organized religion, but Kierkegaard was a deeply religious man and Nietzsche, well (and I know this will come as a shock…) wasn’t.

Existentialism as a movement grew out of the study of these two philosophers in the twentieth century. It has the stereotypical moniker of being the philosophy of the extremely depressed, disaffected and down in the dumps (okay, that last one was a little weak, but I had to keep the alliteration going). The main reason this stereotype exists is because the two most famous existential philosophers of the past sixty years were Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, neither of whom were particularly cheery. This side of existentialism seems to come more from Kierkegaard than Nietzsche, as Kierkegaard wrote an entire book on what is now come to be known as existential angst (The Concept of Dread), and most of Nietzsche’s negativity (of which there is not nearly as much as most assume) is more centered around pity and anger than angst or dread, which are entirely different places on the emotional spectrum. I do think that Nietzsche’s outlook is a lot closer to my personal beliefs and inclinations, and I wanted to spend the rest of this article talking about why this sense of negative existentialism is a bit weak in my eyes.

One of the contributing factors to this existential angst is the central belief that the philosophy is predicated on the existence of the individual. The concerns of the existential philosophy are not the world as such, but how that world is shaped by, interacts with, or relates to the individual. Since the individual is paramount, the world must necessarily be a subjective and relativistic one, because once absolutes of any kind come into play, you have created something that is above the individual, which is against the central thesis of existentialism. As such, free will is absolute, and the angst comes from the need to make decisions in a world that is predicated upon the self. This is the central thesis of The Concept of Dread. There is no escape, because the existentialist is freely and totally in control of himself, and thus has no outward release to relieve the pressure of simply living. This is also how you eventually reach the point of potential nihilism, which for the later existentialists is often rooted in the notion that we are but insignificant beings in a vast uncaring universe that has no legitimate support system with which to deal with such a perspective. As a small aside, one of the more humorous implications of this outlook was made by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Total Perspective Vortex was designed to show the victim a scaled recreation of the entire universe, with the tiniest speck marked with a sign that says “You Are Here,” leading to the implicit ideal that nothing any of us do has any meaning within the scope of the cosmos at large. In the book, it was designed to be a torture device, and the only person to ever come out mentally unscathed was one Zaphod Beeblebrox, which wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows the character.

I think that this kind of macroscopic view of our place in the world is a little out of place considering the philosophical foundations of existentialism. The philosophy lies in the concrete importance of existence, which is of course where the term comes from in the first place, and existence can only be known through the lens of the self. The angst comes into play when the self is broken down in some fashion, whether that is due to some kind of denial or despair that either comes from the failure of the self or the failure of the universe to support the self. In both cases, the subject despairs because he has no support system to use in order to escape the failings of his life. Kierkegaard speaks extensively about this feeling when discussing the anguish of the poet in the Diapsalmata section of Either/Or. The poet attempts to express his feelings of pain and depression, but he is such a good poet that his audience is struck by the beauty of his phrasing and never actually reaches the point of empathy toward the subject, reestablishing that the poet is alone with his grief and can find no solace in the existence of others. It’s the famous line from Sartre’s No Exit. Hell is other people. All of this is fine, and technically accurate when seen from the existentialist’s point of view. The question, however, is whether this point of view is actually necessary within the scope of existentialism, and whether it is possible to keep this subjective sense of the self struggling against the uncaring world without having to immediately revert to despair and angst.

Nietzsche’s philosophy, as a foundation upon which existentialism is eventually built, seems to take the more hopeful perspective. There is definitely a sense of frustration in much of Nietzsche’s writing, but much of this is a product of his attempts to break down the paradigms of the well known and well accepted philosophies of history from Plato to Hegel, nearly all of which were heavily concerned with creating absolute truths that could be used to define the universe for one and all. The difference, however, with Nietzsche is that this outrage he constantly feels when railing against the universe (just read section 125 of The Gay Science, entitled “the madman”) very rarely permeates his actual philosophies. In many ways, Nietzsche’s protagonist (Thus Spoke Zarathustra‘s titular character) is very much the poet described by Kierkegaard, with the marked difference that those emotions he tries and fails to explicate to the herd are generally those of an uplifting and self-actualizing nature, but are doomed to fall upon deaf ears because of the long and storied permeation of Judeo-Christianity into the psyche of western culture. Really, Zarathustra (as the paragon of Nietzsche’s entire belief system) is more akin to the Greek Cassandra, forced to constantly show the rabble the truth of the world while just as constantly failing to elicit change. This is where the existential angst would come into play, as it is the perfect setup for the subject to give in against the uncaring world and devolve and shrink back into the despair of the self. But to do so would completely discount the entire journey of Zarathustra and the self-actualization of the übermensch. By its very nature, the humanistic value system allows for a great amount of freedom. The self can achieve anything because he is bound by nothing. Nietzsche sees the despair and failures inherent in this system and chooses to not ignore them, but instead to use them as a stepping stone to a higher metaphysical existence. The übermensch is not even necessarily defined in any reasonable way; it is simply the goal of human beings.

