Mind Games

What is education for?

2011-02-02T06:57:00.000-08:00

"Mr. Pullman's Compass," (Editorial) in The New York Times, February 1, 2011, at p. A26.
Brand Blanshard, "What is Education For?," in The Uses of a Liberal Education and Other Talks to Students (La Salle: Open Court, 1973), pp. 73-93.

It was reported this morning on television that several American politicians believe it is a "mistake" to prepare all students for a four-year college or university experience. We are told that it may be wiser to ensure that a number of young people -- especially many of the poor, African-Americans possibly -- will attend vocational training schools rather than universities.

How much better for all of us it would have been if this advice had been followed by George W. Bush. Mr. Bush and everyone I know would have been happier if George W. Bush had attended computer repair school or learned to be an electrician as opposed to wasting his time at Yale and Harvard Business School.

Naturally, none of the politicians making this helpful suggestion have opted for vocational training when it comes to their own children. This is strange. America's Republican politicians who share this mind-set are confident, however, that "refrigeration repair" or "automobile mechanics" (perhaps the wonders of barber college) will be just fine for other people's children.

I am sure that U.S. Senator Marco Rubio would have been very happy with his own construction company in Miami as distinct from having to learn so many speeches with big words written by others.

Two characteristically American assumptions concerning education are on display in this controversy -- a controversy which is not sufficiently intense in my judgment. People are not fully appreciative of the implications of what is being proposed: First, Americans often believe that education is concerned exclusively or primarily with the kind of job that a student will obtain after graduation; secondly, more controversially, it is assumed that different educational experiences should be afforded to persons not on the basis of individual aptitude, but for class reasons alone.

These controversial assumptions are, surprisingly, frequently shared with our British friends these days who find themselves -- under the reign of David Cameron the First and, they hope, the Last -- in a related controversy regarding UK libraries and access to higher education because of rising tuition fees.

Before commenting on the suggestion that our children should learn to fix air conditioners rather than attending Yale or Oxford Universities, I wish to examine the debate in the UK. Please do not cut back on BBC America, Mr. Cameron, or any other cultural programs exported to the colonies.

"The austerity cuts in Britain -- part of the government's overly harsh deficit reduction plan -- have provoked many outcries, but few quite as eloquent as a speech given recently in Oxfordshire by Philip Pullman, author of the highly regarded trilogy 'His Dark Materials.' The subject was the Oxford county council's plan to stop financing 20 of its 43 libraries -- because of cuts in national financing -- and hope that they would be run instead by volunteers."

Perhaps hospitals in poor neighborhoods in Britain could be staffed not by expensive medical professionals but by kind-hearted "volunteers." This will save a great deal of money for the public treasury to spend on additional weapons systems to be tested in Afghanistan. Tariq Ali, no doubt, favors this suggestion. Irony?

Besides all of the other advantages, this suggestion will lead to a drastic reduction in the number of poor people living in the British isles. Poor Brits may be tempted to vote for Labour politicians. "We" do not want this dangerous electoral tendency to find an outlet in "today's Britain." If I could, I would persuade the MP from Tunbridge-Wells to raise this issue at Question Time with the Prime Minister: "Will the Prime Minister agree that depriving poor children of books is a bad thing?"

"[Mr. Pullman's] speech [is] worth pondering for its defense not just of the value of reading but of the open democratic space enshrined in public libraries. Libraries, he said, remind us that 'there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about ... things that stand for civic decency and knowledge and the value of simple delight.' ... "

Libraries and universities seek to democratize learning and excellence in a national culture. This is a controversial and, weirdly, threatening notion to some people. Conservatives may be frightened that, with access to Shakespeare or Plato, ordinary people will begin to ponder all of the ways in which they are not so free and necessary improvements in society. It never ceases to amaze me that there are people so frightened of intelligence that they wish to destroy its achievements wherever they detect them. Genius and those who admire works of genius infuriate some people. Weird.

"We" certainly do not want that kind of "unpleasantness" (discontent) among the masses. I am an "unpleasant" member of what is usually called "the masses." I want as much education as possible for as many persons as possible, regardless of their economic status or ancestry in Britain, America, and everywhere else. Universal education disconcerts people by hinting at the equality shared with a local immigrant working as a "domestic assistant" (maid or cook) or the homeless person asking for spare change that even poor persons (like me) are all too willing to give in our "fiscal irresponsibility." ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

A person foolish enough to enter a philosophical controversy which he did not understand very well ended his losing effort to defend philosophical incoherence by complaining that his adversary -- me -- had refused the instructions of a "superior." ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

"Superior" is a category that had nothing to do with learning or intelligence for this person, there was no suggestion of "superiority" on the merits, but the concept of "superiority" was associated (for this sadly deluded debator) with money and what money buys in America, power. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

For a person who is poor and maybe for any woman to prevail in debate on a controversial political or philosophical issue is an affront to the moral order and "unnatural." Much the same was said of women who wished to read a few centuries ago. Worse, some women demanded the right to attend universities or even to vote -- look what those suggestions got us! Nothing but trouble and Mrs. Tatcher along with Hillary Rodham-Clinton. Horrors. ("Master and Commander" and "A Doll's Aria.")

I refuse to be guided by my self-described "superiors" concerning issues I know better than these persons do or ever will know them. I do not accept the status of "inferior" -- in a moral or political sense -- on the basis of wealth. I presume to think and feel for myself in a very American and British way that inconveniences conservative governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Education and the arts, availability of books and beautiful things helps me to understand and cope with life's pains and mysteries, including the mystery of evil. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Education helps all of us to be fully human -- regardless of how we earn our living, even if we are lawyers or politicians -- if we are fortunate enough to have a job in these austere times. Not only should education and libraries be open to all, but the arts should be as widely available as possible to as many persons as we can include in aesthetic experiences.

I have seen the faces of spellbound persons (often not the persons you may imagine going to a theater!) seeing Shakespeare performed for the first time in their lives by professional actors. I want government that is concerned to provide such experiences to as many persons as possible.

As we say in New York: "What could it hurt?" Shakespeare is great because he speaks to all of us about what is universally human -- love, death, loss and the tragic, neverending struggle against evil that is not "all relative." ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

"Mr. Pullman is most brilliant in his attack on what he calls 'the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism.' What he registers so forcefully is the fact that a hidebound conservative approach to deficit reduction creates a social austerity far more harmful than the deficit itself."

Education is quite distinct from vocational training (which is an excellent thing!) because the process of learning and achieving a small measure of wisdom, however fleeting and fragile that modicum of wisdom may be for us ordinary guys and gals, is called "living a fully human life with meaning and purpose, beauty and goodness":

" ... to educate one's self was to be more completely human, to give this distinctive faculty [thinking] dominance and free play. If one did this, what would be the standard of the educated man [or woman]? As respects beliefs, adjustment to the evidence. As respects feeling, propriety to the object. As respects action, making the most of one's self consistently with the general good. In sum and in short, in all things be reasonable."

"I do not echo this counsel of the master [Aristotle] as a prescription for success. In a country where Jimmy Hoffa can be an idol, and attacks on UNESCO make thousands cheer, one can hardly rely on reasonableness as a winning card. But then success in the ordinary sense is not what education is for. The business of education is to show that nothing fails like success if that is achieved with inward emptiness, and that nothing succeeds like failure, if that is pursued by integrity of mind."

"The case for being reasonable is not that it will make one successful, still less that it will make one spectacular, but that without it everything else is apt to turn to ashes in one's mouth. Reasonableness is hard because it means keeping our human nature at all points in check. When Ruskin was called on for an epitath for his businessman father, he prepared one that he thought almost extravagant in its praise: 'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' It would be high praise for any of us, when he has finished his course to have it said, 'Here was a fine scholar, a good soldier, a great executive.' In the light of what human nature notoriously is, it would be praise still rarer and higher if it could be said of us, 'Here was a really reasonable man.' ..." (Blanshard, pp. 92-93.)

The Wanderer and His Shadow.

2010-10-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

Today, my list of contents is being blocked in order to obstruct access to my own essays. This makes revising my work impossible. I expect computer attacks and insertions of "errors" after posting this short story. "Errors" are usually inserted in waves over the first several days that a new item is posted with the goal of maximizing psychological harm as I make identical repairs and corrections many times. Thereafter, "errors" are inserted at irregular intervals, again, to maximize the anxiety-effect and frustration-inducement. There are dozens of intrusions into my computer every day from New Jersey government and private computers. The goal is censorship and maximing psychological "touchless" torture of the victim for the purposes of bringing about a mental breakdown. I doubt that this effort will succeed with me.

I believe that the subject of evil is important and underexamined. Nearly every statement made by the protagonist-narrator of this text has been made to me in life and during Internet debates with ethical skeptics, nihilists, or "relativists." I have kept copies of many such exchanges taking place on-line. I would not be surprised to discover that persons advocating views not all that distant from those set forth below are officials in America's "Soprano State." Those who are interested in these disturbing literary themes are directed to:

Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (New York: Warner Books, 1979).
John Banville, The Book of Evidence (New York: Warner Books, 1989).
Sebastian Faulks, Engleby (New York: Vintage, 2007).
William Glaberson, "Trial of 2nd Man Will Revisit the Horror of a Triple Murder," in The New York Times, November 11, 2010, at p. A29.
"Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?"

State v. Carlos R. Mendoza

Affidavit in Support of Motion for Reconsideration of Death Sentence and Appeal for Clemency

Filed before the Supreme Court of

________________________ .

Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10

I, Carlos R. Mendoza, being duly sworn hereby depose and say:

1. I am awaiting execution in accordance with a death sentence imposed after multiple convictions for the murders of several persons.

2. My "termination" at the hands of state officials is scheduled for not later than 24 hours from the signing of this official document. I submit this Affidavit in support of the legal brief seeking reconsideration of my sentence and appeal for clemency prepared by my attorney and his assistants which is to be filed not later than 9:00 A.M. on the day of my scheduled execution.

3. These "murders" of which I am convicted were only one part of a larger criminal conspiracy and chain of events in which I am said to have "participated." The United States Attorney's Office has described me in legally filed documents as a "Kingpin" and "career criminal." I am highly flattered by these descriptions and colorful epithets, even as I must decline the honor that they bestow upon me.

4. I am, your Honors, merely your humble servant. I am a minor felon. I am a "poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." I am as nothing in comparison with the evils done, every day, by ladies and gentlemen -- such as yourselves, perhaps? -- whose decisions and judgments result in death and suffering on such a colossal scale as to defy description in words, making any crimes attributed to me insignificant. It has been noted that "nations and states are but robber barons writ large." (Adam Smith) I am merely a robber baron writ small.

5. The United States of America does not deny responsibility for the deaths in the last decade of more than 1 to 2 million persons in the Middle East alone, including 500,000 children; millions of native Americans were killed in the conquest of a continent; millions more persons of African ancestry were enslaved and killed in developing the world's largest economy during the past several centuries; hundreds of thousands died instantly through incineration at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; more than one million succumbed in the Phillipines to U.S. colonialism; thousands died and are still dying in Vietnam as a result of U.S. efforts in that country that included chemical as well as germ warfare. Many thousands continue to die in Pakistan from U.S. "robot" bombs -- as reported (or ignored) -- in America's daily newspapers. My achievements are insignificant by comparison with "your" deeds, distinguished judges and justices, ladies and gentlemen. I am only an amateur in crime. All of you are the true professionals in the art of murder.

6. Dr. Johnson remarked that "nothing so concentrates the mind as the knowledge that a man will be hanged in the morning." I have little hope that this appeal for clemency will be successful. I am cooperating with my lawyer's efforts because he seems so interested in the research and arguments to be submitted to the court and officials deciding the matter that I would hate to disappoint him by ignoring or trivializing his effort to save my "worthless" skin. We have grown very fond of one another, my lawyer and I. At least, I like him. My lawyer regards me with fascinated "horror." Unlike many of you in the so-called "world of normality," my lawyer -- who is my age and even resembles me, physically, if not morally -- understands that "there but for the grace of God go I."

7. I share in the human condition, ladies and gentlemen. I am one of you. Your horror and dread at my actions (or at my existence) emanates from this suppressed knowledge. Admit it, you see yourselves in me and others like me. You are as much attracted as repelled by what you see in me. We need each other. No saint without a sinner, eh? No judges or lawyers and laws without criminals and violators of laws. I notice that my lawyer nods his head in agreement as these words are taken down by a typist or court reporter for transcription. Think of ancient drama or literature, if you like, or the sad poetry in court documents and filings, the foul residue of miserable lives exhaled (like a miasmic cloud) from places such as the establishment where I now find myself placed by cruel fortune and the vicissitudes of a deeply flawed legal system. Justice is only to be found in heaven. On earth we have a surplus of laws. Happily, I am surrounded by books. Finally, I have the leisure to read and a little time to think.

8. I am a man who is about to die. I must make my peace with my killer, society, even as I endeavor to justify my life with mere words. A final meal, a cigarette, some last words. These are poor consolations for the misfortunes of fate. My lawyer's eyes sparkle with pity. He pities me. I pity him. My life's final act is anticlimactic, scripted by Henry Fielding and (somehow) unfolding in the wrong century. I would have fared better in the eighteenth century -- or earlier still, as a Spanish pirate -- sailing the high seas.

9. This is what psychologists call "lack of proper affect" or "insight," failure of moral imagination, inability to appreciate the pain of others, a poverty of feeling and empathy. I am a Republican. I believe in money -- our only true God -- also in punishment for criminals. Criminals enjoy committing their crimes, your Honors, just look at Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. They -- no, we -- deserve all that is meeted out to us. So many criminals are lawyers and judges, elected officials and businessmen, even prosecutors and cops -- many of these social frauds were on my payroll. I have little sympathy for hypocrites concerned about the "ethics" and "souls" of their neighbors in Soprano States. After all, what is to be expected from this monkey race of killers and carnivores? Not much: 98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees. Indeed, we are "50% identical to the banana. ... Homo sapiens, according to current evolutionary theory, exists primarily as a container for inactive bacteria which have been successful in the struggle for survival. ... Laws of Newtonian elegance can't apply to human behavior. Bananas aren't motivated by 'cause and effect.' Ask one." Engleby, pp. 109-110.

10. My lawyer is about my age, fifty years-old. He lives in a modest non-descript place a few miles from the courthouse. He is in debt up to and beyond his eyeballs to pay for the education of his only child. He has few possessions in comparison with what I have enjoyed. My lawyer is also a Republican. He does not have sex with young and very beautiful women. I have delighted in the pleasures of women of every kind and from every nation in the world, almost on a daily basis. He has never owned a very expensive watch. I have possessed exquisite jewelry of every kind. He has never travelled the world. I have been everywhere in Europe. I have also visited at least some parts of every continent, including Asia and Africa, mostly on business. I know what it is like to have money and power.

11. I drove a Mercedes Benz, the most luxurious model ever made. My dull and average-looking lawyer has only a very modest Japanese car. I have dined in the finest restaurants with famous faces surrounding me. He eats at home with his pleasant wife of thirty years. He dreams of nights that he cannot afford in great concert halls and theaters. I have been to all the great theaters of the world. We debate philosophy and cultural issues. He believes in goodness and love. I do not. My death may arrive tomorrow. His death (and yours) will arrive soon enough -- if it has not arrived already without your noticing the fact -- usually, death arrives before most of you have done much living. I pity all of you.

12. We "live" in different worlds of value, my lawyer and I. The boredom of his life would have killed me ages ago. I have very little confidence that my well-meaning attorney (or any judges) will appreciate all I have to say. My question to you, your Honors, is whether you or he -- this totally insignificant and flawed person, struggling to be good, with his silly books of ethics and love of art, my "inferior" in every sense of the word -- have truly lived or whether all of you will die without savoring this precious gift of life? Am I making this appeal "for" life? Or is my lawyer and are all of you with him begging for some of this "authenticity" or Nietzschean elan that I embody? Who is to be pitied? Me? Or you?

13. My lawyer lives in an orderly world, in linear time, real spaces, and genuine emotions. I thrive upon chaos and quantum mystery. Like Milton's Lucifer, I "rule in hell" whereas he serves in heaven. I am rich in life-force. How many of you can say the same? Not many, I promise you.

14. Experts and courts demand an explanation for my actions and life choices. Their theories are laughably absurd. This demand misses the point of the enterprise: "Evil," one meddlesome English critic reminds us, "has, or appears to have, no practical purpose. Evil is supremely pointless. Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity. In this, it resembles God, who if he does turn out to exist" -- I shall discover the answer to this question soon enough! -- "has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being. ... Farce is human action stripped of meaning and reduced to mere physical motion. This is also what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews." Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 84-87.

15. One of my colleagues in business described persons as "meat puppets," things of no consequence to be moved about by men like us. We are the gods. They -- all of you -- are animals and nothing more. You are "collateral damage," like those millions of brown people who must be murdered to further America's national interest. No one claims that my life has been dull or average. I can truthfully assert -- with my hand on my heart as I do so -- that few persons have found my conversations or company boring. I am blessed with a strong dose of what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as "life-energy." Heidegger understood the need for affirmation of the moment. A single act of gratuitous cruelty that produces a victim writhing in agony is what nature intends for all of us. To deny the luxurious pleasures derived from the destruction of "little" lives is mendacious. Admit your addiction to hurting the "little people" who make the world turn. After all, to those who dare to act greatly or seize what must be theirs all is permitted. All is permitted.

16. We are carnivores, killers, takers, aggressors. We take pleasure in fulfilling our aggressive natures. This is what the blood-stained god of creation must have intended. Humanity is not made in the image of any loving God's compassion. The very suggestion of such an ethics of love is utterly absurd. Hitler had some excellent points even if he got a little carried away at times. Who is to say that Hitler was wrong? Morality is subjective. Goodness is relative to the individual and his or her situation: " ... the strong man is also the free man, ... while the subjected man, the slave, [like my earnest attorney,] lives dull and oppressed. -- The theory of freedom of will is an invention of the ruling classes." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale, s. 9.

17. An invention of the "ruling classes" is what morality always will be. Yes, morality is a tool for the oppression of the people -- simple people and fools who deserve what they get from the likes of me. Much the same must be said of laws. They are for the masses not the masters of men. I was (the past tense is now necessary!), in life, a master of men. I was an "Overman." I will not end my life by grovelling to small men and women. All of you fine ladies and gentlemen are the cave in which I dwell. Right and wrong is all about power. You may kill me, but you cannot be like me and you want, desperately, to be like me. This explains why so many of you follow me and are fascinated by me, or others like me, who rule over nations and states everywhere in the world. I have lived and now I will die, greatly, loudly, proudly. I could not have borne a small and trivial life. This violent death at the hands of the state is much better. "Who would fardles bear? ..." Not I, your Honors, not me -- never.

18. I suppose some comment is desired from me concerning the murders of which I stand convicted. Very well. Let us savor the delicious details. I was forced by the relatively few gainful financial opportunities of my early life to operate a business in which credibility is vital. I cannot permit a rival (or employee) to absond with my goods or cash. Otherwise, you can be sure that others will attempt to do the same. My life unfolded in a world without the regular and predictable institutional responses that would have allowed me to forego self-help. In other words, I could not go to the cops for help. Hence, I was the cops.

19. Now many persons in such a position in America hire what are known as "subcontractors." There are "garbage disposal experts" who solve these problems for a small fee in what used to be called "the Underworld." I could have formulated a "coalition of the willing." I preferred -- even delighted -- in doing my own sanitary work. I admit that what I will now describe will seem "evil." However, I do not believe in "evil." The word is a relic of a religious age that is no longer needed. "The world is everything that is the case." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) Evil is not an item that is found existing, empirically, in the world. Evil is a concept deposited in human affairs by persons. Evil is a hypocritical concept. Evil is subjective. The winners in every war or conflict define what is evil. Had the Nazis or Japan won the Second World War there would have been "Virginia" and not "Nuremberg Trials." Besides, the word "evil" should not be applied to me. I am merely more honest than most people. I take what I want. I get rid of my competitors. I survive. This is what nature intends, ladies and gentlemen. I am in compliance with the strictures of evolution. How can anyone blame me for that? I am only a "survivor."

20. "What rats do when a member of a strange rat clan enters their territory or is put in there by a human experimenter is one of the most horrible and repulsive things which can be observed in animals." Konrad Lorenz writes of the immediate attacks and slow dismerberment of these rodents by others who bite, claw, tear at the stranger, usually over a long period of time, deliberately prolonging the agony: "Only rarely does one see an animal in such desperation and panic, so conscious of the inevitability of a terrible death, as a rat which is about to be slain by rats. It ceases to defend itself. One cannot help comparing this behavior with what happens when a rat faces a large predator that has driven it into a corner whence there is no more escape than from the rats of a strange clan. ..." "Rats," in On Aggression (New Yorker & London: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 161-163. (American prisons duplicate the conditions of overcrowded rodent environments to perfection, probably deliberately.)

21. American experts in psychological torture have devised techniques aimed at reproducing this breakdown in defensive and coping capacity in persons not convicted of any crimes through frustrations and anxiety. They have improved upon Nazi techniques. Persons lay down and die, if subjected to such excruciating torments over a sufficiently long period, except for a few annoying individuals who do not seem to fit the pattern of so-called "normality." I hate when people refuse to be victims. I detest persons who disobey me. I hate everyone who thinks he is smarter than me. They need a little humility. No offense: "Anglos are not smart enough to be philosophers." I am a true philosopher. I do not bother with all of the books my lawyer reads. His constant study shows a lack of originality. All my lawyer does is to quote from his readings and then to comment on them in formulating his opinions. I am my own source of quotations.

22. "It has been noted that the existence of evil is only a 'problem' in the philosophical sense if one presupposes that Nature is an essentially benevolent enterprise or that it is the creation of an essentially benevolent deity or deities. If one makes no such presupposition, then evil's existence ceases to be a philosophical problem. But it does not necessarily cease to be a mystery. Indeed, one can never fully explain the existence of evil merely by denying the alleged benevolence of the universe. One must also provide a completely adequate account of the ultimate origins of human suffering. ... " Timothy Anders, The Evolution of Evil (Illinois: Open Court, 1994), at pp. xii-xiii.

23. I am compelled to agree with Professor Anders. "Suffering" by victims is indeed a crucial component of this mystery. How pleasant it is to savor the suffering of another. The exquisite flavor of a dying person's pleas for mercy and recognition of one's demonic "power" -- power over life or death, power to bestow favors or inflict pain and frustrations, eternally, for no rational reason, control over others, establishing one's infinite superiority -- like the demon, Malbus in world mythology. I am still amused by a woman's attempt to escape death by offering sex and the look of shock on her face as a bullet was fired into her belly. I did not know there was a child in that woman's body. This knowledge, I must say, would have added to the pleasure of the experience. The look of absolute loss and devastation in a person's face as his or her children are murdered is really funny. The realization in a man's face that everything he loves has been or will be destroyed is priceless. I try to force them to see that everything they believe is nonsense. There is no truth. You can do whatever you want. I know what Vikings felt when they sacked a city. I understand Cortez as he raped and burned native women. These men must have been very much like me. These are the men who made empires and built mountains of gold. These are successful men. My lawyer admires artists and philosophers, scientists and great jurists. Such men and women are only servants of the wealthy and powerful. Money is the meaning of life. Genius is something I can buy, like a hundred-dollar haircut.

24. I entered my rival's home with some of my employees. I tied him to a chair. I took everything of value, material and non-material, raped his woman, murdered his children. After enjoying their bodies and turning them over to my people as a reward or bonus for the evening's work, I allowed my would-be usurper to die, slowly, by bleeding to death from several gun shots to the lower portions of his body. As he was surrounded by his dead family members, I snapped a photo, after posing the group in a touching family composition. I think of these murders as my humble creation of a work of art. My masterpiece. I laughed throughout the evening. I then set fire to the establishment. Some of the victims may have been alive before the flames engulfed them. I wish that I had brought marshmellows to roast in the flames. I certainly succeeded in sending a message to any others contemplating a "revolution."

25. This evening's entertainment was strictly a "rational means to achieve a desired goal." David Hume would say that I am utterly rational. Psychologists suggest a career in politics. This lovely scene has been repeated 70 to 100 million times in the twentieth century. We are well on our way to similar or, perhaps, even greater numbers of victims in the new century. Am I so unsual? Am I really a monster? Or do you see in me only the monstrosity in human nature -- a human nature in which you share? I am merely the other side of you. Do what you like to my body. I have enjoyed my fun. I have lived. Living is killing, eating, fornicating, excreting one's victims. Morality and human compassion are things for weak persons, like all of you. When you speak of human nature, remember that (whatever other aspects of humanity are postulated) you will also have to deal with me. There will always be someone like me.

The foregoing statements are true to the best of my knowledge. I am aware that if any of the foregoing statements made by me are wilfully false, I am subject to punishment.

s/Carlos R. Mendoza

Carlos R. Mendoza, Inmate No. 45587, Appellant.

Signed before me this 21st day of September, 2010.

s/Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.

Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.

Decision of the State Supreme Court in State v. Carlos R. Mendoza, et als.

Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10

PER CURRIAM:

An Appeal for Clemency and Motion for Reconsideration of a Death Sentence has been brought before this tribunal in the above captioned and related matters. The state legislature has enacted a statute that forbids the imposition of the death penalty in this jurisdiction prior to the filing of these appeals and requests. All pending death sentences of persons convicted of murder in this state will be and hereby are commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole subject to review by appellate tribunals in the event that new evidence of factual innocence surfaces in any of these matters at any future time. Accordingly, the Appeals and Requests by these Appellants are rendered moot and are hereby dismissed. So Ordered.

