David Denby is Not Amused.

September 15, 2010 at 10:54 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected. New obstructions of my computer signal prevented me from running a security scan of my system yesterday. I will try, again, today. Please inform law enforcement in your area of these matters. ("Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'")

September 13, 2010 at 8:11 P.M. Attacks against my computer from New Jersey may have resulted in the insertions of "errors" in a number of these writings. I will do my best to make corrections as quickly as possible. This may mean that new indictments are expected in New Jersey.

September 11, 2010 at 5:45 P.M. I just received a call from "Time/Warner" (?) threatening to shut off my cable connection on Tuesday, despite previous assurances that satisfactory and normal payment could be made on Wednesday of this week. How curious? Censorship? The call was made from the following number identified as "Time/Warner": September 11, 2010 at 5:42 P.M. (718)-670-0200. I live in New York. Why would "Time/Warner" call from New Jersey or Brooklyn?

"G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" was vandalized today. Threatening and anonymous calls are received regularly.

September 3, 2010 at 7:10 P.M. Several essays were vandalized. I have made the necessary corrections.

August 28, 2010 at 12:59 P.M. The latest wave of computer crimes has damaged my security system. As a result, I cannot run a full scan of my computer at this time. Noise and other harassments makes it difficult to write today, from this computer. I will write on a legal pad and transfer the essays on to this blog from public computers. I cannot write substantial essays or creative fiction under these conditions, of course, but I can continue to focus on New Jersey corruption and criminality. I hope to purchase a laptop or notebook to write the novel I have been working on for some time.

August 27, 2010 at 2:19 P.M. Due to the seven occasions on which my cable signal to my computer has been blocked over the past two days, requiring me to reboot my computer each time, I have been unable to write as much I would like. Mysteriously, someone mentioned that "death is all we're going to get." For some reason, I "get" the impression that some New Jersey persons do not wish me well. "Headshots?" I will continue to struggle to run security scans and do more work on New Jersey issues. I hope that you will enjoy the lovely weather today. In case there is any doubt about my position, I will make it clear that I am willing to die to express my opinions freely and to face the persons who have committed these crimes against me. I hope those persons are willing to make a similar commitment.

August 17, 2010 at 11:40 A.M. Numerous defacements of writings at these blogs overnight have required me to make corrections, once again. Fraudulent advertisements have been attached to this blog, once more, illegally. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

August 7, 2010 at 1:41 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this blog, illegally and against my will, ostensibly from "Ads by Google":

"NEW YORKER OFFICIAL SITE, Subscribe to New Yorker magazine for $39.95/yr. & save 83%. http://www.newyorker.com/ "

The message conveyed by this bogus advertisement is that David Denby or David Remnick is behind this advertisement and attacks on my writings, except that the subscription price is wrong. New Jersey's OAE? "Cubanoids?" ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

August 6, 2010 at 10:07 A.M. A computer attack last night has left me with no personal computer. I will write twice per week from multiple public computers. I cannot say who is behind this latest attack. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")

July 25, 2010 at 12:49 P.M. More "errors" inserted in this comment and disfigurements of my review of "Inception." I wonder why? Envy? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")

July 24, 2010 at 7:14 P.M. "Error" inserted since this essay was posted earlier this afternoon. I hope that this action was not taken on behalf of Mr. Denby or The New Yorker. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

July 24, 2010 at 12:56 P.M. Attacks against this essay and all of my writings will continue with the protection of corrupt American officials for many years to come. I will make corrections of any inserted "errors" as quickly as possible. These writings are ostensibly protected by the Constitution of the United States of America and copyright laws enacted by the U.S. government. Let us see how much that protection is worth. (Mr. McGill at the OAE?)

September 11, 2010 at 5:40 P.M. Thus far, in practice, legal guarantees have meant nothing to New Jersey which continues to urinate on the Bill of Rights for which men and women in uniform are dying. This sanctioned illegality is especially disgusting and unforgivable on the anniversary of 9/11. Shame on you, Mr. Rabner. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" then "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), entirety.

Two supplemental sources briefly alluded to in what follows:

Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1965).
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995).

I rarely purchase The New Yorker magazine anymore, unless I see something by Woody Allan or another writer I admire greatly. Mr. Denby is a critic I respect and admire as a writer. However, there have been serious mistakes in reviews by Mr. Denby, in my opinion, and also in the view of many persons within as well as beyond the United States of America.

I am sure that David Denby is a moral person and not someone who would ever deliberately insult the religion or ethnicity of another person. I believe that someone inserted paragraphs in Mr. Denby's review -- perhaps, unlike me, this computer criminal is a notorious reader of "graphic novels"? -- that cannot be attributed to the critic whose writings I know fairly well and whose book I would give, if I could, to every college freshman in America. ("Martha Nussbaum on the Vindication of Love" and "Is This America?")

The recent review of "Inception" is a greater disappointment than the astonishing claim by Mr. Denby that there was "no philosophy" in The Matrix: Reloaded. Those were Mr. Denby's words. Well, scholars from all over the world disagree with this contention regarding the Matrix sequel. Years after that film series appeared, scholars continue to write books commenting on the philosophical ideas in those rich "cinematic texts." Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Mr. Denby did not like or "get" The Matrix: Reloaded. I am confident that this is not because Mr. Denby is antisemitic or hostile to the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. David Denby simply did not absorb the ideas in the movie. There is a difference between not liking something that you understand and rejecting something because you don't appreciate all there is in the work. Stupidity is always forgivable, Mr. McGill, especially by highly intelligent critics like Mr. Denby. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")

There are many young men and women -- especially, urban young people -- who like this movie, "Inception," or Dark Knight (which I think less good than "Inception"), whose only contact with philosophical and scientific ideas may be such films. I hope to be respectful of their philosophical curiosity, also to encourage their passion for cinema and ideas. I agree with those young men, especially, that what seems "deep" to them often is deep. "Inception" is a case in point. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

It may be that, when it comes to Dark Knight, I am the one who missed something in the movie.
Mr. Denby, with all due respect to you, you did not fully appreciate the themes in this movie ("Inception") or all of the references, cinematic, philosophical, theological, scientific, mythological, to say nothing of the various painters conjured by the images on-screen. You missed it, David. In a single sentence, this is Mr. Denby's opinion of "Inception":

" ... 'Inception' is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else." (p. 78.)

This conclusion is surprisingly similar to A.O. Scott's opinion. I wonder whether reviews of "Inception" in the Times and New Yorker were "coordinated" or written by the same person or persons? More likely, sentences were inserted in both texts by someone other than their respective authors. A banality repeated by many persons sharing or reflecting a mindset remains a banality. Mr. Edelstein at CBS may concur with this observation? David Brooks?

Among the "little else" the movie deals with are quantum mechanics, Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics and theology -- at least, these issues are present in the opinion of persons who teach the subjects at elite universities -- mind/body issues, the myth of Orpheus, Adriadne's labyrinth, hermeneutics, aesthetic theory, deconstruction, Jungian psychology, love and death, also madness. I wonder whether David Denby writes as "David Brooks"? Their views are so similar, perhaps for the same inserted reasons. For any writer to participate in the violation of the creative efforts of others is especially despicable and cowardly. Mr. Denby, you have been "incepted."

"If you don't pinch yourself too hard," you will believe that Mr. Denby is dismissive and insulting of the religious views of 2 billion or so Hindus and Buddhists, to say nothing of Muslims: "For long stretches, you're not sure of whether you're in a dream or reality, which isn't nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be." (p. 78.)

We all know that everyone in America has the right to create a place of worship on private property. Hence, objections to a mosque near ground zero are politically popular, but Constitutionally absurd. Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for his principled and correct stance on that issue. Symbolically, I cannot think of a more fitting place to indicate the true meaning of Islam as opposed to the bizarre interpretations of terrorists.

This idea that the world is a dream is central to the religious views of billions of persons on the planet, many of whom happen to be very well-educated -- for example, scientist Amit Goswami. Among these persons are Sufis whose mystical versions of Islam are beautiful interpretations of the world as dream-like.

Mr. Denby, how carefully did you think about this statement "not as much fun" as Nolan thought? Is it your statement? You could not have proof-read this text very well. Were there "insertions" (inceptions, perhaps) into your text by lesser hands? I suspect that there must have been such "additions" to this review. This amused contempt for antirealism is not a statement that I associate with the author of the book listed above who wondered in discussing Plato's parallel theories: "Was anything holding us together?" (The Great Books, at p. 66.)

As one inheritor of a religious tradition and people (a point which Mr. Edelstein should bear in mind) which has been subjected to great crimes, oppression and ridicule, Mr. Denby, do you really wish to imply that the religions of Asia are "silly and not much fun?" I doubt it. As a writer, will you remain silent in the presence of censorship or torture? I hope not.

Many of the ideas in "Inception" are paraphrases of ancient metaphysical doctrines, some of which are sacred to many persons today. Mr. Denby, astonishingly, claims that there is "no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream world struggle between C.E.O.s." (p. 79.)

I disagree. I am not alone in this view of "Inception" which is shared by many theologians and philosophers, also scientists, who are already devoting substantial attention to this film. They should study "Inception" most carefully. I have discussed my reasons for differing with Mr. Denby concerning the merits of this movie in my humble "little" review of "Inception." That review is thoroughly documented with scholarly support for all of my assertions of opinion or interpretations. I have reason to believe that the review is admired outside the U.S. and, maybe, by one or two persons inside America who are as "uneducated" as I must seem to Mr. Denby.

