For an explanation of the frustration-inducement technique of psychological torture, see the introduction to "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory."
July 22, 2010 at 3:35 P.M. I am deeply saddened to report that "errors" have been reinserted in this text, once again. These "errors" are not found in previous printed versions of the work. I surmise that the goal of this continuing computer crime is to maximize the psychological harm to me, probably because the good folks in New Jersey responsible for this criminality are incapable of comprehending the ideas discussed below. Lack of comprehension will not preclude plagiarism efforts. I will do my best to repair the harm done to writings as soon as I become aware of such harms. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")
I hoped that this essay would be spared from alteration. It hasn't been. I will do my best to repair the harm done, yet again. These defacements are hurtful to me, also damaging to anyone who may benefit from reading my work. More "errors" inserted and corrected. I cannot say how often this process has taken place. (See "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")
I ask that you read: "What is it like to be tortured?"
Juan Galis-Menendez, "Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation," in Applied Epistemology, http://www.appliedepistemologytoday.com/shop.php?= (reissue or link to my essay on Kant in the Philosophy section at Critique. I hope without editorial additions.)
I cannot access my writings at MSN groups nor can I say whether they continue to exist as I wrote them. If Critique continues to exist at MSN groups, then I urge readers to view these essays with the images I attached to them that were intended to further the argument in the text.
Spacing of paragraphs in this essay may be affected by hackers at any time. Letters may be removed from words or other "errors" may be inserted in the text. Also, it is not unusual for my essays to be plagiarized -- even as I am told that they are no good -- and they are published in scholarly journals for some reason. My discussion is based primarily on the following sources:
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Anchor, 1966), (F. Max Muller, trans., 1st Pub. 1781).
Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1999).
Paul Guyer, The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). http://www.cambridge.org/ (1st printing, 1992).
Robert Paul Wolff, ed., Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: Anchor, 1966).
James Burke, The Knowledge Web (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin-Putnam, 1995).
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2007).
Paul Guyer, Kant (New York & London: Routledge, 2006).
D.G. Leahy, Novitas Mundi (New York: SUNY, 1994).
Richard Lewontin, "Not So Natural Selection," in The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010, at p. 34. Reviewing Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar & Straus and Giroux, 2010), pp. 264, $26.00.
Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (New York & London: Routledge, 2001).
Paul Ricoeur, Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology (New York & London: Continuum, 2004).
Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 2003).
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Plume, 2007).
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
David Wiggins, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Immanuel Kant was concerned to be a scientific thinker, whose views were fully compatible with the latest Newtonian learning of his day. Kant hoped to insulate belief in human freedom and morality, in God and immortality, from the encroachments of mechanistic thinking and Hume's skepticism. This leads me to wonder whether Kant wanted to have it both ways -- like most dualistic or dual-aspect thinkers -- so that, even this greatest of all philosophical intellects, ultimately came up against the limits of human thought. If he did come to those limits, then all the more credit is due to him for the achievement.
The purpose of philosophical effort is to discover solutions to intellectual puzzles that we experience as important, such as reconciling our sense of free will with what we know of the workings of empirical reality. Any attempt to ignore or deny one aspect of this complex reality -- the existence of free agents or of a causally determined material universe -- will be unsatisfactory in the end.
Newton's mechanics governing large material bodies must now be supplemented with discussions of particle physics and the enigmas of quantum mechanics. Since we are all "large" -- and in America, very large "bodies" -- determinism has not gone away. But then, neither has the insistence on freedom in the moral realm. I say this as someone who has been very large and also amazingly fit at different times in his life. I appreciate the difficulties with weight that we all experience these days. I am not criticizing people who are overweight.
Any other disclaimers needed by critics concerning Political Correctness (PC) issues should be understood by the literal-minded. Such literal persons are better-known as what Mr. Lesniak of New Jersey calls: "stupid imbeciles." This category may include Mr. Lesniak to say nothing of Mr. Christie.
