« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
February 28, 2005
When is a person truly free?
We had our first philosophy cafe at the Iron Rail Bookstore in the Marigny and considered the question whether we are truly free. A definition we came up with is that freedom is being or acting without constraint. A followup question is what counts as a constraint? An assailant or an enemy. Our own government. Our own desires. Our own ignorance. All options. Each of these options leads to interesting discussions.
Another option is that we are simply causally constrained. Like, if you consider that you are a natural organism, and that everything you are is dependent upon this natural organism which follows physical laws, then any action you perform is an event having some cause explicable by physical laws, so that the sense of choice you had in performing that action is perhaps illusory.
Another option is that values constrain freedom. The value of not killing determines your action away from murder. But in our conversation about values, there arose the paradox that in acting on values you may actually be considered to be in a freer state than if you, say, acted on mere desire or even chaotically or ambivalently.
Thinking about it after the philosophy cafe, I'd say I more fully experience freedom when I fully accept what is bound to happen. I see that it is going to happen and I say "great". This goes for both things done to me and things I do. What's odd is to be able to think that my own action is bound to happen and yet feel free in letting it happen. I'm thinking of experiences like playing a sport or a musical instrument that you're good at and being "in the zone". It's like what you're doing happens before it happens.
That seems to me the epitome of the experience of freedom and even if all my action is "constrained" by neural firings in my brain, if I could take a look in my brain and see that a particular firing were correlated with a particular effect which I'm happy to see will come about, then great! How liberating!
So, I don't think that a true sense of freedom comes from "being able to do otherwise" as it's often framed. This seems to me like a greedy sense of freedom, a sense of freedom which dooms itself. - Drew
Posted by lyceum at 10:39 PM | Comments (2)
February 25, 2005
What is adventure & where does it take you?
Adventures are more than just fun. They seem to have seem deeper meaning and some deeper necessity and that's what we talked about in this philosophy cafe. In an adventure, there seems to be some discovery one is after, a mystery one is tracking down - some sort of leap into the unknown, in whatever respect. Whether it's travelling to Argentina, trying out an entirely new kind of toothbrush or sitting in a counseling session to discover yourself. The adventure also takes you out of your comfort zone, not in a completely threatening way, but in a way that seems to hold some promise of growth.
Which leads into the question of "where adventure takes you". We nearly came to some consensus that, speaking generally, no matter where the adventure literally takes you, it brings you to yourself, but a self that's expanded in potentiality and courage as a result of the adventure. Sometimes we need adventure, and if there is this need it would seem to be a need for growth, which may be a basic human impulse. Then again, not everyone is so adventurous and even the greatest adventurer appreciates down time. This weariness from adventure may point to something deeper than just physical or emotional limits - it may be that one has to gather together "what I am", or re-integrate, after an adventure in order to better see the next growing edge, the launching point for the next adventure.
But are adventures always positive? Most of us were thinking that if the outcome is not positive, we can't consider the experience an adventure. Like if you die before you reach the top of the mountain, what started out as an adventure turns into a tragedy. It's hard to talk about the adventure of dying from cancer, unless that experience does in some additional way lead to personal growth.
If it is an adventure, it leads to a good story. Adventure may even be the basic story of human existence, tragedy being the denial of a good ending and comedy the absurdity or mishandling of the journey (and realism may be the denial of the story). Thinking of cycles of adventure and integration, I'm reminded of the subtitle to Tolkein's adventure story *The Hobbit*, which is "There and Back Again". But can you ever go back again? - Drew
Posted by lyceum at 09:38 AM | Comments (2)
February 18, 2005
Week End and Antonin Artaud
Our viewing of Godard's "Week End" was painful but like true cinema fans we got through the absurdist film and tried to understand why this flick is so important for film studies. I have thought about how the film does anticipate the deconstructive work of Derrida and the "post-modern-condition" by taking material out of any narrative sequence or familiar context and shuffling the images and dialogues into a stream of consciousness flow with a decidedly dystopic tone. In other words, a really bad trip. We did notice an allusion to Lewis Carroll and wasn't Alice's journey equally disorienting and disturbing? I am also reminded of the work of the wildman of French theatre, Antonin Artaud, who originated the "theatre of cruelty" which presented the audience with very assaultive, revolting and terrorizing presentations that were to work on the unconscious in some kind of liberating fashion. Anne challenged the claim that this could in anyway be therapeutic since, unlike the catharsis in Greek drama, for instance, Week End does not allow for any identification or empathy. By blocking us from the normative ego functions of plot, causation or meaning we are thrown into the nightmarish condition of images that tear apart "thinking" rather than aid in its implimentation. Last night I would have said this all seemed like a waste of time but I must say that many of these images have become more powerful in my memory due to their decontextualization. Maybe there is something to the notion that creativity can be liberated when meaning hungry desire is foiled.