Sadly, my review of "Inception" -- like most of my writings -- is subjected to daily vandalism of a kind that Mr. Denby cannot imagine and which is only possible with the cooperation of a corrupt and lying state government that, allegedly, "guarantees freedom of speech to all Americans." The effort to denigrate my intelligence and to silence me is the experience of billions of humans on this planet who are also relegated to silence and irrelevance by many fortunate Americans. Perhaps their cable connections will be cut off? I believe that the justified anger of those billions of persons will not be contained for long. ("Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker.'")

Perhaps some persons are under the impression that I am a Palestinian. This would make it O.K. for some people to torture or murder me since Palestinian, Arabs (like poor minority men in America) are unworthy of serious consideration in the estimation of some affluent persons in my society who see themselves as my "superiors." We, insignificant persons, must not be heard. Whatever my ethnicity, it should be prohibited to deface and vandalize my writings over so many years, publicly, especially since these writings are protected by U.S. law. To obstruct my access to my own creative work is another form of censorship and psychological torture which can only take place in America with governmental cooperation. ("Censorship!")

I cannot believe that American officials are unable to control this situation. Anyone who writes for a living should think carefully about indulging in censorship of the writings of others or about remaining indifferent to such public cruelty even if they are Jewish graduates of Yale specializing in reviewing restaurants for The New Yorker. The first writers who will be censored and suppressed in a fascist society will be Jews and radical intellectuals of all sorts. ("The Heidegger Controversy" and "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

I may have the unique distinction of being insulted by Nazis and antisemites assuming that I am a Jew (close) and also by persons assuming that I am a Palestinian. Right-wing Cuban-Americans claim that I am Fidel Castro; Cubans may think that I am not far enough on the Left. When everyone objects to something that you are saying, it probably means that you are speaking truth to power. No more "errors" to be inserted today? Will you destroy my Internet connection, Mr. Rabner? ("No More Lies and Cover-Ups, Chief Justice Rabner!")

This scholarship in my writings is necessary because my opinions, as a non-resident of the Upper West Side who avoids summers in Long Island and holds only a J.D. degree, will be dismissed or ignored, laughed at (probably) by many of New York's "witty" media elites right before they plagiarize my work. This does not refer to Mr. Denby. I am lucky not to be hit with a "robot bomb." However, the obvious range of my reading and languages, together with the reception of this work (both the movie and my review, I believe) in many places in the world -- including some elite universities, I hope -- suggests that it is not to be insulted or ignored easily, even if I am not a member of the "club." Pick a card?

Many of us are not members of Manhattan's media "club." Maybe I have been hit with a robot bomb. The trouble with robot bombs is that everyone will start to use them. I prefer argument, discussion, humor to violence. This is probably because I am uneducated. This would be a good time to insert "errors" in this essay, again, New Jersey. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

"The Da Vinci Code" and several other essays have been vandalized today. I surmise that American authorities are aware of these crimes, but U.S. officials are unable or unwilling to take action to prevent these crimes. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. Hypocrisy? Should China and Cuba believe American claims that we respect freedom of speech and protect the rights of dissidents? Is America's dialogue with the world a monologue in which only U.S. voices expressing the will and opinions of the powerful few will be heard? It may be that the world is slightly bigger and more complex than the comfortable media elites in the Hamptons may imagine. Care for a Perrier, Mr. Denby?

Mr. Denby's (or someone else's) fashionable and weary sigh (he has seen through it all?) -- from Amagansett, Long Island perhaps -- at the foolishness of mere mortals who have not socialized with full professors at Columbia University is a little exhausting for the reader: "Nolan is working on so many levels of representation [exactly!] at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what is going on." (p. 79.) (emphasis added)

The universe and/or your psyche, David, are working on many levels all the time, even when you dream. Cosmos and brain are now seen as "holograms": " ... if the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on the possibility that objective reality -- the world of coffee cups, mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps -- might not even exist, or at least not exist in the way we believe it exists."

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), at p. 29. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

At the midnight showing of the film which I attended, a group of undergraduates sat next to me, with decks of cards in their hands, shuffling the cards during the best parts of the film (distraction?). Happily, this activity reminded me of the mathematics of manifolds and theories of probability, randomness, and chance. Who would not be reminded of such theories? I wonder whether Congressman Jerrold Nadler can provide any illumination in this matter?

I invite you to ponder Paul Ricoeur's reflections as he approached death in light of this movie's comment on one couple's construction of their "dream world" over 30 years and its destruction with the loss of one partner in the dialectic. Paul Ricoeur, "The Duty of Memory, The Duty of Justice," in Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 116-126. (Holocaust studies?)

" ... the Unknowable is that which lives in the cracks between the known and the irrelevant; between the hard edges of the world and the ignorance of superstition. Between Hegel's absolute idea and Feuerbach's sensuousness. The unknowable lives in a pack of cards after it has been fairly shuffled but before it has been dealt, each possibility matters."

Steven Brust & Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity (New York: Tor, 1991), at p. 60.

Reality is that deck of cards always being dealt for a new game. Spin that top, David.

"Inception": A Movie Review.

March 20, 2011 at 9:30 P.M. New attacks against this essay have resulted in new "errors" being inserted and corrected, especially in the spacing of titles in the bibliography. New defacements of this work are always expected.

August 20, 2010 at 10:04 P.M. An attack against my security system obstructed my updating feature. I have restarted my computer. I will try to run a scan for the third time today. A single letter was deleted from a word in my list of sources. I have corrected that "error." New arrests are expected in New Jersey soon. I hope. Mr. Codey's brother has a little problema. I will not discuss that matter unless there is more of a connection to Mr. Codey than I have seen so far.

August 19, 2010 at 10:39 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected as New Jersey is accused of fraud in connection with pension funds. ("New Jersey is $46 BILLION 'Short' in Pension Funds.")

August 17, 2010 at 10:50 A.M. Several essays appear to have been vandalized overnight, numerous "errors" were inserted in this essay-review with the goal of maximizing harmful frustrations. I have made all necessary corrections. Furthermore, I will do my best to make corrections of reinserted "errors" as they appear in my writings. I have reason to believe that this essay will be republished in a setting where such crimes may not be committed by persons sheltered from criminal liability. I will make use of more public computers in the future.

August 14, 2010 at 10:10 A.M. Several essays were altered yesterday, the spacing between titles was affected in this essay. I hope to have made all of the necessary corrections in this essay today, until next time. This kind of wave of attacks is usually followed by new indictments in New Jersey. Keep your fingers crossed.

August 7, 2010 at 5:33 P.M. A letter was deleted from a word in this essay. I corrected that "error" from a public computer. A word was deleted from "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." I have also corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other essays or writings have been disfigured in the cybercrimes committed over the past two days. I have run six scans of my computer, removing security risks each time. The number of intrusions into my computer is in the hundreds every day.

July 26, 2010 at 11:45 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected.

July 25, 2010 at 11:56 A.M. "Errors" were inserted in this text which had been left alone for a few days. Let us see what further attacks are directed against this work and others at these blogs. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. I think that the quality of this review, such as it is, has embarrassed some persons whose assessments of this movie seem far less good to many readers. Hence, the continuing efforts to destroy this text as well as many others. I am sure that many persons in the world can relate to my feelings upon discovering further vandalisms of this work today. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

July 22, 2010 at 10:20 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight in this essay, after my most recent review and not found in previous versions of the work, will now be corrected. Sadly, we may expect more of this sort of thing during the next several days. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime" then "What is it like to be censored in America?" and "David Denby is Not Amused.")

Mr. Christie, use of these tactics reflects poorly not only on New Jersey, but also on the United States of America. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")

July 21, 2010 at 5:09 P.M. "Error" inserted since earlier today. I have now corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or vandalized today. I will do my best to make corrections of each "error" inserted in these writings as soon as I become aware of it.

July 21, 2010 at 2:07 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected, alphabetical order of titles listed altered and repaired. Other harassments that I will not name are about what I usually deal with, nothing special. I am told that important arrests are taking place as I type these words in Hudson County. Perhaps even more arrests will take place soon in New Jersey.

July 18, 2010 at 11:07 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight have been corrected.

July 17, 2010 at 10:47 P.M. "Errors" inserted, once more, as part of the continuing "frustration and harassment" campaign from New Jersey. Mostly letters and words may be removed. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

July 17, 2010 at 4:33 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this work posted earlier today. I cannot say how many other writings have been vandalized in violation of copyright law and the American Constitution. I can only hope that no journalists have or would participate in such criminal conduct. I am sure that Steve Adubato agrees with me on this issue of respect for freedom of speech. I wonder whether Mr. Adubato has visited my sites? Rafael Pi Roman? Rick Sanchez of CNN? Senator Lieberman? Professor Daniel Mendelsohn? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")

I have reason to believe and hope that the review which appears below will be translated into Japanese and, perhaps -- without expressing "delusions of grandeur" -- I may expect the review to appear not only in Japan, but also in many other countries. America's media silence in connection with this sad spectacle of government censorship and computer crime is very strange. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")

I am advised that my book concerning Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been selected for inclusion at "In Other Bookcases":

http://www.oscholars.com/to/appendix/library/fthr and
http://www.bookarmy.com/Juan_Galis_Menendez_writer.aspx_UnitedKingdom

My books and these blogs are referenced in: http://www.openlibrary.org/authors/0l2964813A/Juan_Galis_Menendez_mancheckov.net/wordpress/2004/07/nochnoy-dozoy. (Russian culture site.)

This essay along with my review of "The Prestige" (I believe) has been selected for inclusion in http://massdensity.com/category/uncategorized/paper/2/ (Quantum Physics and Scientific Culture.)