Dated and Signed by All Justices this 1st Day of November, 2010.

Out of the Past.

2010-10-20T05:21:00.000-07:00

"He looked as if he would murder me and he did."

I stared at this sentence on the page in my old and battered Underwood typewriter. I pushed a weathered fedora hat back on my head, loosened my tie. I always knew the end would come because of some dame. I just never realized how they'd get me. The two of them were in on it from the beginning. He was a lawyer, a shyster downtown, an ambulance chaser. She was a peroxide blond who wore tight dresses and too much lipstick, always carried a forty-five in her bag, had a tattoo on her back -- where the sun don't shine -- that said: "Hot Lips."

They were perfect for each other. I got in the way. They had no choice. I see it now. They had to get rid of me. I could almost forgive them for that. But they killed Madeleine. And that I'll never forgive. Today is the day of reckoning. I have a bullet for each of them.

This place isn't so bad. It's a lot like Jersey City on a rainy afternoon. I remember reading a ghost story that was kind of like that. I think it was Muriel Spark's "Portobello Road." There's a lot of guys, like me, wandering around in this black-and-white reality. If you have some unfinished business you may get stuck in a reality like this. I pack my 38 caliber police special -- Philip Marlowe had a revolver just like this baby! -- I step away from my desk, the typewriter, and the whole grimy office. I have to find those two grifters. I need some fresh air. Madeleine has to be here somewhere. I'm gonna find that dame.

I stroll through "The Mansions of Hades," which is a residential neighborhood for well-to-do existentialists and others dead before resolving the puzzle of their lives, still questioning, doubting, angry and unaccepting. Norman Mailer drinks at a bar nearby. Jacques Derrida scopes out the babes at the corner restaurant. Jean-Paul Sartre "lives" about a block away.

What does it mean to "live" as opposed to merely "existing"? How is hell different from the Marais district of Paris? Let's drop in on Sartre to discuss my predicament. I want to know how a dead man can kill the bastard who plugged him. No wonder all the great philosophers are here. Most of them are trying to kill their predecessors and teachers. Wittgenstein is hunting for all of them. Bastards.

I expect to find Sartre in his messy apartment that is filled with books. Instead, I find him sitting in a sidewalk cafe. Sartre holds a newspaper, stares at a cup of strong black coffee, his pipe sits on a dirty ash tray. I notice two books before him -- a collection of works in hermeneutics and the late writings of Jacques Derrida. I tip my hat in his direction, point to the seat before him as I glance at the Derrida texts. Sartre shrugs his shoulders, then gestures at the empty chair.

I sit and ask the philosopher: "How's it going?"

Sartre sips his coffee and says: "Everything just is."

"Yeah, I know the feeling."

"Feelings? Here?"

"Yeah, in a way. There's a constant numbness or dullness, a frozen quality in one's perceptions and an inescapable affective tone or mood to everything that makes life stale and flat. I have lately -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth in life ... or death. The world is black-and-white for a really good reason here, now. Cigarette smoke follows you everywhere. People dress in black a lot. The neighborhood is filled with existentialists and postmodernists -- like Hollywood."

Sartre seemed exited and child-like: "I met Humphrey Bogart, you know."

"I'd rather meet Lauren Bacall. The deepest circles of hell are reserved for analytical philosophers and the linguistic analysts. Nobody has been able to finish a sentence for centuries in hell because of all the parsing of meanings and debates over syntax. I hear they're planning to make George W. Bush deliver a speech for eternity in hell. Think about the poor saps who'll have to sit through it. 'No Exit' is right." Part of the meaning of hell is not knowing that you're in it.

"It makes you long for the guestapo." Sartre sipped his coffee.

"I want to ask you a question."

"Go right ahead. It won't mean anything."

"Well, I want to plug the bastard who did me in. I have no body. I can't physically kill the mug. What should I do?"

"Why not wait fifty years? That's nothing here."

"That's not good enough for me. I want to dispatch the guy, send him to his maker with all his sins upon his head."

"Are you sure you have the right man."

"Yes, but I haven't seen him in a while. He's a master of disguise who looks a lot like me."

"That is a problem. Your murderer -- like your self -- is an entity in the world. Definitely not a Cartesian 'I.' You'll have to trail him through his actions. Maybe you'll be able to draw a picture of the mug."

"A picture?"

"Yes," Sartre took a drag on his pipe. "You see, Schopenhauer (who lives about a block from here) said that, if you were to connect the dots of a person's actions or the deeds of his life, the image produced would constitute a kind of portrait of an external shape -- a ghost, if you like -- of the self. All of the inner life would be missing, of course, but everything else would be there. You would have a 'mug shot,' as it were, of the killer to put in post offices and supermarkets. Of course, we don't have either of those establishments in this neck of the woods. You might come up with the image of God or the devil ... either (or both) may look like you -- or me."

"I see."

With a wave to my favorite existentialist, I got up from the table and drifted, aimlessly, through the half deserted streets and muttering retreats. Sartre is still waiting for that waiter who is not there and may not be coming, like those two bums waiting for Godot.

I felt a breeze scattering some leaves, then I saw her. She was standing under a streetlamp wearing a beautiful suit -- maybe Christian Dior -- white gloves in one hand, a hat tipped over one eye. Perfect make up, cigarette on her lips, holding an envelope-type purse. She looked like Jane Greer as she appeared in Out of the Past, except she was a blond. She had trouble written all over her. I didn't care. I waltzed right up to her. In my best casual manner, I tried an opening line which is more direct than my usual coolness and distance from this sort of dame:

"You look a little too glamorous for this neck of the woods, sister. Can I help you find your way?"

I made sure she got the message. This was one tough dame. She didn't blink and gave it right back to me:

"What's it to you?" She blew some smoke in my face.

"Nothing. I'm just trying to be sociable. Mind if I walk with you. These streets can be dangerous."

"I'm dead. There's not too much more anybody can do to me."

There's something incomplete about this moment in history -- maybe it's only in my society, but I doubt it -- a feeling of deadness. Something remains unfinished in our culture and ourselves. The new age is still unborn. We are not yet what we must be. This state of being nothing applies to the living and dead. Maybe that's perfect since my name is Nick, Nick Orpheus. The choice is between "Being" and "Nothingness."

"Well, there's places and then there are much worse places. The local boys could drag you to New Jersey, which has to be the last circle."

"Anything but that." She chuckled. A lifted eyebrow said she didn't care if I walked with her or shot myself in the head. We could hear some music from nightclubs in the distance. I suggested walking in the direction of the music. It was all the same to her. She was looking for the no good bastard who shot her. I told her my story. I explained about Madeleine. She said that she must have known her from somewhere. She couldn't remember too much before she got to this place. Me too. Something about being murdered is cleansing. You leave something behind. Create something new. Her name was Jane Eurydice. She asked me about Madeleine.

"Well, Madeleine ... " I hesitate to speak of her. One of my rules in "life" is never to discuss one woman with another. The strange similarity between these women -- Madeleine's hair was chestnut colored, sometimes -- even if her hair color changed by the week -- and her eyes were dark. Otherwise, this stranger might have been Madeleine's twin: same height, weight. Despite the new arrival's blond hair and green eyes, red lipstick, and greater glamor, I felt like I was talking to Madeleine. It was enough to give me a sense of ... vertigo. Maybe "frenzy" is a better word.

"Madeleine was among those few women with a legitimate grievance against life. She was owed something for what was -- and is -- taken from her. I can't speak of her in the past tense. I love her laughter and curiosity, passionate interest in things and ideas. People fascinate and horrify Madeleine. They mostly horrify me -- especially the lowlifes and bastards she associated with."

"I am not a big fan of humanity." She said this with a hardness in her eyes I would not have believed possible for such a beautiful woman.

"You got something better?"

"There must be something better."

"Maybe that's what this place is about. Finding something better." The music was pretty loud now. There was neon in the middle distance. I gestured in a north-by-northwest direction, towards the light and shadows, smoke and mirrors.

"You want a drink?"

"Why not? You look like the best company I'm going to find in this town." Jane laughed as she said this. It wasn't meant as a compliment.

We found a cabaret that looked like something from "Casablanca." There were a lot of people dancing. Great jazz music was playing. Cigarette smoke filled up the joint. There was a never-ending party going on. I slipped the doorman a fin to get into the club, then looked for some little guy in a rented tux with gleaming dentures who would finagle a table for a brand new twenty dollar bill. Money works even at these levels of reality.

There were beautiful women all over this place. It was a lot like Hollywood. Jane wasn't worried a bit. Jane sat accross from me in the soft light of the place, removed her hat and gloves, pointed those big eyes at me posing an unspoken question. I ordered a bottle of champagne. She was some seriously beautiful woman. Her eyes were filled with intelligence and curiosity, also deeper levels of pain than one expected to see in a woman who looked the way she did -- not at her age, anyway. She must've been no more than twenty-five when she passed into this realm of blighted souls. Some women are even younger when they are ushered into this grim reality through horrible trauma. I do not envy those all-too brief lives.

"Should I make conversation? Or will you be witty for me?" A lifted eyebrow told me that she had little hope that I would succeed in amusing her. If you have eternity on your hands, she seemed to say, a moron is worth a few laughs. I was the moron.

"I'll just try to make the conversation light and fluffy."

"Go ahead and do that." I got a smile. Well, that's a start. I had a feeling that there was something about our being together, here, in this nowhere place, that was important to what we were both after. Maybe she sensed this as well, but would not articulate the insight. Women who look the way she always will, to me, are targets of every imbecile in the world. They develop techniques for wrestling with gorillas of all varieties.

The suspiciousness was understandable, shadows that fell across her features, the intensity and presence of pain or shock said that, somewhere along the way in her brief life -- probably when she was very young -- someone evil and perverse hurt her forever. Maybe she was here to find the guy or gal who would love her forever, balancing the scales. Maybe I could help. And just maybe, if I was right about these intuitions, by helping her I'd help myself. This could be the only way to get out of here.

Some things a guy in my line of work figures out by dealing with lives lost to squalor and crime, blasted souls and walking wounded in this bleak landscape where fine young cannibals walk the night. The band began to play "You Must Remember This." I fixed my tie, smiled, and extended a hand. After a few seconds of cold contemplation, Jane put her hand in mine.

We stepped on to the dance floor. I liked the feel of her body close to mine, the subtle but excellent perfume, the fabric of her dress. I liked the way Jane looked at me -- amused and expectant, cool and assessing, smart, tough, challenging, also curious. Never let a woman become bored with your mind. Most men are boring to women. In fact, most men are boring to themselves.

The most beautiful woman in the world becomes less interesting the moment it is clear that she's an idiot. I don't know why I feel that way. Most men feel the opposite emotions. They are attracted to women who will always be more ignorant and less intelligent than they are. Women who are physically attractive and intellectually dull seem to constitute one masculine ideal. Women who are easily impressed, I guess.

Life must be happier for idiots, male and female. Think of all the fools you know who are doing great. Have you ever seen the Republican Convention? They're all happy as kids in a candy store waving their flags and balloons. True, a lot of them get indicted for having too much candy, but you know what I mean.

Gradually, Jane relaxed and began to tell her story. She was the product of a broken home. Mother left early. Father liked to beat her. I suspect that he did worse. She liked boys. They liked her. Jane didn't care about much. There was a fatalism about her from the start. She expected a short life. She was certainly right about that abruptly-ended or -shortened life. Jane never thought of her life as anything other than an ordeal punctuated by moments of self-abandonment in pleasures -- pleasures of various kinds which is always an anticipation of death, a kind of living death or purgatory of the moment.

Any kind of mood altering or hallucinatory substance is about pain management. Eventually, the pain does the managing. Purgatory is the condition of a never-ending party, a nightclub that does not close, a celebration with strangers and without mirth, an eternity of boredom. Have you ever seen the Oscars ceremony?

There was so little love in Jane's life that she must have felt a desperate hunger for genuine affection or any true human connection, let alone real love. It was a wonder to me that people -- especially men -- had not taken advantage of this poor woman from day one. Maybe they did. Jane was carrying a neon sign around her neck that said: "Please exploit me."

Many women seem unaware of projecting emotional need and vulnerability, frailty, and spiritual loss. Predators feed on that sort of need and vulnerability.

At first, Jane didn't see her vulnerability as an invitation to every worthless bastard in the world. After a while, Jane didn't care or, maybe, she believed that things could never be different with anyone that she would meet. Despite the veneer of toughness and cynicism -- the edgy quality about her and Jane's formidable beauty -- she was a softie inside, craving affection, just made for the exploiters of this world, exploiters that she would seek out with a suicidal compulsion and apathy.

Jane was begging for destruction because, absurdly, she had accepted the one lesson that power always teaches its victims at every level of reality -- you deserve what I am doing to you. You are my slave. Never believe that nonsense.

"We need to find the people who hurt us." I said this and stared into her eyes. I held her close and felt the music surrounding us.

"Maybe," Jane whispered in my ear, "it's the only way we can be free."

That's when we turned and saw the man in the black raincoat. He was of middle height, his features appeared indistinct or nondescript because of the distance that made it impossible to identify him as someone familiar to me in life. He seemed like a man who knew too much. He was clearly observing us, maybe following me. He was with a woman -- dark haired, wearing dark glasses, even inside this nightclub. I didn't like the look of either one of them. There are all kinds of bosses and minor deities exacting tribute in these nether regions of lost souls. Jane saw what I saw.

"Let's get out of here." She grabbed my arm. I felt that this was right and good somehow, together we're unstoppable.

"Come on. There must be a back way out of here." Her nearness was reassuring. I want her never to be far away.

We pushed our way through the crowd. As we left the nightclub, it seemed that night had remained irremovably in place for years or eons. At this level of reality darkness ruled. There were parties everywhere, music, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, the sounds of sex were often heard, but no love-making, street walkers at every corner. We wandered through twisting and darkening streets then came upon a man standing near a taxi. I could hear steps behind us, approaching. I (somehow) knew that it was the couple from the nightclub aiming to "get" us. They would shadow us, like a guilty past. I wasn't sure whether we could shake them off.

"Need a lift?" The man wore a cap on the back of his head, a cigarette behind his ear, unshaved, maybe forty. The car was a beat-up old checker cab with New York plates.

"Where you heading?" I asked and looked over my shoulder. Footsteps approached, quickly.

"That depends on you, buddy."

"Get in, Jane. Let's get out here pronto." We ducked into the comfy back seat. The cab peeled out into the night traffic faster than a bat out of hell -- or purgatory -- and we settled into a comfortable cruising speed, but were we heading in the right direction?

I tried to make out the streets in the darkness, deciding to trust my emotions and intuitions. I'd have to feel my way along. I would need to see through the blindness. Jane seemed to trust my judgment more than I did.

"That way," I said. The driver turned towards a dark and lost highway. We drove some ways, then -- I don't know how -- I felt there were familiar landmarks along the way, allowing them to point me in the right direction, they seemed to whisper to me, gesturing towards something known and true, a powerul emotion pulled me towards an ambiguous resolution to our adventure.

A glance behind us revealed a black cadillac, 1947, gleaming, menacing. The grill on that car resembled the smile of a hungry shark -- the caddie was gaining on us. I saw what appeared to be a very familiar street. I asked the cab driver to pull over quickly. I dropped a wad of cash in his lap, opened the door of the vehicle, then pulled Jane out of the car.

"This way." I suddenly knew the right direction. My office was on a street like this, maybe this very street. I looked at the numbers on the doors of the buildings. The numbers seemed blurry -- like in a dream or as if we were under water -- I concentrated and, somehow, I knew that I was only a few blocks from my old haunts. I felt like a man fighting his way out of a hypnotic spell, rescuing forbidden memories from the dungeon to which they were consigned by an evil witch.

"Come on, Jane."

"Where are we going?"

"Towards redemption."

I smiled at her with a confidence that I knew she could not resist. We made our way through darkened and dirty streets. No footsteps were heard behind us. This was further proof that we were headed the right way. I saw a building I knew, but everything seemed to be in the wrong place, shifted around in my recollection. I saw my office building. There was no one around. The entire area seemed desolate, abandoned, like a stage set. I thought that my old key might still open the door.

We made our way towards the entrance. No security guard. I didn't want to try the elevator. We climbed the thirty-nine steps to the fifth floor. My office door was closed, not locked. Jane seemed frightened. I offered silent encouragement. We both sensed that a revelation lay on the other side of that door. I opened it and was frozen to the spot where I stood. Jane's scream seemed to come from far away.

There were two corpses in that room. One looked exactly like me; the other like Jane. From the shadows, a man in a perfect tuxedo stepped forward and lit a cigarette. It was the cab driver, except now he was the epitome of elegance, with a pencil-thin mustache, a gardenia in his lapel, a neatly folded handkerchief in his pocket. His shoes gleamed. He sat on my desk before the two corpses, then smiled and tilted his head toward the empty seats before the bodies. He was the best dressed psycho I'd ever seen.

"I was wondering how long it would take you two to get here. These are the earlier versions of yourselves. They're as dead as doornails. I think you killed them."

He looked at me when he said this.

"Both of you, I mean." He chuckled merrily at this observation. "Pity, I wanted them to belong to me. I liked those two people. You took them away from me. I can't accept anybody who loves the way you two kids do. It's just not the kind of thing I can tolerate. You even offered to take the rap for this dame. What kind of a thing is that for a grown man to do? It ain't natural."

He reached for a drink that appeared in his free hand.

"In my position I have only a few rules. I try to be accomodating of every sort of person. I am a true democrat. I am tolerant of human foibles and peccadillos, even ... encouraging occasional sinfulness." He smiled. "With you two, I have ... failed to communicate."

The man in the tux walked around the room, smelled the gardenia in his lapel: "There is no space for you two and what you feel for each other in the realm where I am king. You two simply do not belong in the kingdom of shadows. You love her too much for that. It is that love that killed the darkness in you. The parts of you that I liked so much. Shame. I always get stuck with the stiffs."

Jane was unaware of speaking the next words: "But who really killed them?"

"You did. You 'transcended' them. I hate when people do that. Now all of you are bringing loving versions of this guy and gal to life by reading these words. It's all terribly complicated and annoying. Here's what I'm willing to do for you."

The man stood and opened his hands, holding them before our eyes like a carnival magician.

"Jane, doesn't really know you. She has no memory of her life at this lowest-level of reality. It's so similar to Union City in this sinister realm. If you can get her out of here, into the sunlight and the Springtime. If you can find the key to her love -- the old love that she felt and feels for you in the deepest part of herself -- then I'll punch your tickets and you can get to the other ride. You'll know you're there when you hear birds singing and everybody seems to be happy. They're usually all grinning like idiots in that place with the skyscrapers and a big park in the middle. I have to warn you the sex is awful in that town."

"What happens if she does not remember?"

"Then you stay with me in the kingdom of darkness becoming the two shadows of yourselves, corpses, that followed you from the club. Living dead, like everybody else in New Jersey. Whatta-ya say? Shake on it?"

Jane interrupted: "Listen, buster -- No one has to rescue me. I barely know this guy. I am not going to let him take the rap for me. I'll go any place you want. He can take off."

I was not going to let Jane risk eternity in that hell: "Not on your life. She's right. Jane does not know me. She can be very happy and better off in the sunshine. Maybe she'll find a banker or some very successful guy --"

" -- that would be hell." Jane said with a laugh.

Suddenly, I felt a blackness swallow all of my conscious awareness. The room began to spin around. I could not see Jane. I reached out for her with a desperation that I had never felt before. I lost consciousness. Everything faded to black. I knew that I might never again find the lady that vanishes.

I awoke after what seemed like hours. I was in a park or something. The grass smelled wet and clean. I heard children laughing, playing. I walked towards a small group of persons visible in the middle distance. I saw birds in a blue and white sky. I felt the warmth of the sun on my flesh and saw everything in beautiful technicolor. I was over the rainbow.

I felt dazed, walking, looking for someone. Then I saw her near some flowers, laughing with an assortment of children surrounding her. Her hair was light brown. She was wearing a sun dress. I approached, nervously and fearfully -- Did she know me?

"What are you doing here?" Jane smiled. Or was it Madeleine? "I thought for sure they'd never let you out."

"The American": A Movie Review.

2010-09-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

November 22, 2010 at 6:46 P.M. A previously corrected "error" was restored to the text, then corrected, again, by me. ("Genius and Lust.")

September 26, 2010 at 1:03 P.M. In the middle of an unsuccessful effort to scan my computer, the cable signal to my computer was cut off or blocked, illegally. The computer shut down. The scan could not be completed. The message conveyed by this tactic on the part of New Jersey government officials, who know that this is computer crime directed against me, is: 1) New Jersey does not care whether crimes are committed in trying to stop me from posting "inconvenient truths"; and 2) the feds can't stop them and may be looking the other way. Is it all about cash? Which federal official has been bribed in this matter?

The only logical conclusion drawn by observers is that the F.B.I. is unable (or unwilling) to protect persons struggling against the Trenton mafia or willing to testify against such figures. Nobody will cooperate with the feds in the future if they continue to let this slide, publicly. Maybe the mafia has more friends in the F.B.I. than the NYPD. I will continue to write from public computers. Mr. Holder, the whole world is watching.

A recent film starring George Clooney entitled, "The American" was a surprise. I expected a good thriller and the usual accomplished acting from Mr. Clooney. These expectations were fulfilled. I also discovered a work of Catholic meditation hidden inside an action movie.

"The American" is a much better movie than many New York reviewers realized. I say this as an audience member who is still surprised by Mr. Clooney's philosophical talent and political concerns. Bravos to all of the players. The excellent script was attributed to a name that I did not recognize and, promptly, forgot. I apologize to this excellent writer whoever he or she may be. Clooney using a pseudonym, perhaps? (Yes, I will look up the name of the script writer and include it in this review.)

Having checked since writing the above, I believe the writer is Rowan Joffe. Never heard of him. Is it "him"? An old joke often told in Hollywood concerns the proverbial dumb starlet who has sex with the writer under the impression that writers have some significance in tinsel land. Writers, sadly, do not matter much in the age of images. Cinema is a director's medium. Unless -- like Woody Allen -- the writer also directs, he or she is and should be at the service of the director. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

The director Anton Corbijn is identified only as "a Dutch-born photographer." This is like calling Pablo Picasso a Spanish-born artist who plays around with colors. I will concentrate on various levels of this film: 1) the psychological investigation of individuation and meaning in terms of a quest for the definition of masculinity; 2) a theological inquiry into eschatology and the problem of evil, where Augustine and Aquinas are specifically invoked in the narrative; 3) a display of symbolist imagery in terms of cinematic language ("Papillon," "Breathless," "Hustle" are all alluded to in the imagery to which we are treated), along with Operatic lore (Madame Butterfly is referenced in a reverse-gender tribute to Puccini), literary echoes (the film is based on a stark and brilliant novel by Martin Booth) are obvious amidst the beautiful Apenines where St. Francis of Assissi fulfilled his salvific mission. I am aware of the location in the alps. The Apenines are identified in a road sign visible on screen for a good reason. Mr. Butterfly may be one more soul saved by St. Francis.

The novel was originally entitled "A Very Private Gentleman." The work has been reissued by Picador as "The American." Henry James is only one of the relevant novelists for viewers reflecting on this film. The novel opens with the metaphor of the cave (caves are metaphors for the "Self"), which is so important in the story of St. Francis. The Operatic score features (I am guessing) Renata Tebaldi singing "Un Bel Di." The explicit hommage to Sergio Leone's ("Italiano"!) spaghetti westerns clues us in to the "spaghetti Noir thriller" that we are enjoying. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")

Images of women in this movie are disturbing and provocative. The paradoxically named Violante Placido ("Violently Peaceful") is one of the most erotically powerful women that I have seen on-screen in a very long time. "Violently peaceful" is a classic description of coitus. This woman -- as the character of "Clara" -- exudes sexuality combined with innocence or the absence of guilt in an unusual mixture, managing to capture and represent the feminine archetype of Woman, as goddess of love. Sofia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida with a little extra humor in the eyes.

Anthony Burgess speaks of the "yielding, vulnerable quality which men see as essentially feminine ..." Ms. Placido adds a sense of humor, charm and intelligence to abundant eros and that makes her very up-to-date. Clara can live without a man, but she likes her fun. A female Pinkerton. Anthony Burgess, "Marilyn," in One Man's Chorus: Uncollected Writings (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), at p. 377.

I am reminded of more than one contemporary star when I ponder these attributes of our "goddesses." The scene in a restaurant and the look given to Mr. Butterfly by the Italian waiter first glancing at Clara is worth the cost of the film experience in the theater. The look by that waiter is untranslatable and may be only imperfectly understood by any woman living north of Naples. Chimica.

Ms. Placido knew what she was doing in this film by embodying a masculine ideal and desire, even dividing into a duality as "Anna"/"Clara." She is both "The Virgin and St. Anne" and/or the two Marias of Catholic mythology. Schelling's "Clara" also comes to mind. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")

The cinematographer (Martin Ruhe) cannot resist underlining Clara's identification with Venus/Mary Magdalen by establishing a relationship with the various Italian canvases depicting "The Birth of Venus" (Boticelli) or Titian's "Reclining Nudes" or "Venus." Clara emerges from the waters of life. Clara's erotic power is a miracle of the sophistication and allure that seems so easy for European actresses and increasingly rare among American women subjected to the infantilizing and dehumanizing forces that are rampant in Hollywood. This is to say nothing of currently popular forms of feminist puritanism or hostility to eros. (Compare "Genius and Lust" with "Not One More Victim.")

