Philosophy’s 2 disparate strands: what can we know; how can we live

The question I’d like to ask, is there a philosophical view that encompasses both? Some may argue that Aristotle attempted that, but I’m going to take a different approach.
 
For a start, the first part can arguably be broken into 2 further strands: physics and metaphysics. And even this divide is contentious, with some arguing that metaphysics is an ‘abstract theory with no basis in reality’ (one dictionary definition).
 
I wrote an earlier post arguing that we are ‘metaphysical animals’ after discussing a book of the same name, though it was really a biography of 4 Oxford women in the 20th Century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. But I’ll start with this quote from said book.
 
Poetry, art, religion, history, literature and comedy are all metaphysical tools. They are how metaphysical animals explore, discover and describe what is real (and beautiful and good). (My emphasis.)
 
So, arguably, metaphysics could give us a connection between the 2 ‘strands’ in the title. Now here’s the thing: I contend that mathematics should be part of that list, hence part of metaphysics. And, of course, we all know that mathematics is essential to physics as an epistemology. So physics and metaphysics, in my philosophy, are linked in a rather intimate  way.
 
The curious thing about mathematics, or anything metaphysical for that matter, is that, without human consciousness, they don’t really exist, or are certainly not manifest. Everything on that list is a product of human consciousness, notwithstanding that there could be other conscious entities somewhere in the universe with the same capacity.
 
But again, I would argue that mathematics is an exception. I agree with a lot of mathematicians and physicists that while we create the symbols and language of mathematics, we don’t create the intrinsic relationships that said language describes. And furthermore, some of those relationships seem to govern the universe itself.
 
And completely relevant to the first part of this discussion, the limits of our knowledge of mathematics seems to determine the limits of our knowledge of the physical world.
 
I’ve written other posts on how to live, specifically, 3 rules for humans and How should I live? But I’m going to go via metaphysics again, specifically storytelling, because that’s something I do. Storytelling requires an inner and outer world, manifest as character and plot, which is analogous to free will and fate in the real world. Now, even these concepts are contentious, especially free will, because many scientists tell us it’s an illusion. Again, I’ve written about this many times, but it’s relevance to my approach to fiction is that I try and give my characters free will. An important part of my fiction is that the characters are independent of me. If my characters don’t take on a life of their own, then I know I’m wasting my time, and I’ll ditch that story.
 
Its relevance to ‘how to live’ is authenticity. Artists understand better than most the importance of authenticity in their work, which really means keeping themselves out of it. But authenticity has ramifications, as any existentialist will tell you. To live authentically requires an honesty to oneself that is integral to one’s being. And ‘being’ in this sense is about being human rather than its broader ontological meaning. In other words, it’s a fundamental aspect of our psychology, because it evolves and changes according to our environment and milieu. Also, in the world of fiction, it's a fundamental dynamic.
 
What's more, if you can maintain this authenticity (and it’s genuine), then you gain people’s trust, and that becomes your currency, whether in your professional life or your social life. However, there is nothing more fake than false authenticity; examples abound.
 
I’ll give the last word to Socrates; arguably the first existentialist.
 
To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.

Can philosophy be an antidote to dogma?

 This is similar to another post I wrote recently, both of which are answers to questions I found on Quora. The reason I’m posting this is because I think it’s better than the previous one. Not surprisingly, it also references Socrates and the role of argument in philosophical discourse.
 
What qualities are needed to be a good philosopher?
 
I expect you could ask 100 different philosophers and get 100 different answers. Someone (Gregory Scott), in answer to a similar question, claimed that everyone is a philosopher, but not necessarily a good one.
 
I will suggest 2 traits that I try to cultivate in myself: to be intellectually curious and to be analytical. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
 
For a start, there are many ‘branches’ or categories of philosophy: epistemology and ethics, being the best known and most commonly associated with philosophy. Some might include ontology as well, which has a close relationship with epistemology, like 2 sides of the same coin. There is also logic and aesthetics but then the discussion becomes interminable.
 
But perhaps the best way to answer this question is to look at philosophers you admire and ask yourself, what qualities do they possess that merit your admiration?
 
Before I answer that for myself, I’m going to provide some context. Sandy Grant (philosopher at the University of Cambridge) published an essay titled Dogmas (Philosophy Now, Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), whereby she points out the pitfalls of accepting points of view on ‘authority’ without affording them critical analysis. And I would argue that philosophy is an antidote to dogma going back to Socrates, who famously challenged the ‘dogmas’ of his day. Prior to Socrates, philosophy was very prescriptive where you followed someone’s sayings, be they from the Bible, or Confucius or the Upanishads. Socrates revolutionary idea was to introduce argument, and philosophy has been based on argument ever since.
 
Socrates is famously attributed with the saying, The unexamined life is not worth living, which he apparently said before he was forced to take his own life. But there is another saying attributed to Socrates, which is more germane, given the context of his death.
 
To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.
 
Socrates also acquitted himself well in battle, apparently, so he wasn’t afraid of dying for a cause and a principle. Therefore, I would include integrity as the ‘quality’ of a good person, let alone a philosopher.
 
We currently live in an age where the very idea of truth is questioned, whether it be in the realm of science or politics or media. Which is why I think that critical thinking is essential, whereby one looks at evidence and the expertise behind that evidence. I’ve spent a working lifetime in engineering, where, out of necessity, one looks to expertise that one doesn’t have oneself. Trust has gone AWOL in our current social media environment and the ability to analyse without emotion and ideology is paramount. To accept evidence when it goes against your belief system is the mark of a good philosopher. Evidence is the keystone to scientific endeavour and also in administering justice. But perhaps the greatest quality required of a philosopher is to admit, I don’t know, which is also famously attributed to Socrates.

Finding purpose without a fortune teller

 I just started watching a show on Apple TV+ called The Big Door Prize, starring Irish actor, Chris O’Dowd, set in suburban America (Deerfield). It’s listed as a comedy, but it might be a black comedy or a satire; I haven’t watched it long enough to judge.
 
It has an interesting premise: the local store has a machine, which, for small change, will tell you what your ‘potential’ is. Not that surprisingly, people start queuing up to find their potential (or purpose). I say, ‘not surprising’, because people consult Tarot cards or the I Ching for the same reason, not to mention weekly astrological charts found in the local newspaper, magazine or whatever. And of course, if the ‘reading’ coincides with our specific desire or wish, we wholeheartedly agree, whereas, if it doesn’t, we dismiss it as rubbish.
 
I’ve written previously about the importance of finding purpose, and, in fact, it’s considered necessary for one’s psychological health. But this is a subtly different take on it, prompted by the aforementioned premise. I have the advantage of over half a century of hindsight because I think I found my purpose late, yet it was hiding in plain sight all along.
 
We sometimes think of our purpose as a calling or vocation. In my case, I believe it was to be a writer. Now, even though I’m not a successful writer by any stretch of the imagination, the fact that I do write is important to me. It gives me a sense of purpose that I don’t find in my job or my relationships, even though they are all important to me. I don’t often agree with Jordan Peterson, but he once made the comment that creative people who don’t create are like ‘broken sticks’. I totally identify with that.
 
I only have to look to my early childhood (pre-high school) when I started to write stories and draw my own superheroes. But as a teenager and a young adult (in my 20s), I found I couldn’t write to save myself, including essays (like I write on this blog), let alone attempts at fiction. But here’s the thing: when I did start writing fiction, I knew it was terrible – so terrible, I didn’t even tell anyone – yet I persevered because I ‘knew’ that I could. And I think that’s the key point: if you have a purpose, you can visualise it even when everything you’re doing tells you that you should give it up.
 
