Rational Philosophy

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Last week I had my first introduction to the layered world views of Buddhism. Apparently there are six of them, each one introducing a little more more enlightenment than the one before.  Those aspiring to inner peace can ease themselves along the way by meditating on each worldview in turn and practicing its lessons in everyday life.

I got to hear the first two during a yoga class Dharma talk. I apologize to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike if I’m paraphrasing poorly:

Worldview one: Everything changes, or nothing stays the same.

Worldview two: The present moment is what it is and we can do nothing to change it. (Although how we respond to the present moment affects the next moment and the next.)

If something can immediately start to be dwelled upon I immediately began to dwell upon the practice of these worldviews. They seemed to have something to say about every frustration or concern traveling through my mind at the time and about every tricky situation I encountered from that point forward.

I was anxious, for instance, about the ongoing process of approvals at the New York City Department of Buildings (for our renovation) — the Buddhist worldviews helped me realize that I could not change the delays and hurdles, but that they would change with time. My daughter failed her chemistry regents and had to sign up for summer school — I was able to reassure her that this was not the end of the world, as it might seem, but just a modification to her plans for the summer, and a chance to get to learn a bit more about chemistry. And the England soccer team were knocked out of the World Cup after playing several lackluster games of soccer — a mediocre performance for my home country’s national squad; something of a tradition of late.

But while watching a PBS documentary about Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens as he was born) I realized that not only frustrations and hurdles but successes and satisfactions are fleeting and illusory.

Mark Twain’s life story provides a template through which to understand the weaknesses of the capitalist, consumerist worldview that we generally find ourselves stuck in: The perceived rightness of our aspiration for wealth, power, leisure, fame.

Twain denounced and reviled at these aspirations through his words but sought them endlessly in his deeds. He was not a hypocrite, I think, but a man conflicted, unable to reconcile his pleasure in material success and its trappings with his philosophical wisdom about the ultimate futility of striving mercilessly to fix anything that would inevitably change.

He made a fortune, built a beautiful home, surrounded himself with his loving and beloved family, and in the process set the seeds for losing it all (by financial overreaching).

The first two Buddhist worldviews teach us that not only must we practice acceptance and humility in failure and frustration, but also in success and satisfaction. Once I have succeeded in surmounting the feudal bureaucracy of the NYC DOB I will become a landlord and a homeowner with all of the challenges and hurdles that will bring. Once my daughter has passed her chemistry regents she’ll be focused on getting into college. Once England has a successful soccer team again… OK, if England ever has a successful soccer team again its successes won’t last forever (that privilege is reserved for Brazil).

Mississippi Steamboats

Near the beginning of the PBS Mark Twain documentary we learn that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) started his adult life working on steamboats up and down the Mississippi river. He loved it. He was diligent. He worked his way up to the position of pilot. He earned more than the president. Each day on the river opened up new worlds for him and he never tired of the 1200 mile weeks-long trip ferrying passengers and cargo. It was all he wanted to do. Life on the river was like living a dream.

After 12 years on the river the civil war intervened and Twain was forced to move on for a while. He never went back. The rest of his life was full of ultimately frustrated striving.

Twain’s life can be viewed as the mirror image of Siddhartha’s life. Twain started from humble origins, achieved great satisfaction and happiness as a young man traveling up and down the river, but left that behind for a later life of fruitless searching for happiness in wealth, fame and comfort. Siddhartha began with wealth and comfort and moved on to strive for happiness and satisfaction, finding it as a ferry pilot on the river.

If only we could reach back in time and introduce Twain to the first two worldviews of Buddhism.

A Serious Man - Joel and Ethan Coen

In A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen give us a movie that refuses to be chewed, never mind digested. This is intended to be a compliment. A Serious Man has the substance of gristle. After gnashing on it for a while we try to remove it for inspection, hoping that nobody notices that we’ve bitten off something we can’t masticate.

Perhaps this impenetrability is the point. What could be more true to life than a work of art that defies explanation. Do the Coen brothers understand A Serious Man? I don’t know. Do they have theories? Perhaps. Are these theories exhaustive? Who knows.

The protagonist in A Serious Man, a middle-aged, married college professor up for tenure, starts looking for an answer, a solution, as the life he thinks he has begins to crumble. His pathetic fate, as far as we can tell, is both at once entirely his own fault and entirely unavoidable. In the Coen brothers’ universe being good, being serious provides no defense against catastrophe. And so it is in the real universe.