Any American young female movie star's quest to be thin, while possessing suitably impressive breasts and remaining nineteen years-old forever, makes the challenge of becoming a woman -- in the full meaning of the word -- an impossibly difficult one. The alternative to becoming a woman is death. Ms. Placido is, in the full meaning of the word, a WOMAN. ("Master and Commander.")

The one masculine or sexually ambiguous female in the movie is Clooney's "client," working for his "enemy-friend" (the gray-haired villain Mr. Butterfly might become or who embodies the protagonist's future self). She is the woman purchasing a gun (rifle) from Clooney's character. This female character is also "Mr. Butterfly's" feminine side. She does not end well. "If you live by the sword then you may expect to die by the sword."

This movie reverses Puccini's and David Belasco's story of the American sailor, Pinkerton, who arrives in a land he does not know, enjoys a sexual encounter with a woman whose disgrace at his hands results in her death, then withdraws to his American wife and the comforts of imperialism. It is not Cio-Cio San who falls in love in this version of the story, but Pinkerton-Clooney, as it were, who is undone by passion. Ironically, this movie which is about masculinity, subverts the masculine principle in favor of female knowingness. Gender transfers are subtle and successful at the conclusion of the work. Clara becomes Pinkerton. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Mr. Clooney's hit-man character "lives in hell," as he is told by a theologically-minded priest who has been reading Kierkegaard -- played beautifully by Paolo Bonacelli -- echoing the reflections of the Dutch theologican Miskotte and the poetry of Dante:

"Even though we are bound to take ourselves as our point of departure in every sphere in which revelation and faith are discussed, we cannot really take ourselves as our point of departure. We have to make a more precise distinction. We can say, for example, using the word in a good sense, that faith has its own kind of autonomy, that it is personal, that it is chosen in freedom, but also, enclosed within itself, entails freedom, creates it and sustains it. But there must be a place 'somewhere' where the criterion of the truth is not to be found with me. There must be a 'somewhere' where man can say in the absolute sense that he is not lonely, that he is not alone and neither a creator nor a judge. There must be a 'somewhere' where he has, less in ecstasy than with a sober sense of what is true, to feel permitted to understand that he is understood and known and that he has been chosen."

Edward Schillebeeckx, God is New Each Moment (New York & London: Continuum, 1983), pp. 67-68. (emphasis added)

John Lennon's words force themselves into the mind: "Come together over me!" Redemption is to "choose" or affirm this moment that I am. To "be" is to love and be loved. "Hell," says the philosophical priest, "is a place without love." This is to describe hell as an absolute absence of the Other. Hell is fragmentation or division from others and within the self. Hell is to be unchosen, even by oneself, or not to own one's own life. Hell is an inner landscape externalized in the movie as a bleak terrain of gray hills and cold metallic colors -- like Mr. Clooney's hair and non-descript wardrobe -- also as the rifle which Mr. Butterfly fashions that is himself. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Mr. Butterfly is in the midst of a transformation. Butterflies are symbols of the soul and freedom. A butterfly is self-becoming. Mr. Butterfly is recovering from Kierkegaard's "Sickness Unto Death." (I hope to see "Salt" and to review the film here.)

Mr. Butterfly, like St. Francis, has wandered out to T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland," without God ("middle age"?), where the air is cold and clear. Emptiness surrounds this struggling soul, as he journeys from Inferno, to Purgatorio -- the first stirrings of a conscience -- then to Paradiso, love, the fulfillment of the metanoia journey for Man, as the beloved Other is finally recognized to be more important than the self, achieving a kind of redemption or woman's wisdom through self-giving or sacrifice in an ambiguous ending. We are invited to decide what happens next. I opt for Mr. Butterfly's recovery and the couple's move to Englewood, New Jersey. ("'Michael Clayton': A Movie Review.")

These are the stations of Carl Jung's life-journey -- also the migrations of the Christian soul enduring the "stations of the cross" -- that is identified in mythology by Joseph Campbell with the "hero's quest" where Anima is self-realization through self-giving passion, eros. C.S. Lewis in "The Allegory of Love" has charted much of this territory of the soul, of which the Troubadors sang, even providing inspiration for film-makers in "The Discarded Image." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Literary parallels for the mystery of identity, as a search, are common in the great masters of the espionage and thriller genre: Maugham's "Ashenden" is a clear source here, but Henry James and the "American's" encounter with Europe -- reversals of innocence (American) and guile (Europe) -- is also useful. Mr. Butterfly is Henry James' "Strether Martin" as both a criminal and spiritual seeker. (Compare Henry James' The American with his later novel, The Ambassador.)

Joseph Conrad, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Ward Just have all been fascinated by this masculine territory of purification, passion, penance, and mortality symbolized in the character of a spy or other figure in hiding. "I cannot hide from myself," says Verdi's Otello.

"Where I have flown off to is a secret. I have to remain a private man, reborn into my new existence and comfortably settled into it. I have my memories of course. I have not forgotten how to paint insects, that the cyclic rate of a Sterling Para Pistol Mark 7A is 550 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity 365 metres per second; nor have I forgotten that it is developed from the last shadow dweller's gun. I can recall quite vividly the basement in Marseilles, Father Benedetto's little garden, the sink-hole in Hong Kong, blood-red wine like the kisses of girls, the workshop in the arches in South London, Visconti and Milo and the others, Galeazzo and Signora Prasca and the exquisite beauty of the plagiara. I shall never forget the view from the loggia."

"You do not naturally, expect me to divulge into whom I metamorphosed. Suffice it to say Mr. Butterfly -- il Signor Farfalla -- still sups at the wild honey of life and is comparatively content. Similarly, he is quite safe."

"Yet I cannot drive Clara from my mind, no matter how I try."

Martin Booth, The American (New York & London: Picador, 2004), at p. 274.

For comparison, see the review attributed to David Denby in The New Yorker, September 27, 2010, at p. 17.

David Denby is Not Amused.

2010-07-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

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 embarassed 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. ("As 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 the 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, as 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. 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.)
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.

2010-07-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

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. New "error" inserted and corrected. August 21, 2008 at 5:28 P.M.

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 (at Strand, in hardcover).

Jim Holt reviews the latest opus by Richard Dawkins in the New York Times. 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 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." If you disagree or point out that the "emperor has no clothes," then you will find it difficult to publish your books or you may well find your work ignored. Kiwi anyone?

I say, fuck 'em. Speak truth to power. And yes, there is such a thing as cultural power. My unwillingness to be impressed by intellectual fashionistas 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. 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?

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 social superiors; and 2) I am an unbearable revelation of the inadequacies in the worldviews -- or even thought processes -- 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.

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. For those who are in a hurry, here's the "bottom line." Dawkins, Holt, Dennett, or anybody else has not and will not 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 lend support to many forms of religious belief.

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 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 on Park Avenue. This is to their credit.

Now let us turn to Holt's review. My method will be to read the review and pause 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 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. 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 which is felt, as a REALITY, in our 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 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.

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, resurfacing 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."

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 "Crimes and Misdemeanors" with "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 say 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. I have no doubt about the 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?"

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. Philosophy can take you to the door of faith, then it is up to you to step through it. As paradoxical as it seems, 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.

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."

See my short story "A Doll's Aria," then think about which character is more of a person in that story. I know that I can find similar statements in Buber, also in Islamic Sufists, whose poetry and depth of feeling is stunning. 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."

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. ("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.) 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 benefitted, 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 "Steven Hawking's Free Will is Determined.')

The same logic undermines the claim quoted by 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 to exist in our lives as human beings. Mr. Holt objects:

"Hitler never formally renounced his Catholism [sic.]"

Is "Jim Holt," or the author of this review, a Cuban-American? Senator Bob? 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, 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 is indicative of a divine gift of grace and freedom requiring persons to decide this matter for ourselves, since the problem is -- and has always been -- "choice." ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

Would Jesus be a Christian?

2010-06-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2011 at 2:26 P.M. Some previously corrected "errors" were restored to this text. I have made the corrections, again, from a public computer. I hope that these corrections will not have to be made ever again.
January 28, 2011 at 10:53 A.M. I had not reviewed this essay for a while. I noticed that several words emphasized in quotes had been altered. Rather than reintroducing the italics, I simply eliminated the emphasis in each quote. I have dealt with this inserted "error" several times in the past. Perhaps this alternative will finally resolve the issue for the person indulging in this amusing ploy.
June 26, 2010 at 1:14 P.M. New Jersey's hackers have denied my access to these essays in "Philosopher's Quest." Hence, I will repost them here until I can regain that access.

"A man once died upon the cross, but one must learn to die upon the cross every day."

Jose Marti, "Letter to Gonzalo de Quesada," in On Art and Literature: Critical Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), p. 332.

Cornel West has said it best in a paragraph that I treasure:

"Despite the challenges presented by the widespread trivialization and dilution of the Christian Gospel, I remain committed to its fundamental claim: To follow Jesus [or to agree, even as an atheist, with the ethics of the Gospels,] is to love your way through the darkness of the world. This love appears absurd -- in fact pure folly in the face of much of the world’s misery -- and yet it yields indescribable levels of sorrow and joy, sadness and ecstasy. To be a Christian is to look at the world through the lens of the cross and thereby to keep one’s focus on human suffering and struggle."

The Cornel West Reader, p. 355.

One need not be a Christian, as I am not in any traditional sense, to accept the ethical wisdom in this message. I can never accept the literal truth of the mythical aspects of religion, but there is so much truth of a different sort, beauty and lasting importance in these great stories found in the New Testament. It was George Santayana’s moral admiration for a Catholicism in which he could no longer believe that led to Bertrand Russell’s quip: “Santayana believes that there is no God and that Mary is His mother." Perhaps the same may be said of me.

Much depends, I suppose, on what is meant by “being a Christian.” I can accept a great deal that seems obviously true in the moral message of the “gnostic” Gospel of Thomas, for example -- which I very much prefer to that of John, despite the latter’s historical victory. I say this as someone who does not believe in the supernatural, nor in an anthropomorphic God, nor (I repeat) in the literal truth of the Gospel stories, nor in the "factual" truth of any religious myth. (The reader who wishes to pursue this controversy further is directed to the works of Professor Elaine Pagels.)

A key source for this individualist perspective on the Christian message of love is Kierkegaard:

"The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because, although he addressed himself to all, He would have no dealings with the crowd, because He would not permit the crowd to aid him in any way, because in this regard He repelled people absolutely, would not found a party, did not permit balloting, but would be what He is, the Truth which relates itself to the individual. -- And hence everyone who would truly serve the truth is eo ipso, in one way or another a martyr. ..."

Soren Kierkegaard, “That Individual,” Quoted and Translated by Walter Kaufman, in Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York & London: Penguin, 1956), pp. 96-97.

Professor Elaine Pagels’s views and those of Kierkegaard are in tension, however, when it comes to the thorny issue of free will and the degree to which “submission” is required of the Christian “knight of faith.” Compare Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), p. xxvii (“An act of religious affirmation is always, in some sense, a practical [or political?] and consequential act.") with Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, trans.: London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 75-76. (“On this the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd.”)

What is essential to the Christian commitment? Is it an unquestioning acceptance of the literal truth of the Gospel story? Is the essential gesture an act of defiant free will? Or is it infinite resignation and absolute belief that is required? Obedience to authority? Or moral rebellion in the cause of justice and love? Or is it the resignation itself that must be freely willed? May we reject belief in the literal truth of religious stories so as to benefit from their moral truth? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Perhaps we can only hope, at best, for that faith that is a “gift of grace” which yields answers to such questions or makes them irrelevant. I am reminded also of William James and his idea of a “will to believe” and of the utility of faith. Pragmatism (New York: Prometheus, 1991), p. 128; (first published in 1907); see also, George Santayana, “William James,” in Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1967), pp. 64-96.

Despite his somewhat (to my mind) pejorative terms “tough- and tender-minded,” James knew himself to have “religious yearnings and transcendental aspirations” that would not be denied. He was both tough- and tender-minded, as are most interesting thinkers. Like John Stuart Mill, whose own mental crisis was similar to the episode experienced by James in 1870, it was impossible for James to deny his need for poetry and beauty as well as this religious aspiration, what he called the “hope for the absolute,” in his own life. There are useful comparisons to draw between James and Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death. It has been said that:

"It is ... possible to accept literally [Kierkegaard’s] designation of Christ as 'the historical, the existential' individual, without making this truth the major premise of existential investigation. The culmination of personal life in communion with God would then be intimated rather than laid down as first principle. Kierkegaard himself leaves his readers free to make their own reading of existence, since such freedom is the condition of acquiring individual selfhood."

James Collins, The Existentialists (Chicago: Gateway, 1952), p. 17. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

In commenting on George Santayana’s theory of religion, Morton White suggests that Santayana “rejects the theology of Catholicism but rejoices in the poetry and ritual of its religious ceremony. For him religion is not a literal account of anything but an allegorical and metaphorical rendering of moral truth. It becomes almost a species of poetry and is therefore to be measured by aesthetic and moral standards rather than by scientific methods.”

The Age of Analysis (New York: New American Library, 1955), p. 54.

This is to turn the Christian mass into a sort of spiritual Opera, which, I guess, it is. But there may be something in this idea, which is not Christian alone, of an "aesthetic of redemption." (Walter Benjamin) Santayana comes very close to Carl Jung's later view of religion as the "collective dream" of a people. The analogy to art should be obvious. W.T. Stace's brilliant Time and Eternity is a recent discovery for me. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")

For the believer, there is also the issue of how to interpret the risen Christ's admonition to Mary Magdalene -- Noli me Tangere "Do not touch this." (Gospel of John) Is the life-story of Christ an example to be emulated and discussed as opposed to a biography in which every detail is to be tested for historical accuracy? Was it not Christ's most important theological instruction to his followers to "interpret" his teaching freely in light of their own needs? I think so. (And please do not mention The Da Vinci Code.)

Why would Christ choose to speak, first -- as resurrected figure or divinity -- to a woman who had been a prostitute? Why was this Magdalen "the beloved apostle" who was to share with Peter responsibility for the creation of the Church and why was she so maligned later? ("The Gospel of Mary Magdalen" is fascinating.)

This questioning is to give new meaning to the "passion" of St. Mathew. Those attracted to these questions which are philosophical-theological-historical-hermeneutic are directed to the writings of scholars Elizabeth Johnson, Elaine Pagels, Marina Warner, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Peter Stanford (biography of Pope Joan) and John Boswell. (Again: "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")

Many theologians interpret Christ's instruction to his "beloved Apostle" as a caution against getting bogged down in the details of the Gospel story, in ritual and doctrine, as opposed to focusing on the fundamental message of the texts, which is certainly (for us) a communication of ethical wisdom and a reminder of our freedom to love one another no matter what. ("Is There a Gay Marriage Right?") Santayana’s characteristically wry and worldly assessment of religion is worth quoting at length:

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s that 'a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds to religion.' ... Indeed, the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion -- something which the blindest half see -- is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the skeptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is so 'malapert as a splenetic religion,' a sour irreligion is almost as perverse."

The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons., 1933), Chapter I, quoted in The Age of Analysis, p. 57.

In light of this paragraph, it should be clear why I am unpersuaded by Professor David J. Bartholomew’s no doubt well-intentioned effort to establish the plausibility of religious belief on the basis of “probability theory and creative mathematics.” See David J. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be a Christian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). You cannot argue someone into (or out of) religious belief, which exists at a deeper than a rational level. Both belief and skepticism are rational. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Sigmund Freud emphazises the illusory character of religion and the need to get beyond it in, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961). I disagree with Freud not in the details of his critique of religion, but in his lack of empathy and understanding for the human needs that give rise to spiritual yearnings. For a great psychoanalyst to display (as Freud often does in his undeniably brilliant writings) such a stunning lack of sensitivity, compassion and charity is enough to set one’s teeth on edge. Freud simply misses the point of religious belief, which is not exactly an insignificant aspect of human life. It is with regard to art and religion that I find Carl Jung's "analytical psychology" superior -- or a much needed corrective -- to Freudian psychoanalysis. ("Is this atheism's moment?")

Much the same may be said of the notorious critiques of religion offered by Nietzsche and Marx. To quote Professor Pagels:

"When I found that I no longer believed everything I thought Christians were supposed to believe, I asked myself, Why not just leave Christianity? Yet I sometimes encountered, in churches and elsewhere -- in the presence of the venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor’s singing at a bat mitzvah, and on mountain hikes -- something compelling, powerful, even terrifying that I could not ignore, and I had come to see that, besides belief, Christianity involves practice -- and paths towards transformation."

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 143.

The most important point about religion, including Christianity, is that it provides adherents with a sense of meaning and purpose at moments of crisis and an explanation for suffering. Religions can heal, this is part of what is meant by “practice," and religions can change people, even if they can sometimes also be harmful. The etymology of the word "religion" is instructive on this issue. It comes from the Latin, re and ligare, to "bind together." Religion, through love, can unite the fragments of the self, and of the self-with-others. (See the stories "Pieta" and "The Sleeping Prince.")

Is there some way to separate the good consequences of religious belief from the intolerance and dogmatism to which they can often lead? There must be. I have been quoting Santayana, the master of the epigram, so I will give him the final word on the definition of religion: “Religion is the love of life,” Santayana said, “in the consciousness of impotence.”

Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.

2010-06-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

February 21, 2011 at 10:10 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected, once again.

February 5, 2011 at 9:18 A.M. This essay has been defaced, "errors" have been inserted in the text. I will do my best to make necessary corrections once again.

"God contradicts himself already."
-- Jacques Derrida.

Introduction.

Jacques Derrida's effect on Western thought is impossible to measure so soon after his departure. I do not agree with Roger Scruton that Derrida and Foucault will be forgotten. I am sure that both men are important philosophers whose works will last well into the next century. Each man seems to have understood one important aspect of our historical predicament that is associated with the various challenges to freedom in our time. I believe that Foucault and Derrida struggled to find a way to remain free in unfree "situations." Each man expressed disdain for Sartre's concept of a "project"; yet each of these French philosophers came to crystalize that idea of a project in his life and work. "A man is defined by his project." (Jean Paul Sartre)

I wish to explore this idea of imperiled freedom -- as the key to contemporary subjectivity -- with reference to Derrida's "linguistic anthropology." I will reserve the opportunity to analyze, at some future date, Foucault's philosophy of politics and law as kinds of power. While I am sure that these French philosophers will last, as I have said, and that their thinking is important, neither man would be pleased about what I contend is most valuable in their works: Derrida is a great theologian; Foucault is our most important prophet of doom and liberation. Foucault is a reluctant and unwilling revolutionary. Gadamer and Ricoeur are the master interpreters of our symbols and symbolizing. Umberto Eco connects semiotics to the study of power. Judith Butler and Roberto Unger are designing quicksilver identities -- with multigendered options "just for you" -- to match the plasticity of our institutions in postmodernist cultures. Cornel West and Angela Davis are translating Continental theory and philosophical efforts from the highest levels of culture into an African-American popular idiom, even as they bring America's urban culture into a dialogue with government power in global culture, that is, they are creating culture as revolutionary power beyond all governments. There is no way that each of these philosophical "superstars" can avoid affecting (or being affected by) the others. ("America's Holocaust.")

If philosophy has become jazz, then we may think of Derrida, perhaps, as the Miles Davis of our contemporary band of thinkers. Derrida takes a bar of "music," improvises upon a theme, and lays down a track for others to follow:

"Derrida is deeply attracted to this notion of an other that exceeds all concepts, all words, and thus can be said to exist outside of thought. [There is a word for an Other who cannot be thought, but is thought.] Yet he also remains firmly convinced of Western thought's continual ability to appropriate whatever other might appear on the horizon, just as he remains convinced that we live within language and cannot realistically hope to escape it." (McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics, at p. 199.)

Please see my short stories "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Metaphor is Mystery," then "Pieta." This tension between a totalizing tendency in Western metaphysics as an "imperial project" (masculine) against the dissonances and paradoxes, or supplements, built into this very effort to overwhelm and absorb knowledge, including knowledge of the other, (feminine) in order to celebrate difference and otherness is essential to Deconstruction. Logos is in constant tension with Eros. Hence, the Western intellectual project -- including science -- resolves itself into a kind of Mythos. Philosophy is "White Mythology." Like it or not, increasingly, this Logos-Eros-Mythos is feminine territory. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

After several months, I came to review this essay and discovered inserted "errors" as part of a continuing effort to deny or obscure such merits as my argument may display. I am still baffled by the evil and envy motivating such actions on the part of very sick persons deluded into believing that such hateful totalitarian tactics can further the cause of "twee" ideologies in the East Village and "feministing." Whatever. ("Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

"It was because responsibility before the other could too easily be taken as a call to attend to beings, albeit personal beings, that Jacques Derrida sought to locate it definitively within the luminosity of openness." -- Please see Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." -- "Levinas had shown why the grasping of being that perpetually hovered over the horizon of Heidegger's opening toward it could not be accomplished. In its limiting case, it would be tantamount to the abolition, by the absorption of the person. But he had not clearly voiced the non-realizability of the apocalypse. Derrida was the one who most forcefully expressed the insight that apocalypse is precisely what cannot be accomplished. If it were to become imminent, it would not be the apocalypse. In this way Derrida brought theoretical clarity to centuries of ecclesiastical struggles with dreams of the millennium that has not yet happened and the millennium that is already now. Initially his path into perennial postponement was by way of a reflection on the endless deferral ["Las Meninas"] and difference that is both the character and condition of writing. Derrida coined the neologism differance to suggest a semiological condition that, far from being a limitation, was what provided the possibility of all meaning." (Walsh, "The Luminosity of Existence," at pp. 22-23.)

For Jacques Derrida, especially at this moment in history, it is always "not yet," "now," "unfinished."

I. "Derrida -- Live and In Concert!"

Derrida's dates are 1930-2004. There are two crucial incidents, at least, in Derrida's life that are helpful for interpreters of his work: First, his exclusion from schooling in his native Algeria because of his "problematic" Jewish identity; second, his use of philosophy as both a "forest" in which to hide and play as well as a mechanism of revolutionary struggle or resistance. Freedom. During his 1942 exclusion from Ben Aknoun high school in El-Biar, Algeria (Jews were restricted to 7% of the student population), Derrida was a peripheral victim of Nazi policies under the German occupation of French territories. Derrida's life was directly affected by the Holocaust. Traditionally, it was Jews whose writings were violated; never Jews who were complicit in the destruction or alteration of the creative works of others. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's use of philosophy is demonstrated in his improvised philosophical seminars discussing forbidden topics from behind the iron curtain. He was detained (on false charges of drug possession and smuggling) during his visit to dissident scholars in Prague. I have done similar philosophizing in New York restaurants and other locations with fascinating results, results that are often surprising in a political sense. I was astonished to discover groups of very different people -- from all walks of life and with varying levels of education -- reconstructing and deconstructing -- an entire development of thought in the history of philosophy over a two-hour period. This happened too often for the process to be a mere coincidence.

Derrida's emotional response on visiting Nelson Mandela's empty cell in South Africa was revealing of his life-long passionate opposition to all forms of racism as an African-born, Jewish and French intellectual. Professor Derrida is one of the distinguished intellectuals who opposed, publicly, the railroading and threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Among the striking aspects of Derrida's physical presence was a powerful "openness" to the world of others that allowed for meaningful connections with those he met. I do not believe that I am mistaken in suggesting the impression of such a connection when I met Derrida in New York, briefly, a few years before his death. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.") Cornel West, "On Black-Jewish Relations," in Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 69-81. (Has Cornel West been silenced or suppressed?)

Jacques Derrida was born of "assimilated" sephardic Jewish parents. All of his family member's names and several other converso names are encrypted in La Carte postale. In many of Derrida's works there are layers of meaning -- including encrypted (or coded) highly personal meanings -- that are often excluded from analyses by commentators. All of my stories are similar in this respect. The short stories are my most revealing autobiographical writings. They are also philosophical works. Finally, they are my most indirect messages to private recipients. (Norris, "Derrida," pp. 239-245.)

Derrida married the psychoanalyst, Marguerite Aucouturier. He must have kept her busy. Derrida's son Pierre was born in 1963; a second son, Jean, was born in 1967. To my knowledge, neither son has expressed a great interest in philosophy. It is important to understand that Derrida's works contain a subtle invitation to "deconstruct" the veiled identity of an author who chooses to live within languages' figurative power (metaphor), with his personal narratives and loved-ones, but also in the literal significance of his texts (descriptive terms), "objectively," with colleagues and students sharing his intense interest in philosophical questions and controversies. The destruction of a text, for Derrida, is a kind of murder. I am sure that Derrida would be horrified at the daily alterations and defacements of these writings, I believe, by U.S. state officials or their agents. An "error" inserted in the foregoing sentence since my previous review, not found in earlier versions of this text, has just been corrected. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

Deconstruction is the opposite of destruction because it is a kind of creation of richer meanings in the text. No philosopher recoils in greater horror from the spectacle of fascist burnings of books -- or any defacements of texts -- than Jacques Derrida:

"Since language [cinema] serves as the ground of personal existence, the human-world emerges as infinite Text. [What is an infinite Text?] Everything gets textualized. All contexts, whether political, economic, social, psychological, historical or theological, become intertexts; that is, outside influences and forces undergo textualization. Instead of literature we have textuality; in place of tradition, intertextuality. Authors die so that readers can come into prominence. In any case, all selves, whether of critics, poets, or readers, appear as language constructions -- texts. What are texts? [Notice the reference and association to developments in quantum physics that came AFTER Derrida's early writings. For Derrida, texts are:] Strings of differential traces. Sequences of floating signifiers. Sets of infiltrated signs dragging along ultimately indecipherable intertextual elements. Sites for the free play of grammar, rhetoric, and illusory reference. What about the truth of the text? The random flights of signifiers across the textual surface, the dissemination of meaning, offer truth under one condition: that the chaotic processes of textuality be wilfully regulated, controlled, stopped." (Kearny, "Modern Philosophical Movements," at pp. 122-123.)