So, you don’t need a ‘machine’ or Tarot cards, just self-belief. Purpose comes to those who look for it, and know it when they see it, even in its emerging phase, when no one else can see it.
 
 
Now, I’m going to tell you a story about someone else, whom I knew for over 4 decades and who found their ‘purpose’ in spite of circumstances that might have prevented it, or at least, worked against it. She was a single Mum who raised 3 daughters and simultaneously found a role in theatre. The thing is that she never gained any substantial financial reward, yet she won awards, both as an actor and director. She even partook in a theatre festival in Monaco, even though it took a government grant to get her there. The thing is that she had very little in terms of material wealth but it never bothered her and she was generous to a fault. She was a trained nurse, but had no other qualifications – certainly none relevant to her theatrical career. She passed last year and she is sorely missed, not only by me, but by the many lives she touched. She was, by anyone’s judgement, a force of nature.
 
 
 
This is a review of a play, Tuesdays with Morrie, for which Liz Bradley won an award. I happened to attend the opening with her, so it has a special memory for me. Dylan Muir, especially mentioned as providing the vocal, is Liz’s daughter.

What grounds morality?

 In the most recent issue of Philosophy Now (No 153, Dec 2022/Jan 2023), they’ve published the answers to the last Question of the Month: What Grounds or Justifies Morality? I submitted an answer that wasn’t included, and having read the 10 selected, I believe I could have done better. In my answer, I said, ‘courage’, based on the fact that it takes courage for someone to take a stand against the tide of demonisation of the ‘other’, which we witness so often in history and even contemporary society.
 
However, that is too specific and doesn’t really answer the question, which arguably is seeking a principle, like the ‘Golden Rule’ or the Utilitarian principle of ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest number’. Many answers cited Kant’s appeal to ‘reason’, and some cited religion and others, some form of relativism. All in all, I thought they were good answers without singling any one out.
 
So what did I come up with? Well, partly based on observations of my own fiction and my own life, I decided that morality needed to be grounded in trust. I’ve written about trust at least twice before, and I think it’s so fundamental, because, both one-on-one relationships (of all types) and society as a whole, can’t function properly without it. If you think about it, how well you trust someone is a good measure of your assessment of their moral character. But it functions at all levels of society. Imagine living in a society where you can’t say what you think, where you have to obey strict rules of secrecy and deception or you will be punished. Such societies exist.
 
I’ve noticed a recurring motif in my stories (not deliberate) of loyalties being tested and of moral dilemmas. Both in my private life and professional life, I think trust is paramount. It’s my currency. I realised a long time ago that if people don’t trust me, I have no worth.

We are metaphysical animals

 I’m reading a book called Metaphysical Animals (How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back To Life). The four women were Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. The first two I’m acquainted with and the last two, not. They were all at Oxford during the War (WW2) at a time when women were barely tolerated in academia and had to be ‘chaperoned’ to attend lectures. Also a time when some women students ended up marrying their tutors. 

The book is authored by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, both philosophy lecturers who became friends with Mary Midgley in her final years (Mary died in 2018, aged 99). The book is part biographical of all 4 women and part discussion of the philosophical ideas they explored.

 

Bringing ‘philosophy back to life’ is an allusion to the response (backlash is too strong a word) to the empiricism, logical positivism and general rejection of metaphysics that had taken hold of English philosophy, also known as analytical philosophy. Iris spent time in postwar Paris where she was heavily influenced by existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular, whom she met and conversed with. 

 

If I was to categorise myself, I’m a combination of analytical philosopher and existentialist, which I suspect many would see as a contradiction. But this isn’t deliberate on my part – more a consequence of pursuing my interests, which are science on one hand (with a liberal dose of mathematical Platonism) and how-to-live a ‘good life’ (to paraphrase Aristotle) on the other.

 

Iris was intellectually seduced by Sartre’s exhortation: “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself”. But as her own love life fell apart along with all its inherent dreams and promises, she found putting Sartre’s implicit doctrine, of standing solitarily and independently of one’s milieu, difficult to do in practice. I’m not sure if Iris was already a budding novelist at this stage of her life, but anyone who writes fiction knows that this is what it’s all about: the protagonist sailing their lone ship on a sea full of icebergs and other vessels, all of which are outside their control. Life, like the best fiction, is an interaction between the individual and everyone else they meet. Your moral compass, in particular, is often tested. Existentialism can be seen as an attempt to arise above this, but most of us don’t. 

 

Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein looms large in many of the pages, and at least one of the women, Elizabeth Anscombe, had significant interaction with him. With Wittgenstein comes an emphasis on language, which has arguably determined the path of philosophy since. I’m not a scholar of Wittgenstein by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing he taught, or that people took from him, was that the meaning we give to words is a consequence of how they are used in ordinary discourse. Language requires a widespread consensus to actually work. It’s something we rarely think about but we all take for granted, otherwise there would be no social discourse or interaction at all. There is an assumption that when I write these words, they have the same meaning for you as they do for me, otherwise I am wasting my time.

 

But there is a way in which language is truly powerful, and I have done this myself. I can write a passage that creates a scene inside your mind complete with characters who interact and can cause you to laugh or cry, or pretty much any other emotion, as if you were present; as if you were in a dream.

 

There are a couple of specific examples in the book which illustrate Wittgenstein’s influence on Elizabeth and how she used them in debate. They are both topics I have discussed myself without knowing of these previous discourses.

 

In 1947, so just after the war, Elizabeth presented a paper to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, which she began with the following disclosure:

 

Everywhere in this paper I have imitated Dr Wittgenstein’s ideas and methods of discussion. The best that I have written is a weak copy of some features of the original, and its value depends only on my capacity to understand and use Dr Wittgenstein’s work.

 

The subject of her talk was whether one can truly talk about the past, which goes back to the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. In her own words, paraphrasing Parmenides, ‘To speak of something past’ would then to ‘point our thought’ at ‘something there’, but out of reach. Bringing Wittgenstein into the discussion, she claimed that Parmenides specific paradox about the past arose ‘from the way that thought and language connect to the world’.

 

We apply language to objects by naming them, but, in the case of the past, the objects no longer exist. She attempts to resolve this epistemological dilemma by discussing the nature of time as we experience it, which is like a series of pictures that move on a timeline while we stay in the present. This is analogous to my analysis that everything we observe becomes the past as soon as it happens, which is exemplified every time someone takes a photo, but we remain in the present – the time for us is always ‘now’.

 

She explains that the past is a collective recollection, documented in documents and photos, so it’s dependent on a shared memory. I would say that this is what separates our recollection of a real event from a dream, which is solipsistic and not shared with anyone else. But it doesn’t explain why the past appears fixed and the future unknown, which she also attempted to address. But I don’t think this can be addressed without discussing physics.

 

Most physicists will tell you that the asymmetry between the past and future can only be explained by the second law of thermodynamics, but I disagree. I think it is described, if not explained, by quantum mechanics (QM) where the future is probabilistic with an infinitude of possible paths and classical physics is a probability of ONE because it’s already happened and been ‘observed’. In QM, the wave function that gives the probabilities and superpositional states is NEVER observed. The alternative is that all the futures are realised in alternative universes. Of course, Elizabeth Anscombe would know nothing of these conjectures.