It just seems silly to me that a philosophy so immersed in the self as the one true measure of life and the world can so easily fall into the trap of being affected by the pressures of the outside world. Really, external emotional factors shouldn’t even really have much of an effect on the self whatsoever. Oddly enough, this is the main tenet of stoicism, which isn’t really what any of us are going for here. External stimuli will exist, and they will impose their wills on the self in various ways. And it is certainly possible for the self to become caught up in these moments of stimulus for various reasons and with various outcomes both positive and negative, and it is perfectly natural for these things to happen, and they should be embraced as the products of an organic world in which almost anything could legitimately happen. However, to simply make the jump that the negativity will almost always win out in the way that the existential movement constantly falls back on, and that life will always (to borrow the iconic phrase from Hobbes) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, seems to defeat the purpose of the self as the core of the belief system. You become more concerned about what acts upon the self than the self itself (wow. That’s quite a phrase…), and in so doing, you lose sight of what you based your entire belief system on in the first place. This, to me, is the failing of twentieth century existentialism.

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I’m cutting things off here because it’s late and I’m tired. Not sure if that was actually a fully conceived and executed idea. It certainly isn’t meant to be a true representation of all the facets of existentialism either. I’m not writing a thesis here.

This post was written to the tune of The Apex Theory’s Topsy-Turvy

Memory

After finishing my last essay (well, and a few others; I finished this one after I wrote a couple other entries), I was at a loss for what to write next. I wanted to keep it going; I’m thoroughly enjoying writing these little philosophical flights of fancy, but I just couldn’t think of where to go next. Then, I decided to watch a few movies (once again, this was about three weeks to a month ago). I don’t think I necessarily did this purposefully looking for inspiration, but I just wanted to watch a few films with a philosophical bent. The first one on the docket was I Heart Huckabees, a wonderful little flick from David O Russell that represents a torrent of philosophical beliefs, from Spinoza’s views on what makes the world to existential nihilism and so on. I love that movie, and some day I’ll probably write about it, but right now, the second film I watched is much more apropos to what I plan to talk about. To me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best work Charlie Kaufmann has done to this point. It’s not just the fascinating script structure or the slow unveiling of what is actually going on. Really, it’s the relationship aspect of the movie, with the Joel and Clementine love affair creating a beautiful picture of how love and relationships actually work in the real world. My most recent essay talked a lot about emotional instinct and how important I consider it. I’m a romantic at heart, so movies like this hit me hard. But I’ve already talked about emotion. What really lit my fire about watching Eternal Sunshine was what it tells us about memory.

The central conceit of Eternal Sunshine is a company that can selectively erase memories, usually to remove all thoughts and feelings about a former lover. The procedure is done while the patient is asleep, and when he wakes up, he is none the wiser about what happened and who was erased. Years of your life could be gone in an instant. It’s a frightening concept, especially when Jim Carrey’s character realizes halfway through the night that he made a mistake and does not want to lose his memories of Kate Winslett (and who could blame him?). This movie seems to accomplish two things. The first is a sort of proof of Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Recurrence (yep, I’m just going to keep bringing up Nietzsche; I’ve spent far too much time and money on Nietzsche to not use my knowledge at hand). The second point is what I have a tendency to latch onto, which is the conceit that you are what you remember, and that memory has an incredibly strong effect on personal identity. The movie discounts this to some extent though, mostly through its support of eternal recurrence. I might get to that concept here (here’s a spoiler, folks: I didn’t); we’ll see how long it takes for me to talk about memory.

So much of what the mind does on a day to day basis is tied to memory. It’s the main “nonessential” function of the brain (I say nonessential because it does not have an effect on the subconscious upkeep of the body’s essential systems). Everything you actively do is based in at least some superficial way in memory. If you take as a premise that we as a people are the product of a life of perceiving sense data, and that our personalities are inextricably tied to our experiences, the only way this could be the case is through retention of these moments in time in some fashion. Personality, consciousness, and memory are all one in the same. This is a psychological and philosophical ideal that seems to grow out of the tabula rasa theory of human development. It follows that if our personalities are founded upon the memory of personal experiences, then when we first develop as infants, we would have to be as close to blank slates as possible, and those early experiences begin to hard wire us to become the people we are as adults. The memory centers of the brain, and the way our minds process this information allows us to function on a day to day basis. What is philosophically interesting about this is the fact that memory is by its very nature an imperfect construct. It is very simple to have false or forgotten memories, and with this concept having such a great deal to do with our personal identities, it raises an interesting questions about just what we base our entire experiences on.

There is no real sense of validation when it comes to memory. What has passed is past, and that simple tautology informs quite a lot about the constructs of the mind. We remember past experiences, past instances of sense data, but there is no way to truly confirm that the moments we remember (a tryst with a former lover, the act of watching a film, a particular sports game, etc.) are as we actually think they are (or, to whit, were). Some things can be independently and objectively verified and thus known in a purely abstract sense to be validated, but the individual moments, reactions or emotions felt while watching that hockey game that you know ended 3-2 in triple overtime because the box score will exist in perpetuity are suspect.