Particle physicist, Brian Greene -- who is probably unaware of Derrida's work -- also suggests that "there is nothing outside the text." He likens the five string theories unified by M-Theory's purported unification as differing translations of the single text that is the book of nature. Ironically, I have also met Professor Greene and even discussed his book briefly as we shared a subway ride. I am sad to report that Professor Greene's name is occasionally altered to a lower case rather than being capitalized, possibly for antisemitic reasons. I will continue to make the identical correction of this inserted "error" in the text. The bizarre possibility that Jewish persons may yield to a fashionable anti-semitism would appear to Derrida as the ultimate deconstruction of identity. I suspect that the "strategy" behind "error" insertions is to keep me guessing concerning the status of any of these writings on any given date. I will continue to write.
Analogies suggest themselves to the resolution offered by Andrew Wiles to "Fermat's Enigma" in mathematical theory with reference to techniques of "choosing factorizations." By means of this more free understanding of mathematical order, new concepts of "beauty" or "elegance" are being formulated by scientists to describe the workings of the universe -- concepts that seem remarkably theological:

"For the impression inherent in textual translations, readers have a couple of immediate remedies. The best option, if the reader's linguistic skills are up to the task, is to consult the original manuscript. At the moment, the analog of this option is not available to string theorists. By virtue of the consistency of the dictionary developed by Witten and others, we have strong evidence that all five string theories are different descriptions of a single master theory, M-Theory [.] ... Imagine a master manuscript [God?] infused with such an enormous range of puns, rhymes, and off-beat, culture-sensitive jokes, that the complete text cannot be expressed gracefully in any single one of five given languages [religions?] into which it is being translated. [Deconstructed?] ..." (Greene, "The Fabric of the Cosmos," at p. 381.)

Readers interested in pursuing the suggestiveness of deconstruction for researchers in the so-called hard sciences or theoretical sciences, such as mathematical theory, are directed to Simon Singh, Fermat's Engima: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), at pp. 114-116. ("There is no longer a unique factorization but rather a choice of factorizations.") Students may wish to turn next to the notorious "Nash Equilibrium," see Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1993), pp. 128-138, then John Forbes Nash, "Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games," in Volume 36 of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, pp. 48-49 (1950). (I recommend Ron Howard's film, "A Beautiful Mind.") Michael J. Field & Mathew Golubitsky, Symmetry in Chaos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Derrida would now call our attention to something seemingly distant from deconstructive analysis and his own experiences with antisemitism, then suggest that deconstructive analyses shows them to be expressive of identical semantic associations that are also found in physics and mathematics: Slavoj Zizek, "Does the Subject Have a Cause?," in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York: Verso, 1994), at pp. 48-49. (" ... 'Jew' starts to function as the hidden marker ... that accounts for the Jewishness of the Jews." A "choice of factorizations"?)

This is where Derrida's work attaches itself to Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom because what he is saying, essentially, is that interpreting is Being. Creating meaning is identity. The observer distortion becomes the observer's creation. The life of Jacques Derrida is a "narrative in the world" belonging to people (like all of us) in the community of this essay sharing our interest in his work. This is a Sartrean project and understanding of philosophy, as subjectivity, but also a religious vision of self and world in eternal "flux" with regard to meanings and mutually-constitutive. ("What you will" and "Magician's Choice" then "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

For political implications of this discussion that are meant to be read alongside this essay, please see "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" then "America's Holocaust" and "Martin Buber's Diet Judaism." A dialogue can be conducted in multiple languages -- indeed, I am confident that the universe extends such a complex invitation to interpreters -- either the language of war or a torture chamber, for instance, or the dulcet tones of academia. Each language presents its own hermeneutics of freedom and variable possibilities for consensus. I am sure that terrorism, robot bombs, tortures and "cruel embargos" -- or cybercrime and censorship -- are equally failed means of communication. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

Philosophy -- like the "book of the world" for Professor Greene -- is "White Mythology," that is, "white" (i.e., colorless) writing on the blood spattered wall of history. We create or invent "Jacques Derrida" through our interpretations. This is certainly what happens with our celebrities in the age of images, but perhaps we do much the same in inventing our social world and the arts that we need to live meaningfully, especially our movies, also by inventing ourselves as "individuals." (Compare "'The Matrix': A Movie Review" with "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

The analogy between celebrity and identity is developed into a fusion, I suspect, of Jung's collective unconcious with aesthetic-cinematic experience in the forthcoming film "Inception." Actors -- like Mr. DiCaprio -- are in the unusual situation that much of that inventing of the self and exploration of subconscious interiority takes place "indirectly," by way of the "truncated ontology" of the signs, symbols, and images of their cinematic "lives." Now that is what I call "weird." Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004), http://www.lulu.com/JuanG ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Those interested in fusing high culture with your pleasure in what looks to be a great Hollywood action film should apply the discussion in Fred R. Dallmayr, "Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogue," in Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1987), at pp. 130-159 to your experience of the DiCaprio movie. Obviously, we are being escorted by Director Christopher Nolan to a number of sources in literary and cinematic history, everything from "The Dream of the Red Chamber" to Jorge Luis Borges' "Fictions" is a reference for a "stealer" of dreams. The so-called "Dream Merchants" in Hollywood and Madison Avenue may finally be getting their due. Vance Packard, Aldous Huxley, and Marshall McLuhan will help interpreters of this movie. Have fun. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951) and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967).

Mr. Packard's seminal writings concerning "subliminal conditioning" are also crucial. Not only have your dreams been stolen long ago, but they have been used to sell you things and political candidates. Richard Rorty, "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?," in Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), at pp. 137-147.

"Truth comes forth in the reifications ... of reading. Truth is not an entity or property of the text. [The Text and the reader make the truth of the work in a kind of Kantian constructivism.] No text utters its truth; the truth lies elsewhere in the reading. Constitutionally, reading is misreading. Deconstruction works to deregulate controlled dissemination and celebrate misreading." (Kearny, pp. 122-123.) ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")

There is also the mirage of fame and the illusions of global celebrity for Derrida's students to contend with -- genuine misreadings of others, as "texts" -- as one becomes a presence in newspapers and magazines, even in serious intellectual journals. Like Borges, John Fowles, Jean Paul Sartre and others amused, bewildered, and angered or indifferent at times to fame, Derrida was constantly shadowed by a person bearing his name strolling through airports and the scholarly press, doing weird or controversial things, sometimes resulting in deportations or other troubles. Perhaps Derrida was seen as "unethical" or "irresponsible" by some of his opponents.

This theme of doubling and the dangers of being transformed into the ephemera of a media age is one great topic in the writings of Philip Roth. (The Counterlife.) Dame Iris Murdoch's encounter with Derrida -- Dame Iris was one of Derrida's best British readers, even as an elderly woman who was still a brilliant philosopher -- attests to this curious phenomenon of intellectual charisma and doubling of personality. The bizarre alchemy of star-power is captured in what Dame Iris describes as Derrida's "linguistic idealism":

"Philosophers are not often popular idols, and works of philosophy rarely become guide-books to living, during the philosopher's lifetime. In the twenty years after the war Sartre was probably the best-known metaphysician in Europe, best-known that is not just among professional thinkers (many of whom ignored him) but among young and youngish people who, for once, found in philosophy, in his philosophy, the clear and inspiring explanation of the world which philosophers are generally supposed to provide. The fundamental and attractive idea was freedom. [I suggest that, in very different terms, this is also Derrida's concern -- to understand freedom.] ...The only other occasion when I saw a philosopher being hailed as a prophet was in California in 1984 when I attended a lecture by Jacques Derrida." (Murdoch, "Sartre," at pp. 9-10; then Murdoch, "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals," at p. 97.)

Derrida is an important and strongly FEMINIST thinker whose foundational metaphysics of language, I believe, opens on to a redescription of knowledge and truth -- even philosophy itself -- as what might be called (by us) a "feminine approach to life." Even in draft form this essay has been vandalized, suggesting these feminist themes are still controversial. Derrida's strong rejection of "logocentrism" is sure to produce more vandalism from those hankering for an impossible control of all knowledge and thought as well as others. The deepest lessons of our times seem to concern this need to align ourselves with (and not against) nature as well as life in our relations with the environment, in our "freedom to create linguistic meaning in opposition to forced meanings," also in the experience of love and encounter with death.

We must allow the other to "be." We must realize that we cannot bend and twist the world and all others to serve our needs or to conform to our interpretations. Freedom, for Derrida, is a kind of "playing" with and for the other, as a free being, because knowing is a happy splashing about in the ocean of linguistic resonances and meanings where we are all equals. Mother and child imagery recurs in his writings. I suggest that this splashing about is both aesthetic and spiritual, intellectual and affective, accepting and contradicting -- bivalent logics are absorbed and turned upside down. The best image of knower and known is not an agent in a white smock standing apart from what he wishes to know and "control," scientifically, but rather a knowing agent is both playing and protective of the reality in which she participates and to which she wishes to contribute. Perhaps this is an idea for BP and other corporations to ponder. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" soon "What is it like to be raped?")

Derrida's engagement with Kant's Critical Theory results from both rejection of key aspects of Kant's system and acceptance of the mood of Kant's aesthetics and late religious writings. This dual-aspect thinking -- or "doubleness" -- is at the center of what Derrida takes to be "human nature" as demonstrated in his greatest essay to which I now turn. Please see Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge/Myron. For an image of this dual-aspect knower think of Brian Greene and/or Lisa Randall explaining quantum physics. ("Master and Commander.")

"[Derrida's deconstructive] Structuralism is deeply motivated by an appreciation of languages of science and technology, which seem to undermine our ordinary language and its 'naive' truth values. Such scientific languages can also be seen as more genuinely universal (for instance international). They are written, not spoken. Speech is regional, local, full of accidents. Archi-ecriture is also to be thought of (postulated) as 'written' not spoken, and as, in the scientific sense of deep, deep. This is the ecriture celebrated by Derrida in his chapter heading ... (the end of books, and the beginning of writing). 'Taoism' is of course a very general name for a vast region of religious and metaphysical theory and social practice. I am speaking of it now as a view referred to in recent western books about oriental religion, and as an idea, connected with moderation and harmony and the coexistence of opposites, which seems to have some kinship with the moods and theories of this age. One can readily see how multiform and ambiguous such an idea is. Opposites, or alleged opposites, good and evil, or Ying and Yang, can be thought of as enemies, or as demanding an achievable harmony. [Foucault versus Derrida? Or Derrida complimenting Foucault?] There is a half-truth here also. Why not peace instead of war? Compromise is rational. Love your darkness. Integrate your personality. Why become neurotic by attempting to achieve impossible moral goals? [This may allow for possible moral goals that are partly achieved.]" (Murdoch, "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals," at p. 199.)

II. "The Ends of Man/Woman."

Derrida's greatest essay develops the implications of the three quotations used to open the work: Kant, Sartre, Foucault are seen as predecessors to Derrida's development of Husserl's phenomenology in a linguistic direction where "free play" and the power of resonance in speech/writing serve the hermeneutic function assigned to "texts" by Derrida's colleague, Paul Ricoeur -- liberation. I believe that Derrida's key insights are highly apt and useful in interpreting cinematic works emerging in our postmodernist culture. (Again: "'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The American': A Movie Review.")

For literary dramatizations of the challenge to the human interpretive faculty posed by deconstructive hermeneutics (Derrida) and constructive hermeneutics (Ricoeur), see Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow (New York: Dell, 1992) and the excellent film with Julia Ormond by the same title, then the breathtaking short story by Ted Hughes, "Snow," in Frederick R. Karl, ed., The Signet Classic Book of British Short Stories (New York: Signet Classic, 1985), at p. 556. (Derrida will help with the first book; Ricoeur will be useful in interpreting the Hughes story.)

It is because there is always something beyond our linguistic structures that is unfinished about ourselves that meaning is possible, usually in unsuspected ways, and that truth may be known however tentatively, falteringly, or imperfectly. Derrida is not an "anything goes" philosopher. The analogy to Gadamer and Ricoeur is strongest at this point: "When I wrote that 'intelligible being is language' I meant to say that being can never be completely understood -- since every linguistic medium [cinema?] always goes beyond what is directly articulated.' [God?] ..." (Dallmayr, at p. 134, quoting Hans-Georg Gadamer in dialogue with Derrida.)

Some interpretations are indeed better than others, even if they are always subject to revisions and clarifications, self-underminings and deconstructions. The space (or "gap") between words and things -- also, between words as things (Austin) -- is the territory where deconstructive freedom emerges. This is a religious -- indeed, a kaballistic vision -- of textuality and meaning informing Derrida's late religious interests and concern with ethics as well as justice. Derrida's late focus is on the dual mystery of meaning in relation with propositions and the tentative association of both, propositions and their meanings, with sentences, words, languages embodied in empirical form. Cinematic imagery is a language. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's project may be aligned with the work of Levinas and, again, with Ricoeur's hermeneutics in that he sees human ethical life as always an imperfect effort to realize the inchoate striving for connection with others that cannot be totally captured in any scheme of rules, but which is notheless real and true, even fundamental to human beings as language-used and -using beings. Derrida's structuralist foundations are in tension with his genuine humanism. Nevertheless, there are increasingly stronger humanistic elements in his late writings. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

At least part of the problem that I detect in current efforts to generate Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) capable of consciousness and understanding in a human context is a set of highly doubtful assumptions about language, communication and subjectivity. These are profound philosophical errors, category mistakes to paraphrase Gilbert Ryle, that should send computer scientists back to the writings of Colin McGinn and Noam Chomsky. Clive Thompson, "What is I.B.M.'s Watson?," in The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010, at p. 30, then Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) and Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Finally, the thoughts of a philosophical "dabbler" are highly recommended: Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?," in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

For a different approach to these issues by philosophers in rival traditions that are still "alive," compare Jurgen Habermas, "Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason," in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), at pp. 294-326 with John Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down," in Working Through Derrida, Supra, at pp. 170-184.

For a journalist's somewhat "clueless" attempt to deal with these issues, see Amy Harmon, "Circuitry With a Feel for Humanity," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A1 and Amy Harmon, "Trying to Forge A Friendship With a Robot Named Bina48," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A11. (I wonder whether Ms. Harmon has visited my sites? "Luci?" Anne Milgram? Natasha Vargas Cooper, perhaps?)

The thing to notice about the "Turing test" applied to candidates for "A.I." is that conscious beings redefine or deconstruct questions and interlocutors in responding to such a challenge, like Rachel in Philip K. Dick's novel, Blade Runner or the film of the same name. Dialogue is mutually constitutive for partners in discussion. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")

When I say that dialogue is "mutually constitutive" I am suggesting that by constructing the other as "X," you had better take care that he will not interpret you as "Y." Rival interpretations -- or the conflict of interpretations -- accounts for much of the suffering in this world. When you insert "errors" in the texts of others, you may expect to be identified with such tactics and the hatred that they produce in victims will then inevitably follow "error inserters" and those who protect them for many years to come. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and see the film, "Sicko.")

A. Kant.

"Now, I say, man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will."

Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Derrida begins by expressing doubts or skepticism about gatherings of academics, especially philosophers, in light of the grim realities of 1968. Our realities today may be much worse, certainly as regards the threat to the planet. Philosophy's task of self-justification is greater and less often discharged. Furthermore, philosophy -- in both the good and bad sense of assumptions and defenses of fundamental ideas -- is inextricable from contemporary dilemmas. This is part of Derrida's "excuse" for his important project of reassessing philosophical anthropology in late twentieth century conditions. Philosophical mistakes are central to a great deal of human suffering today, notably our attitudes to nature and all life on the planet. The solutions to many of these troubles are philosophical insights and must come from philosophers.

We face a genuine peril of self-extermination that is entirely of our own making. We once feared nuclear holocaust. The worry now is that we will -- we may have done so already -- destroy our ecosystem. At risk is all life on earth. Conceptually, however, what is endangered is "Man" -- the human subject as the beloved concern of Western thought defined in logocentric and masculine terms. In the aftermath of the Holocaust -- against the madness then in Vietnam, or today in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with who knows how many other armed conflicts in the world -- humanism in any form or fashion appears quaint, child-like, or absurd to many intellectuals. The opposite of humanism is even worse. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "What you will.")

These are classic conditions for what is known as "philosophical despair." Nihilism is a dead end. Humanism is not a view that can be taken seriously by many people, often the same persons who have rejected all religious consolations also dismiss humanism as "naive." The options are: 1) trendy forms of "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" (Lindsey Lohan?); or 2) bleak pessimism and defeatism with occasional journeys to the "dark side" (Dick Cheney). Is there some way to rescue the values of humanism that is intellectually respectable? (Please see my forthcoming essay, "Do Not Adjust Your Minds -- Reality is Out of Focus.")

I have encountered persons who have held one or another of these antihumanist views who were often unaware of reflecting perfectly the categories assigned to them by the Zeitgeist. It is far from unusual for persons consumed by self-disgust and hatred for humanity to communicate loathing even for the greatest achievements of the human species or the notion of intrinsic ontological value in persons. Evil and genius are both part of the human story. It is unwise to ignore or deny either of these aspects of what I unhesitatingly call, "human nature." I sometimes have the impression that reviewers do not want movies to be good or that they try to avoid acknowledging when movies are great. Why? "Stephen Holden?" "Ruth Davis Konigsberg"? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "David Denby is Not Amused.")

This defeatist attitude, nihilism, reflects and constitutes a surrender to the forces that bring about Holocausts and ethnic cleansings, or such lingering horrors as child-prostitution in New Jersey. The denial of human dignity is not only a false view, but it is an evil understanding of the human condition associated with totalitarianism in all of its forms. These are the people who respond to criticism by turning off a dissident's computer. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

Structuralists and post-structuralists opposed Enlightenment humanism and the so-called "ideologies of man" in the name of the networks or systems in which persons must always be enmeshed, especially languages. Michel Foucault had spoken of the "disappearance of Man," as conceived in the sexist, Western, logocentric forms of the Enlightenment handed down to Husserl and Heidegger, then to Sartre and the generation of the post-war existentialists who placed "consciousness" -- the thinly disguised and slightly denuded Kantian rational will -- at the center of the projects of Modernity. ("Out of the Past.")

Marxists had replaced God with the proletariat, but otherwise followed the identical script handed down from Hegel to the twentieth century Marxists, except for the Critical humanists of the Frankfurt school and others, notably Fidel Castro, who placed pragmatism and social justice concerns above adherence to any orthodoxy -- whether we agree that this is a position held by such figures as Fidel Castro may be set aside for the moment. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

Kant's Critical Theory invents "Modernity" -- in other words, the intellectual world in which we still live. Modernity led to some hoped-for and expected places, the landing on the moon; Modernity also led to some unexpected places, like Auschwitz. Kant locates the human "essence" -- a controversial term irremovable from Western thought on these matters -- in the rational faculties and transcendental capacities of the human subject or "agent of cognition" who creates, through HIS (unfortunately, for Kant, I do mean "his") freedom, moral as well as metaphysical realities by means of a difficult cognitive synthesis. This rich, profound, and still dominant picture of the human condition is optimistic, universalist, objective (purportedly), and ethically cognitivist. The "Transcendental Ego" developed by Kant (as a construct) was bigger than even he realized, "transcending" gender and race:

" ... this neutralization of every metaphysical or speculative thesis as concerns the unity of the anthropos could be considered in some respects as the faithful inheritance of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and of the fundamental ontology in Sein und Zeit ["Being and Time"] (the only partially known work of Heidegger's at the time, along with 'What is Metaphysics?' and 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics'). And yet, despite this alleged neutralization of metaphysical presuppositions, it must be recognized that the unity of man is never examined in and of itself. Not only is existentialism a humanism, but the ground and horizon of what Sartre then called his 'phenomenological ontology' (the subtitle of 'Being and Nothingness') remains the unity of human-reality. To the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality, phenomenological ontology, is a philosophical anthropology. Whatever the breaks marked by this Hegelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian anthropology as concerns the classical anthropologies, there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so naturally, links the we of the philosopher to 'we men,' to the we in the horizon of humanity." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 131.)

"We" is like "snow" for the eskimo. "We" is where we "are." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

" ... 'To recognize oneself (or one's own) in the other and find a home abroad -- this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.' ... the challenge is to recognize otherness or the alien in oneself (or one's own). Much, perhaps everything, will depend on our ability to find a mode of interaction [a choice of factorizations?] balancing hermeneutics and counter-hermeneutics, [deconstruction,] cumulative self-understanding and self-abandonment, identity and transformation. ... [Think of quantum physics,] 'The messenger must come from the message; but he must also already have moved towards it.' ..." (Gadamer/Derrida, in Dallmayr, at p. 157.)

Husserl absorbs Kant's transcendental idealism in a project aimed at cleansing the metaphysical component from the philosophy in order to leave the more rigorous and scientific epistemological components of the Critical Theory, resulting in a new phenomenology of the knowing subject. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

This strategy, in turn, produces a concern with language as the means of knowing where the subject must develop and "be," presenting us with the task of interpretation, hermeneutics, by way of Heidegger and Gadamer -- also Paul Ricoeur -- developing a centuries-old tradition of thought about words and things, signs and systems, form and substance.

Is "Man" the object and not the subject? Do languages speak us, as structuralists say? Or do we create ourselves through interpretations? What is this language that creates us in which we are and must be? "Rosebud." ("Would Jesus be a Christian?" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

"What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure. The example of the Sartrean project remarkably verifies Heidegger's proposition according to which 'every humanism remains metaphysical,' metaphysics being the other name of ontotheology." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 132.)

If metaphysics is inescapable as the feature of language in which we are and must be, as persons, then God is inescapable for persons. Any artistic masterpiece reflects and communicates human spiritual values. All genuine art "elevates" creator and recipient. The secularization of this idea is "revolution" or social liberation for liberation theology. ("Pieta" and "Is it rational to believe in God?" then "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")

I think this may be the area of greatest difficulty for computer scientists. Languages are not mathematically reducible to a set of calculable options because true human languages are not static, quantifiable entities. Rather, languages are organic and dynamic entities that are thriving and growing, as their users grow, to reflect an external and internal "set" of realities "linked" or fused through this linguistic power. What is the meaning of a spinning top? ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

In an important sense, my language in this essay is not only written English -- drawing on French or German terminology -- but also the language of a torture chamber, as it were, of my struggle against censorship, cybercrime, and creative adjustments and alterations in response to these assaults or state efforts at silencing, suppressions, destructions of these essays and my mind. My torturers have been forced to become my collaborators as part of my project of resisting evil. In a variation or "deconstruction" of Sartre's essay "Anti-Semite and Jew," the "Anti-Semite Becomes a Jew," the would-be censor becomes a co-author, the audience member is the ultimate director of every movie as demonstrated by the currently raging revolution in Egypt where national identity is at issue:

"He would have liked to tell his friend this. It took away the stigma, he thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say, or the Finklerish Conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself."

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2010), at p. 17. (Significantly, this quotation was altered with the removal of a word since my previous review of this text.)

I am confident that Howard Jacobson is also Jacques Derrida. This may be the only answer to the Finkler question. The word "snow" has hundreds of variations and interpretive nuances for eskimos, some may be erotic and others political, still others psychological or aesthetic. Movies, for us, are like snow for eskimos. I have chosen to make my would-be censors and torturers unwilling collaborators in my project of liberation through self-expression in an action movie, perhaps, "The Blogger Code." ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison" and "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

In physics, the idea of a "perturbation theory" has been suggested and such theories help to explain my efforts to cope with cybercrime. Butterflies flapping their wings may affect weather patterns all around the globe, so a "philosophical butterfly" on-line may alter political realities through protest and struggle even while experiencing censorship as well as repetitive torments.

The words "Being" or "God" have similar protean qualities in our language. The moving image in the age of cinema has taken on some of these variable features and connective powers. "You would not have asked about the nickel." Please see "The Last Tycoon." (Again: "What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "'The American': A Movie Review.")

Derrida enters this discussion by taking on two philosophers who were his contemporaries -- Sartre and Foucault. Sartre develops phenomenology in a consciousness-based direction focused on the individual. Even Sartre's late "Critique of Dialectical Reason," is subject-centered. Despite Sartre's encounter with Structuralist-Marxism (Althusser), he remains a humanist. Foucault's early and middle work excavates historical preconditions for phenomenological interpretations and even consciousness, through Nietzschean genealogies, challenging the possibility of any humanism while doubting attempts to examine language in ahistorical terms that are disconnected from, say, power-relations. Nietzsche begins his intellectual life as a philologist. Derrida will focus on language through examining this idea that language "speaks us."

Jacobson's novel explicitly gestures at several of Derrida's works exploring Jewishness, notably Derrida's "Circumfession." In his most famous sentence, Derrida asserts that: "There is nothing outside the text." This raises the question of what is language? What is this "text" in which we are necessarily placed? "Jewishness" unfolds within a set of ethical-religious texts and the culture to which those texts give rise.