 

But I would make the point that language alone does not resolve this. Language can only describe these paradoxes and dilemmas but not explain them.

 

Of course, there is a psychological perspective to this, which many people claim, including physicists, gives the only sense of time passing. According to them, it’s fixed: past, present and future; and our minds create this distinction. I think our minds create the distinction because only consciousness creates a reference point for the present. Everything non-sentient is in a causal relationship that doesn’t sense time. Photons of light, for example, exist in zero time, yet they determine causality. Only light separates everything in time as well as space. I’ve gone off-topic.

 

Elizabeth touched on the psychological aspect, possibly unintentionally (I’ve never read her paper, so I could be wrong) that our memories of the past are actually imagined. We use the same part of the brain to imagine the past as we do to imagine the future, but again, Elizabeth wouldn’t have known this. Nevertheless, she understood that our (only) knowledge of the past is a thought that we turn into language in order to describe it.

 

The other point I wish to discuss is a famous debate she had with C.S. Lewis. This is quite something, because back then, C.S. Lewis was a formidable intellectual figure. Elizabeth’s challenge was all the more remarkable because Lewis’s argument appeared on the surface to be very sound. Lewis argued that the ‘naturalist’ position was self-refuting if it was dependent on ‘reason’, because reason by definition (not his terminology) is based on the premise of cause and effect and human reason has no cause. That’s a simplification, nevertheless it’s the gist of it. Elizabeth’s retort:

 

What I shall discuss is this argument’s central claim that a belief in the validity of reason is inconsistent with the idea that human thought can be fully explained as the product of non-rational causes.

 

In effect, she argued that reason is what humans do perfectly naturally, even if the underlying ‘cause’ is unknown. Not knowing the cause does not make the reasoning irrational nor unnatural. Elizabeth specifically cited the language that Lewis used. She accused him of confusing the concepts of “reason”, “cause” and “explanation”.

 

My argument would be subtly different. For a start, I would contend that by ‘reason’, he meant ‘logic’, because drawing conclusions based on cause and effect is logic, even if the causal relations (under consideration) are assumed or implied rather than observed. And here I contend that logic is not a ‘thing’ – it’s not an entity; it’s an action - something we do. In the modern age, machines perform logic; sometimes better than we do.

 

Secondly, I would ask Lewis, does he think reason only happens in humans and not other animals? I would contend that animals also use logic, though without language. I imagine they’d visualise their logic rather than express it in vocal calls. The difference with humans is that we can perform logic at a whole different level, but the underpinnings in our brains are surely the same. Elizabeth was right: not knowing its physical origins does not make it irrational; they are separate issues.

 

Elizabeth had a strong connection to Wittgenstein right up to his death. She worked with him on a translation and edit of Philosophical Investigations, and he bequeathed her a third of his estate and a third of his copyright.

 

It’s apparent from Iris’s diaries and other sources that Elizabeth and Iris fell in love at one point in their friendship, which caused them both a lot of angst and guilt because of their Catholicism. Despite marrying, Iris later had an affair with Pip (Philippa).

 

Despite my discussion of just 2 of Elizabeth’s arguments, I don’t have the level of erudition necessary to address most of the topics that these 4 philosophers published in. Just reading the 4 page Afterwards, it’s clear that I haven’t even brushed the surface of what they achieved. Nevertheless, I have a philosophical perspective that I think finds some resonance with their mutual ideas. 

 

I’ve consistently contended that the starting point for my philosophy is that for each of us individually, there is an inner and outer world. It even dictates the way I approach fiction. 

 

In the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 149, April/May 2022), Richard Oxenberg, who teaches philosophy at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, wrote an article titled, What Is Truth? wherein he describes an interaction between 2 people, but only from a purely biological and mechanical perspective, and asks, ‘What is missing?’ Well, even though he doesn’t spell it out, what is missing is the emotional aspect. Our inner world is dominated by emotional content and one suspects that this is not unique to humans. I’m pretty sure that other creatures feel emotions like fear, affection and attachment. What’s more I contend that this is what separates, not just us, but the majority of the animal kingdom, from artificial intelligence.

 

But humans are unique, even among other creatures, in our ability to create an inner world every bit as rich as the one we inhabit. And this creates a dichotomy that is reflected in our division of arts and science. There is a passage on page 230 (where the authors discuss R.G. Collingwood’s influence on Mary), and provide an unexpected definition.

 

Poetry, art, religion, history, literature and comedy are all metaphysical tools. They are how metaphysical animals explore, discover and describe what is real (and beautiful and good). (My emphasis.)

 

I thought this summed up what they mean with their coinage, metaphysical animals, which titles the book, and arguably describes humanity’s most unique quality. Descriptions of metaphysics vary and elude precise definition but the word, ‘transcendent’, comes to mind. By which I mean it’s knowledge or experience that transcends the physical world and is most evident in art, music and storytelling, but also includes mathematics in my Platonic worldview.

 

Footnote: I should point out that certain chapters in the book give considerable emphasis to moral philosophy, which I haven’t even touched on, so another reader might well discuss other perspectives.

What is existentialism?

 A few years back, I wrote a ‘vanity piece’, My philosophy in 24 dot points, which I admit is a touch pretentious. But I’ve been prompted to write something more substantive, in a similar vein, whilst reading Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist; or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses. I bought this tome (the 10^thAnniversary Edition) after reading an article by him on ‘Happiness’ in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022). Cox is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. He’s written other books, but this one is written specifically for a general audience, not an academic one. This is revealed in some of the language he uses, like ‘being up shit creek’.

 

I didn’t really learn anything about existentialism until I studied Sartre in an off-campus university course, in my late 40s. I realised that, to all intents and purposes, I was an existentialist, without ever knowing what one was. I did write about existentialism very early in the life of this blog, in the context of my own background. The thing is that one’s philosophical worldview is a product of one’s milieu, upbringing and education, not to mention the age in which one lives. I grew up in a Western culture, post WW2, and I think that made me ripe for existentialist influences without being conscious of it. I lived in the 60s when there was a worldwide zeitgeist of questioning social mores against a background of a religious divide, the Vietnam war and the rise of feminism. 

 

If there is a key word or mantra in existentialism, it’s ‘authenticity’. It’s the key element in my 3 Rules for Humans post, and it’s also the penultimate chapter in Cox’s aforementioned book. The last chapter is on counselling and is like a bookend.

 

As Cox himself points out, existentialism is not a ‘school’ of philosophy in the way ‘analytical philosophy’ or ‘logical positivism’ are. There’s not really a set of rules – it’s more about an attitude and how to live a life without losing your soul or self-respect. It’s not an epistemology, nor an ideology, even though it’s probably associated with a liberal outlook, as I hope will become clear.

 

Many commentators associate existentialism with atheism, the absurd and nihilism. I agree with Cox that it’s actually the opposite of nihilism; if anything, it’s about finding purpose. As I wrote in a post last year:

 

If the Universe has any meaning at all, it’s because it created sentient beings who find meaning against the odds that science tells us are astronomical, both literally and figuratively. Existentialism is about finding purpose in an absurd universe, which is the opposite of nihilism.

 

And that’s the most important lesson of existentialism: if you are to find a purpose, only you can do that; it’s not dependent on anyone else, be they family, a spouse, an employer or a mentor. And logically, one could add, it’s not dependent on God either.