"Inception," Directed and written by Christopher Nolan; director of photography, Wally Pfister (Bravo!); edited by Lee Smith; costumes by Jeffrey Kurland (Oscar for Ms. Cotillard's dresses and one for Mr. Kurland); Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Adriadne, Brava!), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Pothlewaite (Maurice Fisher), Michael Caine (Miles) and Lukas Haas (Nash).

Introduction: "I recognize you from my dreams." -- Pierre Charles Baudelaire, Le Fleurs du Mal (1857).

"And so, being young and dipped in folly
I fell in love with melancholy."
-- Edgar Allan Poe.

I was lucky to see Christopher Nolan's "Inception" on the first day that it was available in New York. As usual with Mr. Nolan's films there is a fascinating mixture of lyricism and philosophical seriousness in this movie. Mr. Nolan is exploring profound and disturbing questions in his work concerning the nature of reality and sanity, good and evil, ethics and fiction. Mr. Nolan studied literature at the University of London, I believe, but he is equally at home in the culture of images, or cinema, in which we all must live in the twenty-first century. These are our languages -- screen music, movement and image, sound and word -- because they shape the subjectivities of persons in our age. ("'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")

"Inception" is a classic example of Umberto Eco's "Open Work." The movie is intended to resonate for viewers in multiple directions. The closest analogy that I can provide to readers is from higher mathematics. For example, a "tesseract" is a multidimensional object placed in abstract space which is describable in various numerical languages and schemes, each featuring its own logic and corresponding aesthetics. This object (a "tesseract") does not exist, empirically, but it is real. For Mr. Nolan, movies are "tesseracts" -- works of art that are necessarily "incomplete" -- "living" stories that may be "entered" by other thriving freedoms-in-the-world and made complete only by the viewer or recipient of the work. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

"Inception" raises the question "What is a movie?" Is a movie only an empirical object? Or is a movie also its meaning? Movies, like reality, are amenable to any number of readings or interpretations, several meanings may always be attached to good films, altering in the flickering light of "projection" and placed before the viewer. Enigmatically, movies must be interpreted, freely, by recipients or they stop being movies. Hence, the analogy to dreams. This means that you, as the audience member, must respect the autonomy of the work of art which is encountered in the movie theater, even as you achieve a kind of "fusion of horizons" with the work. More on this later in pondering the mystery of identity. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Happily, this is also Mr. Nolan's view of reality and of those mysterious beings called "women" who may or may not inhabit reality as distinct from our dreams. Women are freedoms-in-the-world who must be seen as equals through transcending subjective male notions of their identities. This fascination with women and darkness places Mr. Nolan's work in the tradition of American Noir cinema. This is also to suggest that Mr. Nolan's aesthetic sensibility is shaped by literary Romanticism, notably, the English variety of the movement -- especially, I believe, by the poetry of Byron and Tennyson. The latter's apt verse is quoted below:

"O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be?"

A final ingredient in Mr. Nolan's sensibility that is shared with Tim Burton is the influence of surrealism. Students of the Surrealist Manifestos and the paintings of Magritte as well as Salvador Dali will immediately recognize key images in this movie and gestures of gratitude to those artists in addition to the Master of the genre, Jean Cocteau, who also gets a nod. (See Cocteau's "Orpheus" and "Beauty and the Beast.")

The central myth unifying the highly sophisticated ideas illustrated in the plot and drawn from quantum mechanics, hermeneutic theory, Asian mysticism and theoretical speculation is the story of Orpheus who must rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld after her death. Sorrow lives with "Cobb" in the form of "Mal." Orpheus is allowed to bring his wife to the surface (life), only if he refrains from looking back at her lovely features (memory is a thief) until her return to the "day world" of the living. If Orpheus looks back (remembers her long lost beauty and their happiness), Eurydice will be lost forever. Love can only be kept by being given away. Gluck's Opera featuring this myth might have provided a soundtrack to accompany the dizzying images. Memory is a haunting "issue" in all of Nolan's films. ("Out of the Past.")

The parallel myth of Persephone and its linkage to the changes in the seasons is signaled for the audience by transitions from a bleak winter landscape to warm beaches. This is an externalization of what Carl Jung and later Alfred Adler called "guilt complexes" and identity-entanglements that are akin to the relations of particles in the quantum realm explored, as I have said, in other movies by this same director. The Orpheus myth was later absorbed by Christianity as Jesus (in the role of Eurydice) becomes the resident of the Underworld encountering his "wife" Mary Magdalene (the new Orpheus) "as" his resurrection. Noli me tangere. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")

The plunge into the Underworld is obviously a psychological journey taking place in the mind of the hero. It is the metanoia journey which is also the descent into madness externalized in science fiction terms and action sequences calculated to get the dollars of young men and their long-suffering girlfriends this summer. From what I saw at the midnight premier of the film, Mr. Nolan will be a much richer man very soon. I am happy for him.

Adriadne's shattering of a glass allows us to step through the mirror and into the "Wonderland" of this film by establishing a relationship between this film, which is explicitly associated with what is "surreal," and the imagery of Luis Bunuel. No accents on this keyboard, sorry. I am aware of where the accents belong in words even if I am unable to supply the accents. (Mr. Bunuel's Mexican films should be studied by Mr. Nolan, especially Cumbres Borrascosas, i.e., "Wuthering Heights.")

Real/surreal is a dialectic that recurs several times in the film. The word "deconstruction" is used by Mr. DiCaprio's character in connection with the dream reality under "inception." A philosopher -- whom I have excellent reason to believe that Mr. Nolan has read -- writes of reality imploding within multiple levels of meaning that are inextricable from memory and language as death nears: "Might something like this -- we might call it Zeno's eternity -- be a model for an enlightenment experience, or for the experience of dying? If our consciousness survived biological death for (only) one minute, but that minute subjectively felt like eternity, would that constitute a satisfactory form of immortality?" (Nozick, "Being More Real," in The Examined Life, at p. 129 and Kurosawa's "Ikiru," which is a recent discovery for me.)

The literal "fall" (Albert Camus) into the abyss ("leap of faith" in Kierkegaard's terms) is depicted in multiple images, most powerfully as the woman the hero loves falls from a ledge ("Mal"). This movie is a deeply religious work which has already received the attention of theologians. Discussions of theological implications of the movie are scheduled for July 18, 2010 at The Journey Church/Upper West Side, at 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., Brandeis, HS, 145 West 84th Street, New York, NY (84th & Columbus). http://www.Journey/Metro.com

From a Christian gnostic perspective the movie is a meditation on sin, evil, loss, redemption and the unbreakable bonds of love. Jesus, according to gnostic accounts, spent one day in the Underworld before his resurrection. (I direct the reader to Rene Magritte's Le Soir qui tombe, 1934, reproduced in Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, at Plate 17 and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

I hope to see and review "Salt" and "The American." Those films are concerned to explore existential and identity questions that are often placed in the context of espionage thrillers.

I.

Ms. Cotillard does not "warble," despite the ravings of Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Ms. Cotillard is beautiful and elegant in several of the most provocative dresses that I have seen a woman wear on screen for many years. The beauty of this woman's features amplified on screen is worth $13.00. "Mal" (the word means "evil") is a personification of the femme fatal archetype, but she is also "anima." ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

Several of Jung's archetypes are visible in the film underlining the subconscious messages conveyed by the work: the "twin trains" ("A" and "B," the Nolan Brothers?) that travel in different directions hint at alternate time-journeys (past and future), then and now, masculine (past) and feminine (future). I agree that we are heading into a century that is dominated by the feminine side of the human mind. "All of the facts revealed by the train leaving Paddington Station can equally well be explained," Tom Stoppard assures us in Jumpers, "by Paddington Station leaving the train." ("Faust in Manhattan.")

Notice the contrast between Michael Caine's character as "Philemon" and the "wise child," Adriadne, played by Ellen Page, who is excellent. Again, the reference is to Greek mythology, Adriadne of Naxos. Adriana (same name) fashions a thread through the labyrinth to escape the minotaur. The thread is the thematic unity of the text which guides you in the maze of ideas in which you are inevitably involved by seeing this movie. This is a common motif in hermeneutic writings: "The narrative thread in dream logic." Ms. Page understood that she was playing a "trouser role," where gender was "in question." (See "Oscar" in "The Tales of Hoffman" or Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier.")

Intertextuality is also important to the movie which uses the music of Edith Piaf -- Ms. Piaf was "played" by Ms. Cotillard in another movie -- to cope with guilt issues while breaking out of the boundaries of the screen canvas. Mr. DiCaprio's "image" of his character "Cobb" is real, but the man on screen is not DiCaprio. The disturbing idea forced on viewers ("incepted?") is that reality itself -- or the very notion that there are "real versions" of persons apart from how they are seen by others -- is doubted or made into a question for the audience. We have entered a hall of mirrors.

Is the person we see doing these "actions" on screen, Mr. DiCaprio? Is Mr. DiCaprio the person "seen" in interviews pertaining to this film? Which version of DiCaprio is real? The dream subject in DiCaprio's subconscious is real to him? The person "acting" in the empirical world is real to others? The person "acting" on screen seems "real" to audiences? Or is the real person known only to himself? Is there a single "Leonardo DiCaprio"? Is "Cobb" Mr. DiCaprio's "shadow equation"? Is there a single "Inception"? Have we seen the same movie when we sit next to each other at a screening of "Inception"? Arguably, all of the characters in this movie are aspects of a single psyche. Incidentally, I do not have a cell phone. Anyone who does have a cellphone should turn it off when seeing this movie because you will need to pay attention.