I am a "compatibilist," like Kant, that is, someone who believes that human freedom and responsibility, the existence of meaningful "choice," must be compatible with causality in the empirical world. I reject all forms of "absolute determinism," whether the agent of determinism is the subconscious, economic necessity, or spirits. (For a cinematic exploration of this theme in a mythical setting, see the "Matrix" films, which are all about "choice.")
A fascinating contrast and tension exists on this issue of locating free will between Spinoza's rationalism (deterministic, but is it?) and Locke's empiricism (knowledge is derived from the senses) within the Kantian synthesis that is the Enlightenment's Critical Theory (freedom as a necessary "practical" postulate of human social life). This does not obviate the necessity of deciding where (or with whom) to place responsibility for human actions and their consequences.
Professor Goswami's recent scientific work defending a form of transcendental idealism that absorbs traditional material realism might have gained from a return to Kant's thinking, as reinterpreted by contemporary scholars.
What follows is a typical articulation, in the language of science, of idealistic premises and the essence of the phenomenological-hermeneutic insight. All of this can be said in mathematical language today by making use of the new fancy geometry of manifolds. A chapter of Roger Penrose's recent book (Roads to Reality) is devoted to these fascinating developments in the protean language of mathematics -- a chapter absorbed by me while I "examined" this book in the bookstore saving me the $20.00 required to purchase the work:
"Is the effect of our choice preceding its cause in time? Wheeler: 'Nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead, what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose.' ... "
This does not make the results of experiments unobjective or untrue, nor do quantum science and our genetic-environmental ballet become arbitrary processes, nor is nature or truth merely "relative":
"'We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.' [John Wheeler was a colleague of Einstein's at Princeton.] ... There is no manifest photon until we see it, and thus how we see it determines its attributes. Before our observation, the photon splits into two wave packets (a packet for each path), but these packets are only packets of possibilities for the photon; there is no actuality in space-time, [only reality,] no decision-making at M1. Does the effect precede its cause and violate causality? It certainly does -- if you think of the photon as a classical particle always manifest in space-time. The photon is not a classical particle."
The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York & London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 74-75 (emphasis added). ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
The recent death of Ray Solomonoff -- whose pioneering work with Professor Minsky at MIT largely created "probability theory" in the context of A.I. research and so-called "modelling" of complexity options -- is mourned by all students of the new quantum "epistemology." John Markoff, "Ray Solomonoff, 83, Made Machines Think," in The New York Times, January 13, 2010, at p. A29. ("Mind and Machine" and "Computers and Consciousness.")
Ironically, the recent death of Edward Schillebeeckx, the foremost Catholic theologian of the second half of the twentieth century -- whose ideas bear striking parallels with much of this scientific theory concerning A.I. -- coincides with the passing of Mr. Solomonoff.
I am not aware that any commentator on the works of these thinkers has noted that both men may be described as hermeneutic theorists. I suggest to students an approach to the thinking of these scholars focusing on the question: "What is a person?" In what ways did Mr. Solomonoff and Father Schillebeeckx attempt to answer this question concerning "personhood"? Were they always aware that this question was central to their thinking? What is "consciousness"? ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
Any complex work of art is also not a classical particle in Wheeler's sense: Where does the work of art "happen"? At what point in time does a movie take place? Who are the subjects of a film that is a work of art? Is every movie about you, the viewer? Is a "fusion of horizons" (Gadamer) the goal of works of art -- and of our universe -- as the cosmos displays alarming "feminine" wiles? Is this "fusion" your goal as the recipient of art works and as a "subject" within a universe that contains other subjects? ("Pieta" and "Master and Commander.")
I am also not a classical particle. I believe that no human being is reducible to a "psychobabble" (or any other) category or classification. As for "M-theory," you should refer to Wigner's theory concerning "strings" and "blobs." None of this challenges complex understandings of truth or objectivity. Whether (or not) some phenomenon becomes "actual" is always "real."