 

Cox doesn’t talk about God at all, but he does talk quite a lot about consciousness and about it being ‘nothing’ (materialistically). He very fleetingly gives mathematics as an example of something else that’s not ‘corporeal’, specifically numbers. Very curious, as I think that both mathematics and consciousness are ‘special’ in that they are distinct, yet intimately connected to the physical world, but that’s another topic.

 

He also talks about consciousness having a special relationship with time. I’ve said that consciousness is the only thing that exists in a constant present, whereas Cox says the opposite, but I believe we mean the same thing. He says consciousness is forever travelling from the past to the future, whereas I say that the future is forever becoming the past while only consciousness exists in the present – the experiential outcome is the same.

 

So how does God enter the picture? God only exists in someone’s consciousness – it’s part of one’s internal state. So, you can be ‘authentic’ and believe in God, but it’s totally an individualistic experience – it can’t be shared. That’s my interpretation, not anyone else’s, I should emphasise.

 

An important, even essential, aspect of all this is a belief in free will. You can’t take control of your life if you don’t have a belief in free will, and I would argue that you can’t be authentic either. And, logically, this has influenced my prejudices in physics and cosmology. To be consistent, I can’t believe we live in a deterministic universe, and have argued strongly on that point, opposing better minds than mine.

 

Existentialism has some things in common with Buddhism, which might explain why Eastern philosophy seemed to have an influence on the 60s zeitgeist. Having said that, I think the commonality is about treating life as a journey that’s transient. Accepting the impermanence and transience of life, I believe, is part of living authentically.

 

And what do I mean by ‘authentic’ in this context? Possibly, I never really appreciated this until I started writing fiction. I think anyone who creates art strives to be authentic, which means leaving your ego out of your work. I try to take the attitude that it’s my characters’ story, not mine. That’s very difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but I know that actors often say something similar.

 

In my professional life, my integrity was everything to me. I often worked in disputatious environments and it was important to me that people could trust my word and my work. Cox talks about how existentialism intrinsically incorporates our interactions with others. 

 

Freedom is a much-abused, misappropriated term, but in existentialism it has a specific meaning and an interdependent relationship with responsibility – you can’t divorce one from the other. Freedom, in existentialism, means ‘free to choose’, hence the emphasis on free will. It also means, if you invoke the term, that the freedom of others is just as important as your own.

 

One can’t talk about authenticity without talking about its opposite, ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), a term coined by Sartre. Bad faith is something that most of us have experienced, be it working in a job we hate, staying in a destructive relationship or not pursuing a desired goal in lieu of staying in our comfort zone.

 

Of course, sometimes we are in a situation outside our control, so what do we do? Speaking from personal experience, I think one needs to take ownership of one’s response to it; one needs to accept that only YOU can do something about it and not someone else. I’ve never been a prisoner-of-war, but my father was, and he made 3 attempts to escape, because, as he told the Commandant, ‘It’s my job’.

 

I’ve actually explored this in my own fiction. In my last story, two of my characters (independently) find themselves in circumstances of ‘bad faith’. I only analyse this in hindsight – don’t analyse what you write while you’re writing. In fact, one of those characters is attracted to another character who lives authentically, though neither of them ‘think’ in those terms.

Addendum: Someone asked me to come up with a single sentence to describe this. After sleeping on it, I came up with this:

Be responsible for what you are and who you become. That includes being responsible for your failures. (2 sentences)

Existentialism in everyday life

This is a post I wrote on Quora, in answer to the question:

 

If I believe that life is completely meaningless, am I an existentialist or a nihilist?

 

My answer was ‘upvoted’ by Frederick Dolan, who is Professor at UC Berkeley, after I commented on his own answer to the same question.

 

 

Existentialism is often associated with the absurd, thanks to Camus mostly, which is a short step from nihilism in many people’s minds. There is a view among the scientific community that the Universe is meaningless and that the presence of sentient beings is just a freak accident. Paul Davies refers to this view as the ‘absurd universe’, and I tend to agree with him. 

 

The point is that we find meaning in living our lives through relationships and projects, and even through career or vocation. Viktor Frankl elaborated on this in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and added a third way, which is through dealing with adversity. This last ‘way’ might appear ‘absurd’ at first glance, but it’s the premise of virtually every story ever told; it’s a universal theme.

 

Sartre argued that we create our own ‘project’ just by living our lives, and this is what existentialism means to me. So I would contend that there is a direct connection between existentialism and the importance of finding meaning in our lives. In fact, having a ‘purpose’ is considered essential to mental health, according to psychologists. If the Universe has any meaning at all, it’s because it created sentient beings who find meaning against the odds that science tells us are astronomical, both literally and figuratively. Existentialism is about finding purpose in an absurd universe, which is the opposite of nihilism.

Evolution of culture; a uniquely human adaption

I finally got around to reading Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, after someone lent me a copy. I’d already read and reviewed his follow-up book, Homo Deus, so I’m reading them in the reverse order. I have to say he makes bleak reading, yet you feel there’s a lot of truth in his words. Having said that, I still feel I can challenge him on some issues to provide a more optimistic outlook. He is both provocative and thought-provoking, which are not necessarily one and the same thing.

He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.

One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.

He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.

I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.

They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.

Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.

Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity:  ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.

As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.

To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.

The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.

One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:

If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.

Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.

Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.

I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.

And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:

Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.

Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.

So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.

I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).

But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.

So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.

Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.

This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.

One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.

I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.

One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.

I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.

But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.

In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.

Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.

Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.

If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.

You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom.

I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.

A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.

While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.

An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.

3 rules for humans

A very odd post. I joined a Science Fiction group on Facebook, which has its moments. I sometimes comment, even have conversations, and most of the time manage to avoid conflicts. I’ve been a participator on the internet long enough to know when to shut up, or let something through to the keeper, as we say in Oz. In other words, avoid being baited. Most of the time I succeed, considering how opinionated I can be.

Someone asked the question: what would the equivalent 3 laws for humans be, analogous to Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics?

The 3 laws of robotics (without looking them up) are about avoiding harm to humans within certain constraints and then avoiding harm to robots or itself. It’s hierarchical with humans' safety being at the top, or the first law (from memory).

So I submitted an answer, which I can no longer find, so maybe someone took the post down. But it got me thinking, and I found that what I came up with was more like a manifesto than laws per se; so they're nothing like Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics.

In the end, my so-called laws aren't exactly what I submitted but they are succinct and logically consistent, with enough substance to elaborate upon.

                        1.    Don’t try or pretend to be something you’re not

This is a direct attempt at what existentialists call ‘authenticity’, but it’s as plain as one can make it. I originally thought of something Socrates apparently said:

   To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to seem to be.

And my Rule No1 (preferable to law) is really another way of saying the same thing, only it’s more direct, and it has a cultural origin as well. As a child, growing up, ‘having tickets on yourself’, or ‘being up yourself’, to use some local colloquialisms, was considered the greatest sin. So I grew up with a disdain for pretentiousness that became ingrained. But there is more to it than that. I don’t believe in false modesty either.

There is a particular profession where being someone you’re not is an essential skill. I’m talking about acting. Spying also comes to mind, but the secret there I believe is to become invisible, which is the opposite to what James Bond does. That’s why John Le Carre’s George Smiley seems more like the real thing than 007 does. Going undercover, by the way, is extremely stressful and potentially detrimental to your health – just ask anyone who’s done it.

