I can’t keep dwelling on this. I really can’t. Maybe I’ll just fuck it all and go to China.

- C

PS. any advice is warmly welcomed

Մի տարի անց նույն փողոցով անցնելիս պատահաբար նկատեցի, որ Սարտրի գրաֆֆիտին կորել է: Միակ բանը, որ մինչև հիմա կա, դա Սարտրի սիգարետի ծուխն է .

One year passed since I`ve “met ” the graffiti of Sartre. Few days ago I was passing by the same street and noticed that it`s gone. The only which survived is the smoke from Sartre`s cigarette.

[photo] by Ella Kanegarian

If ever a quote told my life…

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Jean-Paul Sartre.

I have to say it worked quite well and a section of the audience found it absolutely hilarious.  The four actors did a pretty good job.  Daniel Pagett was striking as the “coward” Garcin.  Carolyn Hall managed to convince as the oversexed airhead socialite Esytelle.  Tennille Read, as the Lesbian murderess Inez, was knowing and creepy.  Perhap best of all was Ryan Anning as the polite and implacable demonic valet.  His performance was controlled and a bit weird with just enough, almost Pythonesque, physical acting to make a point.  Yet, none of them seemed to quite belong to Sartre’s world.  Rather it was if we had fast forwarded a couple of decades to a play by Ionesco.  It was absurd.  It was funny.  But, where was the sense that the real weakness of the characters is their need for validation?  They cannot be “free” (in a very specific Sartrian sense) and its this weakness that condemns them.  Hell is one’s own weaknesses, not les autres.  That said, a director is free to have her own slant on a work and Thorpe’s worked well enough on its own terms, rather as Marshall Pynkowski’s lightweight Mozart does.

The Hand of Bridge was presented as a kind of prelude.  It’s a slight piece but was well sung by Taylor Strande as the mother fixated Geraldine, Alvaro Vazquez Robles as the adulterous Bill, Silpa Sharma as the hat obsessed Sally and, perhaps best of all, Keith O’Brien as David, with his strange fantasies of palaces full of naked boys and girls.  A fourteen piece band directed by Pratik Gandhi was a real luxury for 10 minutes or so of music.  There were some amusing touches, such as the game being played on laptops (though as always seems to be the case with this work, I doubt anybody involved had ever actually played bridge).  The only real problem was that the work was resented “in the round”.  With a relatively large band for the small space it was very much a lottery whether one could hear the singer or not.  It’s hard to make words out when a soprano is singing with her back to you.

All in all, it was enterprising programme that succeeded on its own terms.  It’s playing at the Ernest Baumer Studio at the Distillery and there are two more performances at 2pm and 7.30pm today.

I know that whatever I do I’ll regret having missed the alternatives, but well that is the horror of being-for-itself. I’ve been reading Sartre’s ‘Transcendence of the Ego’ recently and been finding it very hard-going, but last night some of it clicked. At the most primitive level of consciousness you are not you, that is, before you reflect self-consciously on your behaviour and experience, there is no ‘I’ or Ego in experience. The primitive, pre-reflective mode of consciousness is non-egological. This seems to fit in with our experience: we all frequently have moments where we are engrossed in a spectacle or activity and we have no sense of our ‘I’ness, that is, until we reflect on what is happening and say ‘I am doing such and such’. Anyway, related to this, what I thought was interesting is the idea that our Ego is a thing that is constructed in part to defend consciousness from the horror of its own freedom. I could empty the ketchup bottle into the sink. I could throw my bedding out the window. We defend ourselves from the dizzying contemplation of these possibilities by telling ourselves what we are. When someone asks me if I would like a drink my response is always ‘I don’t drink’. When I say that, am I not in some way covering from myself the possibility that I could drink, in fact I could drink a whole bottle of spirits if I liked? Why don’t you throw your crying baby out the window? You could. Right now. It would be easy. Such thoughts are unpleasant, so we say ‘I am a good mother’, ‘I am not a monster’. But really, we are well able to be monsters at any moment.  Similarly, when we have missed the opportunity for something, don’t we like to cover up the possibility that we had? If I applied to the army and got rejected, I would soon be saying ‘I’m not the military type anyway’.  With respect to our past, present and future we seem to cover up and deny the feeling we all have of our own freedom.

The Other is unintelligible according to Sartre. We are not meant to understand it. The Other cannot be explained -for me it is instead a benchmark. It raises our zen of coping with the inexplicable. We accrue ‘ambiguity’ and ‘absurdity’ in life. But to do so without ignoring it’s existence is to feel alone in pure interiority. That is the void of solipsism, it ensnares consciousness by virtue of the Other. It manifests itself as emptiness in the inability to arrive at Truth. Descending into untruth is terrifying. Everyone wants answers that they cannot have. They pretend to possess truth but they possess nothing.

Many parts of the self are untouchable. It’s emptiness seems Absolute. Mettre à la légère, the fated encounter with the Other is our condemnation.   Moments spent alone in seizing time when repetitive days and scripted interactions follow incessantly after one another until Absurdity –  the experience is none other than Other. Similar to a moment without a beginning or an end. Why is it Other? Perhaps it is meaninglessness.

But it seems that meaninglessness surpasses fate alone. Sartre says, departing from the Cartesian cogito,“All consciousness is self-consciousness.”  Of arriving at consciousness from self-consciousness Sartre says, “There is no I, the ego does not exist in consciousness until pre-reflective consciousness becomes conscious of consciousness.” Seemingly consciousness already entails a thinker that thinks. Cool, but we should also note that for Sartre there is no unconscious. The one who experiences reflects on her experiences a posteriori–she reflects ‘after the fact,’ and therefore arrives at her unconscious via consciousness (explained more completely in Transcendence of the Ego). So rather than having the unconscious, the ID, and the ego, as in Freud – we start from experience, then on to consciousness of experience, and then our consciousness of consciousness as the Ego.

So what do we make of the ego in terms of the Other? Well, perhaps it is the creativity that Otherness influences upon us. We search for a medium to articulate the ineffable; that is, the meaninglessness of experience. That desire to transcend the self is Otherness, to go beyond oneself into universality. It is evocative and destructive and has no conscience but through us becomes ‘something’ amidst nothingness.

Addressing the question of when it is safer to use automated control rather than rely on manual control by drivers, the paper proposes that the lead car driver should be a specially trained platoon leader while “back office” centralized control oversees the platoons in operation. The paper develops a terminology and classification for the range of possible interactions between the system’s actors (drivers, leaders and controllers) and models a variety of scenarios accordingly. It finds that the duration of active platoons would vary from 22 to 75 seconds. Platoon scenarios involving freight trucks generally would have longer durations due to their slower acceleration.

Daugiausia Sartras pasakoja apie savo vaikystę. Jau aštuonerių jis buvo tikras egzistencialistas. Literatūra jam – likimas, nuo kurio neišsisuksi. Žinoma, reikia turėti omeny, kad Sartras kalba apie aštuonmetį save vertindamas save per prabėgusių metų, perskaitytų knygų, susiklosčiusio gyvenimo prizmę. Šis klausimas dažnai sukasi rašytojo galvoje: kaip mūsų poelgius (ir, žinoma, žodžius) praėjus laikui vertins kiti, atsižvelgdami į tai, kuo mes tapome. Juk ir pats Žanas Polis nebuvo pats populiariausias vaikas tarp bendraamžių, be to – namisėda, knygų graužikas. O juk žinodami, kad jis – būsimasis garsus rašytojas, visą jo vaikystę imsime vertinti visiškai kitaip – ji atrodys tarsi turinti kokią pranašišką reikšmę.