Experiences, perceptions, and sense data are by their very nature relativistic situations. Say person A was at that hockey game, and his friend, person B, was there as well, sitting in a different section of the arena. When they meet up after the game for a few drinks and conversation, they’re going to remember it differently simply based on having different vantage points. Perhaps a hooking penalty that person B thought was a terrible call wasn’t so bad in A’s eyes because the stick that hooked the player was obstructed from B’s view and not from A’s. Even the quality of each person’s eyesight and hearing is going to affect memories of the game. And when they talk to another friend (Person C) that watched the game on television at home, that person is going to have a third completely different memory of the game. All three of these folks saw Henrik Zetterberg score the game winner seven minutes into the third overtime (because the hypothetical game I’m talking about is a Wings playoff game, natch), but perhaps one of the two men who saw the game live was sitting in a section of the Joe that was infiltrated by Avs fans. The crowd reaction would be completely different than that of the person surrounded by Wings diehards, and more different still than the third person who had the benefit of play by play and color commentary, but the detriment of the lack of the exhilaration of the live crowd. Three people watching the same game having wildly different experiences and memories of the same outcome. It follows, then, that memory and perception are subjective concepts.

This does make logical sense, considering that memory shapes personality, and our personalities are markedly different from one another. It follows that if memory and perception were not subjective, personal identity would become homogenized. It could be said that subjectivism is necessary from the perspective that one of the great things about humanity and living in this world is the wide variety of personalities that mill around this crazy little thing we call Earth. As a quick aside, this is where I think negative existentialism gets things wrong. The fact that we exist as a sea of individuals on a tiny speck in a giant universal uncaring cosmos is not a source of despair but one of hope. But I can rail against the weaknesses of some forms of existentialism at another time. Subjective memory as a basis for personal identity is what allows us to enjoy the narrative musical stylings of Tom Waits, for example. The opening stanza of “Invitation to the Blues” [She’s up against the register/With an apron and a spatula/Yesterday’s deliveries and a ticket for the bachelors/She’s a moving violation/From her conch down to her shoes/But it’s just an invitation to the blues] is something entirely personal through the lyrical eye of Tom Waits. It may not have been based o a specific occurrence or memory (it’s often difficult to tell what’s real in the world of Mr. Waits), but it is in the voice and style of Tom Waits. And whoever listens to that piece of music is going to have a categorically different reaction to it based on his or her own memories and experiences. Without subjective memory, the lush tapestry of thoughts and feelings that a man like Tom Waits can create with his music would be the same drab gray lifeless hunk of cloth that everybody else created. An assembly line of uninteresting garbage. Who would want that?

What does subjective memory give us that shapes our world and personal identity more than any other aspect? Emotion. I know I’ve prattled on about emotion in the past, but this does at the very least confirm how important I consider emotion on a day to day basis. Emotion is heavily rooted in personal memory and perspective, and as such in personal identity. Emotions are an immediate reaction. If you’ve read my other entries, you’ll need no qualification of that statement. However, despite their nature as immediate and subconscious (you cannot actively force yourself to feel legitimately happy, sad, scared, etc.), they are still the product of memory. I am, however, making a distinction between complex emotion and sense data reactions. The feeling of pain when you touch a hot stove or the feeling of euphoria during sexual intercourse could be considered emotional due to pain and pleasure receptors being innately linked to such emotions as fear, anger, joy, etc. But this is something different because its basis is in chemical and biological reactions of the body and brain. You don’t feel pain in your hand when you touch the stove because you subconsciously and immediately remember that the last time you touched the stove it hurt. You feel pain because your hand was burned. But when you listen to your favorite song and hear that opening guitar riff, you are immediately transported in the mind’s eye to that first time you realized the majesty of the piece and how the music or lyrics remind you of a person, place, event, etc. in a positive way. It can even reach the point that you can’t even remember the origin of your emotional reaction, but you still have that innate feeling in there somewhere. It’s the difference between immediate physical attraction and love.

The flaws of memory as a concept makes us human. In the tradition of western civilization, something being described as human has a tendency to simple be a synonym for flawed. It makes sense then that a flawed foundation creates a flawed product. And, to tie this back to my article about religion and stories, this is not something that would even be a big deal were it not for the fact that the Judeo Christian tradition epitomizes perfection as the ultimate goal for human life. There is a big difference between the desire for perfection that exists in Christendom and the desire for actualization that was the goal of the Greeks and Nietzsche (yep, that pesky übermensch). I would contend that the flaws of humanity are exactly what makes us so fascinating as a species. We have the ability to create wonderful things. We have made great leaps in the quality of life. We have conquered nature and moved beyond biological evolutionary imperative. We have destroyed countless species, natural formations, climates. We are the collective kings of our domain. We have accomplished so much with this impressive flaw directly at the center of our entire being.