But actors routinely become someone they’re not. Many years ago, I used to watch a TV programme called The Actor’s Studio, where well known actors were interviewed, and I have to say that many of them struck me with their authenticity, which seems like a contradiction. But an Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once pointed out that acting requires leaving your ego behind. It struck me that actors know better than anyone else what the difference is between being yourself and being someone else.

I’m not an actor but I create characters in fiction, and I’ve always believed the process is mentally the same. Someone once said that ‘acting requires you to say something as if you’ve just thought of it, and not everyone can do that.’ So it’s spontaneity that matters. Someone else once said that acting requires you to always be in the moment. Writing fiction, I would contend, requires the same attributes. Writing, at least for me, requires you to inhabit the character, and that’s why the dialogue feels spontaneous, because it is. But paradoxically, it also requires authenticity. The secret is to leave yourself out of it.

The Chinese hold modesty in high regard. The I Ching has a lot to say about modesty, but basically we all like and admire people who are what they appear to be, as Socrates himself said.

We all wear masks, but I think those rare people who seem most comfortable without a mask are those we intrinsically admire the most.

                                   2.    Honesty starts with honesty to yourself

It’s not hard to see that this is directly related to Rule 1. The truth is that we can’t be honest to others if we are not honest to ourselves. It should be no surprise that sociopathic narcissists are also serial liars. Narcissists, from my experience, and from what I’ve read, create a ‘reality distortion field’ that is often at odds with everyone else except for their most loyal followers.

There is an argument that this should be Rule 1. They are obviously interdependent. But Rule 1 seems to be the logical starting point for me. Rule 2 is a consequence of Rule 1 rather than the other way round.

Hugh Mackay made the observation in his book, Right & Wrong: How to Decide for Yourself, that ‘The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves’. From this, neurosis is born and many of the ills that beleaguer us. Self-honesty can be much harder than we think. Obviously, if we are deceiving ourselves, then, by definition, we are unaware of it. But the real objective of self-honesty is so we can have social intercourse with others and all that entails.

So you can see there is a hierarchy in my rules. It goes from how we perceive ourselves to how others perceive us, and logically to how we interact with them.

But before leaving Rule 2, I would like to mention a movie I saw a few years back called Ali’s Wedding, which was an Australian Muslim rom-com. Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron but it was a really good film, partly because it was based on real events experienced by the filmmaker. The music by Nigel Weslake was so good, I bought the soundtrack. It’s relevance to this discussion is that the movie opens with a quote from the Quran about lying. It effectively says that lies have a habit of snowballing; so you dig yourself deeper the further you go. It’s the premise upon which the entire film is based.

                              3.    Assume all humans have the same rights as you

This is so fundamental, it could be Rule 1, but I would argue that you can’t put this into practice without Rules 1 and 2. It’s the opposite to narcissism, which is what Rules 1 and 2 are attempting to counter.

One can see that a direct consequence is Confucius’s dictum: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; better known in the West as the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’; and attributed to Jesus of course.

It’s also the premise behind the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. All these rules are actually hard to live by, and I include myself in that broad statement.

A couple of years back when I wrote a post in response to the question: Is morality objective? I effectively argued that Rule No3 is the only objective morality.

The importance of purpose

A short while ago, New Scientist (Issue: 28 January 2017) had on its cover the headline, The Meaning of Life. On reading the article, titled Why am I here? (by Teal Burrell, pp. 30-33) it was really about the importance to health in finding purpose in one’s life. I believe this is so essential that I despair when I see hope and opportunity deliberately curtailed as we do with our treatment of refugees. It’s criminal – I really believe that – because it’s so fundamental to both psychological and physical health. As someone who often struggled to find purpose, this is a subject close to my heart.

As the article points out, for many people, religion provides a ‘higher purpose’, which is really a separate topic, but not an unrelated one. The author also references Viktor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning (very early in the piece), which I’ve sometimes argued is the only book I’ve read that should be compulsory reading. The book is based on Frankl’s experience as a holocaust survivor, but ultimately led to a philosophy and a psychological method (for want of a better term) that he practiced as a psychologist.

I’ve also read another book of his, The Unconscious God, where he argues that there are 3 basic ways in which we find purpose or meaning in our lives. One, through a relationship; two through a project; and three through dealing with adversity. This last seems paradoxical, even oxymoronic, yet it is the premise of virtually every work of narrative fiction that all of us (who watch cinema or TV) imbibe with addictive enthusiasm. I’ve long argued that wisdom doesn’t come from achievements or education but dealing with adversity in our lives, which is impossible to avoid no matter who you are. It makes one think of Socrates' (attributed) famous aphorism: The unexamined life is not worth living. If we think about it, we only examine our lives when we fail. So a life without failure is not really much of a life. The corollary to this is that risk is essential to success and to gaining maturity in all things.

Humans are the most socially complex creatures on the planet – take language. I’ve recently read a book, Cosmo Sapiens; Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, by John Hands. It’s as ambitious as its title suggests and it took him 10 years to complete: very erudite and comprehensive, Hands challenges science orthodoxies without being anti-science. But his book is not the topic of this post, so I won’t distract you further. One of his many salient points is that humans are unique, not the least because of our ability for self-reflection. He contends that we are not the only species with the ability to ‘know’, but we are the only species who ‘know that we know’ (his words) or think about thinking (my words). The point is that cognitively we are distinct from every other species on the planet because we can consider and cogitate on our origins, our mortality and our place in the overall scheme of things, in ways that other species can’t possibly think about.

And language is the key attribute, because, without it, we can’t even think in the way that we all take for granted; yet it's derived from our social environment (we all had to be taught). I understand that children isolated from adults can develop their own language, but, even under these extremely rare circumstances, it requires social interaction to develop. This is a lengthy introduction to the fact that all of us require social interaction (virtually from birth) to have a meaningful life in any way, shape or form. We spend a large part of our lives interacting with others and, to a very large extent, the quality of that interaction determines the quality of our lives.

And this is a convoluted way of reaching the first of Frankl’s ‘ways of finding meaning’: through a relationship. For most of us this implies a conjugal relationship with all that entails. For many of us, in our youth, there is a tendency to put all our eggs in that particular basket. But with age, our perspective changes with lust playing a lesser role, whilst more resilient traits like friendship, reliance and trust become more important, even necessary, in long term relationships, upon which we build something meaningful for ourselves and others. For many people, I think children provide a purpose, not that I’ve ever had any, but it’s something I’ve observed.

I know from personal experience, that having a project can provide purpose, and for many people, myself included, it can seem necessary. We live in a society (in the West, anyway) where our work often defines us and gives us an identity. I think this has historical roots. Men, in particular, were defined by what they do, often following a family tradition. This idea of a hereditary role (for life) is not as prevalent as it once was, but I suspect it snuffed out the light of aspiration for many. A couple of weeks ago I saw David Stratton; a Cinematic Life, followed by a Q&A with the man himself. David, who is about a decade older than me, came to Australia and made a career as a film critic, becoming one of the most respected, not only in Australia, but in the world. However, the cost was the bitter disappointment expressed by his father for not taking over the family grocery business back in England. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed the luxury of finding their own independent identity until relatively recently in Western societies. It’s the word ‘independent’ that was their particular stumbling block, because, even in my postwar childhood, women were not meant to be independent of a man.