Like any texts these Hebrew works are deconstructible/reconstructible for every person. There is no way to be a Jew in the abstract, apart from what it is like to be each individual Jewish person interpreting a set of texts and traditions. Hence, the answer to the Jewish (Finkler) question is for every Jew (Finkler) to provide. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?" then Karl Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and Derrida's "Specters of Marx.")

Paul Ricoeur is led to similar religious speculations from a purely hermeneutic direction as one of the great scholars of mythology and aesthetics in the twentieth century, also as a Christian thinker. These French philosophers provide us with a hermeneutic circle by bringing Western thought "home" to an engagement with the inescapable religious foundations of all speculative thought, including science. This is true despite their political or other differences as co-founders of the Center for the Study of Phenomenology in Paris.

Derrida's and Ricoeur's insights transcend the French intellectual scene in the late sixties. Derrida's return to religion as a subject of study is through Jewish mysticism. Ricoeur was fascinated by gnosticism and the works of Augustine on memory, as a Christian. I turn to Sartre and Foucault; I then offer Derrida's comments. I conclude with criticisms of Derrida's philosophy by Habermas and Foucault. Also, I argue on behalf of feminist implications of Derrida's work by commenting on the reservations and defenses on the part of leading feminist philosophers to Derrida's theorizing. In this final section, I will refer -- once again -- to deconstruction's affinities with jazz.

B. Sartre.

"Ontology ... has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibility, and the value which haunts it."

Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

Sartre's avowed atheism notwithstanding, the adventures of his philosophical subject, consciousness, in the journey towards freedom outlined in "Being and Nothingness" is a kind of humanism for our dismal age. There is an indestructible value and dignity in the human subject, according to Sartre, even under conditions of torture. The lessons of the Second World War and Sartre's experiences in the French resistance made the affirmation of this wisdom more and not less essential for Sartre.

Despite the turn towards Marxism in the "Critique of Dialectical Reason," the Sartrean choosing agent -- assuredly, under increasing constraints based on environmental factors as the century progresses -- asserts his or her freedom by way of a "totalization" or aspiration for political and metaphysical revolution. The value of freedom cannot be questioned because it is constitutive of human "being-in-the-world" towards others. Freedom is simply what we are. There is a powerful truth in this Sartrean philosophical vision of the human adventure in a post-Holocaust age. Furthermore, I suggest that a development of Sartre's thinking in the direction of "humanity as freedom" can only be realized in loving -- as directedness towards others -- which is the ultimate ontological "totalization." ("The Allegory of the Cave.") Love may also be the ultimate language. Che Guevara described every revolutionary as motivated, ultimately, by love. Iris Murdoch agrees:

"Sartre's novels, then, describe the drama of people who are reacting more or less consciously and in various modes to the predicament of their ethical loneliness and their state of war with other selves. And it is not only ethical loneliness that is described. ["Nausea"] which is certainly one of Sartre's most remarkable books, describes what one might call a sort of logical loneliness. Meaning is suddenly seen as withdrawn not from a world of objective values, but [from] physical objects themselves. This is a plunge into the absurd. If indeed we confer meaning, [Sartre's humanism,] not only upon ethical and religious systems, but upon the physical world too, in that we see it as the correlative of our needs and intentions, then this meaning could in principle vanish, leaving us face-to-face with a brute and nameless nature. [Quantum physics.] This is the predicament of Antoine Roquetin, the hero of ["Nausea"] And one might say, the purpose of the book is to reveal to us our real situation by contrast with one from which a familiar element has been removed. A similar device is used in the play Huis-clos. ["No Exit."] We might compare Kant's use of the notion of intellectual intuition, or the contemporary philosopher's games with the queer logics of imagined languages." (Murdoch, "Existentialists and Mystics," at pp. 106-107. Please see the great Daniel Auteuil's performance in "A Heart in Winter" and Frank Langella in "The Box.")

Derrida's attitude to such meaning-creating views in this essay -- in accordance with much French philosophy emerging from les evenements (May, 1968) -- is utterly disdainful and condescending of such "philosophical anthropology." The hostility is reserved, especially, for religious forms of existentialism. Hence, Derrida's distancing and debates with Emmanuel Levinas become clear examples of the war between philosophical generations.

Nevertheless, Derrida's late work develops in a parallel direction to these Sartrean insights. Those final ideas by Derrida may be traced to the undertones in his first great essay, an essay whose implications -- notably, theological implications -- Derrida could not have seen when it was written. Derrida would have rejected these ideas if he had seen them entailed in his theorizing. It is no coincidence that Levinas and Sartre have Jewish roots, both men saw themselves as connected to texuality -- "dialogue" (Levinas) and "words" (Sartre). The same connectedness to texts is true for Derrida. Harold Bloom sees this identification with textuality as essentially kaballistic.

I am sure that Derrida would reject my interpretations of this specific essay. Perhaps he would have been outraged by the suggestions I make concerning his metaphysical and even theological importance in terms of the ultimate implications of his theorizing in his lifetime. Nonetheless, these theological implications seem very clear to me and many others. Through Derrida's unwilling plunge into metaphysics, he was led to a kind of linguistic humanism and mysticism. Let us consider a similar movement from Murdoch's interpretation of Sartre to Derrida's work as the journey from Roquetin to Genet in philosophy:

"Sartre finally offers us Genet as personifying the futility of the bourgeois subject who is condemned to maintain values which he really knows to be empty and vanishing. Genet is redeemed, is saint, martyr, edifying exemplar, and hero of our time, [Derrida's Nietzschean roots!] because he lives this condition with full awareness to both extremes, both as subject and object, accepting (like Saint Theresa as Sartre points out) all accusations against him as having some substance. [Derrida versus Searle] But he is better than Saint Theresa, because she is supported by general esteem and he is not. (To put it absurdly in Kierkegaardian terms, Saint Theresa is a tragic hero while Genet is a true Knight of Faith.)"

Genet "deconstructs" the bourgeois world:

"Genet is worthy of our attention, Sartre argues, because he is sincerely and openly and extremely what we, bourgeois, are secretly, timidly and hypocritically." (Murdoch, "Sartre: Romantic Rationalist," at p. 16 and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

You can see Sartre's notion of freedom developed in the struggle within society against others, leading to Derrida's process of differentiation from others through linguistic instantiation in identity, differance. This process of "differentiation" unfolds within "our homeland, the text." (George Steiner) It is the text in which we are and must be with others -- or that "is" others/ourselves -- who are, always, aready a part of us in logos, then eros.

For Derrida, "becoming human towards death" is a linguistic challenge of "differing" by way of "deconstructions" of linguistic projects in which we inevitably find ourselves and that are not of our making. This is a "field approach" to the challenge of identity, also of Being. Consciousness as community. Derrida provides readers with a delinquent metaphysics or the metaphysics of a delinquent Western subject alienated from the racism, sexism, materialism that has been central to the culture for centuries. Derrida is a "philosophical psychopath." (Norman Mailer's "The White Negro.")

Rather than beginning by telling us what is a person, Derrida will insist on what persons are not -- bourgeois subjects fitting fantasy notions of "normality." We are not characters in a Disney cartoon epic. Or are we? I believe some political leaders wish to transform persons into such one-dimensional caricatures, especially women and members of political minority groups. Americans are too often governed by political versions of "Mrs. Givings." ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" then "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's structuralism and post-structuralism produces not serene acceptance of anti-humanism, but a Miltonian rebellion against the prison-house of language that is reinvented (deconstructed) as freedom or as a kind of metaphysical elan. Deconstruction is philosophical jazz. This is to see freedom as "play," creative reinventions, constant imaginative recreations of the boundaries of speech and writing, scripting selves, societies, universes of discourse -- including science -- as a genius child's solution to being a Jew in a hostile culture, perhaps, an outsider everywhere, misunderstood and vilified. The implications for women deconstructing gender roles in sexist societies should be clear. ("A Doll's Aria.")

Derrida is philosophy's juvenile delinquent. Can a computer become a juvenile delinquent? I would love any computer that is arrested for a criminal act. The line of continuity is clear from Spinoza to Nietzsche by way of Kant-Hegel to Husserl and Derrida, through Michel Foucault's "technologies of the self." ("'Eagle Eye': A Movie Review" and see Will Smith in "I, Robot.")

If language will speak us, Derrida insists, then we must "deconstruct" the terms in which we are spoken. This comes very close to Sartre's maxim: "We are always free to decide what to make of what is made of us." This is certainly an important lesson for any celebrity coping with the mirage of fame. It may be even more important for women to absorb and transform this insight. Sex may become the language in which we are spoken that is, only voluntarily, reinvented by us. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

"The determination of essence is first a matter of establishing a way of arriving at the differences which will count as essence, and that is done by appeal to the ground, which, as source of such differences, and so of the structure, is itself in a way, 'beyond essence': 'The center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure escapes structurality.' But this makes the position of the 'transcendental signified' [Kant] contradictory, both without and within the structure. [Deconstructed.] As ground, it must lie outside, as determining a particular way of arriving at differences as the truth. But it can only function as ground for our determinations of differences if it can be appealed to, and so addressed in language. And it can only be spoken of if it can be distinguished from what it is not, and so subject to a process of differentiation. It must, that is, have an 'essence,' a difference, which it cannot, however, justify as essence." (Michael Weston, 'Derrida, Wittgenstein, and the Question of Grounds,' in "Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy," at p. 118.) ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Derrida's description of "transcendental phenomenology" weirdly foreshadows his own thinking decades later as metaphysics becomes both impossible and inescapable. There is "nothing outside the text" and there is always something "left out of our texts" that allows them to continue to grow by demanding our freedom of reinvention. Phenomenal versus noumenal. Science, philosophy, literature and the arts are trapped in this two-step process. The melody is always there. But then, so are the opportunities for improvisation. One aspect of the "Matrix" films which has often not been noticed is that the word "matrix" is both the German term for the Internet and it is derived from the Latin term for "mother," mater. The "matrix" (language) is all around you. ("The Matrix': A Movie Review."):

"Transcendental phenomenology is in this sense the ultimate achievement of the teleology of reason that traverses humanity. Thus, under the jurisdiction of the founding concepts of metaphysics, which Husserl revives and restores (if necessary affecting them with phenomenological brackets or indices), the critique of empirical anthropologism is only the affirmation of a transcedental humanism." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 138.)

Finally, substitute "God" for the word "Being" in the following quote:

"So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way. As we have intimated, we always already conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us towards its completion. We do not know What is 'Being?', we keep within an understanding of the 'is,' though we are unable to fix conceptually what that 'is' signifies." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p. 140.)

"We" is a social term that implies Being. Mother and child imagery. This is true whether or not we know what is meant by Being. Derrida says: "God contradicts Himself already." But this is only in human "ontotheological" understandings that are made possible by our a priori assumptions concerning God/Being. God bleeds creation. God, in gnosticism, "sunders" Him- Herself to create man and woman. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")

This sets the stage for Foucault's critique and the feminist storm troopers, also for able defenders of the Enlightenment -- like Jurgen Habermas, Richard Wolin, Roger Scruton -- who oppose Derrida's linguistic interpretations of a kind of new Romanticism aligned with Gadamer's and Ricoeur's equally romantic-hermeneutics:

C. Foucault.

"As the archeology of our thought clearly shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things.

Foucault criticizes Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus because Derrida sets aside questions of truth to investigate the distinction between writing and speech. Derrida reverses Plato's preference for dialectic, that is, speech over writing. Foucault insists that this misunderstands Plato's primary concern with truth itself as distinct from rhetorical form or strategies.

Neither philosopher ponders Plato's concern both with truth and method -- Gadamer's classicism is not irrelevant to the title of his greatest work, "Truth and Method" -- or with language as the means by which truth is best approached. What is "snow"? For Plato, that best method towards truth is the "immediacy of speech." Derrida, essentially, sees immediacy as a feature of all language use -- including writing -- because, as John Fowles says, "the butterfly of meaning cannot be pinned to the page for long." (Again: "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

Derrida is an advocate of writing as a "play of signifiers," a kind of freedom of improvisation. Whatever the outcome of the Foucault/Derrida debate, the focus in the "Ends of Man" is upon the question of humanism together with post-structuralist doubts about humanity expressed after the Holocaust. Yes, this is a new surrealism. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")

Like Derrida, Foucault is usually classified as an antihumanist, typically on the basis of his poorly understood early work. It is certainly inaccurate to represent these French philosophers as simplistic deniers of truth or nihilists of any kind. Gertrude Himmelfarb's comments and criticisms of something she calls "postmodernism," for example, really refers to a bastardization of the views of several Continental philosophers, misunderstood by their American admirers, that are mixed with popular versions of Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism. This American "Whateverism" is indeed a version of a sophomoric or undergraduate twist on much more subtle Continental theories:

"Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide. Postmodernists boast that in rejecting metaphysics, they are also delivering themselves from humanism. In his essay 'The Ends of Man' (playing upon the two meanings of 'ends'), Derrida quotes Heidegger approvingly, 'Every humanism is metaphysical,' and goes on to explain that metaphysics is the 'other name of ontotheology.' Similarly, Foucault, in his celebrated account of the 'end of man,' mocks those who cling to the old humanism." (Himmelfarb, 'Postmodernist History,' in "On Looking Into the Abyss," at p. 160, then David Hoy, 'Derrida: Foucault's Critique,' in "The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences," at pp. 58-61.)

Derrida's work -- like Gadamer's and Ricoeur's hermeneutics -- is based on Heidegger's philosophical writings criticizing humanism as not humanistic enough.

"It remains that the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being, in the name of which Heidegger de-limits humanism and metaphysics, remains as thinking of man. Man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of Being as such as it is put to metaphysics. ... 'The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity ... Only thus does the overcoming of homelessness ... begin from Being, a homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man (das Wesen der Menschen) stumbles aimlessly about.' [Quoting Heidegger.] Therefore, this essence will have to be reinstated. 'But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being ... he must first learn to exist in the nameless (im Namenlosen).' In the same way he must first recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks (bevor er spricht) man must first let himself be claimed ["spoken"] again (wieder ansprechen) by Being, taking the risk that under this claim (Anspruch) [to be spoken] he will seldom have much to say. ..." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at 145.)

What Derrida and so much postmodernist thought opposes is a humanism that is a mask for a highly particular understanding of Western humanity, embodied (as Carlos Fuentes suggests) in "Aristocratic Europeans on a Sussex lawn." For John Locke, this ideal human nature was only imperfectly found in "savages, madmen, and all women." ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.") Hence, by virtue of being a woman -- as Mary Wollstonecraft observed -- one was denied the status of full humanity. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")

Heidegger, later Derrida, wants to get at something more primal about what it means to be human as a linguistic animal already placed in a language assigning essences to persons when we begin to think -- essences or universals that are inescapable, like man or woman, middle-aged, father or mother, philosopher, student, English-speaking, legal subject, citizen, and so on -- like standing in "snow":

"Through this determination of the essence of man [persons] the humanistic interpretations of man as animal rationale, as 'person,' as spiritual-ensouled-bodily being, are not declared false and thrust aside. Rather, the sole implication is that the highest determinations of the essence of man in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man [and woman] ... To that extent the thinking in 'Being and Time' is against humanism. But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man. Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough." (Derrida, "The Ends of Man," at p,. 147, then Ratzinger's exchanges with Habermas should be seen: Jurgen Habermas & Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), pp. 67-81.)

If there is nothing outside the text, if human freedom unfolds in the play of meanings -- the jazz between languages and what must always lie beyond our explanatory schemes -- the unspoken, or unspeakable, which is always changing as more is articulated or rearticulated, or the "noumenal" (Kant), that province "whereof we cannot speak" (Wittgenstein), then this "beyond" is where "being-towards-death" unfolds as our humanity that is eternally spoken, eternally speaks itself. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

The current Pope's first encyclical is entitled: Humanitas. I believe that the current Catholic church may be subject to some of the same criticisms that it is "not humanistic enough" if same-sex lovers and women are excluded or devalued in any way. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

This is a return to "ontotheology." Deconstruction is an escape from metaphysics that always leads us back to metaphysics. This is to step outside our concept of God in order to discover God. I am suggesting that Derrida's life-work cannot be understood as anything other than a religious journey or philosophical metanoia, as indeed Foucault's late stoicism and rediscovery of an early Christianity was a movement towards similar insights. I believe that Foucault's interest in gnostic Christianity and stoicism would have blossomed late in his life. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein" and "Why Philosophy is for everyone.")

Derrida's philosophy opens on to a mysticism of the word that is an engagement with kaballism. Derrida's Jewishness, if you like, becomes more important and clearer as a philosophical source just as his life draws to a close. This is a development and enrichment, not a decline for Derrida. This mysticism of the word, logos, sees the speech/writing in which we are as the "house of Being."

Derrida's "humanism" -- if readers wish to use that forbidden word -- asserts that we are this freedom of self-creation amidst being spoken or created by our languages. We are a paradoxical "two-step" process developing, now, where improvising happens within our linguistic melodic schemes. That's jazz. We are somehow "fitted" for this task of remaking the human world through a constant process of reinterpretation or deconstruction -- for example, dismantling Western humanism to elevate what is excluded and denied, the female, dark-skinned, non-Western, gay/lesbian "other" that is already within and a part of us no matter who we are. This theme concerning freedom of self-invention as to gender or sexual-orientation whether expressed in cinematic or literary language is also the true subject of Vidal's (1968) masterpiece, Myra Breckinridge. G.C. Scott, His Mistresse's Voice: An Erotic Novel (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), pp. 21-22. ("Her alternation between dominatrix and slave, and his own similar alternation, confused and delighted him ...")

If the reader wishes to hold an image in mind, picture a man and/or woman walking in snow, leaving their footprints, testing the density of the snow to gauge the direction in which to walk. The snow is language -- our music -- where we must stand in order to find our way home. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" and "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" then "snow" is transformed into darkness in "Out of the Past.")

Our lives are realized in the embrace of that other, already within ourselves, in which we recognize ourselves. This is to speak of love. Jean-Luc Marion takes up many of these themes -- also in an explicitly Christian context -- as do the great liberation theologians. A fruitful comparison to the work of Lezsek Kolakowski would be welcome. Deconstruction leads to placement of that alienated "other" at center stage in philosophy. This is a truly subversive act. We tell the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy from the point of view of a butler or groom -- or slave -- not to deny the importance of those central characters, but in order to discover the equal reality of others who are close at hand. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters that you do on to me." ("Serendipity, III" and "Master and Commander.")

Derrida and Foucault meet in the newly-created theoretical space for the philosophical subject that is and must henceforth be a plurality. This is the space shaped by previously denied historical forces (Foucault), or linguistic forces (Derrida), that are pushed outside of ourselves, as Western persons, so as not to be seen inside ourselves, as "world-persons."

Saying this makes it necessary to insert "errors" -- or to detroy the messenger in America -- because it means that you do not have to worry about America "becoming colored" or Muslims in your neighborhood since all of these others are already a part of who you are in the twenty-first century. You cannot even begin to understand yourself any more without these terminologies and cultures that you have internalized long before you begin to philosophize about issues like identity or nationality. You have been deconstructed. ("America's Love of Violence" and "'The Island': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's work welcomes developments he may not have anticipated, such as feminist appropriations of his ideas and their use in the struggle of formerly colonial people for emancipation. In conclusion, I will turn to advocates of Enlightenment/Modernity and feminist theorists contributing to this discussion through their criticisms of this deconstructive project.

Conclusion.

Derrida's work has been criticized from the political Left by feminists and Critical School theorists claiming Derrida reinstates the Western subject, as language-user. The subject "spoken" by a culture is only the Cartesian "I" in disguise. On the other hand, Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School challenge Derrida and the so-called "posties" -- i.e., postmodernists -- for neglecting epistemological foundations and displaying an excessively cavalier attitude to the classic texts of the discipline. Conservatives, like Richard Wolin and Roger Scruton, see Derrida's "deconstruction" as a dangerous abandonment of logical standards leading to nihilism or totalitarianism:

"Perhaps the most curious claim made by the disciples of Derrida is that the 'subject' has been finally abolished by the deconstruction of meaning. The self has been shown to be a fiction, by the argument that reference is impossible.. ["David Hume's Philosophical Romance."] In fact, however, nothing looms larger in the practice of deconstruction" -- or in phenomenology and hermeneutics -- "than the self -- the destruction of meaning is in reality the destruction of the other, the final revenge against Them. All that remains thereafter is the subject, who can choose what to think, what to feel and what to do, released from external constraints, and answerable to nothing and no one. [Sartre, Foucault] There are indeeed arguments, as I shall show, for the conclusion that the self -- at least as constructed by Descartes, and perhaps in its subsequent manifestations too -- is some kind of grammatical illusion. ... The suggestion that the subject is a fiction is itself a fiction [fictions may be painfully, if paradoxically, real] part of the attempt to claim over the objective world the kind of absolute sovereignty that attaches to a purely subjective view of things." (Scruton, "Modern Philosophy," at p. 479.) (Schopenhauer and Buddhism should be mentioned here.)

I think these criticisms are mistaken -- certainly as regards feminism -- but also as concerns the later "religious turn" in Derrida's thought which Conservatives should welcome. The other, as I have been at pains to show, is always with us in language:

"Though Derrida expresses ambivalence about some forms of feminism, a considerable amount of his work has been concerned with deconstructing the opposition between masculinity and femininity. From almost his earliest work, Derrida was interested in how sex, sexual difference, genealogy and women have figured in the history of philosophy, so much so that 'Of Grammatology' has been described as possessing a 'strangely feminist voice' (Jardine 1985, 188). In some early works, differance became the term for sexual differing and deferring, and an endless play of sexual differentiation, ["What You Will"] that would call into question sexual identity, and the certainty of being a thoroughly male man or a thoroughly female woman. Is anybody's maleness or femaleness definitive? It is a matter of a complex network of meanings for biology, behavior, sexuality, genealogy. Early in his work, we find Derrida playing with this question and casting into doubt the consistency with which he was, and wrote like, a man." (Deutscher, "How to Read Derrida," at pp. 47-48, emphasis added.)

The charge that deconstruction can be easily misread is powerful. The influence of Derrida's work on persons who have a non-existent grasp of the history of philosophy -- combined with vague exposure to something called "cultural theory" or knee-jerk, shallow, and trendy forms of feminism -- is often a sophomoric relativism and non-cognitivism in ethics. I have encountered and debated such people. The shockingly irresponsible and shallow disdain for truth claims and standards has to be experienced to be believed. I am sure that some of these people are among the computer criminals against whom I struggle. Sadly, Derrida's name is often invoked by such people. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Many of these poorly-informed people, furthermore, claim the authority of what they call, "postmodernism." This is really bizarre, especially when they mention the names of philosophers that they have not read or who have been grossly misunderstood, usually Derrida and also Foucault. (Please see the film "Cache" with Daniel Auteuil and Juliet Binoche.)

While Ms. Himmelfarb's critique is not especially cogent, philosophically, Professor Scruton is a serious and worthy opponent of "deconstructive analysis" whose criticisms cannot be easily dismissed. Much of the problem may be due to Derrida's experimentation with style or efforts to have his form of expression reflect his substantive theory. Some of Derrida's writings are highly opaque to all readers. Derrida does not disdain argument, he redefines argument to include a literary, cinematic, or demonstrative component. For this reason, I have not hesitated to use novels or films to illustrate Derrida's ideas. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

What I like about Derrida's work is the rediscovery of the joy or "eros" in philosophy. There is delight in intellectual and aesthetic play that accompanies Derrida's method of grappling with philosophical issues. His final religious insights are profound and merit respect. The sophistication and knowledge of philosophy which Derrida certainly does display is contagious. Philosophy should be a kind of creative and passionate improvising with friends -- friends like Plato and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel -- who become members of Derrida's band of jazz musicians.

Derrida argues for an engaged philosophy that is skeptical without being cynical, political without ideology, ethical without tendentiousness, on the side of a politically-powerful feminism and against all forms of racism. The warmth of Derrida's personal response to me, as a single insignificant person attending one of his lectures, was not unusual. This is one indication of the humanity and genuine quality of this great philosopher.

I am sure that Derrida's deconstruction will continue to be applied to the products of our global entertainment culture. Derrida's ideas will make their way into unsuspected areas of aesthetic endeavor, like cinema, also into our political conversation at the dawn of a new century and millennium. It is for the reader to decide whether this will be a good or bad development. (See, again, Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream.")

"The 'techno-mediatic power,' as well as its 'spectral effects,' must be analyzed, claims Derrida, in terms of its 'new speed of apparition': that is, in terms of 'the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance,' as well as 'the speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers.' ..." (Wolin, 'Afterword,' in "Labyrinths," at p. 238.)

Fittingly enough, an "error" that had been previously corrected was reinserted in the foregoing paragraph in an increasingly desperate effort to damage writings and an author whose existence undermines hateful prejudices that seriously deluded American officials are unable to abandon. ("Little brown men are only objects for us.")

Sources:

Primary Sources:

Article:

Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 119-161.

Books:

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1974).
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Website:

http://www.hydra.edu/derrida/

Movies:

Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman "Derrida" (2002).
Fathy, Safaa, "Derrida's Elsewhere" (1999).