This insight concerning quantum variability has been confirmed by subsequent research. Much of this research among cognitive neurologists and bio-chemists as well as physicists suggests a dual-aspect feature to human consciousness or mind, revealing a particle AND wave aspect of human subjects:
Jahn, R.G., Dunne, B.R., "On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness With Applications to Anomalous Phenomena," 16 Foundations of Physics pp. 771-772 (1986). This classic article by quantum theorists has generated a whole industry devoted to working out the ideas presented by these scientists: H. Froelich & F. Kraemer, Coherent Exitations in Biological Systems (Berlin: Heidelberg, 1983) and Dana Zohar, "A Quantum Mechanical Model of Consciousness," in The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 76-91. ("The meaning of each -- in the case of the electron, its mode of being -- depends on its place within a relationship, on its context.") ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
This is a new vocabulary for Kantian thinking in terms of noumenal and phenomenal aspects of our shared REALITY as "entanglement." Notice that Mr. Demme's "Something Wild" and the actors' performances in that movie predate these developments in physics and biology. Artistic genius can foreshadow developments in intellectual culture.
For those who prefer analogies from biology, you may wish to recall early efforts to cope with genetics information by removal of genes with the hope that identification and removal of genes responsible for specific illnesses would result in abolishing the illness. It became clear to researchers -- notably in France -- that the crucial consideration was the relationship or interaction between and among genes as well as environments to produce illnesses.
There were predispositions and tendencies inherited that made some "narratives" more attractive to one person's genetic composition as distinct from another's genetic make-up. The best course of action seemed to be to discover ways of increasing options or alternatives for genetic "relations" making illness less attractive to genes "dancing" with multiple environmental partners. The goal is to make the narrative of health more attractive to the organism than the narrative of illness for as long a period of time as possible.
Much the same is true with regard to crime as opposed to legality, positive versus negative narrative options, without a collapse into behaviorist incoherence. Invitations to dance. Movies are options offered to viewers. The most interesting "readings" of movies are usually made by the more complex viewers of films. The best movies contain countless options for viewers. But then, the most fascinating people also offer many possible interpretations -- or readings -- of their identities to others. To the extent that a cinematic work may be viewed as a play of "meanings" it should be seen as something organic whose essence is invitational. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
A number of theorists making use of wholistic thinking in formal chemical and biological systems suggest correctives to evolutionary theory emphasizing that it is not traits but organisms, as networks and totalities, that are selected for survival. By whom or what is this "selection" made is a subject of discussion. Another way to speak of total organisms is as "narratives." Hence, new thinking in biology connects to the latest theorizing in physics and mathematics as well as chemistry aligning "narrativity" with "networks logic": "This is not an idle distinction because organisms will be selected as a consequence of their total biology." (Lewontin, p. 35.) ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
There are constraints on freedom: drugging, duress, interference with mental functioning, impairments that can preclude use of freedom, and so on. Nonetheless, deciding on the meaning of such impairments will always remain for the individual. Choice is an inescapable feature of human experience. A lobotomized person, deprived of subjectivity, surrenders an important component of his or her humanity with the loss of social agency. ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.")
We know that we -- like rocks and shoes -- exist in a world of material objects, now governed by post-Newtonian scientific laws. We are subject to the same natural laws that tell us, say, how far my shoe will travel if thrown by me across the room. The relevant factors are considered: the weight of the shoe, the wind resistance, and the amount of strength that I can muster for the throw. The shoe has no say in the matter and neither do I. I cannot suspend the laws of physics and (in that sense) I am not free.
At the same time, whether I choose to throw the shoe across the room or to put it on and go out to get the newspaper is up to me. It is exclusively my totally arbitrary decision. I often do not know which I will do on any given occasion. Neither does my shoe. The difference between myself and my shoe is the “free will” giving rise to that choice in me which is not found in the material realm ("out there"), but rather in the part of me that is in the "noumenal" realm ("in here") -- and which is not subject to material determination, even if it is always compatible with it, according to Kant.
Free will is a product of consciousness and imagination that is concerned with the MEANINGS of our actions. Elsewhere, I offer a defense of this claim using Ricoeur's hermeneutics. What is the meaning of any movie as distinct from what happens in the film?