The movie, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, which I reviewed back in 2010, does a fair job of addressing this issue in the guise of cinematic entertainment. To illustrate my point, I’ll quote from my own post:

The movie opens with a montage of people being sacked (fired) with a voice-over of Clooney explaining his job. This cuts to the core of the movie for me: what do we live for? For many people their job defines them – it is their identity, in their own eyes and the eyes of their society. So cutting off someone’s job is like cutting off their life – it’s humiliating at the very least, suicidally depressing at worst and life-changing at best.

So purpose is something most of us pursue, either through relationships within our family or through our work or both. But many of you will be asking: is there a higher purpose? I can’t answer that, but I’ll provide my own philosophical slant on it.

Socrates (again), who was forced to take his own life (as a consequence of a democratic process, it should be noted) supposedly said, in addition to the well-worn trope quoted above: 'Whether death is a door to another world or an endless sleep, we don’t know'. And I would add: We are not meant to know. I’m agnostic about an afterlife, but, to be honest, I’m not expecting one, and I’ve provided my views elsewhere. But there is a point worth making, which is that people who believe that their next life is more important than the one they’re currently living often have a perverse, not to say destructive, view on mortality. One only has to look at suicide bombers who believe that their death is a ticket to Paradise.

Having said all that, it’s well known that people with religious beliefs can benefit psychologically in that they often live healthy and fulfilling lives (as the New Scientist article, referenced in the introduction, attests). Personally, I think that when one reaches the end of one’s life, they will judge it not by their achievements and successes but by the lives they have touched. Purpose can best be found when we help others, whether it be through work or family or sport or just normal everyday interactions with strangers.

How should I live?

This is the 'Question of the Month' in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 101, March/April 2014). Submissions need to be 400 words or less, so mine is 400 words exactly (refer below).

How should I live?

How I should live and how I do live are not necessarily the same, but having aspirations and trying to live up to them is a good starting point. So the following is how I aspire to live, which I don’t always achieve in practice.

The most important point is that no one lives in isolation. The fact that we all, not only speak in a language, but also think in a language, illustrates how significantly dependent we are on our milieu. What’s more, from our earliest cognitive experiences to the remainder of our lives, we interact with others, and the quality of our lives is largely dependent on that interaction.

Everyone seeks happiness and in modern Western societies this universal goal is taken for granted. But how to achieve it? A tendency to narcissism, tacitly encouraged by the relatively recent innovation of social media, can lead to self-obsession, which we are particularly prone to in our youth. Socrates famously said (or so we believe): ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ But a thoughtful analysis of that coda, when applied to one’s own life, reveals that we only examine our lives when we fail. The corollary to this is that a life without failure is a life not worth living. And this is how wisdom evolves over a life’s experiences: not through success or study but through dealing with life’s trials and tribulations. This is reflected in virtually every story that’s been told: how the protagonist deals with adversity, be it physical or psychological or both. And this is why storytelling is universally appealing.

So how should I live my life? By being the opposite to narcissistic and self-obsessed. By realising that every interaction in my life is an opportunity to make my life more rewarding by making someone else’s life more rewarding. In any relationship, familial, work-related, contractual or whatever, either both parties are satisfied or both are dissatisfied. It is very rare that someone achieves happiness at someone else’s expense, unless they are competing in a sporting event or partaking in a reality TV show.

There is an old Chinese saying, possibly Confucian in origin: If you want to know the true worth of a person, observe the effects they have on other people's lives. A true leader knows that their leadership is not about their personal achievements: it’s about enabling others to realise their own achievements.

Existentialism in a movie

Up in the Air, the latest George Clooney film, is only the third movie I’ve reviewed on this blog, and the only common thread they share is that they all deal with philosophical issues, albeit in completely different ways with totally different themes.

Man on Wire was a documentary about a truly extraordinary, eccentric and uniquely talented human being. It’s hard to imagine we will ever see another Philippe Petit – certainly what he did was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Watchmen was a fantasy comic-book movie that captured an entire era, specifically the cold war, and consequently brought to the screen the contradictions that many of us, on the outside at least, find in the American psyche.

Up in the Air is an existentialist movie for our time, and, even though it is marketed as a romantic-comedy, anyone expecting it to be a typical feel-good movie that promotes happily-ever-after scenarios will be disappointed. It is uplifting, I believe, but not in the way many people will expect. It has had good reviews, at least in this country, and deservedly so in my opinion.

Firstly, I cannot over-emphasise how well-written this movie is. When I ran a writing course, I told my students that good writing is transparent. Even in a novel, I contend that no one notices good writing, they only notice bad writing. The reader should be so engaged in the story and the characters, that the writing becomes a transparent medium.

Well, in a movie the writing is even more transparent, because it comes out of the mouths of actors or is seen through the direction of the director. To give an example, there is a scene in this movie where two different people get two different reactions from the same person in the same scenario. This scene could easily have appeared contrived and unconvincing, but it was completely believable, because all the characters were so well written. But, as far as the audience is concerned, all credit goes to the actors, and that’s what I mean when I say the writing is transparent.

Now, I know that, according to the internet, part of this movie is unscripted and they used real people (non-actors) who had been laid off, but their participation is seamless. And, paradoxically, it’s the script-writing that allows this to happen invisibly.

Personally, I felt some resonances with this movie, because, when I was in America in 2001/2, I was living the same type of life as the protagonist (George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham): living in hotels and flying or driving around the country. No, I wasn’t a high-flying executive or a hatchet-man; just an ordinary bloke working in a foreign country, so I had no home so to speak. I also wrote half a novel during that period, which, in retrospect, I find quite incredible, as I now struggle to write at all, even though I live alone and no longer hold a full time job. I digress and indulge – two unpardonable sins – so let me get back to my theme.

The movie opens with a montage of people being sacked (fired) with a voice-over of Clooney explaining his job. This cuts to the core of the movie for me: what do we live for? For many people their job defines them – it is their identity, in their own eyes and the eyes of their society. So cutting off someone’s job is like cutting off their life – it’s humiliating at the very least, suicidally depressing at worst and life-changing at best.

The movie doesn’t explore these various scenarios, just hints at them, but that’s all it needs to do. A story puts you in the picture - makes you empathise - otherwise it doesn’t work as a story. So sitting in the cinema, we all identify with these people, feel their pain, their humiliation, their sense of betrayal and their sense of failure. It’s done very succinctly – the movie doesn’t dwell on the consequences – it hits us where it hurts then leave us to contemplate. Just how important is your job to you? Is it just a meal ticket or does it define who you are?

In another sub-plot or 2 or 3, the movie explores relationships and family. So in one film all the existential questions concerning 21st Century living are asked. Getting married, having kids, bringing up the next generation – is that what it’s all about? There’s no definitive answer; the question is left hanging because it’s entirely up to the individual.

Recently (last month) Stephen Law tackled the Meaning of Life question from a humanist perspective. Basically he was defending the position against those who claim that there is no meaning to life without religion, specifically, without God. God doesn’t get a mention in this movie, but that’s not surprising; God rarely gets a mention in the best of fiction. In a recent post of my own (Jesus’ Philosophy) I reviewed Don Cupitt’s book on that very topic, and Cupitt makes the observation that it was the introduction of the novel that brought humanist morality into ordinary discourse. And he’s right: one rarely finds a story where God provides the answer to a moral dilemma – the characters are left to work it out for themselves, and we would be hugely disappointed if that wasn’t the case.