Knyga man patiko. Tokios knygos priverčia įsiskaityti į jas – nesiblaškyti, neskubėti. Čia mažai veiksmo, bet daug savianalizės. Prieš kurį laiką skaičiau Sartro „Sieną“, bet „Žodžiai“ man patiko labiau.

Tikrai rekomenduoju tiems, kam įdomios tokios knygos ir kam smalsu pažvelgt į vidinį rašytojo pasaulį (tiek, kiek jis mums jo atskleidė).

Keli skaitant užkliuvę Sartro pasisakymai apie Dieva, gyvenimą, mirtį ir žodžius:

„Prieš 50 metų, jei ne tas nesusipratimas, klaida, atsitiktinumas, kuris mus išskyrė, tarp mūsų galėjo kas nors būti.“ (Apie Dievą) (108 p.)

„Kuo beprasmiškesnis gyvenimas, tuo sunkiau pakeliama mirtis.“ (101 p.)

„Mirtis – mano tikslas, o gyvenimas – vienintelis patikimas būdas numirti.“ (208 p.)

„… pažinęs pasaulį per žodžius, aš dar ilgai laikiau žodžius pasauliu. Egzistuoti – reiškė turėti kur nors begalinėse žodžio lentelėse tam tikrą, nustatytą pavadinimą; rašyti – reiškė graviruoti jose naujas būtybes arba – ir tai buvo mano atkakliausioji iliuzija – gaudyti daiktus gyvais sakinių spąstais; jei aš išradingai suraizgysiu žodžius, daiktas įsipainios tarp ženklų ir bus mano.“ (191 p.)

Anotacija: „Autobiografinėje apysakoje “Žodžiai” vienas garsiausių praėjusio amžiaus filosofų ir rašytojų J. P. Sartre’as skaitytojams pateikė pirmojo savo gyvenimo dešimtmečio paveikslą. Žavų, jaudinantį, įtikinamą ir šiek tiek liūdną.“

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Puslapių sk.: 272

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The subject of whether we truly know ourselves is something that has been debated for centuries. Who am I, what is the meaning of life – some of the so called big questions are constantly being discussed in our minds and with other human beings. One of the biggest mottos of today seems to be “just be yourself” but who is this self? Is it the human body, the mind, the emotions, the atoms which we are made of – or is the self made by how we are perceived by others? One of my biggest interests in life is philosophy and existentialism and so I thought I would give my humble take on one of the huge mysteries (and problems) of life (with a little help from science, and alot of help from Frank Yang, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle).

The physical – the genes and body

Human beings are made up of billions of atoms beyond counting. These atoms are made up from the genes passed on by our mother and father 50 % equally. Today we know  that genes can play a huge role in shaping one’s life, for example such things like looks and physical ability (of course these can also vary with surroundings while growing up) but also stuff like hereditary diseases can have a huge effect on the self. Scientists are finding genes for just about everything that can explain why we are who we are, examples being the homosexual gene and even genes for probability for future alcoholism. But are genes and atoms the answer to who the true self is? Hardly, because atoms are constantly flowing in and out of our bodies and replacing one another. Over a six year span our whole body, including the bones, organs and muscles have their atoms replaced by completely new ones. And this cycle is constantly going on whether we know it or not. You could even argue that the Andreas that wrote this essay is not the same Andreas as he will be the next day when he has handed in the essay because a large amount of atoms in him will have changed. Not to mention the fact that today we can alter our bodies. We can dye our hair, get plastic surgery and even change our sex. This also changes the way we are perceived (and how that matters to the self is the next paragraph)

The Psychological – the mind and perception

The Nature of our mind is intrinsically void, there is no fixed mental substance or gene that determines completely who we are. In fact, sometimes there even seems to be two selves in the mind. You can think “I believe there is something wrong with myself” or “I dislike myself” – so is there both an “I” and a “myself” inside the same human being? Our mind is constantly channeling information, changing and adapting new ideas, ideologies or opinions. The self in the mind is not a single “I” that persists through time, rather it changes every day. We can look back at ourselves in our teen years and think to ourselves “what were we thinking” and ponder our actions but at the time for that person or the “I” those views and actions were normal then. Over time those views and how we act changed, and so we change with time.  But how we are perceived also plays a huge role in how we act. There is a philosophical conundrum consisting of “I exist because you exist” and it says a lot. Without the collective, would there be individuals? There is a constant feedback going on between human beings in how we act and react. We are also adapting to each other and our relations with other humans. The same human being can have several different personalities depending on who the person interacts with, the friend, the teacher, the partner or the lover. Heck, some people’s opinions even change depending on who they are spending time with, because they want to fit in or something like that. But if the self is made up of interactions with other human beings, how about people who say that “they’ don’t care what others think”? Well these people may be the people who care the most about what other people think because the “don’t give a shit” attitude that they have is for them important that other people know, so this is kind of a paradox. They say they don’t care, but in fact they do care. Even people who act like they truly don´t care want to be perceived in some way. The human being simply needs other views and opinions so that we can evolve and grow. Without others, there simply would be no “I” or at least an idea of an “I”.

Conclusion

I think both solutions offer good ideas but in my mind the psychological part, especially interaction with other human beings and perception is what defines the self. You can’t dismiss the physical part especially things like looks but people are so much more than just their bodies and genes. Of course one could argue that life is predetermined via our genes and animal instinct is what drives us, but human beings are the only species capable of thoughts about the self and life’s great mysteries. Therefore we’ve evolved differently. Even with the physical and psychological part together I still think the idea of a self is a bit vague. At least no unified single “I” seems to exist. It changes through life and time, as well as through interacting like the social creatures we are. With that said, I think the motto “Just be yourself” needs to be reevaluated (and perhaps retired) since there are too many variables.

Whoa—WHOA—snap out of it, you French existentialist. Put down the Sartre and pick up some Childs! Fill up your mug with some more wine! The only questions you’ll be asking yourself tonight are “Why didn’t I get two magnum bottles of wine?” and “WHY DIDN’T I MAKE RATATOUILLE BEFORE?? This is so incredibly easy!” (It isn’t.) You also might be asking yourself, “Do I get wine teeth this bad in public?” (You do.)

Alright, so I may be in a bit of a Francophile mood. And can I first say, I wish there was another way to say I like French food without saying “Francophile,” because I just like the food. I just want to go to France and have no one talk to me while I glutton myself. I’m also in a gourmand mood because I made some KICKIN’ baguettes. Please see below:

So, in honor of French food you can make yourself without going anywhere (Fun Kraft Idea: Make a culinary passport and stamp it with food stains!), we’re going to rip a page out of Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and we’re going to make ratatouille! And if you even mention that animated crap film to me, I will smother you with a ham hock (I once spent a week on a cruise ship with skettiandmeatballz and the only thing on loop was Ratatouille and Dan in Real Life).

Ok, so this recipe is not…simple…at all. It’s actually a huge pain in the ass, if I’m going to be completely honest. I almost scrapped the whole thing and made curry, but I already made curry last week, and I didn’t want to get a plethora of emails from disappointed readers (instead of getting a plethora of emails from disappointed everyone else in my life…Le Sigh). So, here it goes. You’re really in for it!

Ok, you know what? I’m going to give you my version, and I guarantee it will come out delicious and will really complement the wine stains on your mustache and teeth.

1 lb eggplant and 1 lb zucchini. Peel the eggplant and figure out a way to cut it in lil’ strips of eggplant that are like, I don’t know, 3 inches long, 3/8 inches thick, and 1 inch wide. Does that make sense? Just start chopping blindfolded, it all tastes the same. Do the same thing with the zucchini. Throw it up in the air and slice it in slow motion. It’s still going to taste like a zucchini, I promise you. Put these sonsofbitches in a bowl.