Memory drives everything. Our identities, knowledge, emotions, our sense of world continuity and spatial relations, all of these essential elements are the product of a biological and metaphysical concept that is not only fundamentally flawed, but also cannot be trusted in many ways. This internal conflict mirrors the classic dichotomous relationships that philosophy has endeavored to understand (good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, paper vs. plastic, Duke vs. UNC, etc.). It is all of us and none of us at the same time. We may want to play the role of Joel Barrish and hire a crazy mad (redundancy!) scientist to go through our brains and systematically destroy the memories that we choose not to want or cause us physical or emotional distress, but this would rob us of the very thing that makes us human. To do such a thing would be self-defeating and as such should not even be considered an option. You’re cutting out portions of your identity and destroying the self. I think this might be why I have such a strong reaction to the long middle section of Eternal Sunshine where Joel is fighting like mad trying to stop the process, not just because he does not want to forget Clementine, but because these moments are a part of his core being. He has become a different person because of his time spent with Clementine, and to go through with his process would halt progress. Memory is not perfect. It can cause just as many problems as it can fix or soothe. But it is what makes us who we are, and there is no reason to reject that.

POSTSCRIPT: There is a lot of John Locke in this essay, specifically An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I haven’t read Locke’s essay in about four years, and I specifically did not read or reference it in the above work. I’m doing these little works as an exercise in writing down my philosophical ideas in as much of my own words as possible. If you want some more memory as personal identity goodness, read Locke’s Essay.

This post was written to the tune of The Beatles’ Abbey Road

Perception

In continuing my look at what shapes both my life and the world, I thought I would tackle one of the most fascinating (in my mind, at least) ambivalences of my personality. There seems to be a constant state of friction between a sort of scientific naturalism or rationalism and emotionally founded instictualism. They are warring ideologies in many ways, but they both profoundly affect the way I think and approach situations. It is possible for these two foundations of thinking to be reconciled in any meaningful way? What does this tell me about the way I think? Should I actually try to fundamentally change by outlook on life to avoid the dreaded hypocrite brand? Is it even possible to do that at this stage of my mental development? How many questions can I throw out here to make this introductory paragraph seem longer than it is? Well, that’s probably a sign I should get moving.

I was always a very strong, well rounded student throughout my entire educational career. There were rough sports at times, but these were due to personal situations more than academic incompetence. It’s usually the case that liberal arts majors like myself are much stronger at subjects like English and History or Social Studies, but for a long time, I was actually an incredible apt pupil in the math and science portions of my secondary school curriculum. It wasn’t until calculus reared its ugly head in my senior year of high school that I lost the passion for that sector of education. I certainly had trouble with calculus back that, and it was the first time I became really frustrated with education. I had already been writing as an ongoing concern at that point, and I had made the decision to pursue English and Creative Writing at university (I didn’t make the change to Philosophy until the second semester of my Freshman year at Boston University), but I did not have an aversion to science or math. Calculus created that aversion. I scraped and clawed my way through AP Calculus and AP Physics 1, 2 (called such because it covered two semesters of college level physics), hating it the entire time and barely sneaking away with low C grades. I somehow pulled 4’s on both the AP tests, and suddenly had 16 credits to my name (in addition to the eight credits I got from getting an easy five on the AP English test). When I came to Boston University, my math and science requirements were already complete. I couldn’t be happier, and I didn’t look back.

I spent the next seven semester at college immersed in a sea of German Idealism, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Greek Morality, and so many other philosophical subjects completely worthy of being capitalized. I can probably count on one hand the number of classes I took that had actual in class non essay tests, and three of those were language courses. I had really stuck to my guns about my new hatred for math and science; the only time it really came up was my higher level logic course, which was a wonderful mix of algebra, grammar and philosophy. This period of my life solidified my beliefs in the importance of the sort of emotional and instinctual outlook on the world. The biggest factor in that development is easily my first exposure to reading Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, which I read for a Philosophy and the Arts class the second semester of my freshman year. Nietzsche has always strongly argued that life is ruled by the instinct, which is meted out through his preference in the Dionysian aspect of tragic theater, which was designed to produce this sort of adrenaline fueled nightmare of terror and ecstasy. Nietzsche also specifically contrasted the Dionysian tradition with that of the Apollonian, which was embodied by the paragon of rational thinking that was Socrates, whose method of questioning, analyzing an argument and searching for truth became the basis for all scientific explication once Aristotle got his hands on it. So right there, in his first published work, Nietzsche attacked the tradition of scientific rationalism. This is something he would continue to do throughout the rest of his writing career, and I was hooked.

While this was going on and I was opening my mind to new philosophical experiences, the rational side of me never went away. So much of what I think makes me who I am is my staunch atheism, and that belief is rooted in science. The natural world, I thought, is such a wonder that the idea of a prime mover that created it seems to rob it of its beauty. This is the kind of beauty that is meticulously meted out over millennia. And as much as I disapproved of calculus, the pull of mathematics and science remained. I consider myself somewhat of an expert logician. It’s part of the reason why I’m such a strong essayist and grammarian. I can understand the innate logical glue that holds together concepts, and it is not difficult for me to discover when two and two do not add up to four. And really, what is mathematics at its core but an organizational system for the logical relation between numbers. And mathematics is at the core of physics, which is in turn at the core of the natural world, a phenomenon unlike any other that I find endlessly fascinating. As such, as much as I love the thoughts and opinions of Nietzsche, I cannot divide myself from the logical order of the natural world. And as much as I am captivated by the endless beauty of this world in which was are so fortunate to live, I cannot divest myself from emotion and the power of instinct.