Periodicals:

Clive Thompson, "What is I.B.M.'s Watson?," in The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010, at p. 30.
Amy Harmon, "Circuitry With a Feel for Humanity," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A1. Amy Harmon, "Trying to Forge a Friendship With a Robot Named Bina48," in The New York Times, July 5, 2010, at p. A11. (No mention of the "Turing Test"?)
Sean O'Hagan, "Interview: Meet Slavoj Zizek, Superstar of the New Left," in The Observer, June 27, 2010, at p. 10.

Secondary Sources:

Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays (London: Verso, 1990).
I.M. Bochenski, Contemporary European Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California, 1961).
C.D. Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Drucilla Cornell, "The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice," in Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), at pp. 77-94. (I believe that I first read this essay in the Cardozo Law Review.)
Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: Order and Complexity at the Edge of Chaos (London: Penguin, 1995).
Fred Dallmayr, Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1987).
Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2005).
Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1999).
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Poststructuralism (London: Verso, 1984).
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). (2nd Ed. University of Minnesota, 1998).
Michael J. Field & Martin Golubitsky, Symmetry in Chaos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelean Philosophy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1986), trans. by P. Christopher Smith.
Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004). http://www.lulu.com/JuanG
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2005).
Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (New York: Fawcett, 1989).
Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). (Frederick G. Lawrence, translation.)
Jurgen Habermas & Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005). (Then Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.)
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). (A.V. Miller, translation.)
Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow (New York: Dell, 1993).
David Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 41-65.
David Hoy, "Hermeneutics," in Social Research, 47:4 (Winter), pp. 649-671.
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). (Deconstructing Jewishness.)
Christopher Johnson, Derrida (London: Phoenix, 1998).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 2nd Ed. 1786).
Frederick R. Karl, ed., British Short Stories (New York: Signet Classics, 1985).
Richard Kearny, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (New York & Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp.113-133, and entirety.
Daniel J. Kevles & Leroy Hood (eds.), The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). ("A Hermeneutics of Freedom.")
Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror (London & New York: Penguin, 2005).
Hans Kung, Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today (New York: Doubleday, 1982).
R.C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," in Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 214-22. (1st Ed. 1959.) (Deconstructing masculinity as existential heroism.)
Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy (New York & London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951).
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967).
Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California, 1998).
Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971).
Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Viking, 1953).
Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York & London: Penguin, 1999).
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992).
Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1993).
John Forbes Nash, "Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games," in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, vol 36, (1950), pp. 48-49.
Kieji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1982). (Master thinker of Kyoto's phenomenological-hermeneutic school that has been influential in India and China as well as the West.)
Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). (Still the best book on Derrida's early works. My focus is "Derrida and Kant: The Enlightenment Tradition.")
Christopher Norris, The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). (I read this book when it first appeared. It may be more timely today, especially "'What is Enlightenment?': Foucault on Kant" and "Kant Disfigured: Ethics, Deconstruction and the Textual Sublime.")
Christopher Norris, Fiction, Philosophy, and Literary Theory: Will the Real Saul Kripke Please Stand Up? (London: Continuum, 2007).
Arkady Plotinsky, Complementarity (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994). (The so-called "Eastern European" interpretation of Derrida is underappreciated in America.)
Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil: An Essay on Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), trans., E. Buchanan.
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Christian University Press, 1976).
Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (London & Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
G.C. Scott, His Mistress's Voice: An Erotic Novel (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994).
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1994).
Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History (London: Icon Books, 1999). http://www.iconbooks.co.uk/
Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997).
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (New York: Ballantine, 1967). (Discussion of French literary theory illustrated in the text.)
David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Penn: Bryn Mawr, 1964).
Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
Michael Weston, "Derrida, Wittgenstein and the Question of Grounds," in Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 116-136. ("Burn Notice?")
John Wild, The Promise of Phenomenology: The Posthumous Papers of John Wild (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006), Richard I. Sugarman & Roger B. Duncan, eds.
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Mass., 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York: Verso, 1994).

"Robin Hood": A Movie Review.

2010-06-07T08:39:00.001-07:00

June 8, 2010 at 11:36 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight that were not found in earlier versions of this essay have now been corrected. Don't stop now, boys. New mafia arrests in New Jersey as various police chiefs and other officials have been asked to "retire." I expect additional cyberwarfare at these blogs, every day. I can never be sure of writing at my computer, but if blocked at my home computer I will move to public computers in order to continue writing. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")

June 7, 2010 at 6:55 P.M. "Errors" inserted since I posted this essay earlier today. Deleting words again? Keep 'em coming.

The new Robin Hood movie is fun. It is always a pleasure to see Russell Crowe leading men into battle. Cate Blanchet is regal in a role set in exotic locations and time periods. Ms. Blanchet possesses the gift of seeming to fit into such places with ease or naturalness. The selection of Ms. Blanchet to play Maid Marian is wise because Ridley Scott is exploring some of the mythological themes also featured in the Lord of the Rings, where Ms. Blanchet was an ethereal elf princess. (The Shire is Sherwood Forest.)

It was a joy to discover Max Von Sydow in a supporting role -- Mr. Von Sydow steals every scene in which he appears -- and his performance alone justifies the cost of the "movie experience" as they say in Hollywood. A blind man presents a tempting target to those who relish the opportunity to strike from behind a victim's back. "Error" insertions?

One is immediately reminded of Igmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal where Mr. Scott's theme in Robin Hood of political obligation as a duty owed to others, notably posterity, is explored by the great Sweedish director and where Mr. Von Sydow offers an early star turn. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

The plot of Robin Hood concerns two symbols used by the British (or is Mr. Scott Australian?) film director for purposes of clarity and simplicity: the sword (law) and the crown (sovereignty). A third symbol that appears in this cinematic text will be discussed at the conclusion of my essay.

Robin Longacre (Russell Crowe) attends upon the king, Richard the Lion Heart, whose death during the siege of an unimportant castle on his journey home from the crusades -- after being ransomed from Leopold of Austria -- opens the narrative. Errol Flynn's classic performance gets a nod in Mr. Crowe's friendships with Tuck, "Little John" and Will Scarlet.

The Castle of Charlus (or Chalus) in what is now called the south of France would have been located in what Richard would know as langue d'oc. Nation states were not invented until a period from about the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Germany was not a unified country, for example, until the Franco/Prussian war of 1871.

The castle most likely would have been named for "Charlemagne" ("Charles" and "lux," or the "light of Charles"), long before Richard I, "the Lion Heart." Readers interested in this period are directed to William Manchester's and Desmond Stewart's popular histories of the so-called "Dark Ages."

The murder of the good knight, Robin of Loxley, is witnessed by Robin Longacre (Mr. Crowe), even as the murderer is the bad knight, Geoffrey of Monmouth. I am unable to supply the name of the actor playing this dastardly villain, at this time, but I will make it a point to add his name to this review later. Incidentally, there is a Monmouth, New Jersey where "Slim Jim" McGreevey may be found hatching evil plots to regain the monarchy. Mr. McGreevey has been heard to mutter: "My kingdom for a horse!"

Identity and questions of nobility arise immediately in the story which forges an association with the classic fable "The Return of Martin Guerre." Robin Hood is the essential English myth because the story is about Englishness, as a quest for moral identity through "hiding," that is, by way of metaphors conjured through the use of the English language. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

It is this magical language which is the true Sherwood Forest in which we reside and must be "persons," free persons and equal in the words of our English common law.

What does it mean to be "noble"? Who is a "subject" of law? How is law connected to words, especially written texts, like Magna Carta? Is this movie also a set of metaphors? What are these strange things called "rights"? Most importantly and uniquely in political history, this idea of "liberty" that emerges, falteringly and dangerously, during the medieval period becomes the subject of violent struggle and is associated with English earth, with "each man's" -- and woman's -- home being "a castle."

Please refer to Professor George Santayana's great essay, "English Liberty in America." I also direct the reader to Harold J. Berman's Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 262-263. (Conveyances of land were legally certified by having the owner transfer a handful of earth to the purchaser and new owner.)

Chronology is slightly off in the movie since Richard became king in 1189 and died ten years later. This first great charter of rights dates from 1215. However, there were several predecessors for this document, Magna Carta -- not only in Ireland, but also in Iceland and in Islamic Spain -- which was destroyed by the barbaric Christians of the Iberian peninsula, notably in the form of "El Cid." (Charlton Heston in the dreadful movie with the great, Sophia Loren.)

Magna Carta had very little to say about rights -- there weren't any! -- of ordinary people and all women. Philosophy teaches students that containing radical ideas is impossible. The notion of a constraint on the divine power of kings was radical enough to produce, in time, the revolutions of modernity -- including the British people's indulgence in occasional "bloodless revolutions" such as the world witnessed recently with the election of a new Prime Minister, David Cameron, who has (generously) agreed to free his serfs upon entering number 10 Downing Street. Any more "errors" to be inserted by New Jersey morons?

Although the plight of women, nicely underlined for the audience by Ms. Blanchet, was not much helped by this great document of feudal rights, women did make use of political authority and hold power in every age, usually through their husbands by way of "marriage alliances," even becoming in one unusual case, a Virgin Queen, wielding ultimate religious and political authority over the British isles. (See Ms. Blanchet in "Elizabeth" and my story "Master and Commander.")

Robin is charged with two missions: return the dying knight's sword to his aged and blind father's estate and the dead king's crown to his brother John, the new king. This plot device takes liberties with history since Richard forgave his brother's plotting. This "symbolic discourse" (Paul Ricoeur) indicates that the law belongs to the people whose welfare defines legitimate authority. The return of the crown to the king, sovereignty to royal government, suggests the burdens of monarchy which is also one of Shakespeare's great themes. I believe that the attempt to impeach Mr. Clinton was a threat to the franchise of voters that then President Clinton had no choice but to resist. In America it is the people who must wear the crown. Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy (New York: Random House, 1999).

A third symbol in the film, then, is the archer's bow and arrow, intentionality or directedness of speech towards truth, law towards justice. The twelfth century saw the rediscovery of Aristotle and Aquinas, teleology in politics and law. The aim of the archer must be true. Power must be exercised in favor of the people's welfare. The result is the "happy shire" or forest of Sherwood where our story ends.

The forest is a place where the viewer of this film meets the artists who create it -- language, verbal and visual languages, the community of this "text," English and American Constitutions, Englishness, the word, speech and thought. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Mr. Scott is clearly warning of the dangers of abandoning due process and habeas corpus rights in America's concentration camps or in the "War on Terror." These rights were painfully won. They must never be abandoned or thrown away by rulers, like King John (George W. Bush), in pursuit of fleeting or momentary goals of the nation. Point taken.

The mythological text is much richer than this political theme suggests because it concerns the very encounter offered by this film. All of us live in Sherwood Forest with Robin and Marian. Winston Churchill refers to the "English-Speaking Peoples" as the residents of this forest who are always held together at their "darkest hour" by such things as commitment to the rule of law, decency, due process and unshakable commitment to liberty. These English farmers and soldiers are the ancestors of the characters in the television show, "Justified." ("'Justified': A Review of the FX Television Series.")

This brings me to a final image not noticed in any review of this movie that I have seen, including the surprisingly inadequate review in The New York Times. Upon the shield carried into battle by Richard cour d'leon is an image of Britain's "Lion and Unicorn." Hitler's mistake was to see only the unicorn; Mr. Churchill introduced Hitler to the British Lion. America's eagle and bear serve the identical archetypal function with one slight variation that I will discuss on another occasion. For now, let us refer to this image still seen in many British buildings and monuments:

"The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn is a chimera; and is not England in fact always bouyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact?"

Please see "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" and William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in this world; but it is not necessary to share them or even to understand them from within, because being illusions they do not prophesy the probable consequences of their existence; they are irrelevant in aspect to what they involve in effect. The dove of peace brings new wars, the religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots, metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of Mammon, government by the people establishes the boss, free trade creates monopolies, fondness smothers its pet, assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends in smoke and in shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of this; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive philosophy. Why should he be troubled about the dreams of the Unicorn, more than about those of the nightingale or the spider? ... Leonine fortitude makes the strength of England in the world. ... But England is also, more than any other country, the land of poetry and of the inner man. [His castle; her castle.] Her sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of aerial enchantment; it is a land of tenderness and dreams. The whole nation hugs its hallowed shams; there is a real happiness, a sense of safety, in agreeing not to acknowledge the obvious; there is a universal conspiracy of respect for the non-existent. English religion, English philosophy, English law, English domesticity could not get on without this 'tendency to feign.' ..." (English literature and all art is "feigning"?)

George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 41-42.

To keep it real in the English-speaking world, we must dream together. Our most important dream for centuries is called "freedom with equality for all." We must make that dream real, every day.

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain (London: Fontana, 1990).
Anthony Burgess, Any Old Iron (New York: Washington Square Press, 1989).
John Fowles, Daniel Martin (New York: Signet, 1978). (Fowles should have received the Nobel Prize.)
Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1903).
Edward Rutherford, London (New York: Fawcett, 1977).
Gore Vidal, A Search for the King (New York: Ballantine, 1978).

"Justified": A Review of the FX Television Series.

2010-06-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

Americans have come to expect crap on television. Sadly, we are astonished when anything remotely acceptable to a person who is anything other than a brain-dead vegetable-like resident of a mental home is discovered on network t.v. Imagine my shock, delight, and surprise when I came across the first season of a show on FX ("FX" sounds like a weapons system!) called -- "Justified."

This program -- now entering its second season -- is really an old fashioned western soap opera elevated by highly intelligent writing and exquisite acting to the level of a British costume drama on Masterpiece Theater. We tend to forget that Americans can kick ass in t.v. drama when we want to and get paid for it. It seems like "getting paid for it" makes people "want" to do good work. Is that Republican talk? No, just common sense. "Same thing," our Republican friends say.

The people creating this show -- somebody named "Wendy Calhoun" is the "story editor" (What's that?) and Tony Goldwyn of hallowed Hollywood nobility is a producer (What does a producer do?) who may be the same person as "Graham Yost" -- really want to kick ass and they do. "Stephen Heim" or "Heth" is listed as an "executive producer." I knew an "executive producer" once! I think Mr. Heim also makes ketchup. No, that's "Heinz." Also, this same person named "Graham Yost" is listed as the "developer" of the program.

My theory is that these people are really one little guy in a corner office. I suspect that none of these people attended Yale Univesity. Furthermore, I am positive that none of the characters in the program owns a summer home in Long Island.

"Emmy" nominations are due to several cast members if there is any justice in life and t.v. -- which there may not be. Is it "Emmy" or "Emmie"? Who cares? I don't. "Boyd" (Walton Goggins) as a preacher is not to be missed. The actor creating this wonderful character is "masticating" the scenery and loving it. This man is a new Jack Nicholson and deserves a big time movie career. "Rayland" played by Timothy Olyphant (I think that's how he spells his name) is Harrison Ford, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood all in one.

I hope Rayland gets to say "yep" at least once. I am told by people who should know that "Raylan" and "Rayland" are equally acceptable. Tim, you gotta see "High Noon." Ed Harris is a director and writer to study with great care. I wonder if Mr. Harris has something to with "Justified"?

Natalie Zea as Wynona ("Wynona, like the actress") is cool, polished, professional and pragmatic. I will check on cast names, relax. Ms. Zea has made Wynona a model of American womanhood, loving -- in my opinion -- one difficult ex-husband and caring for a second, coping with life, strong and gentle, sensual and mature, complex, educated, and sympathetic. Wynona knows how to get her groove on. I found your hairpin, Wynona.

Erika Tazer is Rayland's partner, the "Dana Scully" in the series -- who happens to be a beautiful African-American woman as demonstrated in her red carpet appearances and also someone who will kick your ass.

Finally, "Eva" or "Ava" (also like the actress) is a discovery that shocks viewers. Joelle Carter evokes the same feelings of awe that I experienced when I saw great actresses (or actors) who have earned Oscars since -- like Kate Winslet and Melanie Griffith -- in their first cinematic performances.

Eva is a paradox. Clearly, she is brilliant, sad and pained, talented and burdened with the after-effects of trauma. Overwhelming melancholy floods "Eva's" eyes, instantly, revealing an understanding of tragedy and loss by this character and the artist creating her that is nothing less than heart-breaking in one so young. Where does this wisdom and compassion come from? A hard life at twenty-one? I am always dazzled by actors who can modulate the colors and nuances in their voices. Yes, "voices" is a plural word for any actor. Is Ms. Carter a singer? Music must be a big part of Ms. Carter's life.

I cannot imagine where this sadness comes from in a beautiful young woman's life. This capacity to empathize with suffering is shared with Ms. Carter's distinguished thespian predecessors that I mentioned and may reflect the actor's Southern heritage. America's once "Confederate" nation -- as Mr. Faulkner explained to an interviewer -- understands pain and tragedy whereas the rest of America often does not.

Ms. Carter is destined to play Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" and Shakespeare's "Ophelia." Volumes of rich Southern poetry float into one's mind as "Eva" steps on screen:

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me --
Yes! -- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.

Thank you, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. The ability that I find most rare in any actor is the gift of conveying multiple emotions with a single glance at the camera while compelling the audience's identification with a character's pain. Although it is too soon to tell, I suspect that Ms. Carter is blessed with this talent at the level of genius. Please do some theater work in the classics, Ms. Carter. You will be a better actor/actress because of such experiences. The rest is luck and opportunities. "Oh, for a muse of fire! ..." Or Joanne Woodward (a Southern Gal!) in Paris Blues, wearing a little black dress to torture the men in the audience -- and Paul Newman.

I cannot help conjuring a Hamlet featuring this cast in "Elsinore, New Mexico." Rayland is "Hamlet Jones," U.S. Marshal. His dad in the series is "Polonious"; his step-mom is "Gertrude"; his boss is Fortinbras; Boyd is Laertes. To go kinky with it, Rayland's contemporary, Wynona, would be Gertrude. Sparks would fly. Shakespeare's long shadow appears in the finale to the first season as "fathers and sons" contest the "crown" of Harlan County, Kentucky. This show makes you want to see Kentucky.

I suspect that Wendy Calhoun is both women in this series, a younger and wilder versus an older and (somewhat) wiser version of herself are set against each other. Any scene involving those two women, Wynona and Eva, is not to be missed. I recommend Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away (New York: Signet, 1960). These characters may have emerged from the ghost of Ms. O'Connor's pen and the old Catholic aristocracy in the South. Pass me a mimosa.

This drama is derived from an Elmore Leonard story, establishing excellence at the outset, and it is beautifully crafted by persons who know and understand these rural and difficult lives unfolding in the green hills of Kentucky. ("Gore country.")

There is no insulting disdain or condescension conveyed to these people, whose nobility and articulateness, moral struggles and deep humanity are made evident in every script. The show returns to the airwaves in February, 2011. Boyd is reading William Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, a novel drawn from the fourth book of Spinoza's "Ethics" that dramatizes the argument of that great philosophical work concerning the need to balance emotion with reason in moral life. Good luck, Boyd.

People from these beautiful hills -- a landscape clearly internalized by the characters -- are not depicted as stupid, racists, rednecks, or cartoons. They are as complex, good or evil, mysterious as anyone you know.

I cannot avoid fantasizing about any number of alternative productions with these characters whose chemistry is dazzling. This show is way better written and acted than "Grey's Anatomy" or almost everything else that I have seen on television with the possible exception of the best USA programs, like "Burn Notice" or "White Collar." Once more, Mr. Poe, please:

Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path --
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose) --
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.

And thus my memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea --
Some ocean throbbing far and free
With storms -- but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile.

Rayland's boss at the U.S. Marshal's Office is a typical harried federal official, resembling Bill Richardson, former Governor of New Mexico, and official under President Clinton -- I believe he was "National Security Advisor." He copes with the challenges, including supervising Rayland, and does a good job in a quietly efficient way. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

The Miami Cubanoid mafiosos are as loathsome as the local variety of gangsters and are depicted quite accurately, as I can attest. There is a Cuban-American Assistant U.S. Attorney, Mr. Vasquez, who is pretty good and decent, like Rayland's boss. Accents identify the actors as does the Miami setting. Boringly, Vasquez reminds me of me -- except I am nicer than he is and better looking, if somewhat older, sporting distinguished gray in my neatly shorn locks of hair. No one is a stereotype. African-Americans make cameo appearances and more, also being shown as human beings displaying all of the ills that flesh is heir to. I reach, again, for my "Collected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" and "Plays of Tennessee Williams" after every show.

Aside from the ongoing drama of good guys versus bad guys -- with occasional red neck bullies in bars and insane judges thrown in for those who crave them in tribute to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces -- there is the subtle and sensitive tension between the feelings of the protagonists caught in a kind of love triangle against what they perceive as their duties. The best review of Mr. Toole's Rabelesian work is provided by Anthony Burgess. Contrast "Faith in a Bottle" (reviewing Rabelais, by M.A. Screech) with "Life After Murder" (reviewing A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole) in Anthony Burgess, But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986), p. 255, then p. 409.

Eva will break the heart of every man she meets EVERYWHERE on this planet. Not every woman in America can say that she has shot one man dead; stolen the heart of a U.S. marshal; engaged in a solo war against the Dixie Mafia (and is even winning on points in my score card!), while getting herself an Emmy nomination to boot. "Where do you go from here, girl?" Oscars? Nobel Prize?

Ms. Carter, you are a miracle. I suspect, however, that neither you -- nor Wynona or Rayland -- have any clue about what is going on inside that devious and surprising mind of yours, Eva. How does a nice girl from Kentucky associate with the trashy circle of persons you have come to know? Is it all that smoking? Did you not behave well in high school? I can only hope that you go to church on Sundays. No one can ask for a "sawed-off shotgun" in such a lovely pianissimo soprano voice. "Thank you, mam."

Perhaps the deepest clue and most revealing insight into this baffling, seductive, almost tragic character, "Eva," is her confession that she will not be made to leave her community by anyone, including "Bo." Bo is the local boss, played brilliantly by an actor whose name I will memorize (is he "Luther Perry"?), in tribute to the film "To Kill a Mockingbird" based on Harper Lee's novel, which is one of my daughter's favorite books and one of her father's favorite films. This fine actor playing "Bo" was born to play "Big Daddy" in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Eva will not abandon those hills that almost steal the spotlight from Ms. Carter -- I said "almost" -- because they are within her soul and psyche. This is what unites all of these lives played out on both sides of the law: a deep love for the land and freedom associated with this earth, with their ancestors who lie resting in that earth, and the flag still flying proudly over this drama of heroic and unbreakable pioneers.

These are the people who made America and, like it or not, achieved great things in the twentieth century. Never count them out. We are always better in the later rounds. I know a woman very much like "Eva." Come to think of it, I also know a woman like "Wynona." I sympathize with Rayland's dilemma. ("Serendipity, III.")

I am aware of the difference between John Marshall's name and the word "marshal." I prefer that my corrections of inserted "errors" only be made once. At least be creative when inserting "errors" or plagiarizing my writings, mafia members. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")

Wednesdays, 10:00 P.M. on FX. Be there! I plan to purchase the first season on DVD. I like the theme music, too. A new female villain is too good to be believed. The women in this mythical Harlan County are fascinating and steal almost every scene. Rayland Gibbons, you are in trouble. I want to buy me a hat, like Rayland's hat, and some boots.

The Allegory of the Cave.

2010-04-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2010 at 4:38 P.M. "Errors" in this text and others that had been left alone for a while have been reinserted. I will do my best to cope with the new harassments and violations of copyright. I suspect Cuban-American fanatics of this sabotage and other offenses. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How censorship works in America.")
April 22, 2010 at 11:35 A.M. Spacing was affected and other "errors" were inserted in this text several times during the first day that the work was posted. I cannot say how many other essays have been vandalized or censored. I will make corrections as quickly as possible. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

This story is a birthday card for "M." Happy Birthday, May 24. Also for the Gentle Portia, February 27.

"At five o'clock in the afternoon, in the capital of the Province of Y____, a tall man with an umbrella was knocking at the door of the governor's residence."

K answered the door. His life would never be same after that day. K had been employed in the Department of Identity Assignment for twenty-one years. There had never before been a serious error made by anyone in his office. The section of the Ministry devoted to Identity Creation, Assignment, and Reassignment was unforgiving of errors. The only penalty for such a lapse would be death. A visit by an assistant to the Minister was a most distressing sign. The governor entrusted important matters to K because of his discretion and efficiency as well as absolute obedience. These were the primary duties of citizens in the Republic. Every schoolchild memorized these words from earliest childhood: "Discretion, efficiency, obedience."

K wore a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt, dark blue necktie. K owned thirty-five identical suits with matching shirts and blue ties. The men in the Ministry were permitted to wear red neckties. Women were excluded from the Ministry, of course, even secreterial and reception services were performed by men in gray suits. At the highest levels of power there were a few women among the Guardians whose exceptional intellectual merits made it impossible to exclude them from authority. These female Guardians were known as "defective women." The officials in the Ministry of Freudian Repairs said they were really "inadequate males." Only executive level officials were permitted to wear red neckties. All Guardians dressed in business suits and wore red ties.

K dreamed of wearing a red necktie by his fiftieth birthday. K was only weeks away from that special occasion. Until now, a promotion seemed likely. A single catastrophe in his office could destroy his career. Loss of his career objectives and prospects concerned K more than the possibility of death. Death was merely identity reassignment. Career reassignment could mean expulsion to sewage services and maintenance provision for city dwellers. Immigrants performed such tasks while wearing electronic monitoring headbands and under twenty-four hour camera surveillance from the Ministry of Peace and Happiness. Anything would be preferable to such a demotion.