Thus are we thrust us headfirst into a contemplation of the philosophy of purpose as if into an oven.

We elected Barack Obama because he is a serious man, a man with a purpose. His purpose is to make things better for America and for the world we live in. (Many people would dispute this, I’m sure. But I’m not writing for those people, so that doesn’t matter. If you agree with me, you know what I mean.) We were sick of being presided over by a bunch of people with other purposes at heart, purposes less altruistic and noble.

As the Coen brothers wryly point out, having a purpose is no protection against the universe. As we have seen over the past year Obama’s purpose in all its forms has been undermined, denigrated, thwarted, and diminished at every turn.

But does this mean that there is no substance to purpose? Does the universal irony of inevitable failure, disintegration, and death mean that having a purpose has no purpose?

Cold Souls - Paul G And A Soul

To answer that question I turn to another interesting movie I saw recently - Cold Souls. In Cold Souls those burdened by a heavy, angst-ridden soul can have it removed. Life without a soul, it turns out, becomes much lighter and more fun for some. What use is a soul if we only suffer it? The movie asks. But as Paul Giamatti discovers, he misses his soul, he misses the ballast of that inner weight.

And there is the answer, lying like a penny on the sidewalk, waiting to see whether it will be picked up. If we have a purpose, if we perceive a meaning, then this perception has substance. Refuting or ignoring that purpose and meaning denies the substance.

By analogy, physicists have shown that the apparently solid matter that fills the universe is not as solid as it seems. Not only is all material substance made up of tiny particles that are mostly empty space, but the tiniest components of matter present themselves as waves of electromechanical energy when we try to pin them down in space.

And yet to deny that the material world has practical substance would be to deny all of the information of our senses.

Matter is an illusion, but it is a meaningful, reliable illusion, one which shapes and defines our physical experience of our lives.

Having a purpose is the existential equivalent. Demonstrably irrelevant and illusory until we accept that it shapes and defines our spiritual or psychological purpose. This goes beyond cognitive dissonance. Denying purpose is as real as perceiving a mathematical absolute only to try to disprove it.

Quention Tarantino - Inglorious Basterds

On Friday night my wife and I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. Having enjoyed much of Mr. Tarantino’s previous work (Pulp Fiction, in particular) I was anticipating with great relish another dose of his enormous flair for form, pacing, humor, dialog, color, and hubris. He did not disappoint. Bloody, violent, and disturbing, yes, but a great treat all the same.

I had two philosophical issues with the movie. One quite limited and aesthetic, and the other raising a broader question. The first I will explain by saying that I prefer solid wood to veneer. Veneer inserts a fiction between the viewer and the object. Solid wood permits the viewer to see the object for what it is. Tarantino’s script rewrote certain important, nay critical, aspects of the Second World War. While a pleasing veneer from a plot perspective, his choice seemed to me to be unnecessary.

The second issue had to do with something more fundamental. Ends and means.

The script bristled with rousting “let’s stick it to those krauts” moments with its eponymous hand-picked cadre of scalping killers bent on instilling rampant fear in the ranks of the German army. But once or twice I wondered whether Tarantino didn’t perhaps want us to feel just as uncomfortable about the brutality of the good guys as he did about the brutality of the bad guys. (If so, the movie perhaps ventured into new moral territory for Mr. Tarantino, who has previously cleaved to the open plain of moral expedience.)

The Inglorious Basterds slaughter and scalp and leave bloody mark on their victims, and we root for them, don’t we? I mean they’re fighting against the Nazi’s, after all. Later we see the self-important Nazi sharp-shooter hero turned actor picking off allied soldiers in a Goebbels propaganda movie and we’re supposed to feel disgust for him, aren’t we? After all, he’s fighting the allies.

After a while there’s so much wanton mayhem on both sides that we begin to lose sight of who holds the moral high ground. I was confused. I got the feeling that perhaps Mr. Tarantino was confused.

Top (left to right): Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor. Bottom: Kennedy, Stevens, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

But that’s not what I really set out to write about. I really set out to write about those inglorious basterds the conservative supreme court justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. As written about in the NY Times, their recent majority decision on campaign finance puts the free speech rights of corporations and other organizations on a par with that of individuals, opening the door to an increase in corporate money in politics.

Lead dissenter, Justice Stevens pointed out that no new principle required overruling two major campaign finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those two decisions, he wrote, “is the composition of this court.”