Meaning is about interpretation; what happens is about descriptions. Meanings concern actions; descriptions are of events. Meanings are the products of human experience; events happen in the empirical world. A movie may be an empirical object (this DVD) and also more than this empirical object (the construction of the work as a movie). For example, the story "told" by the film and what it means to you is not reducible to what "happened" on film. For this reason reviewers may disagree about the merits of a movie while agreeing concerning what is depicted, factually, on-screen.
With regard to temporal dynamics and issues, the problem to think about is not whether time travel is possible, but whether moments in our personal time travel with us in our life's journeys, erupting at any single instant in order to alter the dynamics of our lives.
Professor Greene and other commentators on quantum theory have noted that the future may affect the past in the sense of selecting some sets of possibilities over others. Continental theory would assign this choice to the process of discovering-selecting meanings from contending sets of "options" that are always "present" in the past or "present" for the future. Please refer to Mr. Lewontin's writings on evolutionary theory.
The Kantian ding an sich leads by way of Hegel's "Spirit" and Schopenhauer's "Will" to Freud's description of the "id." Some recent findings by cognitive neurologists raise doubts about much of this. Persons may certainly be impaired or obstructed in their freedom, as I say, but for now this general picture will do.
“People will do what they want to do and no one knows why,” as my grandmother (who was a Kantian without knowing it) used to say.
"Psychobabblers" and torturers (often the same people) seeking to condition persons into permissible ways of being, as determined by them, are frustrated to discover this indestructible human inclination and need for freedom. Determinists and some materialists claim that I am only a material object exactly like my shoe, in the sense that all of me is material. To such social scientists I am only a "thing." There is no Kantian noumenal part of me. No part of me is beyond the reach of the material or mechanical causation which operates in the empirical world.
Yet for reasons of biology alone, it is useless to think in such terms. In light of current theories of the inherent uncertainties of psychological -- or even physical -- reality, it makes little sense to think in such outdated Newtonian terms at all. Such a misconception may involve a category mistake where meanings (actions) are confused with empirical occurrences (events). Human being-in-the-world-with-others involves events-as-actions, INTERPRETATIONS. See Bryan Appleyard's, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 158-187 and James Gleick, "Revolution," in Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 35-83:
" ... coherent superpositions are transcendent objects. They are brought into imminence [instantiated] only when consciousness, by the process of observation, chooses one of the many facets of the coherent superposition, though its choice is constrained by the probabilities [emphasis added] allowed by the quantum calculus. (Consciousness is lawful.) The creativity of the cosmos [freedom] comes from the creativity of its quantum laws, not from arbitrary lawlessness." (Goswami, p. 84.)
Pick a card, any card. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
Where and when does the art work happen? Where and when the recipient allows the work of art (like the other) to "be." The self and the world jointly make up the self and the world. The way to create the work of art is to be "open" to its being; the way to create the other's freedom is to receive the gift of the other's being (pain?), in order to provide one's gift (love that heals) of the self to and for others. Let the work of art speak to you, just you, in a unique way. Be receptive to the "messages" of others. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
This is a Kantian insight. Freedom is only possible in a lawful universe and not in an arbitrary one. Among the laws foundational to the universal order is the principle of freedom (quantum variability). Given the dynamic conception of biological identity, which is always in flux and evolving, it will not be helpful to think in metaphors of rigid mechanical determination when speaking of organisms and their natural transformations. A one sentence summary of new thinking concerning the relationship between organisms and environments is: "When you move, I move -- just like that." Mambo? (See the film Paris, Je T'aime, which I was unable to see to completion yesterday, for a sense of a complex whole with a unique identity.)
Thinkers to plug in at this juncture must include biologists Rupert Sheldrake and Nobel winner, biochemist Humberto Maturana. Chile, Brazil and Argentina have produced thriving schools of biology and physics which are not as well known in North America as they should be:
"If DNA is not a code but a flowing message" -- a set of movie-like narrative options or plots unfolding in time? -- "affected by the very things it is supposed to be controlling, then neo-Darwinians will have to face sticky questions about how natural selection works. How can environmental pressures select one gene over another if the genes themselves are in a constant process [or dance]?"