There is, of course, a link between the two divergent parts. All animals, with man included, are governed by an absolute and hard wired fight for survival. Food, shelter, sex, these three things allow us to continue living and carry on our progeny to a new generation. These are instinctual acts, but they also lie at the center of biology and evolution science. But at the same time, instinct is by its very nature beyond rationality. That was a good portion of Nietzsche’s original point. Instinctual actions can be rationalized or viewed as a rational decision in hindsight (for instance, the instinctual action of desiring food is inherently a rational decision, because it keeps you alive), but they are naturally not the product of rationality. You don’t rationally decide that it is in your best interest for your heart to continue beating, and then, predicated on that decision, will your heart to start or continue beating. It is instinctually controlled by the subconscious functions of the mind. There is no room for rationale in instinct because it is a split decision and there is no window of time to mull over the whos, whats, and wherefores of whatever you basically just did, because you’ve already done it by the time you thought about it.

The rational side of me began to return after I graduated from BU and returned to Pennsylvania. I started listening to podcasts as an ongoing concern, and in 2007 I discovered the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, a skeptical science show out of New England based around interviews and news subjects of the day. I listened to about 130 episodes over the course of about four months, and I really rather enjoy it. That show has gone a long way to remind me of love of science and the fonder of the natural world. Of course, science is unerringly clinical in its bent, and as such there is less room for the kind of overflowing of emotion that is often at the base of many of Nietzsche’s fundamental beliefs. The life of science has certain similarities to the philosophical sentiments of atheism and secular humanism. Most atheists and secular humanists think the way they do from a scientific outlook, in that most of the wonders of the world previously attributed to God have since been adequately explained by the sciences. Indeed, much of the instinctual side of life is also explained by the biological sciences, so there is a kind of overlap there.

What unites these two factions of belief is the sense of anti-spiritualism. Neither the instinctual nor the rational outlook on life require a higher power to understand the functions of the world. This is fundamental to both sides, because the influence of a higher power undermines each of them. I guess, the a certain extent, that the instinctual side of this is less incompatible and as such more susceptible to the belief in a godlike deity, because much of the emotional perspective on the world is unexplained, and the whole point of religion is to explain that which cannot be explained. At the same time, it’s another example of taking the onus away from the self. If you do something as an instinctual or emotional reaction, attributing that to God would take away any (and this is a somewhat clunky word in this case) credit away from the actions of the person. What is the point of instinct and emotion if they come from without.

I think the bottom line is a kind of selective use of both mental disciplines when they fit to the situation. Matters of emotion are covered by the instinct, while matters concerning elevated thought are the domain of the rational mind. It’s a bit of a cheat, and there’s a good chance that it simply doesn’t follow logically, but in a way, that’s sort of the point. The instinct does overcome the rational mind in times of great strife or joy or what have you. The choice, then, is made by deciding which side to embrace. Do you forsake the rational mind and live entirely in the moment, trusting only your perceptions and gut feelings? Or do you do anything in your power to eschew the pull of emotion and live in a sort of ascetic stoic existence predicated on learning and understanding the world of rational and scientific extent, relying entirely on a priori knowledge to shape your view of the world? Let me tell you something: I’ve read Immanuel Kant. Quite a lot of it, really, and that outlook is just boring as hell. When you basically disavow all sensation, which is necessary because sensation is by its very nature a posteriori knowledge beyond the realm of rational pursuit, you’re walking a very fine line.

The fully sense based anti-rationalist look at the world is also a bit incompatible with the way the world actually works. Both disciplines create a partial view of reality as it is. So it is obviously the case that the extremes have to fold into each other in some kind of hybrid view of the world, but what makes this tricky is the attempt to make the instinctual and rational play nice without creating direct contradictions or expressly defeating the purpose of either. To do so, it is needed to break down the intent of each discipline, and how they are designed to look at the world from a metaphysical perspective. With a better understanding of their metaphysical functions, it is more likely that synergy will present itself.

Two words can be used to describe the basic way in which these two conceits interact with the world: reaction and reflection. The instinct is the domain of reaction. The world is how you see it. Sense data is to be processed at the immediate moment it is encountered, and taken at face value. If you react to something emotionally at first glimpse, this is not only intended, but encouraged. Extreme rationalism can go so far in the other direction that sense data can no longer be trusted at all, potentially reaching a sort of Cartesian skepticism. It is not often the case that your average every day rational scientist ascribes to this theory, especially considering that the natural sciences extrapolate their theories and hypotheses from that self same sense data. So your average run of the mill rationalist will not discount sense data, but also will not take it on face value in the same fashion the empiricists do (here we are, about 2000 words into this essay, and that’s the first time I’ve actually referenced empiricism as such. Strange). The rationalists instead choose to reflect, predominantly in an abstract way, in an attempt to determine how these moments in time may or may not reinforce their pre-established world view. Immediate, snap decisions are not in the realm of the rational mind. So you have a discipline that is based around immediate reactions and a second discipline based around analyzing these moments after the fact. So really, it’s a situation where these two sides both look at the sense data in different ways at different times, and these approaches do not interfere with each other in a temporal sense. And this is where, with a bit of playful jiggering, we can make them at least superficially fall in line.