1 tsp. salt. Sprinkle this on your massacred eggplant and zucchini and let it sit for 30 minutes. watch an episode of Wheel of Fortune. Or, better yet, stare at a blank wall and scream out letters of the alphabet. After 30 minutes have passed, drain ‘em and dry ‘em.

Some Olive Oil. This is where things get tricky. Saute the eggplant and zucchini in some olive oil. BACK OFF, DON’T CROWD THE PAN. You have to do this in stages. That’s right. Now remove to a side dish.

Oh my god this is taking FOR-EFFING-EVER. Let’s move this along. Slice 1 1/2 onions. Slice 1 1/2 green bell pepper. Saute in a large pan. After about 10 minutes, stir in 2 crushed garlic cloves. Season with salt and pepper.

This is where we’re going to take a little detour to Lazy Village. Take your 1 lb can of whole, peeled tomatoes and drain it. Chop them all up real nice and sloppy. Stir them into the green peppers and onions and simmer down until there’s almost no liquid left.

Ok this is seriously where I took a left-hand turn into Where the Hell Are We-ville. I misread Julia’s instructions and got impatient, and you know what? I found a little bit of myself. Take a casserole and alternate layers of 1/3 tomato mixture and 1/3 eggplant and zucchini, and in between those layers, sprinkle like a tablespoon of parsley. Then, sprinkle the whole thing with breadcrumbs, flavored anyway you like! It turns out Where the Hell Are We-ville is a democratic nation of flavors. Then, sprinkle that with Parmesan. JESUS I AM SO HUNGRY. Bake this for like 25 minutes or so, until it’s heated through, or until you find yourself eating with your filthy paws because you’re so hungry.

Now, sit back and relax and enjoy another Meatless Monday or Tasty Tuesday. You’ve really done it this time! Or maybe this whole thing just took place in your cheap bottle of wine. WHO AM I??

The term negation implies a mathematical reduction. The term negative implies the opposite side of a dyadic spectrum. The term absence, on the other hand, implies something that is not there but that was at some point there. I guess the question is then: if there is a here, or a presence, then there can also be an absence. Sartre says that “any positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself.” Or put more simply, when we are conscious of something we are also by necessity conscious of ourselves. This holds true insofar as an absence can not be without a preceding presence. Nonetheless, this assumes that an object exists insofar as it is consciousness of an object via the objects tangible position. So what of an object that has no tangible position?

Objects such as race, sex, or class, the self even and broadly speaking, that are but are not here nor there. Objects that cannot be placed positionally in relation to these objects warrant the term negation. A positional consciousness that has not made these objects tangible cannot be defined by their absence. They have no presence. They cannot find them in their lives because they are not a part of their world in any tangible way that requires them to be conscious of them. So does an object that does not have a tangible position in the world in light of this ignorance become a mere proposition? 

Supposing then we cannot point to race, class, or sex as having any content or substance.  Does that mean that they do not exist? Does this mean that they cannot be absent and are therefore too only present? If we are–as conscious objects–always present, then how can something be present for us in an intangible way but not as an object? Can objects such as race, class, and sex be pointed at without being made into propositions?

My experience as being multi-racial has led me to encounter negation. I’ve encountered in rooms full of white people, the absence of race and in places of wealth, the absence of class. Most importantly, my experience occurs as a presence and not an absence. The experience isn’t reducible to the dyadic relationship of black and white, rich or poor, but more so to a triadic relationship between myself amidst the dyadic relationship as negation. This negation of the dyadic relationship occurs because the object that I am conscious of in the experience is not only my consciousness and the consciousness of the object of race, but is instead the consciousness of myself first as consciousness of myself, then consciousness of the object, and lastly consciousness of others. I am conscious of myself as being conscious of myself in comparison to others.

This negation is what Du Bois termed double-consciousness and it gives presence to objects in the form of negation. It is the absence that an object could be. It is consciousness of an object, but the consciousness of my consciousness is negated both in and through consciousness of the object. The experience is a triadic one. But this means that the intangible experience, via double-consciousness, becomes tangible and therefore gains a position as an object. It is not a proposition then if we arrive at race, class, and sex through experience, and should not therefore be treated as such. Negation does not apply to these objects.

Nonetheless, these objects are neither present nor absent for those who cannot place their consciousness in relation to them. It is in this sense that negation serves as an ignorant rendition of their objectivity. These objects fail to become Sartrean objects and should instead take the requirements for objectivity into account in order to avoid becoming negation.

Atheism is the absence of belief in a god, gods or any kind of other divine power(s). For the atheist, the only thing you can really ever know is that which can be proven to exist. Moreover, the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims. In other words, it is not the atheist’s job to prove that gods, pink elephants, teapots orbiting the sun and so forth do not exist. It is up to the entity making such claims to prove they do exist.

Agnosticism is the notion that the existence or non-existence of any deity is unknown or cannot be known because said existence cannot be disproved. Agnostics, therefore, do not believe that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims. For an agnostic not being able to disprove the existence of god is good enough of a reason to remain open to the possibility of its existence.

Agnosticism and Organized Religion

Note that agnostics may also be people who believe in a higher power or a god without the attachment of organized religion. An agnostic may believe in a higher power or a transcendent nature of reality that “drives” the universe, life and the human condition. In that case, the higher power is not necessarily god as described in the Abrahamic religions or the gods in polytheistic traditions. The “I am spiritual but not religious” phrase is often used to self-identify a life stance of spirituality that rejects traditional organized religion as the sole or most valuable means of furthering spiritual growth.

Agnosticism is, therefore, compatible with both theism and atheism. A person can believe in a god (theism) without claiming to know for sure if that god exists; the result is agnostic theism. On the other hand, a person can disbelieve in gods (atheism) without claiming to know for sure that no gods can or do exist; the result is agnostic atheism.

Agnosticism More Reasonable?

There is also a common (false) perception that agnosticism is a more “reasonable” position while atheism is more “dogmatic,” ultimately indistinguishable from theism except in the details. An assertion that could not be further from the truth because the very things, the “details” that inform a religious person and an atheist are precisely the things that starkly set them apart and define them. Atheism and theism are not like catholicism and protestantism that in essence adhere to the same principles and are only different with respect to their (extreme) interpretations of each belief system.

To state that atheists are just like theists, “except in detail” is missing the whole point and thus what those “details” consist of. It is like saying anti-segregationists and segregationists are indistinguishable from one another “except in the details”. As if being against slavery and the subjugation of human beings was as valid and desirable of a view as being pro slavery. 

Similarly, stating that theism and atheism are the same except for some “minor detail” implies that theism is an equally valid and desirable view only distinguishable from atheism with respect to some minor “details”.

Fact is, they are not. Theism is clearly an inferior and undesirable view to hold for all the reasons that have been discussed at length by skeptics. Therefore, to equate both as being merely two sides of the same coin misses the essence and nature of either belief. 

In the world view of religious people, rationality, logic, fact-based knowledge and thus not wanting to live one’s life based on fairy tales and anecdotes, are considered too radical and threatening.  Therefore, the religious person prefers the agnostic over the atheist whom they often equate with and perceive as a path to evil – mainly because atheists do not have religion to guide their ethics and morals. 

Agnosticism gives the impression of reason. Therefore, while an agnostic, just like an atheist, may not believe in any of the fairy tales perpetuated by religious thinking, the agnostic may still say – unlike the atheist – that he is “open” to religion so he is left alone to appear reasonable. After all, no one can blame you or attack you or think less of you because you don’t know any better. In fact, as long as you are open to the religious person’s belief in falsehoods, said religious people are cool with you and you aren’t considered a radical or a threat.  On the contrary, in that case you become merely a lost, misguided soul eligible for redemption. 

