Rational Philosophy

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.

Paper Heart - Charlyne Li, Michael Cera

We’d had the NetFlix DVD of “Paper Heart” sitting next to the TV for a couple of weeks, never quite summoning up the necessary enthusiasm to stick it in the player and watch it. (I’m sure that others are familiar with this phenomenon — the movie malaise of not knowing whether one will enjoy the experience enough to justify the time spent watching.) “Well,” said my wife eventually, “Shall we just get it over with so that we can send it back.” Since she put it that way…

For me, Paper Heart turned out to be well worth the time spent. It is a mindful movie. The participants set out to make a quirky, deliberate, deliberative movie, and achieve their aim. Just when you think that no movie can avoid cliche one pops up that proves you wrong. (This has been a bonanza week for such movies — Paper Heart, A Serious Man, and Cold Souls. More of which in future posts.)

Paper Heart follows Charlyne Li on her examination of the question “does love exist.” She claims never to have felt love and to feel herself incapable of love.

In her pursuit of an answer two fascinating philosophical concepts pop up:

1. Is it possible for a person to find true love for another when the love is not reciprocated?

2. Is it possible for someone to lack the capacity for love (even though love, in general, exists)?

A positive answer to the first question might be rather unromantic, but I would say it is the correct answer.  If we consider true love, as opposed to infatuation, objectively we see that it represents an overwhelming interest in the well-being of another person. Here I use the term “well-being” very broadly. It includes their health and welfare, and their growth and blossoming. Our love reflects our understanding and awareness of the positive forces of life onto the object of our love.

This description is entirely one-sided. It doesn’t call for a reciprocation. Of course, it’s much more likely for us to be able to love someone and continue loving someone who reciprocates our love. But that’s beside the point.

And what about lacking the capacity for love? By our definition of love this would either mean that someone doesn’t perceive the positive forces inherent in life, or that someone perceives them but doesn’t or can’t reflect them onto another person.

So then, in fact there can be several reasons why someone would lack the capacity for love.

a. Life experience may have brought them to the point at which they can’t appreciate the positive things in life: Someone who has suffered misfortune, cruelty, or chronic depression, for instance.

b. Their disposition may make them incapable of reflecting positive feelings about life onto another person. A narcissist or sociopath, for instance.

But Charlyne was interested in something slightly different. She wondered whether something in a person’s brain chemistry might inhibit their ability to love. Why not? Despite appreciating life and other people the chemical impulse to love, for some, may be absent… An interesting thought.

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.”

Have you heard the new Danger Mouse CD? You may think that you haven’t, but you have. (It sounds a lot like George Harrison’s 33 1/3.)

As a result of some mysterious disagreement with EMI, Danger Mouse just put out a blank CD. It’s writeable and comes with a book of photos by David Lynch, so not a complete waste of money. Perhaps it will inspire some to record their own music onto DM’s CD.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot (or trying not to think) about mindfulness — being in the moment. It’s very tricky. I realize I’m not very good at it, even though I would have expected it to be quite easy.

My own path toward mindfulness started with meditation and moved on to brain training with an extended detour into yoga. Brain training has shown me just how fleeting mindfulness can be. Some days I struggle mightily to hold onto the training sequences for just 20 seconds. That doesn’t seem like very long to try to stay mindful, but I guess it is.

I recently read about mindful walking. I’ve been trying it out. As you walk you try to keep your mind on your physical body in the act of walking. (It’s OK to pay attention to walk-signs, traffic and dog crap, too.) After a few steps I find I’m thinking about something else. At which point I start again.

I’ve been practicing being mindful while I give Otto a bath, too. He’s 14 months old and he enjoys his bath. There’s a lot to stay mindful on and for when Otto’s in the tub. He likes his yellow rubber duck and smiles when I make it go “quack.”

Mindfulness strikes me as a kind of antidote to our frequent absences from the here and now. We resort to thoughts of past, future, and fantasy as a way to avoid or numb the act of “being.” In meditation and eastern philosophy the act of “being” carries great significance and import. If we are absent in our thoughts we are in some important sense absent from the world.

But even the mindful mind cannot derive any substance from the act of being. Every moment disappears from us. There is nothing tangible to grasp. Mindfulness prods us with the stick of immateriality, of nothingness.

It’s here that I sometimes come full circle, knowing that we can be mindful of our thoughts, too. And, in some ways our thoughts present an aspect of existence that one can consider tangible. The rules of existence. Logic, math, relationships between objects, physical laws. The unchanging ideas of existence remain, even as the fleeting objects of existence elude us.