The conservative justices sought to equalize the rights of corporations and individuals. But surely the freedoms of corporations or organizations should be distinguished from those of individuals rather than equated to them?

Society affords certain rights and privileges to its individual members by virtue of the fundamental equality it wishes them to have. This is eminently sensible. But to say that corporate entities inherit these same rights by default rests on nothing but a sleight of hand. Corporate entities or other organizations serve society only as far as they don’t impose on the general rights or wants of society. That’s why corporations are regulated, so that we can keep them in check.

The right of free speech implies the voice of an individual conscience expressing itself. Where in a corporation would you find that individual conscience? If it’s in one person, then let that person speak. If it’s in a board room, then let those board members speak. If it’s in the shareholdings, then let those shareholders speak.

Let’s be frank, corporate free speech implies corporate special interest. Permitting it willy nilly in politics further dilutes the voice of the average American citizen.

“While American democracy is imperfect,” writes Justice Stevens, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Bravo, Justice Stevens.

Paul Bowles’ “Points In Time” (highly recommended) contains the story of a wise man and teacher who removes himself from society by leaving town for a solitary spot in the wilderness. Pursued by his disciples who beg him to return and quiz him on the reason for his move he answers by taking a glass and filling it with water from the ocean: The water in the glass, now removed from the turbulent froth of tide and rocks, stands still.

Not all moves promise such peace. Some moves seem to disturb a settled state and throw us into disarray - both physical and psychic. I’ve just been through one such move.

After seven years establishing the insidious sediment of deliberate acquisitions and passive accumulations the act of wrapping it all up and putting it into the back of a moving truck (or three) comes as a shock to the system. It forces one to face the weight of one’s material load. And once the trucks have departed and trundled off (in our case) to long term storage, it reminds one that one can go quite happily about with a couple of bags and a credit card. Could it be that we didn’t really need all of that stuff?

Nature, inherently, involves motion. Our existence involves space in three dimensions and time. Time intrinsically requires motion, and motion intrinsically begets time. A universe without motion would be static and timeless. And a universe without time would be… well, in fact, would not be.

For human beings, time and motion take on higher-order paradoxical significance. Modern life is fast-paced. Self-reflection requires mindfulness and quieting the mind. Lack of motion implies sloth. Routine can be numbing or reassuring.

The act of moving inevitably stimulates experience. And this insight, I now realize, prompted me to write this post.

Whether we go out for a walk, or pack up and move on from seven years of history, changing our circumstances puts us into new circumstances. And new circumstances confront us with new experiences.

I’ve noticed that I am keenly aware of my new surroundings. We haven’t moved far; I was already quite familiar with our new neighborhood before we came to live here, and yet I feel as though I am inhabiting a new world, knee-deep in an alien culture. Each time I leave the house and walk down the block I examine and dissect the subtly unfamiliar sights and sounds of storefronts, church bells, and passersby.

Even the garbage piles intrigue me. What are the unwritten by laws around here for putting your trash out on the sidewalk for collection?

This open and engaged state of the mind in motion, I think, emerges from the very nature of our existence as mobile creatures in a changing world. Our minds respond intensely to change because if they didn’t we wouldn’t have survived.

A recent finding by neuroscience pioneer Fred Gage would seem to underscore this. Gage has discovered that our DNA is not, as had previously been thought, identical in every cell of our body. Where does it differ? In the brain. Gage postulates that this flexibility in the brain’s DNA has evolved as a way of ensuring that we can best meet life’s unpredictable challenges as we age. See DNA Brain Differences

I apologize for the wandering nature of this post. But I like that it’s brought me here. All of philosophy is experience. And all of experience is the mind in motion.

PS. For a little bemusement, read this Op Ed by Nicholas Kristoff, paid for by the Costa Rican tourist board - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html?em

The NY Times reports on a study published in Science magazine that correlates objective measures of quality of life across the nation, state by state, with subjective self-reporting of happiness. The conclusion? Objective measures of quality of life correlate very strongly to the subjective measures of happiness. Sunnier, more easily livable states rank higher on the happiness scale.

As a state, New York has the unhappiest people, according to the survey. But if you’re a New Yorker don’t plan on moving out of town as a strategy for improving your happiness — Connecticut and New Jersey place second to last and third to last respectively. It’s as if the region lies under a big gloomy cloud.