In a quantum universe, like it or not, we seem to discover a set of realities that are only constructed as we perceive them or through our perceptions of them -- while remaining objective and true -- even "true illusions." The movie is the tree that falls in the forest but only makes a noise when someone hears the "fall." Think again of "Mal's" leap into the darkness. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

"Schopenhauer regards his deduction of transcendental subject and object as being legitimate ... we are left confronting them as two mysteries: the unknowable subject and unknowable matter. (Perhaps they are rather one mystery, [God?] for our analysis has already led us to expect them to be different aspects of the same thing.) The transcendental subject, as the sustainer of the world of space and time, cannot itself be in the world of space and time; as sustainer of the realm within which the principle of sufficient reason operates, it can itself be neither object nor agent of that principle. For these reasons it could never be an object of empirical knowledge to anyone -- quite apart from the fact that, for other reasons considered separately, it cannot be an object of knowledge to itself. Yet its existence is a necessary presupposition of our having the experiences that we do have. Putting this the other way round, this whole world of experience is perfectly real, just as real as it presents itself as being, but is unconceptualizable in any terms other than such as presuppose the existence of a subject. This is, in a nutshell, what transcendental idealism means." (emphasis added)

There is no "Inception," until you see the movie. The movie is an "inception" into your subconscious. Schopenhauer's interest in Altman, the Hindu "worldsoul" is shared by Mr. Nolan. Today's physicists as well as biologists articulate the same idea in different terms and, often, without realizing that the latest description of the universe is really a few thousand years-old:

"This means that we cannot fall out of time, as the realist supposes us to do when we die. [Death is a character in this movie that is associated also with eros, "Mal."] The idea that we can [fall out of time] is likened by Schopenhauer to childish misapprehensions about space. When a European child first learns that the world is a giant ball, and that Australia is on the other side of it, he commonly imagines the Australians to be walking about upside-down, hanging from the world by their feet like flies from a ceiling, and is puzzled that they do not drop off into space. If he is imaginative he may also wonder why he himself, if he is perched on top of a giant ball, does not slide down the side of it. His puzzlement can be partly removed by gravity's being explained to him, but only partly: such a young child will almost certainly be unable to grasp the point that it has no meaning to talk of an 'up' or 'down' which is not relative to a subject, so that in a universe thought of as being without an observer there could be no up or down at all. His puzzlement about space, like an adult's bafflement about time, would spring from regarding a particular state of affairs as objectively existing when in fact it can have being and significance only for a subject. Our minds seem to be constructed in such a way that in both cases it borders on the inconceivable not just that the states of affairs in question should not be able to exist independently of us but that they do not in fact exist independently of us. ["Is it rational to believe in God?"] Yet so it is. The top of the giant ball is quite simply wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no top. [Where is "Inception" located?] Similarly, 'now' is wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no 'now.' ..." (Magee, The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, at pp. 116-117, pp. 214-215.) ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'")

II.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that for the world to "hang together," as it does, there must be a unifying consciousness underlying reality keeping our scientific knowledge in place and fixing the order in the cosmos (or as that order) in the absence of any particular individual or of all persons in the world. The question that arises next for film makers and audiences concerns the freedom of the protagonists and viewers "conditioned" by subconscious forces and desires, trapped in the logic of dreams and the mysteries of a universe that is also a "dream" seducing all of us. This coincides with the so-called "dreaming universe" theory postulated by physicists. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

The various levels of the subconscious are similar to the levels of ascent for the soul in Dante's "Divine Comedy" -- from "Inferno" to Purgatory," then to "Paradise." Paradise is symbolized in the love and innocence of children and the idea of "homecoming." Milton's "Paradise Lost" and battle in the heavens is also analogized by a director who has done his homework. I suspect that Mr. DiCaprio's character would have found "Mal" in his "home" at the end of the movie wearing a lovely dress, as a blond perhaps, wondering whether he wanted a sandwich for lunch. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")

Mr. Nolan is beguiled and frightened by a reality expressing itself in his works that contains genuine horrors (I don't blame him) together with the beauties also found in the world. Terror and joy at beauty seem to come from women for this film director. One shudders to think of Mr. DiCaprio's views of women. The universe -- like women -- plays tricks on us in a quantum reality that we are only beginning to understand. I can spare Mr. Nolan many years of puzzlement: He will never fully understand women. As for Mr. DiCaprio, I would never presume to offer him advice on the subject of women. ("God is Texting Me!")

We learn of "levels" of the subconscious (Underworld), also in particle physics, where reality is manufactured and may be programed by observers. As with "The Prestige" and "Memento," the "I" (Cobb) is divided into a duality (Adriadne), Hamlet and Horatio. Schizophrenia is a constant presence in Mr. Nolan's films, perhaps as a way of commenting on what must be an interesting relationship with his brother. The Nolans are gentile versions of the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. My guess is that Christopher Nolan is the older brother. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

Mr. DiCaprio's "Cobb" is a corporate spy who "plunges" into the dreams of his targets or victims -- which is what Mr. Nolan is doing to all of us, plunging into our minds, with "his" movie -- ostensibly in order to steal secrets that are worth money to sinister corporations. There may be no non-sinister corporations. This is evidenced by the logo of "Time-Warner" that accompanies this movie. More difficult is "inception" or planting an idea in the mind of a subject who will act on that idea in the real world. Subconscious manipulations were charted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited. The C.I.A. is very good at that sort of thing. This effort involves actual entry into the mind of another through hypnosis and other, sometimes horrifying interventions. Sexual analogies are intentional and obvious. ("What You Will ...")

Behaviorists at Yale University experimented with "creatures" (this was the term used for all "animals") by stitching their eyelids shut and rotating them on sticks -- sometimes very rapidly (spinning tops?) -- using electrical prods (on humans!), as well as many other indescribably cruel techniques for inducing continual stress and "defensiveness" leading to collapse or self-destruction, starvation maybe. This psychological torture method probably accounts for the constant "error" insertions in these writings and other harassments I deal with, every day. The goal of hackers is to cause permanent and severe psychological damage through constant anxieties and frustrations. Much of this research is parallel to developments in the plot-line of the movie:

" ... at higher levels the subject becomes more and more sensitive to pain; his torment becomes exquisite. However, should this cycling continue without diminishment, then one would observe at last, 'the ultimate demoralization of behavior': a nervous breakdown." (Rebecca Lemov, "Circle of Fear and Hope," in World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men, at pp. 92-93.) ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture." Has Joseph Nye visited my sites?)

Saito (Ken Watanabe) wishes to enter the mind of his victim Cillian Murphy's character, whose father, Pete Pothelwaite, is a business rival of Saito in order to have him break-up the rival empire controlling all of the energy in the world. Topical allusions to "evil empires" seeking control of the world's energy are obvious and (I think) secondary to the metaphysics of the film. Elaborate subconscious defenses or security forces (Mr. Cheney is burned in effigy) are developed to cope with such threats, as in a torture chamber. The analogy to viruses in electronic space and our adventures on-line makes the collective subconscious depicted in "Inception" like the Internet. This is is to describe persons inserting "errors" in my writings as a virus or fungus of evil.

Beyond Freud, Jung's experiments with altered consciousness and anthropological studies led him to formulate theories of individual, then collective and/or species subconscious (the realm of the archetypes) where we find ourselves in this movie. Collective mind is transcendent consciousness. This is a Buddhist concept and also, I keep insisting, a doctrine discussed in physics and mathematics today. For example, by Oxford's superstar quantum physicist and computer expert, David Deutsch, and fellow Oxford superstar, biologist Rupert Sheldrake:

"Thus we have arrived at a significant moment" -- with the development of probability theory and, soon, quantum computing -- "in the history of ideas -- the moment when the scope of our understanding begins to be fully universal. Up to now, all our understanding has been about some aspect of reality, untypical of the whole. In the future it will be about a unified conception of reality, [that spinning top,] all explanations will be understood against the backdrop of universality, and every new idea will automatically tend to illuminate not just a particular subject, but, to varying degrees, all subjects. The dividend of understanding that we shall eventually reap from this last great unification may far surpass that yielded by any previous one. For we shall see that it is not only science, but also potentially the far reaches of philosophy, logic and mathematics, ethics, politics and aesthetics; perhaps everything that we currently understand, and probably much that we do not yet understand." (Deutsch, "The Theory of Everything," in The Fabric of Reality, at p. 29.)

Mind and world are described, again, as mirrors set facing each other which is to describe the postmodern condition:

"The very existence of general explanatory theories implies that disparate objects and events are physically alike in some ways. The light reaching us from distant galaxies is, after all, only light, but it looks to us like galaxies. Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artifacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. [Immanuel Kant] In those symbols -- in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains -- there are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects, but of the structure of reality. There are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent. There are descriptions and explanations of the Big Bang and subnuclear particles and processes; there are mathematical abstractions; fictions; art; morality; shadow photons; [DiCaprio/Cobb?] parallel universes. To the extent that these symbols, images and theories are true -- that is, they resemble in appropriate respects the concrete or abstract things they refer to -- that existence gives reality a new sort of self-similarity, self-similarity we call knowledge." (Deutsch, "Criteria for Reality," in The Fabric of Reality, at pp. 95-96. "Gravity?")

This dialectical form of transcendental realism/idealism (Roy Bashkar) amounts to much the same as scientific phenomenological-hermeneutics as outlined beautifully in this movie through the symbol of a spinning top.