Posted by lyceum at 07:43 PM | Comments (1)
February 08, 2005
Greetings from Argentina
Hola Lyceum bloggers! I am now in central Argentina, staying with a friend I met is Peru last year while doing shamanic work. He is the director of an addiction program and wants to include the use of the sacred shamanic plants such as ayahuasca and san pedro in his work. It is very interesting staying with an Argentine family in a small town. My Spanish is non-existent and English is rare, so I muddle by and am confused and open, like a child, to lots of help. And the people are generally very kind, friendly and patient. Buenos Aires was a surprise - a very modern, cosmopolitan city with reams of bookstores. It is definitely the cultural hub of South America. Uruguay (Montevideo) contrasted starkly to this, being poorer, more traditional and more intimate. An interesting custom is the drinking of mate (a yerba tea - not the mate de coca of Peru) out of traditional cups with silver straws as strainers that everyone seems to pull out at about 5:00. Ando of course the notorious custom in Buenos Aires of beginning to think about dinner about 11:00 and having the meal at midnight and then dancing Tango 'til 3 or 4. (not me) But I did see some fine tango and heard wonderful guitar music. Tonight I take a 16 hour bus ride across the Andes for my last week in Santiago de Chile. See yall soon, David O
Posted by lyceum at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2005
The Grifters
What's grifting? It seems to be something like con-artistry and breaking the rules to your advantage with the object of purely personal gain. If you're such a crook, you're "in the grift". If you're bad at it, you should "get out of the grift". So, that's basically what this movie is about, three people in the grift, Roy, Lily & Myra, and it's about their various ways of grifting, and it's about Roy's desire to get out of the grift. Oh, and it's also about incest.
At first, that may seem like a strange thematic overlay. But then you see the two themes - hustling & incest - running parallel, and they seem to work together seamlessly. The story: Lily is Roy's mom, she had him at age 14, and brought him up in this grifting milieu. There were hints in the movie that she had sexual relations with him before he left home at 17, and then she definitely approaches him sexually at the end of the movie.
More on grifters, then I'll get back to the incest theme: A grifter works purely out of self-interest. Grifters respect each other for not giving a damn about each other and for even besting each other. When Lily in the movie finally revealed to her cruel (but griftingly rational) boss Bobo that she had a (now 25 yr old) kid, he asked "What in the hell are you doing with a kid?" It doesn't make sense to have a kid in the grift-world, because you have to be so intensely self-interested (which ostensibly means you're money-interested, but it seemed in the movie that more important is that a grifter have the "upperhand", to "be the wiser").
Why doesn't it make sense to have a kid in the grift? Because (I'm guessing - I'm not a parent) good parents put the interest of their kids before their own. This is impossible in the grift world. And when Lily approaches Roy sexually at the end of the movie it is purely out of self-interest, so that he'll give her his money. And her doing this sorta thing made sense, when you looked at it from Lily's perhaps blinkered point of view.
Okay, that's part of the movie. Others can comment on other aspects of the story if they like, but the movie got me to thinking about incest. I wonder about our intuition that parent/child incest is bad - what makes us think this? If it is *always* (or almost always) the case that approaching someone sexually is more in *one's own* self-interest than the approachee, then maybe that's why it seems bad for a parent to sexually approach a child whose interest the parent should consider over the parent's own interest. A parent shouldn't be self-interested over a child like this.
And it's often said, when we try to explain what's bad about incest, that the child can't understand what's going on (if the child is young), and in that case it's hard to say sexual approaches are in the child's interest.
In any case, don't have a kid if you're in the grift. - Drew
Posted by lyceum at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)