The report though got me thinking about the philosophy of happiness. To ask someone to rank his happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, for instance, measures not his or her subjective happiness level, but his or her consciously evaluated perception of his or her happiness. Do these measures correlate? And what is the philosophical foundation by which we place our level of happiness on an arbitrary scale?

As always when faced with a basic philosophical conundrum I ask myself how Socrates or Plato would approach it.

The form of happiness seems related to the form of the good. We instinctively know goodness when we see it, but it is only by evaluating the bigger picture of what will serve us or society or existence in the long term that we can meaningfully evaluate goodness. So too, I think, with happiness.

Let me explain. First we must ask whether happiness can be said to me meaningful beyond being a state of mind or spirit. Is happiness intrinsically an end in itself, or can it be said to serve a purpose to us as organisms, as people in a society, and as a species?

If we simply conclude that happiness derives from some quirk of human and animal nature and serves no greater purpose than its own result, then we can end the inquiry here. But this seems short-sighted.

Surely something so rife and debilitating as happiness must have appeared as an evolutionary appendage to the human spirit for a reason.

And what about its corollary feelings - unhappiness or misery or depression - surely these serve a purpose, too?

I have come to understand that unhappiness is as necessary to the human spirit as happiness. Unhappiness results from a friction between how we’d like things to be and how they are. The outcome of this friction is the necessary heat required to effect a change. And the evolutionary purpose to this chain reaction is the overcoming of obstacles to our persistence.

So, unhappiness is not only a necessary condition, it is a useful and fruitful condition. Unhappiness, so long as it doesn’t defeat us, gives us the spiritual will and gumption to do something positive.

Happiness, on the other hand, arises out of satisfaction with the status quo. The evolutionary purpose of happiness is to induce a torpor of the problem solving spirit. “Don’t worry!” our happiness tells us, “Everything is fine; nothing to worry about.” Happiness tends to have a sedative impact on the human spirit.

So, in a ranking of happiness New York falls at the bottom of the list. So what? In a ranking of unhappiness, in a ranking of persistence and doggedness, of force of will in the purpose of overcoming obstacles, New York would come out on top… The lop-sided survey failed to ask the most basic question — is happiness necessarily a better condition than unhappiness. Surely us New Yorkers understand that life isn’t meant to be easy.

YMCA Good Health Advisory

Above every water fountain at the YMCA there is a sign affixed to the wall, which reads: “Please Use Good Health Practices.”  The sign, of course, should read: “Don’t put your mouth on the spigot.”

Herein we have a ready symbol for the current health care debate. As the government wrestles over a bill to overhaul the healthcare system we fear that instead of a clear remedy we will end up with an ill-crafted obfuscation.

The issue of healthcare reform seems to raise an interesting paradox. To a large degree a culture of individualism defines American society. The enterprising, disenchanted Europeans who traveled thousands of miles to endure the rigors and dangers of the pioneering life for the sake of freedom put their stamp on the country’s DNA. That spirit of individual freedom coupled with entrepreneurial grit has evolved into an expectation of choice and self-determination in all things.

We believe we have a right to buy something at free market value and we don’t like to be told that an item isn’t available or can’t be had, or is priced artificially high.

The current healthcare system does just that. We can’t go out and purchase the healthcare package that’s right for us. Most of the time we have to buy the one our employer offers. The current healthcare system is unAmerican, surely.

Here is the paradox; people who object to the process of healthcare reform generally do so out of a fear that it means socialized medicine… Whereas what we have now is totalitarianized or monopolized medicine.

But I didn’t intend this to be a post about healthcare (even though I have a cold). I was more concerned with the problem of the wording of that sign over the water fountain. “Please Use Good Health Practices.” Haven’t we learned anything in the last few thousand years? Wasn’t Socrates chiding us for such imprecise and literally meaningless thinking-turned-language all those eons ago at the ancient Greek equivalent of the YMCA?

Every child should learn good thinking habits. It’s more important than brushing one’s teeth.

Another case in point: Senator Joseph Lieberman — a man somehow innoculated against lucid thought — has described the Fort Hood shootings as a “homegrown terrorist attack.” What does that mean? How does that concatenation of labels get absorbed by the American people and by people in other countries? “Homegrown,” “terrorist,” “attack.” Each word carries heavy freight under mildewed tarpaulin.