"The symbol gives rise to thought," as Paul Ricoeur has taught us. The deployment of master symbols and their use in defense against governmental efforts at manipulation is an unexplored aspect of the continuing controversy over subliminal conditioning or "inception." ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")

III.

Scientists and others speak of the "many minds" or mentalistic interpretation of quantum theory. (Octavio Paz, David Deutsch) Religious persons speak of "God." However, the insight is very similar for both types of persons. Mind is required to hold intellectual order in place. You are "Inception," as you experience the movie or through your interactions with the work because you are changed by the movie and your accounts of the movie to others changes their ways of seeing "Inception." If scientists are to be believed, the same is true of what is laughingly called "Reality." We change reality, even as reality changes us. This is another way of describing the unitary message of the great religions concerning the experience of God. ("Is this atheism's moment?")

"Ontology" (the study of the ultimate nature of reality in metaphysics) is "bracketed" or set aside for viewers experiencing the movie. (Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer) The spinning top is the "hidden variable" in quantum mechanics to which David Bohm referred in his discussions with Albert Einstein. Orson Wells calls it "Rosebud" the hidden and then exploding symbol that keeps "Citizen Kane" unified, as a character and in terms of that classic movie. "Rosebud" is the symbol of what mattered in a life as that life ended. William Randolph Hearst on whom "Kane" was based, used this term, "Rosebud," to describe a portion of his wife's anatomy. This cannot be "verified" empirically. Deeper levels of reality explain what appears mysterious to us, except when it comes to women, of course, where one is simply faced with a "conundrum" (as it were) that is irresolvable. "Rosebud," indeed. (Gore Vidal)

Time is the liquid in which this cinematic experience floats for the viewer. Ironically, levels of reality are in tension, once again, because it may take years to complete a film that audiences will enjoy over two-and-a-half hours. Time orders weave together in "Inception." This is true within the cinematic text and outside of that text, for us, as viewers. ("A Review of the t.v. Show, 'Alice'" and "Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")

A field is established for interaction. We are shaped, subconsciously, by the movie and the movie changes based on how we see it, with some people seeing more and others less of what is on-screen. This is a dialectic without termination. The movie is always new for somebody. The narrative, then, in which we are -- you can call it God, if you like -- is increasingly elastic today, protean, variable, yet still real and true, even necessarily true. To hold these ideas in place the image of the spinning top serves as a Sufi device for disorienting and refocusing the mind. This achievement of dislocation is the traditional role of madness as a journey in human experience aimed at integration of the fragmented self. For this reason, psychological dislocations from normality were sought by mystics, great scientists, and many artists throughout human history as their chosen "doorways" to illumination. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Philip K. Dick's great subject is this boundary between sanity and madness:

" ... we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced ["incepted"] in virtually any person, but the added horror of 'posthypnotic suggestion' gets thrown in for good measure ... and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -- grows from observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by 'suggestion' during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word and how little it conveys compared to the experience itself. [Forced hypnosis is a kind of violation comparable to rape.] I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.) ..." (Philip K. Dick, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, at pp. 169-170.)

Hypnosis in the wrong hands can cripple or kill victims by destroying their lives as well as minds as the ultimate form of "inception." Medical techniques should not be seen as "weapons" to injure people in order to serve political objectives, or as a way of keeping victims as personal experimental animals or slaves, much less for purposes of interrogation or investigation of innocent persons. Psychologists agree:

" ... the neo-Jungian or metanoia journey construed madness as an inner journey, [a kind of 'leap of faith" or "fall,"] or one occurring in 'inner space,' rather than as a social artifact occurring in the social domain. In his own words: 'This journey is experienced as going further in',' as going back through one's personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the realm of animals, vegetables and minerals."

Professor Burston associates Jung's theory with the works of Foucault, Laing, then Lacan:

" ... Lacan said the goal of analysis was to deconstruct the ego, rather than to support and strengthen it, [the opposite of adjustment or normalization,] as Freud and his followers had enjoined. This therapeutic objective echoes the ancient Gnostic view that all but a handful of cogniscenti fundamentally misrecognize themselves and their condition. They imagine that they are free, that they know who they are, but their sense of identity is a chimera born of unconscious subjection." (Burston, "Normality and the Numinous," in The Crucible of Experience, at pp. 121-122.)

"Inception" like all excellent art is designed to make us free, to disturb us, to be unclassifiable and not easily absorbed. If the movie bothered you, if you found yourself arguing about what it all meant, then it "worked" as drama and belongs with several of the great films invoked during the course of the "story." I regret that the numerous defacements and vandalisms of this essay or other attempts to injure me will be interpreted in any way as discouraging people from seeing the film. The hostilities reflected in these tactics are directed at me because of my opinions and comments, not at anyone associated with "Inception." ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")

"Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, [homecoming or fusion with divinity,] the unitive knowledge of the imminent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?" (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, at pp. IX-X.)

Conclusion.

"A labyrinthine human being never seeks the truth, but -- whatever he may try to tell us -- always and only his Adriadne." -- Friedrich Nietzsche. (Krell, Post-Ponements, at p. 15.)

The review in the Times missed many or most of these important themes of the film. The newspaper's critic, A.O. Scott, offered some "conclusory" and dismissive remarks. She also failed to detect nearly all of the cinematic allusions and references in "Inception":

"Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he [?] were writing now, [Freud lived into the era of cinema and placed films within his theory of art as displacement,] he [?] would have to acknowledge that they [films? or dreams?] are also for many of us, made of movies."

Hollywood has been called: "The Factory of Dreams." Hence, this film which aligns dreams and art in a view closer to Jung's analytical psychology than to Freud's psychoanalysis posits that the unconscious speaks through dreams or art (equally) because both are externalizations of the "powers of the psyche" (Joseph Campbell) that allow persons to cope with life's transitions and crises, like the death of a beloved spouse. We see Cobb and Mal as an old couple, then enter the hero's mind, possibly during his final seconds, as he comes to terms with recollections of this woman and love that are "now" lost to death's dateless night. "This was our dream world for thirty years," Cobb says. This is to describe a marriage. (Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, at pp. 231-267.)

"Film as dream, film as music." Igmar Berman writes of themes similar to those which feature in Mr. Nolan's contemporary movies: "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. [A spinning top?] At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster -- a movement." (Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, at pp. 74-75.)

This narrative called "Inception" is about the loss of one person and self in shifting temporal orders together with the forlorn partner's suffering and pain. This is called "being-there" for the other in the mode of love and compassion. The final image of Mr. DiCaprio's character evokes the compassionate Buddha as love for all suffering children. Please see the film, "Taken." This grieving for a child is a theme of Tim Burton's not always sanguine view of childhood. Is the frightened and threatened child with a great sense of humor in Mr. Burton's films, himself? I certainly understand that child that was (is?) Mr. Burton. (Paul Ricoeur, Keiji Nishitani)

"Inception" is aimed at entertaining audiences and being successful commercially. It is also a movie that helps persons to live through and understand the language of the "collective subconscious" -- by sharing in a dream with these artists -- in order to meet the challenge of individuation so that we can bear the encounter with evil and death. Seeing "Inception" is the meeting with Mr. DiCaprio's "persona" that matters not encountering the man who happens to be an actor in Hollywood.

Nietzsche describes this process of self-narration as "becoming the person you are." Jung spoke of individuation towards mortality. "Inception" is as good as Blade Runner and other films that are now seen as classics. I believe that, in time, this fine film by Mr. Nolan will take its place with those few other movies that endure in our new century. Mr. DiCaprio's way of becoming himself is through the externalization of his inner journey in his art or self-narrative: compare "Shutter Island" with "Inception."

No film can "resolve" philosophical issues that have concerned humanity for thousands of years. This movie dramatizes such issues in archetypal forms to make them accessible to all kinds of people who may not otherwise think about such questions. This is a valuable service. "Inception" is a work of public theology that is non-sectarian. The Cartesian spectator in the theater of the mind is you, the audience member. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

"Inception" is a postmodernist text that is highly self-aware and self-questioning because it poses the ultimate riddle of cinema: What is movie reality? What is any reality? What is this "dream" (nightmare?) called "history" from which we cannot awake? (Karl Marx) Personal identity is a narrative which we create or enter through interacting with another "project in time." A personal journey is a project in time. A movie is also a project in time. Interactions that are interpersonal are also intertextual. Experiencing art is a kind of energy exchange, a form of love-making or love-sharing, which happens or does not happen to a different degree for each viewer of the work. There is art in shaping experience into a narrative by making a movie or a personal identity. Everyone is and must be an artist to some degree:

"Accident engages the question of the truth-status of 'fictions,' and therefore of the truth-status of what we call 'reality.' Consider, for instance, the problem of who is supposed to have written the text we have just finished reading. [Who "made" the movie "Inception"?] Is it Charlie, the novelist, or Stephen, who looks remarkably like Charlie?"

Postmodernist artists are suspicious of --

" -- how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen claims: 'You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory.' And Accident argues that what is real is not a text [by creating a text] -- for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. [A "Memento"?] But Mosley adds the proviso that as 'reality' becomes past it is accessible only as a 'text' ... when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling." (Stephen Weisenberger, "Afterword," in Nicholas Mosley, Accident, at pp. 195-196.)