Note that while both atheists and agnostics operate from the standpoint of “I don’t know” – agnostics remain open to the possibility of a higher power “just in case” or because they cannot disprove it, while atheists do not leave any room for religion and higher power and will only be convinced if they see evidence.

Existential Uncertainty

Psychologically speaking, agnosticism appears more “bearable” as a philosophy than flat out rejection of a deity. Agnostics may remain open to the possibility of a higher power because ultimately they cannot fathom that there is no higher power and deeper reason behind all this. While their logical, rational mind tells them that all the stuff they read in the Bible and other outlets of religiosity are a bunch of made up hooey, their hearts – the emotional aspect of their being, the part of their higher developed brains capable of abstract thought – that which is looking for the meaning of it all –  does not permit them to just dismiss god and the notion of a higher power.

That is because existential angst and uncertainty can be terrifying and something a lot of people cannot get their minds around. The idea that there is no higher power. No father figure with a plan for all of us. No afterlife and instead a real end to consciousness and existence as we know it is something most human beings find unbearable to live with.  In fact, it can be argued that if it wasn’t for the belief in a higher power, a higher purpose and a promise of a better tomorrow and heaven surrounded by one’s loved ones for eternity etc., most people wouldn’t put up with the crap they are putting up with everyday. In that sense, being a non-believer is a luxury most people do not have. 

Spirituality and Atheism Are Not Mutually Exclusive

If one defines spirituality as the private realm of thought and experience connoting a blend of humanistic psychology with the internal experience of the individual and esoteric traditions aimed at personal well-being, growth and development (as opposed to religion that represents the organized aspect, the institutions, which press people into a mold) then atheists can be spiritual people too. However, that does not mean that they believe in a higher power as an explanation for existence. 

An atheist, much like an agnostic, admits that he simply does not know (unlike religious people who seemingly have an “answer” for everything). However, unlike the agnostic, the atheist is not willing to entertain the possibility of a god and religion simply because he “does not know.”

Atheists are skeptics, much like agnostics, and any good skeptic maintains an open mind and is willing to learn, evaluate and re-evaluate their beliefs and views as well as be educated. But being a skeptic, having an open mind and being willing to learn and find out more does not equal entertaining far fetched fairy tales and fantasies in the from of religion as a serious possibility for our existence and being. This is were atheists and agnostics diverge as for the atheist, religion does not become the substitute belief or truth until something else comes around.

The reason atheists are quite persistent is that they do not believe that standing by and respecting religious supremacy can do any good. On the contrary, atheists see a real and palpable danger in giving credence to such views as atheists find religion to be solely responsible for the decline in knowledge and education (such as pertaining to stem cell research, teaching creationism and intelligent design being taught in schools in the United States as a viable theory next to evolution, just to name a few examples) and the myriad of other wrongs taking place in the name of religion. 

Atheists may even adhere to the notion that religion is just a byproduct of the diseased human mind as opposed to its driver. Misogyny was not born out of religion. It existed before religion was invented and became incorporated and institutionalized into religious doctrine. That is why misogyny is prevalent among  religious people and atheists alike.

I Do Not Know

Finally, one of the most important things that distinguishes atheists from agnostics is that the latter ultimately believes that the answers may be there and are just waiting to be discovered. That there is a possibility that there is a higher power and purpose that we just haven’t figured it out yet but one day may.

An atheist, on the other hand, is perfectly fine with not knowing all the answers or the notion that there may really never be an answer when it comes to the questions of why and the nature of existence. In fact, an atheist operates from that assumption and is only willing to entertain the alternative with definite proof.  An agnostic, however, is willing to entertain the alternative even without proof.

Ultimately, the atheist recognizes that maybe there are some things we will never know. And maybe the key is to know what those things are and to leave them alone.

Following Agamben, Smith holds that there are two radically divergent trajectories in contemporary thought. The first is the push towards a conceptualization of ‘pure immanence,’ a task that inevitably comes to problematize the passional affects that are associated with the notion of transcendence: “From the viewpoint of immanence,” Smith writes, transcendence is an indicator of a lack of power, “impotence reduced to its lowest point,” and if transcendence represents this impotence, then “under what conditions can I have actually been led to desire transcendence?”[1] The second trajectory, on the other hand, is characterized by the retention of precisely these passional affects and the apotheosis of the ‘formal structure’ of transcendence, which problematizes any thought of immanence without transcendence. According to Smith, Deleuze employs the concept of ‘difference-in-itself’ to obliterate transcendence, whereas Derrida employs his différance to preserve the formal structure of transcendence in immanence.

Thus, Deleuze follows the first trajectory, whereas Derrida, a ‘thinker of transcendence,’ diverges from Deleuze insofar as he follows the second trajectory. Smith argues further that any intellectual ‘encounter’ between Deleuze and any contemporary thinker of transcendence (e.g. Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Lévinas) must be staged in light of this irreparable divide: to retain transcendence within immanence (even as a phantasm, the thought of the impossible) is to reject Deleuze’s conception of immanence. In our ‘contemporary moment,’ thinkers of transcendence “no longer [see] immanence as immanent to something”—a transcendent world of Ideas, as in Plato, or Kant’s notions of a transcendental subject or an insensible God.[2] Their strategy, instead, is to locate “transcendence within the heart of immanence … as a breach or interruption of its field.”[3] Smith cites Levinas’ concept of the infinite transcendence of the “Other,” as well as Habermas’ ‘postmetaphysical’ concept of a transcendent “intersubjective world” (cf. Habermas 1988). To these two, we could add Sartre’s postulation of a ‘hole in the heart of being’: Sartre’s deflationary claim that “it is nothingness which is at the very heart of transcendence and which conditions it” reduces transcendence to a (non-)being, yet nonetheless preserves the very notion of transcendence, albeit in an abstract and ‘empty’ form.[4] Invariably, transcendence is retained through an internal relation to the immanent. Contrast this with Deleuze’s contention that only the immanent could ever have an internal relation to immanence: “It is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence,” that is, of immanence as such.[5]

The chapter on Deleuze and Derrida, which ends in aporia (but an aporia in which the ‘progressive’ truth-seeker Deleuze has the decided advantage, as with Socrates at the end of Book II of the Republic), is immediately followed by two essays that present a rigorous defense of Deleuze’s œuvre against the objections of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who have both written critical texts that have called Deleuze into question. In these texts, which are perhaps the most technical pieces of philosophy in this entire collection, Smith plays the classic ‘apologist,’ surpassing any defense that Deleuze himself would have ever cared to give for his own work, as Deleuze notoriously held that ‘objections have never contributed anything’ to philosophy and that they are best left ignored. In both these essays, Smith claims that the error of Badiou and Žižek lies in the fact that they pose an interesting challenge to Deleuze at first, but they do not follow through with their initial objections and instead argue for weaker claims (e.g., Badiou’s claim that Deleuze is a philosopher of the One), which ‘get Deleuze wrong’ on a basic level. Smith thus attempts to reduce their arguments to poor hermeneutics. On this note, I am mildly sympathetic to Žižek’s response to Smith, which accuses Smith of a certain degree of hypocrisy:

“after outlining his basic point about Lacan and Deleuze (how Deleuze was effectively much closer to Lacan than it may appear, how Anti-Oedipus aims at saving Lacan from Lacanians, etc.), one would expect Smith to confront (critically reject or whatever) my specific reading of Deleuze…. What we get instead of this is the expanded version of the standard “Deleuzian” party line on Lacan: it is already Lacan who, especially in his late writings, breaks out of the Oedipal constraints … in their Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari merely want to go further (to the end) in this direction…”[6]

However, when Smith poses his objection to Žižek’s readings of Deleuze, he ‘follows through’ inasmuch as his response is a sustained (i.e. coherent) meditation on a single theme. (This cannot be said of Žižek’s Organs Without Bodies—nor of the response to Smith’s essay that is quoted above.) Also, one can already see how the “standard ‘Deleuzian’ party line” does respond to Smith’s basic point about the relation between Lacan and Deleuze in a way that Badiou and Žižek’s arguments do not. Thus, Smith’s use of this form of objection is generally more convincing than Žižek’s use the same form of objection in response to Smith’s reading of Žižek.