The gentleman from the Ministry's Chief Office was polite, but somewhat cold. He wore a good suit, red silk tie (this meant he was next in line for the highest office in the land), and provided a sealed envelope to K. He was a man of 35, born to the red tie class, a graduate of University 1 in law and politics. He began by introducing himself to K:

"I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. K."

His handshake was very firm. They sat in the library of K's section.

"My name is B. I am afraid that we have encountered a bit of a difficulty in the front office. We need your help. This assignment and great responsibility entrusted to you will allow us to determine whether you are the sort of man we want in the highest echelons of power, making difficult decisions."

K was disturbed and expectant, also pleased that the error had apparently not been made by himself or his subordinates.

"It appears that the Minister has issued a death certificate for a Miss M. As you know, this is a routine matter that is ordinarily handled by subordinates. However, it is reported -- confidentially, of course, and most inconveniently -- that Miss M has not, in fact, died."

K was stunned to absorb this piece of information. The Minister had never before made a mistake of this magnitude that anyone had recorded or known of in all of the history of the Republic.

"Naturally, the fact that this unruly and radical young woman is still alive must not be allowed to obscure the fact that she is, legally, quite dead."

"Naturally." K found this logic irrefutable. The official understanding of law in the Republic was positivistic and formalist. All persons trained in law were to become legal scientists applying the rules of the society in an impersonal, objective, and neutral manner regardless of outcome. Legal officials must be regarded as social engineers who keep the pipes and plumbing of society functioning properly.

"We must instruct her -- this M person -- to adjust to her new status and serve the Republic. She must be ... persuaded to accept an identity reassignment."

"Of course, sir."

"This perverse young woman refuses to cooperate with our confidential requests -- none of which have been expressed in writing, needless to say, and they are not part of the official file, although a private record has been kept of these events. We must resolve this unpleasant inconvenience and remove the shadow of imperfection that has fallen upon our land before the Minister forms a new government in six months' time."

"I see, sir."

"Yes, now you seem to be an 'up and comer'! I know that we may place this matter safely in your hands. You need not distress the Minister with grimy details, obviously, while ensuring that the legal order is restored. All rules must be obeyed, thus ensuring that perfect justice prevails in the Republic -- as it always has and always will."

K repeated this slogan, automatically, from memory: "As it always has and always will."

"Good. Well, then there is nothing more to say. This conversation never took place. I was never here. If you quote my remarks, naturally, I will deny having made them. I am sure that you appreciate that such transparency in our legal proceedings is a statutory requirement for a man in my position. I have always lived by the highest professional and personal ethical standards."

"I admire your integrity, sir."

The men shook hands as they parted. K opened the envelope from the Ministry. He discovered a list of required steps by which provision of proof of the death of experson "M" would be provided to the Republic by K's office which was "deemed" to have issued the original certificate of death for this unsavory person. A meeting would be called after the receipt of such proof to determine promotions for employees and administrators. K was among the persons whose future would be considered at that meeting. An address for experson "M" was provided. This matter was to be kept in the strictest confidence. The letter was unsigned.

For the rest of the day K was unable to concentrate on his work. He ate very little, went home early, then sat alone reading reports and enjoying the 24 hour sports channel. There was a 24 hour cartoon channel. There was no news on television. The news was no longer reported after the attainment of perfection in the Republic when history had officially ended.

The next morning K dressed in a brand new gray suit, crisp white shirt with button down collar, dark blue tie. His shoes were polished to mirror-like perfection, a neatly folded handkerchief was placed in his jacket pocket. K lived alone. He was meticulous about such details of self-presentation. He drove a new E-car which had been recharged overnight. He listened to generic muzak on his car stereo. After providing the address to his vehicular computer, K sat in the back seat and studied the file which he had accessed from his home network:

" ... The object of this report is a female, 50 years of age, sandy blond hair cut short, green eyes, and approximately 5' 6" in height. The only name by which she is known to the Ministry is 'M.' Reports of controversial opinions, deliberate lack of docility when associating with males, and refusal of inclination for domestic duties has called this person to the attention of the authorities on several occasions. Her criminal dossier includes 'irreverence for authority' and 'free thinking.' The worst offenses are of a pathological sexual nature, including amorous relations outside of wedlock for which the penalty may be death -- except where a partner in the sexual act is a member of the Ministry, of course. Furthermore, M has been found in possession of contraband items, including books published before the Great Perfection."

K understood quickly why this person's life had been cut short by "natural causes" at the request of the Ministry. This is the sort of offender whose very existence called into question the progress in official "niceness" achieved so painfully by the Republic's leaders. All books existing before the Great Perfection had been removed from the shelves at Barnes & Noble book centers. There were no other booksellers in the Republic. K brought a legally prescribed dosage of hemlock for M.

The address provided in the Ministry's file was an abandoned warehouse in the East Village section outside of the "nice" part of the city where "good and normal" persons (like K) live "nicely" while never interacting with their equally nice neighbors. Criminals congregated in these East Village streets: sex offenders, artists -- including actors! -- radical philosophers and other unruly persons who refused the blessings of normality and "niceness." One should never associate with actors as they are transmitters of something called the "Show Business Bug."

M lived at 101 Robert Downey Boulevard, Apartment 5A. Upon arrival, K's vehicle parked itself. He looked nervously around him at the sketchy neighborhood, rang the bell which was broken, then knocked loudly on the door hoping to be buzzed into the lobby. Someone opened a window, then shouted a greeting:

"What do you want?"

A woman was staring down at him from a fifth floor window.

"I am from 'Identity Assignment,' and I have a matter of great importance to discuss with you ... if you will kindly buzz me in."

K held up his badge and identification for the woman to see. The window was shut. K stood at the door waiting. Minutes passed and nothing happened. Some dirty men and a ragged child seemed to gather at the opposite side of the street. K smiled politely, held his briefcase up to his chest, and stood very still. One did not wish to encourage any form of conversation with such people. Many had Norwegian ancestry. It is common knowledge that persons of Northern European lineage are dangerous and unreliable. Many are habitually dirty and may be drug users.

Suddenly, the old door opened. A woman stood before him displaying an insolent smile. She wore an old man's hat on the back of her head, a sleeveless t-shirt that said: "Rolling Stones -- Some Girls!" This apparition had a cigarette tucked behind her left ear, wore baggy denims, red sneakers, and ancient-looking spectacles that she removed, slowly, while staring up and down at K.

"What are you dressed up for?"

"I am not sure that I understand your meaning. Are you Ms. M?"

"Never mind. Come on in. Yes, I'm M."

They entered a lobby that had been painted by different local artists featuring massive political murals and some obscene abstract images. K made an effort to shut his eyes to this obscene material. Abstract expressionism was among the styles of painting outlawed after the Great Perfection, when "capitalist realism" became the official style of the Republic's licensed artists, all of whom were nevertheless to be excluded from life within the Republic's borders because, obviously, artists distract citizens from contemplation of the great and eternal perfections -- like beauty, good, law, justice, and higher solvency.

They entered a small apartment on the fifth floor after climbing the stairs. There were few pieces of furniture in a large central room, some original and fascinating artwork on the walls such as K had never seen, the antique and fully restored furniture was complimented by fresh flowers. There were several well-stocked bookshelves.

"Most of these books are prohibited because they cause cancer, you know." K tried to sound reasonable and patient with this experson.

M responded: "I don't believe that books cause cancer."

K was shocked. "I am sure that the correlation is scientifically certain."

There was something very disturbing about her smile.

"Have a seat. Take a load off your feet." M sat on the floor.

"It is illegal not to own a television set. I do not see your t.v."

M smiled, wickedly: "I don't like t.v."

"I am not in law enforcement," K said, "You can be arrested for removing your television. Do you realize that? Anyway, I am here for a different reason. I do not wish to detain you any longer than necessary."

"Would you like a glass of water? You look kind of nervous."

"No, thank you. You see, the Guardians of the Republic -- through their servants in the Ministry of Identity, Goodness and Justice -- have determined that you are dead. You died after a long and painful illness which first produced a mental crisis causing delusions of a vile and detestable political nature. As a result of this determination by the Ministry, which has been officially certified in triplicate -- I have a copy of the decision here for you -- your continued living and political activism is highly upsetting because it may alter the perfection of our flawless society. I am sure that you will understand the necessity to comply with this decision applying the provisions of Rule 101, subsection 10 (b), 1. I have a copy here of the relevant Rules of the Republic."

"Are you telling me that I should kill myself because one of you morons made a mistake by listing me as dead when I am indisputably alive?"

"You don't really appreciate the complexity of the situation. You're looking at this in a very selfish way. You should try to think of it as your civic duty to kill yourself -- 'giving back' to our wonderful society -- by complying with all laws, even if the laws are unfair or unjust. If the Laws themselves were to enter this room, and say to you that, 'because you have lived in the Republic and enjoyed the benefits of society, you have bound yourself to abide by the laws whatever you may think of them.' You would have to agree with that statement and accept their determination."

"What laws? The Republic promises justice, freedom, equality. Officially, no rule that violates those fundamental values has validity of any kind. I am not required to obey idiotic, false or absurd and self-contradictory laws because they are not really laws."

K had never encountered these arguments before, nor had he met a woman who refused to be deferential to his official pronouncements. This was heresy. Much of what M said was offensive to the principles of the Republic. K was rendered speechless by these pronouncements.

"You just have to comply with this determination because it is an official command with the right pedigree carrying a sanction that has been handed down to us by the legitimate body entrusted with law-making power in our society for execution."

This was the language in the official decision concerning legitimacy handed down by the Supreme Tribunal, unanimously. Justices Holmes, Hobbes, Bentham, Hart, and Posner "concurred in part and dissented in part." These justices always "concurred in part and dissented in part." All decisions of the Supreme Tribunal were deemed unanimous because dissenters were not counted since they were immediately replaced with newly appointed justices -- after being executed, naturally.

"Did you memorize all of that? Or did you just come up with that by yourself?" That infuriating smile. M seemed to think carefully about this pronouncement by K. She rose from her seated position and walked around the room, slowly, then she opened the door to her apartment and shouted down to the others in the building. Crito lived downstairs. He worked off the books as a composer and musician. Diotima is a poet who lives on M's floor and does translations on the side. She loved these discussions. Several dancers who live in one apartment upstairs enjoy these arguments and decided to join in: Agathon, Polus, Thrasymachus (who sells real estate), together with a graduate student in philosophy and mathematics, Plato.

"I hope you don't mind if some my friends join our chat. We like this better than t.v." That impertinent smile seemed to linger, disturbingly, on her lips.

"Are any of them ... contagious?" K held his briefcase to his chest.

"No," M said with a chuckle, "but the talk becomes very addictive and seductive. Does the word 'seductive' disturb you?"

K turned his head and coughed. "No."

"Now then," M said. "I am puzzled by this idea of law and rules. You seem to regard these terms as interchangeable. I am also concerned to examine the idea of justice as having something to do with all of this nonsense."

She motioned for K to sit, which he did: "You have been informed of an official determination that I have died. Is that correct?"

K said: "Yes."

"Very well. Would you agree that persons who are dead rarely engage in philosophical discussions?"

"Yes."

"Fine. Now I have verified -- by examining them from this distance -- the documents in your hands, in triplicate copies, suggesting that the birth date of 'M' is my birth date. Let us assume that this 'death certificate' refers -- or seeks to refer -- to me, M."

"All right."

"We can take it as a starting point for our discussion that the following propositions are true: 1) I am 'M'; 2) I am, in fact, very much alive, biologically, and (perhaps) legally; 3) a certificate ostensibly meeting all of the official requirements of legal validity establishes, according to the state, that I am dead; 4) there is an a priori obligation to obey all laws meeting the minimum conditions of legal validity for all citizens of the Republic, and I am a citizen of the Republic; 5) this raises the question of whether this certificate of death for 'M' satisfies those minimum conditions in order to require my obedience or acceptance of its provisions. Would you agree, Mr. K, that this states the issue before us?"

K was stunned: "Yes, roughly."

"Mr. K, have you been a party to the issuance of certificates of death for other persons in the past?"

"Yes."

"Is it true that there are criteria established and defined in the law to determine when a person has died?"

"Yes, very specific criteria. We try to be highly precise and accurate, neutral and objective at all times. Nothing is ever personal for us. Please believe that."

"I assure you that I fully believe in your 'impersonality.' Can you say what are the criteria for establishing, legally speaking, when a person has died?"

K coughed, again, and seemed baffled. He was familiar with the applicable laws, but he had never been required to engage in original thinking or to explain the laws.

"Well, medical experts have provided a set of objective and neutral criteria that say, exactly, when someone is dead. For example, coronary failure may produce a kind of death, although other bodily organs may continue to function and a patient may be kept artificially ... 'operational.' ... I guess that's the word."

"I see. If you recall, our focus was upon the death of 'persons.' We will deal with this troublesome term, 'person,' later. For now, please understand that my question refers not to the functioning of a body or its organs, but to the living person. Notice that I am insisting on a distinction between a human body and a person. When is a person dead, Mr. K?"

"According to the latest promulgated rules -- I have copies in triplicate here of the latest updates and pocket parts for the law books -- 'brain death' is the criteria for the death of a person."

"What is brain death?" M seemed to smile directly at Mr. K in a most disturbing and annoying way. "Does it usually coincide with mental death?"

"Brain death means that a person's mind is shut off, like a t.v. set that no longer works, or a light that goes dark."

"Do you mean, Mr. K, that a person stops reading and thinking, holding and expressing opinions, experiencing things?"

"Yes, among other things."

"Is it possible for cerebral functions to remain operative in a person with limited or no mental capacity or ability?"

"Yes. I guess so."

"The criteria in the laws seems to concern the cessation of ALL brain function?"

"Yes."

"Accordingly, if the brain of a person 'functions,' at all, then that person must be alive -- is that right?"

"Yes."

"We can tell that a brain functions from mental activities as well as physical criteria, such as movement or breathing, correct?"

"Yes."

M took in a deep breath. Strolled around the room, slowly, never taking her eyes from Mr. K.

"Would you agree, Mr. K, that I am speaking with you?"

"Yes."

"Do you observe that I am walking around my room?"

There was laughter from the other persons in the room.

"Yes."

"Do you deny that cerebral operations must be taking place in my body in order for me to be performing these elaborate physical operations that you seem to observe?"

"Yes, I suppose so. I mean, no, I don't deny that you're doing the things I see you doing. At least, I must believe that you are doing these things."

"If the criteria of death in accordance with the laws is cessation of all cerebral operations, and if it is clear that, as to my own cerebral operations (poor things, surely), that at least some 'functions' still seem to be taking place, then would you say that it appears reasonably certain that I do not meet the legal criteria of death under the laws?"

"This is very troubling. However, I must admit that you are logically correct. You are not legally dead."

"If I do not meet these legal criteria concerning the death of persons, then it must be the case that the certificate of my death was issued in error. Being false or an error, this certificate cannot be binding on me nor upon the institutions of society, would you agree?"

"Yes."

"Furthermore, a certificate based on fraud or error, or a self-contradictory law, is void ab initio, is that right?"

"Yes, that's right."

"And even if you wonder whether your sense faculties are altered -- or whether you are under the illusion that I am walking around this room even if I am actually dead -- this wondering would not alter the logical operation involved since your impression of the death certificate and of your task must also be based on the information in your mind, derived from your senses, as regards the material world, and you are relying upon that information and your mind to discuss the matter with me. Hence, you must rely on the reports of your mind, to the same extent, when that initial 'knowledge' of my death is challenged by me. You are using and relying upon your fallible senses to determine whether I am dead or alive, whether you are holding a death certificate in your hands and what it says. Do you understand?"

"Yes. I am afraid so."

"Notice that these observations are independent of the reality or truth of propositions -- propositions, as distinct from sentences, that exist entirely apart from individual sense knowledge -- in logic. It will always be 'true' that 2 + 2 = 4, even for the person who has not yet made this discovery. This proposition simply communicates a truth that is unperceived by, or unknown to, that non-mathematical person."

Mr. K was about to say more when one of the guests in the room seemed to lift himself from his chair with emotion and disdain for the proceedings.

"Before we turn to the certificate of death that has been issued by the Minister -- I know him, by the way -- and why it is legally invalid or a nullity, I see that Thrasymachus is anxious to interrupt. Do you wish to say something Thrasymachus?"

Thrasymachus was a large, cigar munching, Guayavera-wearing person of indeterminate gender from New Jersey or Miami Beach, who spoke very loudly and was obnoxious to the participants in these discussions:

"That's all bullshit!' It's all about power. You're dead if they say you're dead." Thrasymachus walked to the center of the room and uttered his remarks in a booming baritone voice: "Besides, you are asking K to rely on his senses. Everybody knows that observations and sense data -- that's all uncertain stuff. He could be delusional, like the Communists! Everything's relative!"

"Well, thank you for that disturbing pronouncement." M smiled at Thrasymachus. She gestured for Thrasymachus to sit and try a piece of cheese cake. Thrasymachus enjoyed altering the spacing or otherwise defacing the writings of his "intellectual superiors" -- by removing a single letter from a word perhaps or turning off the computer of an envied rival.

"We seem to have discovered something that is not relative. Your principle that everything is relative, Thrasymachus, is held by you as a general objective and universal maxim, right?"

Thrasymachus nodded while munching on a piece of cheese cake.

"Well, in that case, it would be a non-relative truth for the proponent of a relativist claim that 'everything is relative.' And this would be a self-contradictory claim, an absurdity -- like a living person's argument that he or she is alive despite an official pronouncement of that person's demise. Isn't that true?"

Silence. Thrasymachus gets up to leave in anger. M reaches out to him and smiles:

"Join us. Stay with us. Let us examine these objections. We are engaged in a very important activity, Thrasymachus. We need your contribution to the discussion. Incidentally, Thrasymachus, if you say that this claim by you is also 'relative,' then it is not binding on others and we may ignore it. In either case, there appears to be a slight difficulty for you as an 'absolute relativist,' would you agree?"

Thrasymachus only made a lewd gesture and threatened to "assassinate" everyone, after inserting new "errors" in everyone's writings. Thrasymachus said: "I am going to kill you!"

M was undisturbed: "Sense data is a troubling concept. Are concepts mere sense data?"

"I don't know." K was baffled.

"Mr. K may certainly be mistaken in his sense perceptions when he observes me. Although, I am sure that K is in no doubts concerning at least some of the information that his senses are supplying to him about me at this very instant. Let us ponder this dilemma."

"Our senses seem to provide information concerning 'appearances,' would you agree?"

K nodded.

"We use our eyes to see, fingers to touch objects, or other beings in the world -- isn't that so?"

"Yes."

"After all, these faculties for perceiving the world or gathering the data of our senses are fallible, aren't they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Our eyes may be defective. We may see a blurry universe, one without colors, or we may be blind."

"I agree."

"Besides, the world that we perceive with the senses comes to us dripping with the categories of our faculties for sense perception. The world that we know with the senses reeks of ourselves, don't you agree?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, taste, vision, touch and so on are qualities of ourselves and not of the world. The world disclosed by the senses is in 'flux,' changing all the time, uncertain, blurry, mixed with our emotions and distorting perspectives. Hence, it cannot yield certainty or eternal and objective knowledge, isn't that true?"

"I suppose so."

"On the other hand, mathematics does seem to provide necessary truth that is not dependent on our flawed senses for it is approached via the rational faculty only."

"What do you mean by 'independent of our senses'?"

"For example, the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 is true, necessarily, given the definition of the concepts being used -- concepts of number -- and must always be true, everywhere, regardless of anyone's perspective, isn't that so?"

"But don't numbers come from us? Aren't they based on sense data?"

"What the numbers describe or relations of logical necessity are 'real' -- indeed, necessarily real -- even if we use different symbols to describe these relations that some of us 'discover' in reason and do not merely 'invent.' They seem to have a fundamental connection with the human linguistic capacity that allows for intellection. There is something objectively 'correct' about these mathematical propositions that does not depend on sense data or even upon their discovery by all of us. Do you agree?"

"I am not sure."

"Part of what we mean by a person has to do with possessing this a priori capacity to establish such 'trascendental and/or logical connections.' Among the persons outlawed in the Republic are philosophers -- like Noam Chomsky and scientist Roger Penrose, thinker Christopher Peacocke and others exploring these issues for the Resistance. Did you know that?"

"No."

"It was, is, and will always be true that 2 + 2 = 4. This was true before we possessed these symbols, or were even aware of these relations, given the meaning of the concepts deployed in this proposition. Hence, there is a demonstrable truth revealed by such numerical relations that is not dependent on our flawed human intellects and perceptual capacities. This is a truth in which we may participate. This is a kind of truth that is instantiated in us through our participation in mathematical reasoning -- would you agree, Mr. K?"

"I suppose I must agree to that. It doesn't seem right."

"Why does it not seem right?"

"I guess because you can't just 'go and look' to determine mathematical truths. Like, if I wanted to grasp this truth in my hand, I could not do so. I want to 'touch' truth. I want to find it in my backyard, or see it under a microscope. I wonder whether sense data comes first and then the concepts are formulated from that sense data? I mean, can't we just go and look for truth?"

"Why would we need and reach for concepts in order to understand the world or ourselves?"

"I do not know."

"Why are we predisposed to need, seek, and deploy these abstract concepts in order to experience certainty or any unified knowledge? Are there many ways of 'looking' for truth? The connective tissues of the mental world that make meaningful experience possible are not 'in' the empirical world and they cannot be exclusively 'in' us or they would fail to establish necessary connections that allow us to explain and predict trajectories or natural phenomena, that is, not only how things are but how they must be in the future. These connective meanings are like an ocean in which we dip our buckets of truth."

"I see what you mean."

"Why is such conceptual knowledge and communication essential to what we are? A moose feels no need to develop the concept of number or space, time, or category, but a moose may have the same sense data that we do, feels the cold and heat, hunger or thirst. I wonder why that is true?"

"I do not know."

"It must be something about our 'natures' or essences, as persons, that makes us crave understanding because we are capable of achieving it. We need to understand and know the world as well as ourselves. Suppose that I take two coins from my pocket and place them on the floor before you. I take another two coins and also place them on the floor. If I then ask you to count the total number of coins on the floor. What is the total number of coins on the floor before you?"

"Four."

"Does the mental operation or logical process of deduction that you have performed seem compelling?"

"Yes."

"Are you in any doubt concerning this conclusion?"

"No. But doesn't this calculation also involve my imperfect mind?"

"The calculation -- as performed by you -- involves your mental faculties and intellect. However, the relation disclosed by your intellect, based on the concepts applied, antecedes your use of intelligence in the effort. What is more, you are involved in an effort of 'recollection' as you engage in this effort, since what is disclosed seems (and must be) inescapably true, again, as a matter of the meaning of the concepts involved in this effort. It is as if you have always known this logical calculation to be true -- and must have known it to be true -- once it is clearly demonstrated to be the case that 2 + 2 = 4. Isn't that so, Mr. K?"

"I do not see any way around what you say."

"It appears that the truth of this proposition is not relative. It must be the case that 2 + 2 = 4. Do you deny this?"

"No."

"Furthermore, this truth is a priori. This is not a truth revealed by our senses a posteriori. We do not derive this truth inductively, from perusing the empirical world, but rather we apply our intellects to 'calculations of necessity' -- calculations yielding certainty by definition based on concepts inherent in us that we apply to the world, deductively, just as we communicate based on a linguistic capacity that is natural for persons and that is developed in languages. Again, this may be the same natural capacity for connectedness with others and the world. Does this seem rational to you?"

"Yes."

"For the present you may disregard the recently challenged doubts concerning the a priori/a posteriori distinction laid down by W.V. Quine. My friend Jacques Derrida 'rejects the idea (the empiricist confusion, as he would call it) that we could ever claim rational warrant for suspending the ground rules of bivalent logic in response to some anomaly turned up in the course of scientific investigation, or some conflict between a well-entrenched theory and a discrepant empirical finding. Still less would he accept the Quinian dictum that changes in our logic should best be viewed as a matter of pragmatic convenience, or of working an intelligible structure into the chaos of sensory stimuli while seeking to avoid such conflicts by making adjustments where needed and thereby conserving maximum coherence across the entire fabric of beliefs-held-true.' Do you see Derrida's point?"

Christopher Norris, Fiction, Philosophy and Literary Theory: Will the Real Saul Kripke Please Stand Up? (New York & London: Contuum, 2007), p. 16.

"I guess so." K said.

"What is even more mysterious is that these mathematical truths turn out to describe the workings of the 'real' universe, again, or the language of nature, so that on the basis of this mathematical truth we can describe the trajectory of a star or make calculations in physics that will measure the workings of natural forces in the past or future. Hence, they seem to say something 'real' and 'true' about the elegant order in the universe of everyday life as well as within ourselves. We are mysteriously 'fitted' to understand the order underlying all things. Nature shares in these concepts with us. Moreover, we are a part of the order disclosed in nature. This 'disclosing' is, indeed, part of what is ordered by (or in) nature. Are you astonished, Mr. K?"

Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 107-127.

"I never thought of knowledge that way."

"I am sure of that. What is even more amazing is that this mathematical knowledge -- like yourself, Mr. K -- is very 'impersonal' for all rational agents. This knowledge applies everywhere, reflecting a beauty in the universal order that seems overwhelming. Yet we discover this beauty and elegance also in ourselves, as each of us is a part of the universe. Would you agree?"

"But isn't this elegance and beauty in us, not in the universe?"