Story-telling means objectivity, cohesiveness, unity. Thematic unity can be spiritual, as in the "unity of the Holy Spirit." This phenomenon called "Inception" is real and not real, yes-and-no, the center that is everywhere. (Kaballah) The least significant aspect of the movie from the "point of view" of audiences is "technical." The ideas in the work -- this is and probably will be true of anything that Mr. Nolan creates -- are as ancient as the Buddhist doctrine that the world is "Maya," illusion. In Buddhist lore: Illusion is a woman. Truth is also a woman. ('The Fountain': A Movie Review" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")

The film's gestures in the direction of Akira Kurosawa's interpretations of Shakespeare and Yukio Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavillion" lead to the wisdom of the great Kyoto school of philosophers. People who like "Inception" should see Takashi Yamazaki's brilliant, "Returner." Kyoto is mentioned in the script. In light of the relationship between Cobb and the architect, the lore of knights and squires, Samurai and their "youthful assistants" should be kept in mind:

"On the one hand, the thing-in-itself is truly itself on this field, for in contrast with what is called objective reality, it has shaken off its ties with the subject. This does not mean, however, that it is utterly unknowable. For reason, it is indeed unknowable; but when we turn and enter into the field of emptiness, where the thing-in-itself is always and ever manifest as such, its realization is able to come about. On the other hand, on this field the being of a thing is at one with emptiness, and thus radically illusory. It is not, however, an illusory appearance in the sense that dogmatism uses the word [illusory] to denote what is not objectively real. Neither is it a phenomenon in the sense, say, that critical philosophy uses the word to distinguish it from the thing-in-itself. A thing is truly an illusory appearance at the precise point that it is truly a thing-in-itself." (Keiji Nishitani, "The Standpoint of 'Sunyata,' in Religion and Nothingness, at p. 139.)

The audience's "role" is written into "Inception." ("Master and Commander.") Your reactions are necessary at key points in the story for the movie to succeed, a movie whose mysteries also create room for unanticipated developments or reactions by (and within) your mind. If you see "Inception," then you can say that you were in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

If a movie must now be thought of as a whole "gestalt experience," then every movie must be supplied with an "emergent principle of totality" ("Soft Chaos Theory") -- say, elegance, beauty, or simplicity -- in its dream logic. Curiously, it seems that "Reality" also prefers beautiful solutions by creating intelligible order with your help. Spin that top.

Sources:

Periodical Reviews and Articles:

A.O. Scott, "This Time the Dream's on Me," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. C1.
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
Stephen Witty, "Building on a Dream," in The Sunday Star Ledger, Sec. 4, July 11, 2010, at p. 1. (Mr. Adubato?)
Dennis Overbye, "Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton," in The New York Times, Science Times, July 13, 2010, at p. D1. (The "ideal" nature of gravity and its "illusory" properties are set forth, allegedly, by daring physicist and Kantian, Erik Verlinde.)
Benedict Carey, "Columbia Lab Halts Research Over Injections," in The New York Times, July 17, 2010, at p. A1. (Columbia University scientists halted research that involved secret injections of harmful substances on unknowing human experimental subjects. Inceptions? My experiences of torture, as someone who has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, are worse than the horrors described in this article.)
Richard Perez-Pena, "New Jersey is Sued Over the Forced Medication of Patients at Psychiatric Hospitals," in The New York Times, August 4, 2010, at p. A15. (Involuntary chemical lobotomies inflicted on unsuspecting victims, many of them women -- Jennifer Velez? -- who may have been sexually and otherwise abused. How many of you in New Jersey had sex with Marilyn Straus? New Jersey is accused of "suspending people's civil rights without due process." Many victims are made worse and some are destroyed by this practice. "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'" New Jersey may have surpassed Libyia in violating human rights.)
Donald G. McNeil Jr., "U.S. Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis in '40s," in The New York Times, October 2, 2010, at p. A1. (U.S. physicians experimented on unwilling victims by infecting them with syphilis, as they experiment today with techniques of psychological torture in New Jersey.)
Charlie Savage & Scott Shane, "Bush Aide Calls Some Methods Used by C.I.A. Unauthorized," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A12. (Circuit Judge Bybee, an architect of America's torture policy, regrets being "inconvenienced" by an inquiry. "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")
Nina Bernstein, "U.S. Court Orders Safety, Not Deportation, for Woman Facing Torture," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A20. (Person facing less severe hardships than are deemed legal by Mr. Bybee, or routine treatment of the mentally ill in N.J., will be given asylum in the U.S.)
Anthony Thomasini, "Cause for Worry: A Deep Drink of Bliss, With Confusion for a Chaser," in The New York Times, Arts Section, August 3, 2010, at p. C2. (Review of Gluck's Opera "Orfeo ed Euridice.")
Helen Vendler, "Science and the Poet," in The New Republic, June 24, 2010, at p. 28. (Warum schriftlos leben.)
"The Film Issue," in Granta 86, Summer, 2004 (Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Sajat Ray). http://www.granta.com/

Cinema referenced in this work by Christopher Nolan:

1. "Citizen Kane."
2. "A Clockwork Orange."
3. "2001, A Space Odyssey."
4. "Pan's Labyrinth."
5. "Orpheus/Blood of a Poet/Beauty and the Beast."
6. "Apocalypse Now."
7. "The Matrix Trilogy."
8. "Out of the Past."
9. "Casino Royale."
10. "Vertigo/North by Northwest/The Lady Vanishes."
11. "Blade Runner."
12. "Wings of Desire."
13. "Ikiru/Seven Samurai/Ran/Rashomon."
14. "L'Age D'Or."
15. "Returner."
16. "Dark City."

Selected books I have relied upon in writing this essay:

Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Penguin, 2003).
John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995).
Roy Bashkar, Plato, Etc.,: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London & New York: Verso, 1994). ("Explanations and the Laws of Nature," esp. p. 35.)
Igmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1988). (Joan Tate, trans.)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, eds., Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985).
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Times (London: Vintage, 1997). (The Nolan Brothers?)
Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). (Particularly good discussion of dissipation theories.)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949), (2nd Ed., 1968).
Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Carl Jung (London: New York: Penguin, 1976).
Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (Analogy to Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of belief in writings about God.)
Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 7, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Fitche to Hegel (New York: Image Books, 1963).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Bentham to Russell (British Empiricism and the Idealist Movement in Britain) (New York: Image Books, 1966).
Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 1997).
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1966).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). (See the first letter from Rene Magritte to Michel Foucault in the Appendix.)
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (Robert Bernasconi, ed.)
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995). (" ... consciousness is the true foundation of all we know or perceive.")
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2005).
George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: The Life and Mind of the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988).
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: mcMillan, 1966).
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932). (La vie marche vers les utopies. -- Nicolas Berdiaeff's opening quote.)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993). (Focus on the Romantics is perceptive and sympathetic.)
Mark Johnson, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Carl G. Jung, et als., Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell-Laurel, 1964).
Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There is No God ... (Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2001).
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and the Twilight Zone (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
David Farrell Krell, Post-Ponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). ("Adriana" ... is the problem of the "mask that looks upon itself as a mask ..." pp. 15-31, and Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask.")
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961). (Schizophrenia as defense and liberation in environments of forced encounter with extreme evil, like Auschwitz, that shatter the looking glass of identity.)
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980).
Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). (Behaviorist "Inceptions"?)
C.C. Lin & L.A. Segel, Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences (Philadelphia: Society for Applied Mathematics, 1988). ("Tensor Theory," especially so-called "Cartesian" tensors analogous to "leaping" from one dream to another.)
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (London: Penguin, 1984). (Letters have been deleted from this author's name and defacements will probably continue in the future.)
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1991).
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Pantheon, 2005). ("Dreams on Film.")
Colin McGinn, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation (London: Acumen, 2008). ("Error" insertions, alterations of the alphabetical order or spacing of titles in this bibliography, computer crime, obstructions of my cable signal, harassments intended to injure a person forced to make corrections many times.)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). (" ... movies offer as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams.")
Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962). ("Leap of Faith.")
Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Press, 1965).
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (New York: Random House, 1990). (One of the great novels of the last several decades in which "key" passages are echoed in the dialogue of "Inception.")
Nicholas Mosley, Inventing God (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2003).
Nicholas Mosley, Experience and Religion (London: Stodder & Houghton, 1965). ("Anyone can spin any theory ..." see page 39.)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Olivier Pauvet, Noir: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005).
Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (New York: Arcade, 1990). ("Notes on La Realidad y El Deseo.")
Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (New York: Arcade, 1990) ("Labyrinth of Solitude," Reflections on "Jean Paul Sartre -- Memento.")
William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason (New York: Anchor, 1976), ("The Maze and the Mystery" or "The Paradoxes of Completeness in the Labyrinths of Ts'ui Pen.")
Douglas Shrader, ed., The Fractal Self (New York: Oneonta Philosophy Center, 2000).
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor, 1973).
Ninian Smart, The Philosophy of Religion (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). (What is reality "piercing" -- inception -- to achieve the "religious ultimate?")
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). ("Closed Loops.")
Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
James Waddell, Erotic Perception: Philosophical Portraits (New York: University Press of America, 1997). (How heterosexual men see women.)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965). (See Ronald Penrose's painting "The Invisible Isle.")
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1994).
Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Andrew Wiles, "Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 443-551. (Fusion approach unifying the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture establishing a dialectic between "elliptical equations" and "modular forms" in order to "prove" Fermat's Last Theorem. ... Every woman is an "elliptical equation.")
Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, "Ring Theoretic Properties of Certain Heckle Algebras," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 553-572. (They had to get the kinks out of the first formulation of the proof by what Goro Shimura described as a "more elegant and beautiful" statement of the field or negative proof of Fermat -- interestingly, in terms of the movie "Inception" -- these approaches are called "phantom equations" and are almost always captured in feminine metaphors. "Mal" is the shadow equation of "Cobb." Each of the movie characters is a shadow equation for the actor playing the part.)
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). (Williams comments on P.F. Strawson's "Individuals.")
Colin Wilson, The Essential Colin Wilson (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1986). ("The Ladder of Selves.")
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994). (See what I mean?)
Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990).