The next chapter in Essays on Deleuze comes as a bit of a surprise, as it is a reading of Pierre Klossowski and not Gilles Deleuze, only tangentially related to the rest of the Essays through the mediating force of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (and through the fact that Deleuze and Klossowski were amiable contemporaries). In this chapter, Smith unpacks the conceptual ‘toolbox’ of Klossowski’s Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle, an unorthodox analysis of Nietzsche’s “lived experience” of the eternal return. The eponymous ‘circle’ is not necessarily the indication of a circular temporality (as in other interpretations of the eternal return), but instead stems from a reading of the theory of psychological ‘drives’ or impulses [Trieb] as expounded in Nietzsche’s Daybreak: the vicious circle refers to the self-reinforcing relation between conscious intentions and unconscious impulses. The ‘drives,’ which are unconscious and pre-personal, constitute a new conception of the ‘soul’ which is fundamentally multiple: “What makes every individual a ‘singular case’ or an ‘idiosyncrasy’ is the unique constellation of impulses of which it is constituted.”[7] This constellation, while irrational and chaotic, is nonetheless political, and the meta-stability of the political patterns between conflicting drives enables the dominant impulses to produce phantasms, or ‘obsessional images,’ which are expressed through the objects of our conscious (i.e. intentional) desires as stable stereotypes. Unconscious drives thus exercise their will to power over other subordinate drives and over the conscious ‘subject’. When our conscious desire wills the reproduction of the phantasm, however, it produces not a stereotype, but a simulacrum—an artifact that exaggerates the singular characteristics of stereotypes, which in turn pushes us back into the sub-representational domain of the lived intensity of the drives. The affects produced by simulacra (which, by definition, only ever imitates the affect of the phantasm and can never directly replicate it) in turn alter the constellation of drives in profound ways, which produces new phantasms, stereotypes, and simulacra. The vicious circle… It is as such that the thought of the truth of the eternal return (the ‘simulacrum of a doctrine’) necessarily changes those who come to experience it, for better or for worse (Nietzsche had already expressed doubts that the eternal return was itself a symptom of his life-denying culture and of décadence).

The final chapter in Smith’s collection concerns Paul Patton’s Deleuze & the Political. Patton brings a variety of Deleuze’s texts together (not only his directly political Capitalism & Schizophrenia series, but also his 1968 treatise Difference & Repetition) to present a forceful contribution to the encounter between Deleuze and the liberal tradition. Smith focuses on the notion of a “critical” political freedom that is not based on agency or subjectivity, but is instead on realizing the conditions necessary for the production of new modes of life. The only permanently ‘territorialized’ norm, then, for Patton, is “deterritorialization” itself: that is, the uprooting of norms, the “creation of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze) or ‘resistance’ (Foucault) that allow[s] one to break free from a given norm or to transform the norm.”[8] While all our norms may be called into question, the quest for the production of the new must remain unquestioned: otherwise, we will stagnate. Smith does not make explicit how this view departs from Derrida’s conception of the undeconstructability of justice contra the deconstructability of the law, but Patton’s more recent work Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics may provide a more articulate account of the differences between Derrida and Deleuze in the political domain.

References:

Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University, 1994).

Habermas, Jürgen. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being & Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956).

Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze & Derrida, Immanence & Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in Essays on Deleuze (Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 271-286.

__________. “Mathematics & the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze & Badiou Revisited,” in Essays, 287-311.

__________. “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan,” in Essays, 312-324.

__________. “Klossowski’s Reading of Nietzsche: Impulses, Phantasms, Stereotypes,” in Essays, 325-338.

__________. “Deleuze & the Liberal Tradition: Normativity, Freedom, and Judgment,” in Essays, 339-360.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People,’” in Criticism 46:4 (2004), 661-666.

When I first thought about writing this blog, I wanted to bold all the Ifs that appeared in the texts.

But not any if. Only the magic IF.

The magic IF happens whenever there is a possibility. When a direction can be chosen instead of another.

When imagination allows us to think about other possibilities than those that actually occurred, or even at all the possibilities [and in my case really at all] that may happen in the future.

We may even be condemned to this freedom, but it is so nice to know that every time [and in my case it is at the instant] decisions can be taken [or amended].

With the freedom to often choose the worst option.

This week’s post (and the next) are going to deal with some complicated issues regarding technology, consciousness, human development, and the future of humanity.  Sold?  OK.  But before we begin I want to remind you of two facts that are usually held in isolation but become astounding when comprehended together.  They are both dates.  The first is December 17, 1903, when the Wright Brothers managed to invent powered human flight at Kitty Hawk.  The second is July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.  Now, think about this: the intervening time between those dates is 65 years, 7 months, and 3 days.  In 65 years, 7 months, and 3 days we went from two bicycle mechanics from Ohio managing to fly a distance of 120 feet, 10 feet off the ground in North Carolina, to another Ohioan (and a Roman and a Jerseyite, to be fair) traversing roughly 238,900 miles* in the vacuum of space.  Then, you know, landing on the goddamn Moon.  And then, you know, flying back.  From the goddamn Moon.  We did all this in 65 years, 7 months, and 3 days.  Well within a lifespan.   This is something that should keep you up at night and periodically surprise you in the shower when you’re thinking about other things.  The history of powered human flight, from inception to arguable apex in 65 years, 7 months, and 3 days.  This is the paradigm of technology: it runs away from us so fast we’re barely holding onto it with our fingernails.  And it just gets faster.

All right, onto the bullshit.

As sentient or conscious beings we humans have a very important, primordial relationship with technology—not only with modern technological artifacts like the overpriced and underpowered but devastatingly sexy laptop I am currently typing this on, but also with even the most rudimentary clubs our hirsute but ambitious ancestors may have used to crush berries or each other’s skulls.  So primitive is this relationship that the questions we have concerning technology and the questions concerning consciousness are fundamentally tied to each other, and if we are to explore one we must explore the other.  Fortunately, this is why the President of Philosophy pays me such enormous amounts of money.  Because I am good at talking out of my ass.

First, let’s take what may appear to be a completely senseless detour—and, for those of you who are veteran readers of Seemingly Completely Senseless Detours, you know that there is at best only a 50/50 chance of us ever finding our way back.   And here it is: We need to talk about freedom.  (Oh dear.  I hope you have packed a sandwich and a stout machete.)

That there are many things that we mean when we talk about “freedom” is something new only to a freshman political science/philosophy student or those of us who have never been cripplingly poor and subject to the fell clutch of circumstance and the bludgeonings of chance.  There is the most common, in modern times, notion of freedom: to be free is to be able to do something without impediment by other people or the government or whatever.  When I go shooting quail with a 100 round drum magazine I am taking advantage of ‘merica being a “free country” in this sense.   Gubmint can’t stop me from splodin’ those tiny birds with hollow points because Socialisms and Con-sil-tution, etc.  This is the kind of freedom that we typically try to maximize in our society and for ourselves.  We shrink government and slash regulations so that people can take care of themselves without having to rely on government handouts and don’t have to know that their hamburger is 80% sawdust and 20% drifters.  We try to accumulate as much money as possible so that we can be free from worries and constraints like people on TV, who travel and purchase spontaneously and never seem to work, get gas, or shit.  But what about those of us who will never achieve such bourgeois freedom?  What is freedom for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?  Well, like every “advantage” the dregs of society have clawed out for themselves, this sense of freedom involves cheating.