In one scene in the movie, Bingham tells a teary-eyed middle-aged man that he can finally follow the dream he gave up in his youth of becoming a pastry chef or something similar. Existential psychology, if not existential philosophy, emphasises the importance of authenticity – it’s what all artists strive for - it’s about being honest to one’s self. How many of us fail to follow the dream and instead follow the path of least resistance, which is to do what is expected of us by our family, our church, our society or our spouse.

For most of us, finding meaning in our life has very little to do with God, even those of us who believe in a god, because it’s something internal not external. Viktor Frankl, in his autobiographical book about Auschwitz (Man's Search for Meaning), contends that there are 3 ways we find meaning in our life: through a project, through a relationship and through adversity. This movie, with no detour to a war zone or prison camp, hints at all three. Yet it’s in the context of relationships that the real questions are asked.

On Stephen’s blog, another blogger wrote a response which was drenched in cynicism – effectively saying that anyone seeking meaning, in a metaphysical sense, is delusional. And that Stephen’s criteria about what constitutes a ‘meaningful’ life was purely subjective. I challenged this guy by saying: ‘I don’t believe you’; everyone seeks meaning in their life, through their work or their art or their relationships, but, in particular, through relationships.

At the end of one’s life, I would suggest that one would judge it on how many lives one touched and how meaningfully they touched them; all other criteria would pale by comparison. To quote one of my favourite quotes from Eastern antiquity: If you want to judge the true worth of a person, observe the effects they have on other people’s lives.

The Existential God

I was introduced to Don Cupitt on Stephen Law’s blog, about a year ago, or even earlier, when he provided a link to a radio interview with Cupitt on a BBC philosophy programme. Cupitt is a theologian, and he was being quizzed on his particularly unorthodox view of God, which, from memory, was more humanist than sacred.

More recently, I acquired his book, Above Us Only Sky, followed by a Chinese hieroglyph, which I assume means ‘sky’. Inside, the book is subtitled, The Religion of Ordinary Life, which pretty well sums up Cupitt’s entire philosophy. The book’s title is obviously a direct reference to the line in John Lennon’s song, Imagine, which also includes the line, ‘And no religion too’, and, despite being a theologian, that line could equally apply to Cupitt’s book. Right at the start of his book, he provides 27 points in, what one might call, a manifesto for living. Point 22 is headed:

“Even the Supreme Good must be left behind at once.

I, all my expressions, and even the Summum Bonumm, the Supreme Good itself, are all of them transient. Eternal happiness may be great enough to make one feel that one’s whole life has been worthwhile, but it is utterly transient. Let it go!”

His book, as the above quote exemplifies, is even more humanist than his interview, and, in fact, I would call it existentialist, hence the title of this post. I have also called myself existentialist on more than one occasion, but then so is Viktor Frankl in my view, who is not entirely an atheist either. Existentialism is not synonymous with atheism, by the way, but most theists think it is. By existentialist, I mean that we are responsible for our own destiny, which makes God less significant in the overall scheme of things. In other words, a belief in God is less relevant when one considers that moral choices, and any other choice for that matter, are completely dependent on the individual. I take the extreme view and suggest that we are responsible for God rather than God is responsible for us, but that’s so heretical I’ll desist from pursuing it for the sake of continuity.

But Cupitt’s book was a genuine surprise, because, despite its glib title, it’s actually a very meaty book on philosophy. For a start, Cupitt puts emphasis on language as the prism, or even filter, through which we analyse and conceptualise the world. To quote his point 6:

“Life is a continuous streaming process of symbolic expression and exchange.

The motion of language logically precedes the appearing of a formed and ‘definite’ world. It is in this sense that it was once said that ‘In the beginning was the Word’.”

I don’t entirely agree with him, concerning his implication that language determines our reality, but I need to digress a bit before I can address that specifically.

A central tenet of his thesis is that our Platonic heritage of a ‘perfect’ world is an illusion that we are only just starting to shed. Life is exactly what we get and that’s all it is. His philosophy is that once we realise this ‘truth’, we can live the ‘religion of ordinary life’ as his title suggests, and his manifesto specifies. In fact, he argues that this is what we already do in a secular humanist society, but we just don’t articulate it as such. Curiously, I made a similar point in a post I wrote on this blog almost 2 years ago, titled, Existentialism: the unconscious philosophy (Oct.07). Basically, I contended that, following the global Western cultural revolution of the 1960s, we adopted an existentialist philosophy without specifying it as such, or even realising it. We effectively said that we are responsible for our actions and their consequences and God has very little to do with it. I believe Cupitt is making a similar point: we achieved a revelation that humanity’s future is in our hands, and, unless we accept that responsibility, we will fail it.

But it’s in his discussion on rejecting Plato and the illusion that we inherited from him, that he returns to the significance of language:

“You can have more-or-less anything, provided only that you understand and accept that you can have it only language-wrapped – that is, mediated by language’s secondary, symbolic and always-ambiguous quality.” (Emphasis in the original.)

In highlighting this point, I’ve skipped a lot of his text, including an entire chapter on ‘Truth’ and a discussion on Descartes, and, in particular, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant famously contends that we will never understand the ‘thing-in-itself’, which is a direct reference to Plato’s ‘Forms’.

Like many dissertations on epistemology, Cupitt glosses over the significance of mathematics, which is arguably the most stubborn relic of Plato’s philosophy, and one that effectively side-steps Cupitt’s ‘language-wrapped’ dependence that I quoted above. I’m not a physicist but physics has interested me my whole life, and I’ve long believed that, as a discipline, it provides us with the best means of interpreting the universe and revealing its mysteries. In fact, without physics, our knowledge of the universe would still be stuck in the dark ages. But Cupitt alludes to a deep scepticism when he describes it thus:

“The physicist sets out his definitions of matter, space and time, then his laws of motion, and then his formulae for making calculations. But when he has developed his system of mathematical physics – a system of ideas – how is he to prove that there is a Real World out there of which the system is true and to which it applies? …whence do all its ideas get their ‘objective reality’?”

In other words, Cupitt is sceptical that a ‘system of ideas’, even one imbedded in mathematics, can provide an ‘objective reality’. But there are 2 points that Cupitt fails to address in his dissertation on ‘truth’ and ‘language’. Firstly, mathematics is not a language in the normal sense, although many people refer to it as if it is. Mathematical symbols are a language of sorts, but the concepts they represent, and, in particular, the relationships that mathematics describes are the closest we will get to ‘“God-given” truth’ to quote Roger Penrose (The Emperor’s New Mind). In other words, they have a universal quality unlike any other epistemic system that we know of, that arguably contain truths independent of the human mind. Now, I know many philosophers dispute this, but mathematical ‘truths’ (wherever they come from) are arguably the only abstract truths we can rely on, and do rely on all the time, in every technological marvel we exploit.

So mathematics provides us with ‘truths’ as well as a window into the ‘reality’ of the universe that we would never otherwise possess. It is on this point that I believe Cupitt and I epistemologically differ.

But it’s not epistemology per se that Cupitt is challenging when he explicates: ideas are ‘language-wrapped’; he has a deeper, theological motive. He points out how absurd it is to think that God provided us with scriptures using a language humans invented. Especially since God should be outside language in the same way ‘He’s’ supposedly outside the very universe in which we exist. What’s more, Cupitt challenges the very notion that our experience of ‘God’ by praying can be validated without language. I believe Cupitt makes a very good point here: if our ideas are language-wrapped then so is our idea of God.