The basic conceit is to take the best of both worlds while eliminating the contradicting elements of each. It is a similar take to the super simplified version of the Hegelian Dialectic, which takes a concept (thesis), finds its counter argument (antithesis), and searches for similarities within the two to create a new concept (synthesis). The dialectic continues past that point until a satisfying end point is reached. In this case, we have only one iteration of the dialectic to complete, getting us to a satisfying conclusion and a model of perception. First, we establish the essential parts of the whole that are needed. From the empirical/instinctual/emotional side of things, the importance obviously lies in the immediacy of perception. This is the cornerstone of instinctual acts, and without it you cannot react instinctually. The cornerstone of scientific rationality is deductive reasoning. You take the sense data that you receive through perceptive events and figure out not only what it tells you about the world as such, but whether it can be trusts by seeing if it ascribes to what the world should be from a logical scientific sense. So far, we’re not really in the territory of a necessary contradiction between the two mediums beyond reason’s inherent skepticism of perception in general. The problem lies in reason’s discounting of emotion. It is a necessary evil for the rationalists, as emotion will create bias, and bias obscures one of the tenets of rationality, which is the withdrawn outlook of the disinterested third party.

What we need to do is justify take the disinterested nature out of scientific rationality. You cannot be impartial when dealing with emotional situations that directly affect you. And as someone who cannot give up on the emotions of life, I need that to change if I want to put these two disparate elements together in creating a model of perception. From my angle, what works the best is to use sense data as an immediate foundation in the day to day shaping of the outside world. Whatever happens needs to be dealt with in an at least partially immediate fashion. But these moments should not just be perceived and then pushed off to the side. They would and should be processed and reflected upon at a later date to see what these situations mean and how they shape both the self from a personality sense and the world from a natural science sense. There is even a psychological component to this reasoning that exists beyond the realm of sense perception that creates more value after the fact for these emotional situations. Despite the fact that this model of perception does not incorporate the full breadth of both the rational and the empirical in its union, this reinforces the point and purpose and of the Hegelian Dialectic, in that it is designed to create a strengthened unity that more accurately informs the world in a metaphysical sense. And I believe, in my own way, that I have done that.

This post was predominantly written to the tune of Mastodon’s Crack the Skye

Storytelling and Religion

I’ve been working on this one for the past couple days. Decided to go overboard on my return to this blog with a 1,600 word monster of a stream of consciousness treatise about religion, mythology, and why I am the man I am today.

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I’ve never been a religious man. I am probably one of the few people (this this country, at least) who can make the claim that I was born atheist. There was no moment of great enlightenment, no crisis of faith or fall from grace. I simply never believe in a higher power as far back into my childhood as I can remember. Sure, memory is a tricky thing, and I might be looking back with rose colored glasses, but the fact remains. What I find intriguing, though, is how often I find myself captivated with certain polytheistic cultures. The ancient Greeks are probably the best example of this; granted, this is the kind of thing that runs with the territory when you devote your life to the study of western philosophy, but it extends beyond that. I love the art and mysticism of ancient South American tribal cultures (your Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilizations). The Egyptian hierarchy pulls at me. Norse mythology is just plain fun. It’s no wonder that my two favorite comic series at the moment are Thor and The Incredible Hercules. Or that books like American Gods or the Vertigo comic series Fables seem to be right in my wheelhouse. I often try to figure out just why I have such an aversion to monotheism, and yet at the same time cannot deny the pull these polytheistic cultures have on my imagination.

I used to say that if I ever got a tattoo, I would put three ancient Greek words on my back, two on my shoulders and one on my neck that would form a sort of wide, fat triangle. Those words were going to be αρέτε, or excellence, τίμε, or honor, and λογος, or knowledge. These three terms were at the core of ancient Greek culture and philosophy. They were very much a meritocracy, where people of great wisdom and power rose to prominence. This was contrasted in a way by their theological underpinnings; the Greek pantheon was a group of petty, imperialistic, adulterous and generally awful gods. I find it fascinating that a culture predicated on such flawed deities could produce such groundbreaking developments in the entirety of western civilization from science to art to philosophy to warfare. These people grew up idolizing deities that did not live up to the expectations to which they eventually rose. And yet, throughout that whole time, everything was done in supplication to these gods, which logically does not seem to follow. But I think I have an idea whi I personally find it so captivating.