Richard Dawkins and the Atheist Delusion.

I have reposted my essay on Michel Foucault and authorship as well as this polemical piece contra Richard Dawkins' atheism.

This essay has been defaced and attacked on several occasions, probably because people who disagree with me are unable to respond to my substantive criticisms of Mr. Dawkins' arguments.

I suggest that you read both Dawkins and his critics -- especially Oxford scientist, Alister McGrath (whose book is cited below) -- then come to your own conclusions concerning the rationality of religious belief. For my views, see "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?"

The image accompanying this essay has been blocked many times and other attacks on this work are always expected by those claiming to argue "for" diversity and scientific open-mindedness.

I highly recommend Professor Dawkins' books, also anything by Christopher Hitchens is worthy of your attention.

Jim Holt, "Beyond Belief," The New York Times, Book Review, October 22, 2006, at p. 1.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), $27.00.

The following works are just as highly recommended as anything by Dawkins or Hitchens:

Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (London: Blackwell, 2005), $18.95.
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), $7.50.

"Jim Holt" ("Manhola Dargis"?) reviews the latest opus by Richard Dawkins in a recent issue of the New York Times.

Mr. Holt is a well-informed, diligent, not highly imaginative journalist with a clear bias for what he takes to be the "scientific perspective" on things -- kind of like Kurt Andersen, except that Andersen also writes good novels.

Most contemporary graduates of "elite" schools in America will adopt a secularist, antireligious attitude, along with a polite and mild condescension towards all members of the lower orders, clinging to so-called "archaic" religious beliefs.

This deprecating view of religion is not required by their educations, it is merely a cultural fashion.

A hundred years ago, religious belief was expected of the bright young person entering journalism, today disdain for religion is preferred.

Today's bien pensant "opinion-makers" are undisturbed by the fact that most people in the nation -- and in the world, for that matter -- disagree about this hostility to religion. This secularist, atheist, mildly liberal worldview is officially sanctioned in academia and in trendy corners of Manhattan where media people and advertising executives congregate to schedule sessions of fornication and aroma therapy.

Any political candidate too closely associated with such people will not do well with the vast majority of the population. This is fortunate. The subtext these days is: "... people like us think this way, so don't you dare to disagree."

If you do disagree or point out that the "emperor has no clothes' you may find it difficult to publish your books or you may well find your work ignored.

Kiwi anyone? How about a little mineral water?

Let us hope that Hillary Clinton keeps some distance from the "skinny people dressed in black" (Ms. Maddow?) until she is elected to the presidency. ("'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")

I say speak truth to power. And yes, there is such a thing as cultural power. My unwillingness to be impressed by intellectual "fashionistas" (of all genders) is my true offense, not to mention having read more books than most of them and being at least as smart as they are. I will say nothing about my shapely legs. These are grave faults. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")

Why are people so disturbed to realize that I am a tiny bit smart and well read? How does it offend YOU to think that I may be a wee bit clever? Why insert "errors" in my writings? Money? Envy? Both?

My theory on this issue is that the existence of someone like me is doubly offensive and unbearable to lower-upper-middle-class-suburbanites of all genders, races, and sexual orientations because: 1) I upset a view of the universe in which persons (like me) are in need of instruction from so-called "social superiors"; and 2) I am an unbearable revelation of the inadequacies in the worldviews -- or even in the thinking -- of trendy "others" who have taken the time to learn about life from the t.v. show "The View."

I am merely "unbearable" you say? Fine. Make your judgments if you must.

Mr. Holt makes some serious mistakes in this review. Dawkins makes even more philosophical blunders. Although I admire Mr. Dawkins, as a scientist, he is just not a very good philosopher. ("Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined.")

For those who are in a hurry, here's the "bottom line." Neither Dawkins, Holt, Dennett, nor anybody else has provided (or will provide) a demonstration that it is "irrational" to believe in God. Contemporary science is neutral on this issue and always will be, partly for reasons that these men (Dennett is an exception) find difficult to grasp. Furthermore, creative interpretations of current scientific findings, arguably, lend support to many forms of religious belief. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")

Belief is a choice which is exactly as rational as non-belief. You must choose on this issue. I suspect that this is how it should be if human beings are (as I believe them to be) free subjects and not just material objects, beings endowed with spirituality and not exclusively animals concerned to eat and excrete. (You definitely want to do both of those things.)

Religion is about meaning. It is not a factual description of empirical reality derived from a laboratory. I am not alone in this view that belief in God is as rational as the opposite belief. My view is shared by many of the most distinguished scientists, philosophers, artists, police officers, mail carriers, nurses, and other people in the U.S. and throughout the world.

True, many of these people do not attend fashionable parties in Park Avenue apartments. This is to their credit.

Now let us turn to Holt's review. My method will be to read the review pausing to identify what are called "difficulties" along the way. I will conclude with what I think belief in God is about even as I invite the reader to decide this issue for him- or herself.

Holt begins by recognizing that Dawkins is not writing a book of scientific explanation, but an attempt at "consciousness raising." Thus, Mr. Dawkins has no greater claim to your attention on this matter than anyone else. Dawkins is offering his opinions. Feel free to give him yours. I do. And I will. Just watch me. According to Holt:

"The nub of Dawkins's consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a 'brave and splendid' aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a 'pernicious' one."

Dawkins says:

"I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."

No one knows for certain, Richard. Some scientists believe that God is highly probable. For example, theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne writes:

"In my friendly arguments with my unbelieving friends I am always encouraging them to lift their eyes beyond the limited horizons of the scientific view. I believe that beauty is not mere emotion, and that it provides an important window into the nature of reality. I think that I know, as certainly as I know anything, that torturing children is wrong and that love is better than hate. I cannot for a moment suppose that these ethical insights are merely cultural choices of the particular society in which I happen to live, or some curious strategy to propagate my genes more effectively. One of the attractions of belief in God is that it ties together these very different aspects of the one world of our human experience." ("Hermano: An Evening With Christopher Hitchens.")

Keep in mind this idea of the unifying power of God, as a principle, since it has been found useful by scientists and mathematicians, philosophers and theologians, in many parts of the world today. This idea is also found in world mythology from the very beginnings of recorded human history, probably earlier. A recent article in Scientific American suggests religious worship may have been part of human groups 70 thousand years ago, long before the development of civilization.

Persons have been groping in the dark for a clearer sense of what is revealed by the, I believe, innate human intuition of divinity or the numinous. It may well be that 70 thousand years ago a representation of a powerful animal would serve human symbolic needs adequately. Today more sophisticated symbols will be needed for what will always escape literal definition but which is felt, as a REALITY, in human lives.

The unifying power of the religious impulse in humanity is crystalized in monotheism leading to the world's great religions and (for me), supremely, in the symbol of the cross.

Catholic priest and scientist, Lorenzo Albacete, comments:

"All our views related to meaning and purpose are born out of experience the same way that a scientific insight emerges. These experiences give rise to religion. Therefore, according to Pollack, only a 'semantic difference' exists between scientific thought and what religion calls 'revelation.' ..."

Dawkins is engaged in a work of "exhortation," a religious effort, which -- he believes -- is supported by argument. We readers will decide on the plausibility of this claim since we are no longer intimidated by Dawkins' scientific credentials. Dawkins is "preaching" as it were. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

If Dawkins were to decide to become a boxer his scientific learning would be pretty irrelevant; by the same token, his scientific learning is not all that helpful when it comes to his theological or metaphysical speculations as we will see.

Mr Holt summarizes Dawkins' argument, but Jim Holt first offers this definition of God:

" ... 'God' is here taken to denote the Judeo-Christian deity, presumed to be eternal, all-powerful, all-good and the creator of the world ..."

Holt's "Judeo-Christian" God is a construct. There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian text containing this definition. For one thing, "omniscience" is not mentioned by Holt; also, Islam is excluded, for some reason, though God in Islam is pretty much identical to the so-called Judeo-Christian version of God, as an idea and in terms of His attributes. ("Ought Implies Can.")

Mr. Holt fails to tell us whether this definition is found in Dawkins' text; and if it is, where it is to be found; Holt does not make clear whether this is Dawkins' conception of God or his own; Holt does not indicate where he finds Biblical support for this definition that, he says, is used "here."

As my cab driver friend likes to say: "Where's here?" Footnote please, Mr. Holt.

A reference is made to "three great arguments" for the existence of God. In fact, Thomas Aquinas provides five in the Summa Theologica. If we add Maimonedes and Averroes, we can formulate at least seven such arguments, which have survived for centuries (suggesting that they're pretty good arguments).

Some pro-God arguments are derived from pure reason (a priori), others from observation and experience (a posteriori).

Mr. Holt concentrates on the "ontological argument," some forms of which are untouched by anything said "here." See Richard Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and my essays on R.G. Collingwood's historicism and on the rationality of belief in God. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Holt and Dawkins seem unaware of the formal argument from "contingency to complexity" -- i.e., entropy theory and chaos -- which has now put on a different name and costume to resurface in theoretical physics so that it is often (unknowingly) used by scientists as a "working hypothesis":

"If the unpicturable world of electrons gives us some surprises, we shouldn't be too amazed if the unpicturable God has some surprises in store for us also." ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")

John Polkinghorne uses this idea of God's unifying power knowingly. Among scientifically-informed writers echoing these sentiments, the reader will find Alister McGrath, Steven Jay Gould (who advocates separating religious from scientific discourse as non-competitive inquiries), psychologist Diarmuid O'Murchu agrees. Biologists have also defended religious belief, see Arthur Peacocke's Paths From Science Towards God (2001) and Robert Pollack's The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith (2000). Mr Holt makes his bias clear when he writes:

"It is doubtful that many people come to believe in God because of logical arguments, as opposed to their upbringing or 'having heard a call.' But such arguments, even when they fail to be conclusive, can at least give religious belief an aura of reasonableness, especially when combined with certain scientific findings."