Let’s say that you’re Crunchy, the syphilitic hobo.  Trustfund T. Moneybags can do whatever he wants, when he wants, and is truly free while you must distribute back-alley handies just to get enough scratch to buy your medicine.  (Which is heroin.  Your medicine is heroin.)  Clearly you are not free at all in the sense of Moneybags.  You are a slave to your conditions, your circumstances.  So you come up with a new kind of freedom that cheats the system.  Freedom, you suppose, comes not from he situation that you are in but in how you react to it.  You can’t control the fact that you’re a syphilitic hobo without any marketable skills or teeth.  But you can control how you react to being ol’ Crunchy.  You can, through discipline and self-control, come to appreciate what you have and find happiness in any situation, even your impending and inevitable case of AID-ies (hybrid of AIDS and rabies).  You smile and curl up in the corner of the boxcar that isn’t full of feces, knowing that you are truly free.  You sure showed them.  Up, no, wait.  You died because scurvy turned your organs into hot cheese soup.  Sorry.

Both of these notions of freedom come with downsides.  The first kind leads to the fuck-you-I-got-mine mentality of the hover-round brigade who don’t want Obama govermenting their Medicare, don’t believe in a social contract, don’t want to pay for anything, and think it’s a great idea to vote for politicians who don’t want to govern. (“If we were to hire you, what would be your first act as manager of this McDonalds?”  “To break everyone’s legs, burn it down, and sell the smoldering wreckage to the Chinese.”  “Excellent.  When can you start?”)  The second form of freedom, as shown by my philosophy-bro Isaiah Berlin, can lead to all kinds of totalitarian shenanigans: if freedom is self-control, then it must be control of some kind of “lower” self by a “higher” self.  And if that’s the case, then you might be defective and not be able to regulate yourself properly.  You need someone who represents a “higher” self to do that for you.  This is what a good government should do.  You know, force you to be free.  It’s OK.  Just sign here.  You don’t need to read it.  Great.  Now what size mass grave do you wear?

I’m sure we’ll talk about these kinds of freedom again at some point (especially because I appear to be allergic to not talking about Plato), but there’s something else I want to point out here.  Besides these two types of freedom (and their associated derivatives) there is a third type—and it is much more basic than the other two.  This third type, we might even say, is the foundation for any other type of freedom that we could talk about.  This primordial freedom is brought to our attention by our favorite beret-wearing, baget-toting, scarf-tossing, cigarette-smoking jackasses: the existentialists.  They call it radical freedom because it wears a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses and it skateboards.  Actually they just stole it from the stoics, dolled it up with some 20^th Century Frenchy-talk, and hoped no one would notice.  This type of freedom is associated with consciousness.  Actually, this type of freedom is consciousness.

Awesome.  What the hell does that mean.

Well, the stoics talked about it like this: all animals are capable of receiving impressions.  If there’s a dog on one side of a room, and you put a plate of food on the other side, the dog gets an impression of the food through its senses, and it ambles over and eats it.  Bad dog.  People, like other animals, also get impressions.  But unlike other animals, human beings are capable of either, shall we say, affirming or negating those impressions.  You put the plate of food down, the dog sees it, and the dog goes after it.  We all know that this will happen.  The dog sees the food and he goes for it.  That’s it.  But there is no reason to assume the situation would play out similarly if it were a person instead of a dog.  Animals act on their impressions immediately, but people have an extra faculty, an added step between getting an impression and acting.  That is, human beings can say “yes” or “no.”  A gazelle hears the snap of a twig in the tall grass.  It runs away.  Joe the Animal Planet cameraman hears the snap of a twig in the tall grass.  Prompt: C:DOS/Run away?  Y/N.

Similarly, for the existentialists, freedom comes from consciousness two-year-old-esque endless ability to say “no.”  You can say no to anything.  Let’s go back to the dog and the food.  Suppose the dog is starving when we put the food down.  It’s going to eat that food 10 times out of 10.  Suppose that we replace the dog with a starving person.  We might assume the same result.  However, unlike the dog even a starving person can still say no.  He may be on a hunger strike.  He may have some kind of dying-of-starvation fetish.  For whatever reason, it is still possible for him to refuse the food.  Their larger point is this:  we act as though most of our behavior is determined.  Get up, go to work, go to bed, get up, go to work, go to bed.  We do these things because we have no choice—but, of course, we do.  You don’t have to get up.  You don’t have to go to work.  You don’t have to do anything.  As they say, no one has a gun to your head.  And even if someone did have a gun to your head, you could still say no.  He’ll show you your brains as a Jackson Pollock, but you can still say no.  Radical freedom!

We’re still not there yet, however.  We have now that consciousness is freedom, and that according to the stoics and the existentialists that it is the freedom to say “no” to whatever, but what is consciousness freedom from?  That answer is a little more complicated.  However (lucky us), we’ve touched on this idea before when we talked about the Cave, that wonderful, inexhaustible allegory.  Imagine, for a moment, that you are not the glitch in the Matrix that you are, the Gödel sentence in the system of nature, the malfunctioning ape.  Instead, you are a normal (neurotypical?) animal.  What is the actual life of a normal animal really like?  It’s hard for us to imagine, after so many millennia exiled from Eden.  But we can probably assume that, from dawn ‘til dusk, every moment is entirely consumed with survival—the mere, unadorned maintenance of your life.  Not your way of life or your activities or hopes or dreams. Your, as we say, bare life.  The mere continued beating of your heart and firing of your synapses.  Simply staying alive.  There is nothing else for you.  Every action you take is dictated to you by this.  You must get food, you must get shelter, you must stay out of the jaws of the larger things.  There is nothing more than this.  It is, for you, a totality.  This is what your life and the world is, entirely.  Every minute of every day.  You are within Nature and subject to Necessity.

Let’s construct a cumbersome metaphor—the best kind of metaphor.  Suppose that the world is really an enormous game of chess.  All of our animal friends (lambs, sloths, carps, orangutans, breakfast cereals, fruit bats, etc.) are the pieces—all pawns.  The chessboard is the environment, and the rules of the game are the various natural laws that govern what certain animals can and cannot do—what we might call capital-n Nature.  We might say that the hand that moves the pieces is that of Necessity.  Necessity moves each animal according to its capabilities and the laws of Nature (the rules of the game) and its surroundings (the board).  At one point we were the pawns of Necessity, also: our every action was governed by instinct and mere survival, and we were therefore pushed around the board, zig-zagging away from all manner of leopards in the tall grass.  But somewhere, sometime, something changed.  What happens when a pawn gets to the other side of the board?

The point is this:  at some point we overthrew the tyranny of instinct, deposed Necessity, and became something…else.  We cast ourselves out, separated ourselves from Nature.  And this is what it is to be conscious: to be free from Necessity and therefore booted out of Nature.  When you go camping it’s like trespassing in your old childhood home or peering in the windows: you don’t live there anymore.  Just visiting.  Whereas everything around your little campsite does what it does because it has to, you’re going camping because you want to.  You’re free.  The squirrels are not.  Nature and Necessity tell them how to spend every minute of every day.  But you, to use the famous metaphor, are an actor sent out on stage with no lines and no direction, just making it up as you go along.**

So we’ve answered several questions (consciousness is freedom, the freedom to say yes or no, and freedom from Necessity), but now we have another: how the hell did that happen?  How did we become this paradoxical creature that, in a sense, is part of Nature but irrevocably separated from it?  How did Patient Zero come down with consciousness?

I don’t know, of course.  I’m a philosopher (ha!), not some big city scientician all up in his planetorium with beakers and test tubes and large hard-on colliders.  But I reckon it had something to do with the development of technology.