When you consider yourself to be a writer, that comes with expectations. .Unless you have always just focused on copy writing or critiques or essays, you don’t become a writer unless you have some sense of storytelling foundation. Some people are born storytellers. Neil Gaiman is the type of person I would put in that column, and you can tell because of the wide range of literary output that he has produced all across the board, from comic work like The Sandman to the Douglas Adams biography Don’t Panic to his well established novels. Some are born to read stories. I always loved John Hurt for his voice and delivery when reading stories. Just watch an episode of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller or the opening sequence of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Stories capture the imagination, excite the senses and offer a vicarious escape from the drudgeries of day to day life. The fact that the ancient Greek pantheon had humanistic qualities and flaws makes them great characters in a story. Stories need conflict. I have personally held the opinion that the best conflict comes from within rather than without; the perfect protagonist persevering against a hateful, black hatted villain can only take you so far. You believe that there can be something more. You cast doubt into the reader’s mind about the hero only to make his triumph more satisfying. It’s storytelling 101. Much of this, of course, has been collapsed into the monotheistic Judeo-Christian tradition. Flawed characters abound in both the Testaments, but the flawed characters are all human. By its very nature, the God figure of a monotheistic religion must be perfect and infallible, because it is the cornerstone of all creation. You introduce a flaw in the creator, and that imperfection can be extrapolated out into all that He creates. So, of course, they have built in ways to explain why the world is not perfect, ranging from the fall of Adam to the sacrifices of Jesus and so on. But I think you lose something in translation when you do that, and the stories just don’t grasp me the way that these grand mythological tales seem to do.

So much about what makes a religion impressive and powerful is the way it captivates the imagination and moves the human mind to act in some fashion. Without that, all you’re really doing is going through the motions. It’s a kind of untenable faith that is prone to fracture, which is not something around which you want to build a value system. Someone who is basically half-heartedly going along is less likely to be resolute in his beliefs and values when the chips are down. I have many problems, most of them ideological, with religious faith in general. However, I would probably prefer to interact with someone who is resolute in his faith than someone who is going through the motions. There are limits, and once religious fanaticism comes into play, you’re walking a fine line and things can get much worse very quickly, but that is a topic for another time. What’s important (and I fully realize that this…whatever it is has been somewhat scattershot in its execution, and I hope, dear Reader, that it has enhanced your experience) is the execution of the story. And the Greeks were just better storytellers. You worshipped these gods because if you crossed them, they would absolutely ruin every possible facet of your life. The traffic plays would be the best example of this. Look at the folly of Agamemnon and Cassandra. See what happens when Oedipus and his family tempt fate and refuse prophecy. Prometheus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, the list goes on. If you can catch your audience in your thrall with the storytelling that is at the core of your faith/spiritualism/mysticism/religion/what have you, then you have done most of the necessary work on the road to absolute allegiance.

When I was growing up, I never had any interest in the stories of the Bible. I think a lot of that has to do with how straightforward these stories are, which has at its root the problem of the infallible deity as I mentioned before. But beyond that, so many of the stories of the Bible struck me as pedestrian. I was exposed to Greek mythology, Aesop’s Fables and Grimm’s Fairy Tales along with the stories of the Bible at a young age, and I saw no real difference between any of them. At their core, they are all allegorical morality tales. But the Judeo-Christian tradition is more grounded. The fantastical is portrayed in a different way. When you are a young boy and your imagination is firing off in all directions, it just makes sense that the more otherworldly parables would catch your attention. If you read the story of the Prodigal Son and the myth of Phaethon, how could the vision of this boy in way over his head barely hanging on while this chariot pulled by flaming horses burns the sky itself not be the one that burns (yes, that was on purpose) indelibly in the mind? But society and culture makes it readily apparent from go that these myths and fables are fairy tales are just stories and aren’t real or significant beyond their entertainment value. I content that there is a strong chance that if I lived in a world where the Greek myths were not myths but instead the basis of a legitimate religion, there would have been a very strong possibility that I would have bought into it as more than just a story. The Greeks never saw the gods or Minotaurs or any of the other wild creatures, but I you can catch the mind you can catch the heart, and visa versa.

Stories shape our world in such a significant way; it’s a shame that the stories so many of us are raised on just don’t cut it as stories. They’re fine on their own, I guess, and they serve a purpose, but when you compare to the long traditions of epic poetry, tragic plays and the fable tradition, they just don’t stack up. It makes you wonder what the future holds. I mean, sure, the Judeo-Christian model has held for thousands of years, and gets stronger generationally due to the power of tradition, and how you can pass something down to your children at an early age and indelibly hold them to those beliefs. It’s certainly possible that this will be the dominant religious model in the western world for the rest of all time. But what if it doesn’t? What if something else comes along, be it a new religion or some kind of event that leads to the worldwide spread of either atheism or agnosticism. Would the stories of Adam and Eve or the Flood or Sodom and Gomorrah just become the mythology of a new age? It seems like it would follow if some global change were to occur. Hopefully these new myths would not replace the old ones; I would hate to see the grand Greek tradition die on the vine replaced by an inferior series of tales. Not that I would actually see it, of course. There is no way anything like this could ever happen in my lifetime. Still, it’s fun to think about.