I fear that Lieberman, like the sign-crafters at the YMCA, really intended to convey something much more directly but shrank from it, or chose to obscure it. “Don’t put your mouth on the spigot!” was the real message, or, in Lieberman’s case “Let’s keep a closer watch on the arabs in our midst.”

I was happy to hear this morning that the recession has officially ended. I heard it on NPR. And you can clearly see this is the case from the graph below:

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(The red bar at 2009 Q3 goes up instead of down.)

This is wonderful news, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The memory of this latest economic fiasco can now begin slowly to fade from individual, institutional, governmental, and collective memory. Oh, happy day.

PBS tried to throw me into despair on the night before the first World Series game by showing a documentary about the economic collapse that preceded the great depression. Those PBS folks are such wet blankets. Who wants to be reminded that we’ve made the same mistakes before and we’ll make them again?

In a related story, Professor Gordon Marino (yes, that professor Gordon Marino… what do you mean you’ve never heard of him?) tells us that we’ve lost contact with the exquisite malaise that is human despair. “If Kierkegaard were on Facebook,” he says, yes, he actually says that, “If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video,” yes, he says that, too, “he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.”

Soren Kierkegaard, being miserable

Marino argues that Kierkegaard argues that whereas depression is a mental disorder, despair arises out of an imbalance between our character and our achievements. If despair had a pair of arms and a mouth it would be shaking us and saying “wake up!”

So, how did Kierkegaard know this way back when, but we’ve forgotten it? (And here I’m agreeing that Marino and Kierkegaard are onto something.) The pressure to feel good has begun to stunt our ability to submit ourselves to self examination. Evolution in reverse.

So, too, with running, we’re told. Forgoing the opportunity to use a reference to the term gluteus maximus for comic effect (tragic in itself) Tara Parker-Pope in her Well column presents the intriguing argument that the human body evolved to be good at long distance running:

We sweat, which is apparently much more cooling efficient than panting (even though we often do both at the same time), and therefore we’re well adapted to running long distances without over-heating. And the gluteus maximus (or, big-ass muscle) is the biggest of our muscles but rarely gets fussed when we’re walking - it’s all about running, apparently.

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How ironic that these days we generally take great pains not to sweat, and put our gluteus maximus to use as a cushion for those long hours of sitting while we avoid running.

It’s the end of the end, as Kierkegaard would have Twittered. But he didn’t Twitter, he wrote books and this is how he opened his “despair” opus:

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.

We forget history, but wring our hands at the tragedy of its repetition. We reject the rigors of self-examination, but lament endlessly about our fate. And we wonder why our ass is so big when we drive 0.2 miles to fetch a pack of Twinkies.

You can thank me later…

I have been stirred from my cave by reading a piece of Spring madness by David Brooks. With the catchy headline The End of Philosophy Brooks turns out a column of such ill-reasoned sophistry that it roused me from my long hiatus.

In the first two sentences Brooks manages to diss Socrates while he incorrectly describes what Socrates was all about. That’s unforgivable for someone writing for the Times and I wonder what his editor was thinking in publishing it.

In the tradition of all good sophists, Brooks’ real target turns out not to be philosophy nor Socrates but rational morality. Brooks argues that morality derives from subjective impressions, myriad emotional responses to the many situations we encounter that all add up to judgments of good and bad.

But it’s not until we reach the last paragraph that we find out just why Brooks has embarked on this particular Op Ed assault.

“Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Ah, so you don’t have to explain things as long as you feel them.

This is not an attack on philosophy or rational morality, it is an attack on reason, an attack on science, and, by association, an attack on the man who leads our country, Barack Obama, a man of intellect and reason who has declared that he will return science to a rightful place of prominence in our decision making.

Brooks’s piece is good-old American conservatism masquerading as learned philosophical analysis.

Brooks says that Socrates believed “moral thinking” to be “mostly a matter of reason and deliberation.” Well, yes, that would be moral thinking wouldn’t it. Moral feeling would be something else, right? A nice sophist twist.

But what did Socrates really do that Brooks is so afraid of? Socrates tried to encourage people to examine their feelings as a way of understanding whether they were really valid feelings, or just learned biases and prejudices. Isn’t this essential to living as a conscious and sensible human being. If not, we could just defend any action or moral judgment by saying “that’s what I feel, I don’t need to examine it.”

I don’t disagree that we tend to judge and act from an accummulated store of moral impressions, but that ignores the fact that moral strides, great and small, come through reflection and bold conviction. The person who reflects on his or her past actions and decides that he must change. The activist who speaks out in eloquent defense of a new morality (e.g., abolishing slavery) and persuades people to the reason and rightness of his cause.