There are two ways in which this may be the case.  The first is relatively straightforward.  The development of technology allowed us to become conscious.  Again, we’ve talked about this before: technology makes bare survival easier.  The more technology we have, the less we have to deal with keeping our blood in our veins and food in our bellies.  Instead of circumstances (Nature and Necessity) dictating who, when, and how we eat, we take the reins.  Technology (from the rudimentary bone club to the computer) is supposed to free up time for other things.  What do we do in the time that we’re not consumed with finding food and shelter and running away from leopards?  Well, that’s where human history starts.  All that other stuff that we do.

But there is another sense in which the use of technology may make us conscious.  The problem with uncovering this sense is the way we tend to think about what it means to be conscious.  At least, the way most people think about it.  We tend to lump consciousness together with sentience and self-awareness.  To be conscious, in this sense, is to be in a state of wakefulness, we might say.  Animals are kind of sleepwalking through their lives, unaware of anything else but the next edible paycheck.  But you are “awake”.  You have an identity and are aware of yourself.  You are a thing that sees through your eyes and lives your life and has dreams and desires and loves and losses and wonders what happens when the curtain falls.  This is what it means to be self-aware.  But this, is not, I think, what it means to be conscious.

In order to tease this difference out, we need to talk about what the use of technology means.  What does a technological act signify?  Think back tens of thousands of years.  You are an Ape on the verge of becoming a Man.  You are Patient Zero.  What does it mean when you, like in 2001, shatter a skull with a femur-club?  What does that act tell us?

As hinted at above, the technological act signifies or constitutes a breach of the system.  Up to that point, Nature dictates our actions but also provides.  Think about another great technological leap forward: the invention of agriculture.  Before that we wandered and gathered as we went, dependent entirely upon what we could find.  But when we started to plant crops we settled down.  We used technology to provide for ourselves.  What I’m getting at is even more apparent in the domestication of animals and selective breeding of livestock: both of these involve the use of the processes of Nature to our advantage.  With the technological act—even the simplest, most primitive one—we are stepping outside of Nature and using it.  This is a breach because we are no longer subsumed under the system, but have instead, by the material means of technology, enslaved that which used to entirely dominate us.  Therein lies that primordial rift between us and Nature, but the most important thing here, for our purposes at least, is that you cannot use something without being aware of it.

The point is this: the technological act either signifies or constitutes an awareness not only of the self, but an awareness of the self and the system of which it is a part.  So when Patient Zero shatters that skull with his club he is announcing that he is aware of Nature.  That’s where the money is, kid.  Becoming conscious isn’t just waking up one day and realizing that you are you.  It’s realizing yourself relative to something else—in this case, Nature.  Can you overthrow a tyrant that you didn’t even know existed?  And how can you separate yourself out from something, how can you differentiate you without drawing a stark line between you and whatever it is that isn’t you?  You don’t just “wake up.”  Like everything else, it involves work.  In this case, literally.  The length and breadth of human history can be summed up by saying that one day some apes got wise to the grift and started to turn things around.  And as the years roll by we widen that gulf between ourselves and Nature, and we subjugate it more and more.

The question for part two:  how does this story end?  All of this is the setup.  But what is the punchline?  There’s reason to believe that we’re getting damn close to it.  Remember: 65 years, 7 months, 3 days.  And it just. Gets. Faster.

* They actually went a hell of a lot farther than that, but that’s the average distance to the Moon.  In total I’d imagine Apollo 11 went from liftoff to splashdown between one and two million miles.  But I don’t feel like looking it up.  There’s grading to do.

** Clearly, this is not to say that we are totally out of Nature’s domain.  It still whispers to us from time to time.  You still have to pee every once in a while.  And you still jump at loud noises.  And you’re still uneasy in the dark.  But you get my point.  I hope.

“In My Mailbox a été mis en place par Kristi du blog The Story Siren et inspiré par Alea du blog Pop Culture Junkie. C’est un moyen de partager les livres reçus chaque semaine dans notre boite aux lettres ainsi que les livres achetés ou empruntés à la bibliothèque.”

Bon, cette semaine, c’était seulement des emprunts à la bibliothèques ! Et pas des moindres puisque je me suis pris un livre de Sartre, je ne sais pas si je le chroniquerais, mais je trouve important de le lire, il m’intrigue ce philosophe. Quand à Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’éléphants, vous le retrouverez dans pas longtemps puisque j’ai vraiment hâte de le lire.

Et pour finir, une petit livre philosophique que j’ai déjà commencé ! Il est tout simplement génial.

Et vous, qu’avez-vous reçu ?

Freedom is not an “added on quality or property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being…”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology

This also happens to be the question for my first essay assignment for the module, Introduction to Continental Philosophy. And I was surprised I did relatively ok for it. Philosophy sounded intimidating at first and I was never the person that’s best at writing.. It is turning out the module that I got at the very last minute which wasn’t part of my academic plan is the module that I’m gaining most from this semester..We’re past existentialism and on to post-structuralism now and I hope my next assignment will be okay as well.

Sartre developed the philosophical attitude of existentialism, which, in a nutshell, is the belief that in life, you must confront and deal with the meaninglessness inherent in living, but not succumbing to the despair that is commonly associated with this realisation, and not giving up or avoiding responsibility of your actions. It’s pretty heavy stuff. It’s only 250-odd pages long, and it’s not a tough read. The ideas are evocative and it tugs at the cords in my mind. I’ve always had a thing for philosophy, I might study it in uni or something.

I’m also glad it fits in with my Extension English module of Modernism at school. It has all the stream-of-consciousness, alienation-from-society, epiphany sort of stuff modernism encompasses. Yay for me!

If you’ve ever read the ABOUT section of my right sidebar, you’ve probably wondered about that quote. “I do not exist, therefore I am a moustache.” It’s from this book. It’s also taken entirely out of context. I guess that’s why I like it.

Oh yeah, you can buy the book here.

Conversations with John Gardner

It’s not surprising to see how many of the interview introductions in this collection focus on John Gardner’s physical appearance and on the controversy that surrounded his book On Moral Fiction. We’re familiar now with the famous description by Stephen Singular: ‘He is a small, potbellied man and his white hair falls over his shoulders, so that he looks something like a pregnant woman trying to pass for a Hell’s Angel.’ We get the full article here. Singular goes on a little too eagerly with the most venomous attacks on Gardner’s character delivered by the authors Gardner himself attacked.

Though never quite tasteful to compare a grown man to a pregnant woman, though we feel sorry about the poor reception of his work in the last years of his life, did he not sort of bring it upon himself? He started On Moral Fiction when he was unknown and redrafted it when he was known, which transitioned him to very known. The man who had once been known for the classic Grendel and the best-selling The Sunlight Dialogues was later known as the self-righteous pipe-smoking country boy who regarded Saul Bellow’s works as failures, Kurt Vonnegut’s works as comic books and Stanly Elkin’s work as childish playthings.

If you’re to agree with Gardner, you’d think America’s literature was full of ‘evil.’ Well, then who’s left to follow? Whom do we have left to read if we can’t read satans like Saul Below, snakes like Stanly Elkin, jerks like John Barth and brats like Bernard Malamud? John Gardner, of course! Oh, and don’t worry, there are others. Those who make the cut include Dickens and Tolstoy with Joyce Carol Oats and John Fowls, following (curiously) close behind.

After ‘evil,’ other words that Gardner uses frequently and plays pretty loose with include ‘bad,’ ‘immoral,’ and my personal favorite, ‘genius,’ (everyone in his family, including himself, seems to qualify as a genius). The term ‘nihilism’ is interchangeable with ‘pessimism’ in Gardner’s vocabulary.