Why is it doubtful that many people come to believe in God because of "logical arguments"? Some of the most important such arguments are not recognized by Holt or Dawkins, so why are they rejected? Are distinguished scientists and philosophers who believe in God "irrational" only because they disagree with Dawkins and Holt? Are there ways of understanding, through experience, the existence of God that have nothing to do with rationality -- as narrowly understood by Dawkins and Holt -- ways that are as intelligent (or more so) than the opposite belief? Exactly how is "rationality" understood by Dawkins or Holt? If "there is no atheist in a foxhole," then ask yourself why that is so? Comfort or hope, you say? Is it more likely that something false or true will provide comfort and hope to people?

When all rhetoric is stripped away and life gets as real as cancer God seems to surface at the center of consciousness. Why is that? Is it rational? Do you believe that something "irrational" and "stupid" would have been (and still is) central to the lives of billions of people all over the world because Richard Dawkins did not write a book before this year? I don't. (Compare Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" with his recent film "Cassandra's Dream.")

Nothing that I say "here" should take away from the clarity and informative value of Dawkins, as a scientist and writer on scientific subjects. I will read and review in this group The Selfish Gene. I have read Dawkins' essays on a regular basis in Free Inquiry.

Since atheism is not a matter that can be established by arguments may we not conclude that Dawkins and Holt only give an "aura of reasonableness" to atheism which remains a minority view among both the world's intellectuals and ordinary people?

I say this as someone who is usually classified as an atheist, who regards himself as an agnostic, at best, on the question of whether God, as traditionally conceived, exists.

The answer to the God question does not require a Ph.D., but maybe only a capacity to feel, especially to love and be willing to suffer for it. Take a look at my essays examining the metaphysics of F.H. Bradley or at the metaphysics of C.S. Peirce. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")

I have no doubt about the ethical truth and wisdom at the center of the great religions -- a truth which (I think) is about the meaning and importance of love.

The crux of the issue on the God question is: "What do you mean by God?" If by God is meant the power of love in human life then I am a believer.

"Where is God?" The skeptic asks with a smile.

The believer responds: "Why are you asking? Are you missing something or someone?"

Beyond establishing the open-ended nature of the question, philosophy and science leave us with the awesome responsibility to decide for ourselves: "Is there a God?"

It must be significant to this inquiry that the need to ask this question does not go away. It is often answered in a very unsatisfactory manner by persons who have decided to call something else -- like science or money -- "God." Such substitutes will not be satisfactory in the long run. (See the movie "In America.")

I don't claim to know "objectively" what is the answer to this question of whether God "exists." I have read and studied much more intensely than I did for the bar examination, over a period of many years, and what I have learned and know is only so much straw. In the end, the decision must come from a more central place in the self than the part of us that "knows" facts and information. It is in one's center that one must know. It is in that place where one loves another person, where proof or argument seem irrelevant, as they do when you love someone no matter what and contra mundus.

Philosophy can take you to the door of faith; it is up to you to step through it -- or not.

As paradoxical as it may seem, if there is nothing and no one that you love enough to die for that person or faith (if it comes to that), then you are not truly alive. ("Law and Literature.")

I think I know the direction in which I am moving on the issue of faith. When I decide, you'll be the first to know. I have a "feeling" that decision has already been made, I just haven't understood it yet. "Here" is a better theologian -- who is probably smarter -- than either Dawkins or Holt (or me), Thomas Merton, who notes that the God of the philosophers or scientists is fine, if you're into philosophy or science. Just as good or better is the path of love and intuition. All of these paths lead to the same place anyway. And yes, you can be both a socialist and Christian. You can also be a scientist and religious:

"[God] ... is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality and without their rightful integrity as persons." ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

See my short story "A Doll's Aria," then ask yourself which character is more of a person in that story. I can find similar statements in Buber, also in Islamic Sufists, whose poetry and depth of feeling is stunning. ("Westworld: A Review of the T.V. Series.")

Belief in God is "improbable," Holt and Dawkins insist. The emergence of life in the universe is even more "improbable." Guess what, we're "here."

What if God says the same to Dawkins upon his arrival at that great academic establishment in the sky. Think of God as a mildly amused Oxford don: "Ah, yes ... Dawkins. I've been waiting for you." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

It is improbable that I will meet Melanie Griffith. I am not willing to say that it's impossible. I've got my "Antonio" cologne and everything. I'm all set. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

Holt dismisses the claim by theologians that God is the essence of simplicity as "woolly." I find Holt's dismissal "woolly." We are faced with the mystery of subjectivity and agency resulting from the experience of freedom. Hence, we also experience metaphysical yearning for other free entities. We are equipped to experience and to satisfy this yearning as "mirror neurons" and language-capacity enable us to socialize -- so as to become fully human -- by uniting with other freedoms-in-the-world. The ultimate destination and drive in us, scientists suggest, is towards an always larger unity with that which equips us with this "mirroring" capacity even as it seems to share in that capacity. (Again: "Steven Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

We find ourselves in a universe amazingly fine-tuned for life and intelligence. Consciousness is shaped by intentionality and mirror neurons drive us to reflect inside ourselves an external "Other" that reaches out to us from beyond ourselves. We discover, according to believers, under our microscopes and at the end of our telescopes what Michelangelo depicted -- a God reaching out to us with (or as) all of His/Her love. Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Victorio Galessi, "Mirrors in the Mind," Scientific American, November 2006, at p. 54. (Yes, these are metaphors.)

Mr. Holt exclaims in frustration:

"Perhaps, as Russell thought, 'the universe is just there, and that's all.' ..."

I'll tell you, Jim, I doubt that anything important is just "there."

At this point, metaphors get out of control for Dawkins. "Memes" are not only selfish, but "religious beliefs," on his view, "benefit neither us nor our genes; they benefit themselves."

Memes are not persons and cannot be "selfish." Religious beliefs cannot benefit "themselves," since they do not have and are not "selves," nor can they exist apart from the persons who accept them. Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (New York & London: Routledge, 2001). (Professor Midgley prevailed in her debate against Dawkins and she would certainly prevail in debate against me.)

I alluded to defenses of belief in God based on complexity theory, quantum physics as well as chaos, much of this new science raises serious problems for Mr. Dawkins and other critics of the "concept" of God:

"Despite the power of molecular genetics to reveal the hereditary essences of organisms, the large-scale aspects of evolution remain unexplained, including the origin of species. ... It is here that new theories, themselves recently emerged within mathematics and physics, offer significant insights into the origins of biological order and form. Whereas physicists have traditionally dealt with 'simple' systems in the sense that they are made of few types of component, and observed macroscopic or large-scale order is then explained in terms of uniform interactions between these components, biologists deal with systems (cells, organisms) that are hideously complex. ... However, what is being recognized within these 'sciences of complexity,' as studies of these highly diverse systems are called, is that there are characteristic types of order that emerge from the interactions of many different components. ... Order emerges out of chaos."

Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), pp. x-xi and discussion with analysis by Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-17.

What happened to entropy?

Beliefs have no "interests" to be benefited, since they are abstractions. The persons to whom religious beliefs belong have interests. What allows beliefs (religious or otherwise) to survive is plausibility and usefulness. These qualities have a little something to do with truth. My belief that the bathroom at the big Barnes & Noble store near Lincoln Center is on the second floor will survive when I discover that, in fact, the bathroom is on the second floor. My belief that religion has something to do with human goodness and meaning in life will survive if I discover that this belief is shared by many others and borne out in human experience. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

The same logic undermines the claim quoted by Jim Holt and attributed to E.O. Wilson and Michael Ruse: "ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate."

Now it seems that genes are not only capable of motives, but that they're tiny "con men," looking to "deceive" and manipulate us. This is literature masquerading as science. Why not speak of little devils or angels? Gremlins? The effect is the same -- to escape our freedom and responsibility for choosing between good and evil -- qualities that we recognize as existing in our lives as human beings. Mr. Holt objects:

"Hitler never formally renounced his Catholism. [sic.]" ("Catholicism"?)

Is "Jim Holt," or one author of this review, a Cuban-American? Senator Bob? ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")

True, Jimmy Boy, but then Hitler also never admitted there was a policy to exterminate the Jews. "What Holocaust?" Jews were merely being "repopulated."

Why expect candor and honesty from Hitler? Whatever Hitler called himself, he was no Catholic. W.H. Auden referred to Hitler as a "lapsed Catholic." I think of Hitler as a lapsed human. Mengele was a scientist. Are all scientists equally evil? Other than "C.I.A. Psychiatrist" Terry Tuchin a.k.a. "David" I mean. Holt says:

" ... believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right."

It may be more accurate to shift the burden of persuasion on this issue: Dawkins and fellow atheists may never discover that they are wrong whereas religious believers (in this world) may never be able to know or prove that they are right. Pascal wagers on God based on similar considerations.

Perhaps this uncertainty and mystery is indicative of a divine gift of grace and freedom requiring persons to decide this matter for them- or ourselves, since the problem is -- and has always been -- "choice." ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")