DangerMouse has given EMI a taste of absence, of lack — “this is the world of EMI without DangerMouse,” his new release says. Which makes me think that I have never knowingly heard any music by DangerMouse. Perhaps this CD is not the place to start.

“There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute.”

So says David Brooks, aiming another low blow below the belt of reason. Brooks seems to be on some kind of one man mission against sensible, rational thought. Brooks is referring to the Grant Study as captured in an essay called “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in The Atlantic. (Available online today.) What a way for Brooks to set expectations about what science and analysis may yet achieve.

This from a letter to the editor in today’s Times:

“While I applaud David Brooks for drawing attention to an effective inner-city school, I disagree with his assessment of why such schools are so effective.

“The success of schools like the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Promise Academy is not because of the inculcation of “middle-class values” (when do middle-class kids ever learn to look at the person who is talking?). It is because of the teachers’ and principal’s high expectations of the students.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Ah, David, what would you say about Michael Phelps’ pot-smoking?  A story of high expectations and middle-class debauchery.

I read the piece about Michael Phelps today with a new and acute sense of the incredible dedication and sacrifice that his swimming achievements required. Such incredible results took very high expectations that recognized no existing limits.

If we look at human achievement from a philosophical perspective we find that it is marked by a willingness to go beyond existing limits, to defy limits perhaps. Philosophers have been defying reality to prove itself worthy of belief for thousands of years. In turn this reflects a common human characteristic to allow ourselves to set expectations that defy existing norms.

Surely no amount of human complexity will keep science and analysis mute for long…

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.

A BBC World News interview this morning on NPR focused on a new law proposed in the UK which would criminalize the act of a client who pays for sex if the prostitute is being controlled for another’s gain. The point being to cut down on pimping and human trafficking. During the interview a proponent of the new law argued with an opponent. The opponent was a London businessman who had been, at various points in his life, a client of legally-regulated prostitutes in places such as Australia. (I would give names and more details, but I haven’t been able to track the story down.)

Central to the debate was whether it was right to punish the client if he had no way of knowing whether the prostitute was under another’s control. At one point during the interview, the proponent asked the opponent, let’s call him “John,” whether he wouldn’t be ashamed if he were to find out that he’d had sex with a woman who was being coerced or forced by another into prostituting herself. John said no of course not, how could he feel retroactive shame for something he wasn’t aware of at the time. The proponent of the law seemed equally adamant that he should feel shame.

This got me wondering about the philosophy of shame and its manifestation and whether the two coincide. Or, put another way, shame is a feeling induced by our circumstance and nature, but is there a rational philosophy of shame that can explain why it would appear in some and not in others given the same circumstances.

I’ll begin with two statements:

1. Shame requires a feeling in the current moment that one has acted wrongly in a past moment.

2. The definition of “wrongly” depends upon the way the person feeling the shame assesses right and wrong in the current moment.

As John pointed out during the discussion, if he knowingly had sex with a prostitute who was being coerced he would feel ashamed. Whereas, if he didn’t know but found out later, he wouldn’t feel ashamed.

This forces me to be more precise about my definition of “wrongly.” We need to feel responsible for the wrongness of our actions.

Another man, let’s call him Paul, under the same circumstances might well feel retroactive shame because he felt that he shouldered some of the collective responsibility for having sex with a prostitute who he knew was perhaps being coerced.

Is there some kind of universal adjudication under which Paul is right to feel shame and John wrong not to, or vise versa?

From a practical perspective, it would seem that it’s all a matter of degrees. If John and Paul prior to visiting the prostitute understood that more than half of all prostitutes were under coercion, we might be inclined to say that Paul is right to be ashamed and John is wrong not to be.

On the other hand, John may have made a determination that the prostitute is unlikely to be under coercion because she works in a legally-regulated and licensed brothel…

However, there does seem to be some definitive logic to the idea that shame shouldn’t be connected purely circumstantially to one’s awareness of guilt. If no other aspect of the circumstances has changed, finding out that one has transgressed without realizing it shouldn’t rationally, in and of itself, induce feelings of shame. In this much, I think I agree with John.

UN Ambassador Andrew Young

I am sure that many have cried at some point since 11pm last night. My own tears caught me by surprise. I was emptying the dishwasher this morning as I listened to NPR. Ambassador Andrew Young, the first black ambassador to the UN, (who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr) was speaking in calm, measured praise of Obama and the weight of the history of Obama’s accomplishment. I’m not black, but in the upsurge of emotion that brought my tears I felt suddenly, immediately aware of what this moment meant historically in a country with such a poor record of racial discrimination, both overt and covert — it was a mixture of relief and joy.