Moral code is painted in broad brush strokes. For the most part we agree on the way these strokes are painted. But we can only disagree or change our moral code by engaging in a rational debate, either with ourselves or as a society.

Finally, morality as a concept, which Socrates encouraged people to seek for themselves, does indeed have an objective basis. Whether we like it or not, our fundamental moral objective is to continue to persist as individuals, as a society, as a species, and as an integrated part of the universe. As we progress morally over time we tend to come closer to this objective standard.

As I posted yesterday’s philosophical insight inspired by the film “Happy Go Lucky” I felt as if the post didn’t quite express my full thought but I didn’t quite know what more to say. As I lay waiting for my son to wake up this morning — those indeterminate minutes as the day goes from black to gray — I realized what it was that I hadn’t said.

Kant recognized and asserted that we only know existence at arm’s length, through our experience of it. Schopenhauer underscored, vaunted, and elaborated on this point through several hundred pages. It’s been refined and narrowed since. Our minds create an impression of existence through the evidence of our senses. We don’t know sunlight, for instance, we know the mind’s recreation of sunlight through the stimulation of our optic nerve.

I left off yesterday with the thought that life is, to some extent, what we make of it. We can choose a negative, pessimistic interpretation or a positive, optimistic interpretation.

Mike Leigh

The operation of the mind connects these two thoughts: The mind not only forms an impression of existence, but applies a set of psychological rules to determine how we feel about that impression.

Someone steals Poppy’s bike. Poppy’s mind applies a rule set that interprets this incident without anger and with a light, bittersweet sense of regret.

In contrast the driving instructor interprets Poppy’s attempts at humor as an attack on him, a game she’s playing to undermine him.

So, Mike Leigh’s film informs us, and is right in doing so, that our senses don’t give us a reliable impression of existence. Our minds apply a complex psychological interpretation to the direct evidence of our senses. And it could be said that only without a psychological rule set, or only with a completely neutral psychological rule set, could we get a somewhat untainted impression of existence.

The constraints of a blog post don’t permit further exploration of this idea. But it promises to be a very rich vein to hack away at. I’ll end with the thought I had just as my son was waking up: Quite apart from our psychological disposition, the rules encoded in the nature of our existence (in our DNA) provide yet another impression of existence that is just as important, if not more important, than the evidence of our senses in yielding an impression of existence.

Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky

If you haven’t seen the new Mike Leigh film “Happy Go Lucky” don’t read this blog post, go out and see the movie. Also, if you haven’t seen Charlie Kaufmann’s “Synechdoche” go out and see that, too. I’d recommend seeing the Kaufmann film before the Leigh film.

In any case, Happy Go Lucky, for me at least, raised an interesting philosophical question. It also acts as a good foil for Kaufmann’s somewhat bleaker statement about life’s ultimate futility.

As I was watching Happy Go Lucky I found myself remembering feelings evoked by some of Leigh’s earlier movies. The driving instructor spewing vehement, paranoid rancor reminds me of the vehement, paranoid character in Naked, for instance. But Leigh’s dramatic point of view has broadened and shifted, well, dramatically, over the years. Once roiling with seething, unremitting anger and misery, his preferred outlook in Happy Go Lucky is decidedly positive.

Leigh’s embrace of the positive fascinates me philosophically because it doesn’t exclude the negative.

Sally Hawkins’ character, Poppy, chooses to remain happy, positive and joyous in the face of misery, anger, and negativity. She doesn’t ignore life’s hardships, she allows them in, tries to work with them. In fact, she seeks them out, stays with them. Again and again we see Poppy engaging with troubled characters, trying to coax them out of their dark shells, or to shed some light in there.

Life is, to some extent, how we look at it, Leigh says. Someone steals our bike; do we let it ruin our day, or do we express a little mischievous regret that we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye?

Abandoned Warehouse

Bad things happen to people through no fault of their own, of course. Terrible things. Things that can’t be recovered from. But there’s no harm in trying to shed light, to help people, as Poppy’s character points out. And many of us allow ourselves to be unhappy about things that aren’t really terrible or unrecoverable.

Kaufmann reminds us that each moment is infinitessimally brief, unrecoverable, irrelevant. Leigh gently counters that each moment is enormous, inescapable, and joyous.