This ‘Conversations With’ series, which usually prints pretty thin books of 120 odd pages, gave Gardner a full 300 pages. He likes to talk a lot. He likes to talk a lot about his own books. But that’s not the only thing he seems to like talking about. The Detroit Magazine interview assures us that ‘most of what he knows about philosophy he keeps to himself unless you press him to reveal it.’ Now, I’m sorry, but who in the world is going to press you about your knowledge of philosophy? In this book, Gardner takes up so much space talking about philosophy that the only presser one could imagine pressing him is something like a gangster-interviewer with a gun pointed at Gardner, telling him to spill absolutely everything he knows.

Gardner is probably at his best when interpreting different philosophical conundrums. He qualifies his moral arguments quite well with the historical backdrop of morality itself. His criticism of Sartre is quite clear and he even praises his prose.

At his worst, Gardner is saying far too much far too fast, not checking dates but drawing convenient conclusions that compliment his moral points, such as this:

‘For example, Dostoyevsky reads Nietzsche and he’s interested in Nietzsche’s theory of the superman, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, Dostoyevsky had inclinations in that direction, a touch of megalomania certainly, and a touch of the outlaw … Raskolnikov would naturally, being exactly the kind of person he is, have certain friends, relatives, associations and Dostoyevsky introduces them, makes a perfect laboratory experiment.’
This conclusion isn’t wrong for theoretical literary reasons. It is wrong for a much simpler reason. Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which features the very first mention of ‘the superman,’ was published more than 20 years after Raskolnikov’s exploits in Crime and Punishment. This is a largely forgivable mistake since it is merely a matter of switching diametrically opposed details (we have every reason to believe that it was in fact Dostoyevsky’s characters who inspired ‘the superman’)

Strange logical aberrations are bound to pop up in the language of a man who talks this much. Here’s another: ‘And then I think the whole world shifted with the rise of The Beatles and the drug culture and the revival of Disney.’

He comes off so charming and generous in his answers that we find ourselves wanting to believe him even when he contradicts himself. Sometimes he says he writes 15 or 20 hours every day without exception. Sometimes he tells us he doesn’t write when he’s depressed. Sometimes he feels he belongs to the school of verbal acrobats like Barthelme, Coover, Hawkes and Gass. Other times he considers those same the worst. Sometimes he despairs over and disowns On Moral Fiction as badly researched and unfair, while other times he assures us that his work and his theories will stand the test of time.

It is too perfect that one of his close friends was William Gass, perhaps the only writer who didn’t get hurt by Gardner’s criticisms. Gass just didn’t care too much about what anyone else had to say about his work, or about anyone’s work. They got in shouting matches over bottles of gin at the kitchen table late at night, bound together by their difference.

We don’t know if Gardner’s books will be read a hundred years from now, but they are being read now. Ten years ago, all but the best selling of his best sellers were out of print. Now, the post career controversy novel, Micklsson’s Ghosts, has come back into print along with several other works. We get to enjoy the best of what Gardner has to offer in glistening prose even if, now and then, it is interrupted by the odd cliché, the cumbersome sentence. His books are like him and vice versa. They talk a lot, they are full of contradictions, they try big things, they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Either way, we’re endeared to the effort and the spirit of the work.

More and more Filipinos are leaving their own county out of this growing consciousness of nothingness which has become a phenomenological fact of our daily lives.  Such nothingness manifests itself in different forms and levels of deficiency, from basic nutrition to public healthcare to quality education to public order to good governance to name a few. It is precisely this awareness of nothingness which impels one to create himself according to Sartre. But as we have seen, such self-creation is defined these days no longer in terms of a self-project.  With the advent of global economy, underwritten by liberalist ideology, self-creation has been equated with mere acquisition of skills considered marketable in well developed countries such as those mentioned above.  The current generation sees their becoming no longer as a meaningful pursuit but as an endeavor towards a more profitable future.  Certainly there is nothing wrong in aspiring to earn more; what makes the situation lamentable is the reduction of human potential to mere acquisition of profit.   This obsession with profit, either in individual or social scale, is the chief characteristic of the modern society and it infects the way individuals look at themselves and the manner with which they relate with one another and the world at large.  Sartre’s notion of freedom as the key to human creativity has no place in modern society.  There is no need to be free after all; our fates have been decided and our journeys has been charted by the gods in the Olympus of the global economy long before we could learn how to dream   Our needs have been subsumed by the needs of the market.  Our hopes are pinned on the worldwide financial forecasts.  Our angst hangs in the balance of the shifting behavior of the global trade.  The only freedom left in us is the freedom to choose which skill to acquire to match the demands of the labor market or the freedom is to stay home and starve ourselves to extinction.  Such is the famous Sartrean irony of freedom.  Whether to be the worlds’ laborer or to remain poor in one’s own country is a matter of a personal cboice.  Freedom is both our transcendence and condemnation.  There is really no exit out of it.  The Sartrean notion of freedom is a celebration of individual autonomy and at the same time, a phenomenology of the irony of the human condition.  Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is an exploration of the inherent promise and problem of becoming human which freedom itself underlies.  Sartre reminds us that:  “Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism. This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that man can realize himself as truly human.”

There is therefore something definitely remiss then when the individual is disempowered of his ability to surpass himself and relegated merely as a cog in the machine of global wealth creation; when the individual as a being for-itself is reduced and restricted into a mindless being in-itself by the lords and masters of profit.  Sartrean philosophical anthropology, when read with critical caution, is a good reminder of the beauty of becoming human, which sadly, is gradually fading from the appreciation of the modern individual.  Or maybe it has not really faded but suppressed by a caricature of himself as free man inside the cage he himself gilded with gold and silver.

That is a unique experience. Einstein came to the same conclusion when he developed the Theory of Special Relativity, though perhaps he didn’t have quite the same experience. You both beheld the same underlying reality, although you expressed it in different ways.

Plato’s Absolute, i.e., which is Beauty, Goodness and Truth in One, is immanent. It is distinct but not distant from us, and every soul can ascend to it by reason and intellect. There are different types and levels of beauty, in the human body, in nature, in the universe, in science and art, literature and music. One doesn’t have to be a “Superman” to see beauty or create beauty. Every life is an artistic activity. Every individual is an artist.

The concept of Absolute by no means deny or diminish the freedom of individual existence. On the contrary, the more diverse and free the individual existence, the better and fuller it manifest Absolute Beauty. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth, unless each member of the choir and orchestra plays his/her best part, the beauty of the symphony cannot be manifested nor experienced by the audience.

Unlike Kant who believes that the noumenal is unknowable, Platonists reason that the noumenal and the phenomenal correspond with one another (sort of like the way an image in the mirror corresponds to the original), since they are both derived from one and the same intelligible reality. Because of this “correspondence”, it is possible to do science. We have been able to predict with accuracy the movement of the stars and other events occurring in nature; Because of this “correspondence” between our consciousness and the outside world, it is possible for us to interact with other people and the world

Thus, while I am free to choose for myself whether I take up my understanding of my being-in-the-world as a student, a doctor, a lawyer, a husband, or philosopher; I am not free to choose from among those possibilities for which, on account of my thrownness, do not present themselves to me as meaningful possibilities.

Thus, Sartre is wrong when he concludes that human being’s freedom (of action) is absolute. This presumes that one can get fully behind, or separate from, one’s facticity; but this only evidences Sartre’s latent Cartesianism – and indeed, contributing to his general misreading of Heidegger. In other words, Sartre is unable to move beyond his presupposition of a subject removed, or detached from his situated-ness in the world.

It still suffices to say that human being is doomed to his freedom. Even if our freedom isn’t the absolute freedom that Sartre believes it to be, we are still all alone, abandoned to ourselves, and faced with the same abysmal groundlessness of existence – with only the slight qualification as regards the otherwise tenuous security offered by our facticity.