In an earlier post (May 09) I referenced an essay by Raymond Smullyan called Is God a Taoist? In my post, I made a connection between Smullyan’s idea of God or Tao as ‘the scheme of things’ and the mathematical laws at different levels of scale that the universe appears to obey. This particular concept of an impersonal, non-language-wrapped God in combination with a Platonic mathematical realm is entirely compatible with Cupitt’s stated philosophy, though I doubt he would accept it. Cupitt provides an allegorical tale of a large group of Buddhist monks, one of whom gets up to speak about the Tao (Cupitt uses the term, ‘Supreme Good’), saying that: ‘No words can speak of it… It is beyond speech, it is even beyond all thought.’ When he sits down, another monk stands to address the same crowd: ‘Did the last speaker say anything?’

In a recent post on Storytelling (July 09), I made the point that without language we would think in the language of dreams, which is imagery and emotion. In fact, I argued that the language of dreams is the language of storytelling, only we are unaware of it. The story is ‘language-wrapped’ but the emotional content of the story is not, and neither is the imagery it conjures in our minds. Without these 2 components, the story is lifeless, just words on paper – it fails to engage the mind as story.

I’m not surprised that many cultures include dreaming as part of their religion – the American Indians are possibly the best known. Australian Aborigines use the term ‘Dream-time’ (at least, that’s its English translation) as the reference to their religion, full of mythical creatures and mythical tales. In recent posts on Larry Niven’s blog, there have been a couple of references to the comparison between religion and music that people often make. Many people have made the observation that music transcends language, and to some extent that is true. The only reason, we can say that, is because music moves us emotionally, and whilst language can describe those emotions it can’t convey them, whereas music can. So I would argue that religious experience is not language-wrapped in the same way that musical experience is not language-wrapped. Again, Cupitt would beg to differ. In fact, he would dispute the religious experience and call it illusion, and he is not alone. Most philosophers would agree with him completely.

Cupitt devotes an entire chapter to the subject, ‘Religion’, where he describes it as a ‘standard’ (as in a flag) to which people rally and identify, and, to which he rightly acknowledges, represents a view of God that is no longer tenable or of value. This is the religion that divides people and incorporates an infinite being who stands outside the world and judges us all. On this point, Cupitt and I are in agreement: it’s an entirely outdated, even dangerous, concept.

“…those who split the world between good and evil in effect split their own psyches too, and the puritans, the wowsers, the morality-campaigners, the condemners and the persecutors end up as unhappy people, Bible-bashers who are themselves without religion.”

This is the origin of the neurosis that made people of my generation revolt. Cupitt also makes reference to the 1960s when he describes the change in the zeitgeist that is effectively the theme of his book. Neurosis is like hypnotism – your brain tells you to do one thing but you do something else over which you feel you have no control. If you put your mind in a strait-jacket then it will revolt in a way that will shock you. Religion can do exactly that. To quote Cupitt again:

“In one form or another around the world, organized religion still manages to keep a large percentage of humanity locked in the most wretched mental poverty and backwardness.”

Cupitt goes on to express his individualistic philosophy that he calls ‘solar living’ (as in solo or solitary) but I would call existentialism, or a variant thereof. The fundamentals of his religious philosophy is to replace ‘God’ with ‘Life’, and rather than have a relationship between an earthly existence and an immortal one, to have a relationship between the individual’s life and the continuing stream of life that involves the rest of humanity.

My own approach is to refer to the internal and external world, which is the cornerstone of my entire world philosophy, but is effectively the same concept that Cupitt expresses here, albeit using different language. (Later in the book, Cupitt rejects the inner life concept altogether.) However, unlike Cupitt, I would contend that religion is part of one’s inner world rather than the external world. This makes religion completely subjective, and, in many respects, in conflict with organised or institutionalised religion. I’ve made this point before on previous posts, and Cupitt makes a similar point, arguably the most important in the book for me:

“The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.”

Cupitt always brings the discussion back to language, and this is the source of my personal dissent with his philosophy. He makes the apparently self-evident point: ‘…there is no meaning, no truth, no reality, and no knowledge without language.’ Which is true for us humans, cognitively, but the unstated corollary is that because none of these things can exist without language, they can’t exist without humanity either. This is the crux of his entire epistemological thesis.

Language is the most obvious bridge between our internal and external world, and almost nothing can be conveyed without language, but lots of things can be felt and experienced without the intervention of language. But Cupitt would argue that any experience is meaningless, quite literally, if it can’t be expressed in language. In other words, because it comes ‘language-wrapped’, that’s what makes it real. One needs to be careful here to distinguish epistemology from ontology, and I think the 2 are being confounded.

I think religion, as it is experienced by the individual, actually has little to do with language and more to do with emotion, just like music or even storytelling. As I described above, a story is written in words, but if it doesn’t transcend the words then it’s not a story. On the other hand, Cupitt argues, categorically, that there is nothing meaningful ‘outside language’.

Religion, and therefore God, is a psychological phenomenon, just like colour. Now, everyone thinks this is a misguided analogy, but colour does not exist out there in the external world, it only exists in your mind. What exists in the external world are light waves reflected off objects. You could probably build a robot that could delineate different wavelengths of light and associate a range of wavelengths with a label, like red for instance. But the robot wouldn’t actually see the colour red like you and I do. Some monkeys can’t see colours that we can see, because they only have bichromatic vision not trichromatic, but, if we genetically engineer them, they can. Yes, that’s a fact, not internet bullshit – it’s been done.

Anyway God is an experience that some people have that ‘feels’ like something outside themselves even though it only occurs in their minds. Many people never have this experience, so they don’t believe in God. The problem with this is that some of the people who think they have this experience believe that makes them superior to those who don’t, and likewise some of the people who don’t, believe they must be axiomatically superior to those who claim they do, because they’re obviously nuts.

Cupitt doesn’t address this, but I do because it’s what creates the whole divide that is actually so unimportant. I contend it’s like heterosexuals believing that everyone should be heterosexual, because it’s unimaginable to be anything else, and homosexuals arguing that everyone should be homosexual, even though they never do. But, in the same way that I think people who are heterosexual should behave as heterosexuals and people who are homosexual should behave as homosexuals, I believe that people who have an experience that they call God should be theists, and those who don’t should be atheists.

At the end of the day, I think God is a projection. I believe that the God someone believes in says more about them than it says about God (I’ve made this point before). That way people get the God they deserve. I call it the existential God.

I’ve now gone completely away from Cupitt’s book, but don’t be put off, it’s a very good book. And it’s very good philosophy because it provokes critical thinking. Another person would write something completely different to what I have written because they would focus on something else. This is a book to which, I admit, I have not done justice. It is worth acquiring just to read the essay he wrote for a symposium on Judaic Christian dialogue – not what people expected, I’m sure.

Cupitt ultimately argues for a universal morality that ignores identity of any kind, just like Lennon’s song. Accordingly, I’ll give Cupitt the last word(s):

“Our moral posture and practice must never be associated with a claim to be… an adherent of some particular ethnic or religious group, because all those who retreat into ‘identity’ have given up universal morality and have embraced some form of partisan fundamentalism – which means paranoia and hatred of humanity.”

“…any philosopher who is serious about religion should avoid all contact with ‘organized religion’. …Which is why, on the day this book is published, I shall finally and sadly terminate my own lifelong connection with organized religion.”