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Not sure if there was much of a point to that, but I needed to get something out of my system and into a blog, so there you have it.

This post was (mostly) written to the tune of Ween’s At The Cat’s Cradle 1992, with some final flair from King Crimson’s Red

Why Philosophy?

It’s a question that is asked to me often. Especially in my current (well, current for one more day) environment of a super corporate big finance Fortune 500 company. Most people around me are very confused when they found out that I actually picked a major in college with no tangible monetary benefit other than the base line of “I went to college for four years and survived” to get past those job qualifications of at least having some college degree. So why would I basically waste close to four years of my life to get a degree only to not use it at all in the past three years working for the company that I work for? Well, first of all, it’s about what portion of my life I think was wasted. Pretty simple response there. Life fulfillment is really the name of the game, and I can’t exactly say that the past three years could be considered fulfilling. You go to work. You sit at a desk with a computer in front of it. You stare at the thing for eight hours, with various breaks during the day to chain smoke cigarettes to make the pain go away. You go home. You do it again the next day. The weekend ends before you even know it. You’re working in a temporary capacity so you don’t get paid time off. When you step back and look at things, it’s a pretty horrendous experience.

What I miss is intellectual discourse. I mentioned in my first article the kind of fresh air culture shock that occurred when I moved from suburban Pennsylvania to Boston. Well, imagine going back after all the personality building and changes that can happen over those four fertile years. And imagine knowing that all your best friends, some of which you literally spent every day with, stayed in Boston. And imagine having to deal with this by going to a job that I described in the above paragraph. You can understand now why I’m quite excited about moving back to the city in three weeks. But one thing I learned while I was in Boston was the idea of education as an end in itself. Now keep in mind that I originally came to Boston U with aspirations of majoring in English, which also isn’t exactly the most lucrative major (reminds me of the opening song of the Avenue Q musical, “What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?”). The change was made due to my dissatisfaction with the English program. I was probably going to minor in Philosophy prior to my change, but I decided to just run with it. Really, it’s not specifically education that’s an end in itself. Because there are certainly types of education that are not designed to be the end result. Vocational training, business school, communications, these things are not designed to be ongoing pursuits. English literature could be seen as either an end or a means; it really depends on what you plan to use it for. But Philosophy. That has no visible applications in our modern work world. It’s an artifact, long since ignored.

Really, Philosophy as such is something that is taken for granted. You look at the history of Philosophy and it’s got its roots in everything. The first scientists were Philosophers. Aristotle defined notions such as metaphysics, logic and astrological concerns for generations. They weren’t always the pioneers of these fields, but they certainly had their hands in evolving and refining these ideals, running parallel with their own thoughts about the world and what is in it. There is no end to the philosophical method. You can look at it as the liberal version of science, where you have over the millennia a slow evolution of thought and action where the whole always contains the parts of its predecessor (this is the foundation for the simplistic version of the Hegelian Dialectic) with no legitimate end in sight. You’ll never reach a point where the philosophical enterprise “ends” much in a similar way as science. So it’s a discipline that has no conceivable end, but that the end is the actual process itself. It is theoretical academics. Philosophers will never make any new discovery that changes the world in a way that a scientist would. So the question is once again raised: why bother?

Most philosophers and philosophy students do not enter the field out of ignorance or pragmatism. As I mentioned, it’s not a field that attracts those who are looking for job security or a quick buck. It’s a field (especially in the current climate) that in a way has mutated into a combination of history and literature, where your average Philosophy class is going to consist of either an overview of multiple philosophical ideals in a kind of introductory course or an analytical reading of selected texts. In a way, Hegel could be considered eerily accurate when he pronounced his book The Phenomenology of Spirit to basically be considered the end of history. And we haven’t seen any kind of philosophy or philosophical movement that could be considered truly original since the work Hegel did in the early 1800’s. But I’m trying not to make this too dry of a read, so I’m going to get back to the point. I truly believe that interest in philosophy often comes from dissatisfaction with the world in some way, shape or form that leads to questioning the status quo. This could come from religion or science, or simply an inquisitive nature. Either way, the desire to dig deeper persists. And it percolates over time. A breakthrough occurs when you first read a truly philosophical text (for me, it was three of Plato’s dialogues, Apoloy, Crito, and Republic) and realize that there are others out there like you that are not satisfied by going through the motions. And it grows from there, and you’re suddenly trying to figure out just what the hell to do with this fancy degree in unemployment you just earned.

But what really matters is the fact that any true philosopher doesn’t care. Because the discipline is an end in itself. Maybe you move on to the “real world” and get a cubical job and slowly lose that mental sharpness, or maybe you find ways to keep yourself sharp. Or maybe you continue on your education to the point that the student becomes the teacher. What matters is the fact that it doesn’t matter. Fulfillment comes from the action of thought. I study Philosophy because my mind cannot allow me to do anything else. I wouldn’t be able to sleep well without this outlet. Why do I study Philosophy? Because my life depends on it. Care to think of a better reason?

This post was written to the tune of Failure’s Fantastic Planet and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Henry’s Dream