This joy is in part the very pure philosophical joy of a good thing happening, a thing that will change the future. In Andrew Young’s words: “a victory of grace over greed, of vision over violence.”

Can change really happen and if so how?  This is the country that twice elected George W. Bush. Many who voted-in perhaps the worst president in the nation’s history, twice, must have decided to vote for Obama over McCain. So are we a conservative nation simply disillusioned by a lousy president, or are we a nation newly and differently inspired, a changed nation?

Barack Obama Victor

I can’t know the answer. I can only give an opinion based on what I see and hear.  Obama and his campaign team have wrought change by reaching out and engaging people with new ideas. These ideas have rubbed up against old, automated, reactive ways of thinking. Obama has spent the last couple of years asking people why we should see the intractable problems of the country as hopelessly intractable. He’s also stood and overtly and covertly challenged people to find him wanting because of the color of his skin, or the unamericanness of his name, or the power of his rational intellect.

Many failed to meet this challenge. After all 47% of America voted for McCain, or against Obama. That’s tens of millions of people who have proven themselves insusceptible to a force for powerful, positive change.

The world is now a different place. Obama’s skill and insight in his campaign promise great things for his presidency. Thank you, Barack.

Congress And The Bailout

I just deleted several hundred “spam” comments from my comment moderation queue. The mysterious originators of these comments, which are then automatically generated in huge numbers around the Internet, aim to attract or influence commercial traffic in their direction. I don’t really care whether the operation works. I presume it does, since otherwise why would they keep doing it? But I care about having to delete all of those messages when I have better things to do with my time.

A couple of weeks ago I was on the phone with my friend in Australia just after the AIG bailout and he mentioned that had AIG gone under he would have been left in the hole for several hundred thousand dollars. Many clients of his medical business have insurance with AIG. The fingers of this particular invisible hand spread far.

But why did AIG, with its trillion dollar balance sheet and stalwart history of conservative risk management need to be bailed out?

Joseph P. Cassano AIG Financial Products

Well, if the NY Times has its story straight, AIG’s problems were catalyzed by the overreaching overconfident overpowerful work of one man — Joseph J. Cassano, a former executive with Drexel Burnham Lambert — Michael “the-junk-bond-king” Milken’s old investment bank. Cassano helped found AIG Financial Products in London and built it into a very profitable, very independent entity within AIG that leveraged AIG’s tremendous financial strength and standing to sell ever more speculative products. AIG Financial Products, being drastically overleveraged, eventually imploded. Cassano left and now lives quietly in a Knightsbridge town-house. (I love this picture from the NY Times; Cassano peering around the corner in his bright red shirt like a con at the perimeter of the prison yard.)

When McCain debated Obama last week after supposedly spending several days in intense economy-recovery sessions he didn’t seem to have much of a grasp on what had happened to cause the problems in the first place, nor on what needed to be done to avoid them happening again. It was as if invoking the specter of regulation caused him such shudders that it wobbled his brain off-kilter.

John McCain at a loss

Ideally, regulation is what we do when we don’t want something bad to happen. Avoiding regulation is something we do when we care more about a belief or concept than real-world consequences.

The Bush administration has been bad for America and the world for many reasons, but there has been one overriding and all-pervasive reason for its badness — the arrogance of favoring faith over fact. The administration has consistently argued for, lied for, evaded for, invaded for, and bullied for its ideologies in the face of the evidence against them. They have set the bar very low for what a government can do to manipulate and subvert in the name of ideology and get away with it.

All that being said, when the congress began beating up on Paulsen and his three page proposal I felt for the first time in a long time that we were seeing government in action. Rusty, creaking, inept as it may have been, the house gave us the hint of an idea of what it should be doing for us — working in our best interests. For once we got a glimpse of the invisible hand.

The Invisible Hand Part 1

Related posts from around the web:

Walter Williams and Bryan D. Jones: The Most Important Election … - Choose McCain and likely opt for a third term of the governing philosophy that has pushed the United States back toward the economy of the Great Depression. Select McCain and keep the governing approach of unregulated free market …

McCain Touts Plan to Privatize Bailout [3rd attempt] - “The problem with the earlier plan,” McCain explains, “is that it relies on big government to save the banks. My plan puts the bailout in the hands of the free market, which is the only solution that works in times like these.” …