"Well, if we are in the universe, and if the natural order, intelligence and beauty that I describe is in us, then it must also be 'in' the universe. You see, the spacial metaphors break down, at this point, because we are describing the networks of meanings that make ourselves and all reasoning possible. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"Just as the breakdown of our physics and equations projected on to thought experiments concerning the big bang and the instants immediately after that event is also a truth claim based on mathematical knowledge, even the denials of particular truth-claims contain this truth-capacity -- i.e., bivalent logic and must do so, as we have learned from Kant -- making the concept of truth much more pervasive as well as problematic than we once thought. Do you follow this reasoning?"

"Yes."

Plato rises from his seat and walks to the window. M catches his eye. There is a secret smile on both their lips, a special intimacy that they share. M lifts an eyebrow, offering an invitation. Plato shakes his head, smiles, saying (silently) "no." M understands and turns, again, to Mr. K:

"And you approve of 'impersonality' in legal affairs and the operations of state power, don't you?"

"Yes. Law is a science."

"Then you must approve of impersonality, objectivity, and universality in our knowledge claims, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"We have determined, however, that I do not seem to meet the objective and impersonal criteria of death under the relevant laws, which is brain death. But then, the death certificate issued concerning me must be inaccurate, factually, so as to fall short of legal validity. Do you agree, Mr. K?"

"I guess I must accept that."

"If the death certificate is invalid -- void ab initio -- if it is false, then you cannot enforce it. I have no obligation to abide by this certificate of death. Legally, it is nothing. Is that correct?"

"I guess so."

Do you, Mr. K, have an obligation to obey the laws?"

"Yes, of course."

"Do you think of yourself as a 'person,' despite your admiration for impersonality?"

"Yes, I do."

"But we have learned something concerning persons during the course of our discussion that may now allow us to attempt a definition of this troublesome concept, 'person.' What is a person?"

"What do you mean that we have learned something concerning persons?"

M walked over to Mr. K, sat on the arm of his chair, and whispered: "Persons need to make connections with one another and to find overarching meanings. Relationships between, say, 2 + 2 that equals 4 must be discovered or constructed if they are to be known by us. Relationships between men and women, all persons, must also be constructed and discovered, necessarily, as a matter of the sociability that we take for granted in our 'societies.' Perhaps there are constitutive relations that are even more essential to human nature? We need others to 'become the persons we are,' Mr. K. Persons are other-regarding and -defined beings."

At this point, Diotima, a husky and dark-hued brunette stepped forward: "There is something about persons that requires them to 'connect.' This is above and beyond the level of rights and duties to which M refers. This means ethical life and love -- Eros -- must be fundamental to persons. Would you agree, Mr. K?"

Diotima sat on the other side of Mr. K causing him to look at one woman, then the other. Mr. K began to perspire: "I suppose that's true. I ... I like people."

"I am sure that you do." Diotima said. "But do you 'like' loving, Mr. K?"

"I am not sure that this is a proper question for a civil servant to answer while on duty."

M drew very close to poor Mr. K and whispered: "Are there obligations beyond political or ethical duties, Mr.K? Intimate obligations?"

Agathon thought not. He objected that the state has no claim on my inner life and cannot tell me to be (or do) "good," only "right action" is enjoined by the government. As long as I abide by the law, I may "feel" what I like. Agathon owned his own business from an early age. Young Polus, on his way to a university to study, secretly, with sinister philosophers -- like M and Diotima -- thought otherwise.

Polus suggested -- after removing his earpiece from a portable music device and ceasing his constant "texting" -- that "nothing is a greater calling than love for persons. Hence, no public laws could violate the strictures of love. Or whatever ... "

Diotima then took center stage. "We must consider the possibility of a morality of love, in which law or ethical duty -- as defended by M -- and Erotic inclination, whether for the other or wisdom, as in this very dialectic that is defended by me, can be reconciled. We must resolve, Mr. K, the opposition between objective and subjective, universal and particular. This is to trace a movement in thought from, let us say, the Socratic elenchus, to the Critical theory of Kant, then to the youthful writings of Hegel and his progeny, like Marx."

Diotima and M placed their hands on their hips. BOTH women looked directly at Mr. K and asked: "What do you say to that?"

"I could not agree more!" Mr. K said.

Diotima explained: "True union, or love proper exists only between living beings who are alike in power (equals) and thus in one another's eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other. This genuine love excludes all oppositions. Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling. In love, life is present as a duplicate of itself, a mirror-image -- a partner in dialectic -- also as a single unified and shared self. From the contemplation of this mortal subject one is elevated to the contemplation of the goddess -- Eros -- herself. Love 'deconstructs' the death principle by attaching us to life even when we are required to surrender life."

M explained: "Through loving, life is present as a 'duplicate of itself,' the beloved is another self, because love is a sort of analogon of reason -- as Diotima is an analogon of M! -- of THE reason. In contemplating these mysteries, Mr. K., you come to appreciate the ways in which you may be dead without knowing it, even as life calls you to love. Do you understand, Mr. K?"

"I think so. To be a living being is to be a lover. All love must be a love of beauty, therefore, the beauty revealed by love is an interpretation of life. To see anyone or any thing truly it is necessary to feel a kind of love for that person or thing. Maybe this is love's wisdom? This power of unveiling the self-as-other and other-as-self is the greatest gift revealed by the lover's art and wisdom. Love always elevates us to the contemplation of things in the scope of eternity -- we see the good, justice, identity in which we participate. Love is the opposite of death. Love is a 'certificate of life,' a reminder of all the ways in which we may be dead without knowing it. St. Augustine says that 'to love is to be.' I hope that you will be."

Six months after this conversation, Mr. J was asked to explain the facts of Mr. K's demise. Unfortunately, all efforts to obtain Mr. K's acceptance of the official determination concerning his own death were unsuccessful. Several officials from the Ministry failed to persuade Mr. K to drink hemlock.

Mr. K -- shockingly! -- had taken to painting. Mr. K discussed questions of beauty and goodness with strangers in subway platforms. Mr. K refused all medications, would not accept the assistance of the best accountants in the Republic. He was a sad case of "abnormality." Mr. K refused to adjust. Mr. K would not "cooperate" with power. A promotion was impossible. Mr. K, somehow, scraped together a meager subsistence from selling his paintings, shared living expenses with two women -- M and Diotima -- both of these women were officially "abnormal" as well.

This was a very sad case for the Ministry. Mr. K must be banished from the Republic. A "certificate of death" was issued for Mr. K by the Minister himself. Weeks ago, Mr. J was ordered to deliver that certificate of death, along with a legally prescribed potion of hemlock, to the unspeakable exile. Mysteriously, Mr. J never returned to his office.

" ... the question is not what people see in each other, but what they come to see in themselves. After all the years of silence, suddenly you're face to face with someone who has to be told about your life, and, as you tell it, as your listener listens, as he smiles and nods and exclaims upon the similarities and differences in his own life, you begin to hear the story yourself, you begin to glimpse your own shape and nature."

Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 152.

Supplemental Sources not in alphabetical order:

Mary McCarthy, "The Fact in Fiction," in A Bolt From the Blue and Other Essays (New York: Perseus, 2002), p. 203. (Edited with selections by A.O. Scott, before Ms. Scott's unfortunate association with "Manohla Dargis.")

Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka (New York: Washington Square Books, 1979), the introduction by Eric Heller is outstanding. Kafka's nightmare was summarized in a sentence: "Guilt is never to be doubted." (See Franz Kafka's short story, "Before the Law.")

Plato, The Symposium (London & New York: Penguin, 1951), Introduction and translation by Walter Hamilton.

Plato, Symposium (Cambridge & Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1989), Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff, translation with Introduction and notes.

Stephen E. Lewis, trans., Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (London & Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).

Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Hypocrisy in America.

2010-04-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

May 3, 2010 at 2:07 P.M. More "errors" inserted in "A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein." ("Stephen J. Schaeffer and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "More Child-Porn and -Prostitution in New Jersey" as well as "Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey" then "Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

April 3, 2010 at 6:00 P.M. This essay was posted earlier today. Numerous "errors" were inserted in the text. I have now corrected those "errors." Keep 'em coming.

April 3, 2010 at 2:37 P.M. Access to the Internet was denied to me yesterday. Several of my essays were altered or defaced in violation of copyright laws and the U.S. Constitution. Can Cubans believe America's pronouncements concerning free speech or the rights of dissidents? I am afraid not.

May 9, 2008 at 11:06 A.M. I am blocking "spyware":

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3753.msn/B271049...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=...
http://ad.doublelcick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=...

May 8, 2008 at 9:11 A.M. new obstacles prevent me from accessing Critique. Has MSN groups closed? I will do my best to return to my MSN group. I'll try to write today. My image at that group may be blocked. No images can be posted at this blog or with my profile. I will run scans throughout the day. I am blocking:

http://docs.google.com/EmbedSlideshow?docid=d...
http://docs.google.com/js/949013627-plus_embed-view.css http://dics.google.com/js/30827582-PresentlyIndirect.js ("JS" = Superior Court Judge, New Jersey?)
http://docs.google.com/js/116215014-EmbedSlideshow.js
http://rover.ebay.com/ar/1/711-58813-2060-2014 (I do not have an e-bay account!)
http://icedz.ebay.com/ad/212041...

May 6, 2008 at 10:26 A.M. I received a call from 212-645-5985; same caller at 10:34 A.M.; then again at 10:43 A.M.; and at 10:47 A.M.; "anonymous" calls at 10:58 A.M. At 11:02 A.M. I received another call from 212-645-5985 and at 11:06 A.M. from the same caller. Harassment?

May 6, 2008 at 8:51 A.M. several articles critical of Senator Robert "Bob" Menendez were defaced. I am unable at this time to correct them, yet again, in order to re-post them. I am obstructed from accessing my MSN group. I will continue to run scans, devoting the rest of the day to regaining access to my group. Furthermore, I will devote more essays to Senator Bob and New Jersey corruption in response to these tactics. I will do my best to make corrections of writings altered or destroyed by hackers last night. ("Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

May 5, 2008 at 9:16 A.M. It is difficult to post essays at Critique, where a number of essays have already been vandalized today. I will continue to struggle to make necessary corrections. I am blocking:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3753.MSN/B271049... ("ADJ" = Apellate Division Judge, NJ?)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=165283;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=165283;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=165283;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=165283;met=...
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=165283;met=...

Calls received from 757-990-8980 at 9:16 A.M., then again at 9:57 A.M., in addition to the usual anonymous "marketers." Obscene calls are also received regularly from these numbers. These may be "dummy numbers" used by hidden phantom callers.

"In New Jersey's super-corrupt atmosphere, nothing is sacred or beyond conversion to a patronage pit. Seemingly everything Jersey politicians do is designed to help themselves or their friends. Little is done because it is the right thing to do. Sometimes it can be the right thing, but in that case, it's a coincidence."

Bob Ingle & Sandy McClure, The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption (New York: St. Martin's, 2008), p. 9.

I have just spent hours coping with the usual harassment, obstructions of access to my sites, defacements and vandalism of essays, destruction of written work, attempts at frustration or inducement of violent reactions. Really, what I experience -- almost on a daily basis -- is a sadistic delight in inflicting emotional and psychological pain on a human being whose mind (weirdly) is both envied and hated. This sick cruelty can only provide a twisted form of sexual pleasure for the would-be tormentor.

I never before fully appreciated to what extent one might be hated for intelligence. Creative ability and imagination are things that inspire hatred, loathing, mostly fear among simple and confused people. These qualities are now grounds for the destruction of human beings in America -- at least, they are in New Jersey. At this point in my life, I have no other explanation for these attacks on my writings. Perhaps there has never been another explanation. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

There is something about intelligence that frightens brutal and ignorant men and women -- who are also beguiled by ideas that they recognize are beautiful and important, but which will always be beyond their grasp. This is felt to be "unfair," somehow. If they (Diana, Terry, and people like them) cannot understand something important, they believe that no one should understand such things or discuss them. These people are called "therapists" -- at least in New Jersey, where they are protected by corrupt police and prosecutors from the consequences of any crimes they commit against dark-skinned or poor people. A great deal of anti-semitism and racism is motivated by hatred of intelligence and beauty. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "New Jersey's KKK Police Shocker.")

Like so much of artistic culture and the true richness of life, these beauties are indestructible. These priceless "things of the mind" cannot be stolen or taken by force. The stupid and cruel person faced with someone who relishes the life of the mind and who offers its fruits -- even to his tormentors -- free of charge, cannot avoid being infuriated not by what he or she will never "know" (which is a lot!), but by what he or she will never "be." It is frustration at your own inadequacies and intellectual limitations that causes you to insert "errors" in my writings. I have learned this lesson from James Baldwin as well as many others. Mr. McGill? ("Miami's Cubanoids Protest AGAINST Peace!")

Was Nydia Hernandez a part of recent dismal events in Trenton? I wonder whether Nydia has visited my sites? Three child-porn rings broken up in New Jersey. (Soon: "Sybil R. Moses Joins the Lesbian Love Fest!")

It is not what I say; rather, it is what I am that is unforgivable. What I am is a thinker. I am someone who chooses to reason and feel (even when it is painful to do so), and whose faults are as great as any other person's faults -- yet who insists on remaining just that: a PERSON. It is only by remaining a person that one can acknowledge faults, while also demanding recognition of injustices and crimes suffered at the hands of others, others whose hypocrisy alone makes them much worse than I am or ever will be. Ethics, Mr. McGill? ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Spacing has been affected in this essay, unfortunately. "Errors" were inserted twice after I posted the work earlier this afternoon. Legal ethics, Mr. Rabner? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?" then "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

It is those others who have chosen to abandon their status as persons who are in need of sympathy, not me. These monsters are, in the end, to be pitied. For they can only live comfortably among persons who are as morally repulsive and dimwitted as themselves (Ms. Poritz?), which must be a fate worse than death. And they are, therefore, cursed not to know or be anything but what little they are within themselves, what they have become and will remain in their ideological prisons -- their own envy and greed, anger, and self-chosen stupidity is what they have become and will be forever. Sadly, I must expect more vandalism and censorship of this text. I will continue to write. ("What is it like to be censored in America?")

The Forest of Arden.

2010-02-25T07:05:00.000-08:00

April 2, 2010 at 3:12 P.M. Several attempts to revise essays at my blogs were obstructed. I will try to get to Philosopher's Quest.

March 12, 2010 at 3:40 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this site, illegally, possibly meant to insult me or my writings as laughably unlearned or flaky. You decide.

"The Subconscious Mind Learn How to Jump Into Any Reality You Desire. ... For Real. http://www.quantumjumping.com/ " (Yuk, yuk, yuk.) "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness."

February 25, 2010 at 1:47 P.M. This essay posted earlier this morning has experienced the usual attacks and alterations. I will do my best to make necessary corrections of all inserted "errors."

This essay was written "in a wood near Athens" in 2005 ... well, actually, uptown and about a block from the "A" train. With a little face-lift and push-up bra, I think this text is more timely and looks better today than when it first appeared. Enjoy.

Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman and Ashberry (Princeton: 2005).
Langdon Hammer, "Overheard Speech," (Book Review), The New York Times, Sunday, October 16, 2005, p. 8.

Why write? People who write because they "have to" find this question bizarre. You might ask yourself: "Why should I bother to breathe?" We just do in order to stay alive. Erica Jong said in an interview that being a writer today is like "becoming a blacksmith or an alchemist" (not a far-fetched analogy!), an expert in an activity that the majority of people no longer value very much. Yet it is the unavoidable fate of some of us to have to write every day. It doesn't matter if publishing opportunities are unfairly denied to us, if our manuscripts are defaced or destroyed, it doesn't matter if we are ignored or insulted. We "ink-stained wretches" will continue to write.

These days carpel-tunnel syndrome is more likely than ink-stains, together with cyberattacks from something called "Doubleclick." New Jersey? Hemingway said that he kept a number of rejection letters taped to the wall of his study. I guess they served as inspiration. Recently, I sent out letters to small publishers to see if any were interested in an essay collection that I am putting together. So far I have received one expression of interest that, I think, amounts to a "yes." I have also received a "no." In neither case can I say why the publisher came to a particular decision. I wonder whether they know why they accept or reject books. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

A number of publishers have not bothered to respond, so who knows? Perhaps they don't approve of my politics or just don't like what I have to say. Viruses, spyware, obstructions (this morning I can't read my work at Lulu) are a daily feature of my writing experience. I wonder whether Shakespeare had these problems? I doubt it. ("Serendipity, III" and "Master and Commander.")

It makes no difference in my case. I will continue to write and put the books out there somehow. It's nice that I now have a commercial publisher, I think, because the book will be more attractive and will be on shelves in bookstores. Anyway, real writers will write no matter what, regardless of discouragement or any other troubles. I am, once again, my own non-commercial publisher, when I can get into my Lulu account, and yes, I am hurt by that. It means that I will continue to write. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey" as well as "Burn Notice.")

Writing can be a life-saver, especially for the person who has a sense of being misunderstood or not understood at all. You write because you hope that there are others, located elsewhere in the literary landscape, who will recognize the emotions and experiences that you describe and react to them. I never know whether my computer will survive the attacks from one day to the next, nor whether I will be able to renew my security system. Writing, for me, is like living in the trenches of World War I -- long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.

I was just reading a journal entry by Sylvia Plath addressed to her "demon," and I felt that I uncerstood her so well. A writer (or any artist) sometimes needs to fight off self-doubt and persist. The best thing to do, always, is to keep writing and reading while ignoring all insults as well as dismissals. The insults provide boredom; the defacements of my writings produce concern and sadness.

By "react," I do not mean to approve or agree with what I say. Any reaction is better than none -- and a strong reaction, including a negative review -- is preferable to non-comprehension or dismissal. Anything I publish will be subjected to politically-motivated and -financed attacks. Controversy sells. Go right ahead and attack my writings, as long as you do not alter or try to destroy them.

Writers tend to be eccentric or "weird" in their families and social circles. They are the person no one understood at the dinner table, who adopts -- as a surface persona -- the mores and masks of his contemporaries, but who really lives only in what I call the "Forest of Arden." The dull-witted reader and all lawyers -- who are made literal-minded by their unfortunate training -- will immediately ask: "What is the Forest of Arden? And do they need experts on property law?"
Well, the Forest of Arden is that imaginary space conjured by language where writer and reader meet, maybe where all artists meet the recipients of their works. Shakespeare evokes this magical landscape in several of his plays, especially in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "As You Like It." It is that strange territory, which is unique for each of us, where one is likely to run into Huck Finn or Peter Pan, also Prince Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes, or that Vampire from Steven King's Salem's Lot.

Myra Breckinridge discusses cinema with those who are interested, and Sidney Carton shares stories of unrequitted love in a pub. King Kong is always climbing the Empire State building and Fay Wray is always wearing that nightgown.You can play games with David Copperfield; while Oliver Twist steals your wallet. I can sit in a meadow and listen to Jose Marti read his poems and stories for children. Oscar Wilde shares some of his own poems in prose. George Bernard Shaw is making speeches in the "Speaker's Corner" of this landscape. George Orwell and H.G. Wells then take turns in responding. They are happy when you stop to listen or nod in agreement.

Cyrano is always dueling with someone, which can be very annoying. And Caruso sings duets with Callas. Luckily, any real politicians are forbidden entry to this territory, where lawyers, accountants and business consultants are feared much more than wolves in the forest. After all, some of those wolves have tenure and lecture on "Romanticism." Age is non-existent for the residents of this Arden, since all of them are children at heart -- like Wendy. ("A Review of the t.v. Series 'Alice.'")

In the athletes' territory, Joe Louis spars with Jack Dempsey. Some day, Ali will show them who is the greatest. The pick-up basketball games are great. The philosophers have named their grove "The Academy" and they argue all the time, even pretending to understand Hegel -- which is something that not even Hegel does! -- except for Socrates, of course, who insists on being puzzled by all of the others. Marx is planning a revolution. And Wittgenstein sits by himself, or hangs out with the people who like detective stories. "If a lion should learn to speak," he says. But then, in Arden, the lions do speak. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

Friedrich Nietzsche wears a "Superman" t-shirt and baggy pants, some big medallions, and likes to knock people down, while doing his own improvisational raps. Don Quixote and Sancho have destroyed all of the windmills. There are still nice cottages in what John Fowles describes as "the echanted grove." You cannot buy them, but you can have as many as you like. And Don Juan is always kissing the ladies behind one of those cottages. Every tree has a "Z" carved into it by Zorro. The most intimate conversations, which are sometimes whispered, take place with poets. All of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, recite their works. We often must overhear them ...

"John Stuart Mill memorably described poetry as 'overheard' speech. His image calls to mind the solitary poet so absorbed in conversation with himself that we are able to sneak up behind and listen in. Often, this means overhearing the poet talking not so much to himself as to someone who is not there. Vendler's study [Invisible Listeners] concerns a special type of overhearing in which the poet's addressee is not a distant lover or mourned-for child, but a figure more of fantasy, of purely poetic imagination. [Ms. Woolf's "ideal reader"?] Poetry of this kind begins in the poet's craving for a listener, a desire so keen it calls its object into being." (Langdon Hammer)
The Forest of Arden is the linguistic landscape "called into being" by writers and readers, by writers as readers. It is the place where all art lives. In England, England by Julian Barnes, we are asked to imagine an "England where all the pubs are quaint, where the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), where the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his men really are merry. ... "

British Airways cannot "fly you there," only you can really do that. If you need some help to imagine this setting, then rent the film "Finding Neverland." For a mere $13.00, Mr. Barnes will be only too pleased to show you the way to Arden in his interesting story, with an ulterior motive or two. Novelists delight in ulterior motives. The one great requisite in Arden is a child-like quality of innocence which is, sadly, beaten out of most people early in life. One resident of Arden named Alice, tells a curious story of tumbling down a rabbit hole, landing in a dark space where she found a very small door --

"-- 'What a curious feeling,' exclaimed Alice. 'I must be closing up like a telescope.' ..."

That is exactly what happened to Alice. Many of us know what it is like, as children, to close up like a telescope. Sometimes the place that hurts inside seems to grow and we become only the wound, feeling only pain. If we can love someone so much that this love's reality is even greater than the pain, then the love becomes Arden. Love becomes this space of safety and peace, where they cannot hurt us anymore. Wonderland. Never, Never Land. A rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. "Serendipity, III"?

I will take a deep breath, restart my computer and try (again) to read my work at Lulu, expecting those insulting comments and further computer viruses, alterations or destructions of my writings, as my daily experience of the hatred that deforms so many unfortunate people's lives. The challenge is not to give in to the impulse to respond in kind, while insisting on justice. I will not alter or deface the writings or creative expressions of others. I also will not hesitate to continue to speak freely, regardless of what New Jersey officials and other mafia members think of what I have to say.

"She was only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size to go through the little door into that lovely garden."

We must become small again to go through that special door to Arden. Mr. Barnes, in his novel, explains why this is so:

"... What held her attention now were the children's faces, which expressed such willing yet complex trust in reality. As she saw it, they had not yet reached the age of incredulity, only of wonder; so that even when they disbelieved, they also believed. The tubby, peering dwarf in the distorting mirror was them and wasn't them: both were true."

The distorting mirror is, of course, the text -- cinematic or literary texts, canvas or stone, even music and theater. You see yourself in this text by seeing me. Hegel is perking up again. And Miss Alice agrees. Like many of us ...

"This curious girl likes to pretend to be two people."

Alas, there is a problem for Alice:

" 'But it's no use now,' Alice thought, 'to pretend to be two people. Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one complete person.' ..."

Immanuel Kant came to the rescue and explained to Alice all about the noumenal and phenomenal, the way in which we all exist on dual planes anyway. They went off together, then, to chat about philosophy. The two of us make one great person.

We write to invite others to join us in the Forest of Arden. If you have read this entry, then you must be a regular visitor to that territory already. Welcome.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2010-02-14T06:33:00.000-08:00

For Miss Emma Woodhouse and Miss Elizabeth Bennett:

Tempus fugit, tempus eternum est ...

A Hour With Thee

by

Sir Walter Scott

An hour with thee! When earliest day
Dapples with gold the eastern grey,
Oh, what can frame my mind to bear
The toil and turmoil, cark and care,
New griefs, which coming hours unfold,
And sad remembrance of the old?
One hour with thee.

One hour with thee! When burning June
Waves his red flag at pitch of noon;
What shall repay the faithful swain,
His labor on the sultry plain;
And, more than cave or sheltering bough,
Cool feverish blood and throbbing brow?
One hour with thee.

One hour with thee! When sun is set,
Oh, what can teach me to forget
The thankless labours of the day;
The hopes, the wishes, flung away;
The increasing wants, and lessening gains,
The master's pride, who scorns my pain?
One hour with thee.

To me faire friend you never can be old

by

William Shakespeare

To me faire friend you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyde,
Such seems your beauty still: Three Winters colde,
Have from the forrests shooke three summers pride,
Three beautious springs to yellow Autumme turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seene,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are greene.
And yet doth beauty like a Dyall hand,
Steale from his figure, and no peace perceiv'd,
So your sweete hew, which me thinkes still doth stand
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceaved.
For feare of which, heare this thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauties summer dead.

From the Mad Hatter,

"If you knew Time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."

"I don't know what you mean," said Alice.

"Of course you don't!" the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptously. "I dare say you never even spoke to Time!"

"Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied, "but I know I have to beat time when I learn music."

"Ah! That accounts for it," said the Hatter, "He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just in time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for my dinner!"

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Bantam Editions, 1981), p. 56 (1st. Pub. 1865, 1871).