J.P. Briggs & F.D. Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 200-201. (Maturana's "autopoiesis," at pp. 190-191.)
The mathematics of biological systems in calculating probabilities within complex trans-organic systems (systems of meanings, like economies) and ecosystems -- probabilities set genetically and environmentally -- is a new-born specialty in science. Chinese medicine has been aware of these insights for years. Schrodinger's classic study What is Life? up to Sheldrake's current speculations concerning "morphic fields" are advancing knowledge in this important area of biology. Much of this work is a priori and consistent with idealist models of epistemology that are usually rationalist. Paul Davies writes:
"Most physicists would claim that the conflict between determinism and free will is irrelevant because we know that the quantum factor disproves determinism anyway."
God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 139-140.
Notice that Brian Greene's discussion of the physics of time leaves him with a choice of narratives: " ... the example gives insight into the issue of whether spacetime (the loaf) is really an entity or just an abstract concept, [both?] an abstract union of space right now together with its history and purported future." The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2007), p. 138.
Even in defining "time" Professor Greene cannot escape the temporal constraints of language ("now") that shape his most seemingly objective scientific discussion. This is something that would remain true if the discussion were to unfold in a mathematical language of equations.
Literary and philosophical understandings of time cannot be ignored because they filter into all discussions of the concept, whether in science or the various arts, also in terms of how we live our lives. No one has seen that Sheldrake's "morphic fields" is a contribution to epistemology and aesthetics. ("Stephen Hawking is Right on Time" and "Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined.")
Do we know that determinism is disproved? If so, then shouldn't someone tell behaviorists?
I regret that continuing attacks on this essay have damaged the text so many times that readers may be discouraged from pursuing the logic of these arguments. I will do my best to keep up with corrections required by these daily criminal vandalisms of my work. It is encouraging to realize that I must have struck a nerve by articulating these truths. It is also discouraging to think that corruption in an American jurisdiction makes this censorship possible. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
We certainly do know that determinism is at least "uncertain" when it comes to the sub-atomic realm, as I have noted, although Newton's laws continue to apply to larger material bodies. Marxist theories of the determining material-economic forces of history -- theories which were developed partly by analogy to physics understood in nineteenth century terms -- are rendered absurd in light of contemporary scientific knowledge, which has no bearing on the validity of the important ethics of a much more attractive non-scientific or humanistic Marxism associated with the writings of the young Marx, as well as many contemporary Critical Marxist thinkers, including the Frankfurt School and Fidel Castro:
"In contrast to the mechanistic ... view of the world, the world view emerging from modern physics can be characterized by words like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of multiple objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process."
Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Bantam, 1982), pp. 77-78 (see the film, "Mindwalk").
The dangers of our metaphors in science, as noted by Professor Lewontin, become acute when the metaphors are outworn or refer to an outdated paradigm:
"Darwin, quite explicitly, derived this understanding of the motivating force underlying evolution from the actions of plant and animal breeders who consciously choose variant individuals with desirable properties to breed for future generations." (Lewontin, p. 34, emphasis added.)
This same description may apply to societies or revolutions, even to networks of human knowledge which are akin to organisms "selected" for survival. Here are some unlikely associations, Paul Weiss, "Understanding: The Acceptance of the Modes," in Modes of Being (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958), pp. 519-548 and Paul Guyer, "Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality," in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 242-265 with Timothy Bewes, "Reification as Cultural Anxiety," in Reification: The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London & New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 191-201.
We read that: "Panasonic is only slightly ahead of its time." We fail to realize that this is another way of saying that "Panasonic" does not yet exist. Panasonic exists only when the word has meaning for you. Most advertising phrases are, literally, meaningless. "We will sell no wine before its time." ("Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
Evidently, my mere mention of Fidel Castro is sufficient for these censorship efforts to take place, also for them not to be punished or prevented by corrupt officials from New Jersey or Florida. I will make it a point to discuss more of Mr. Castro's ideas and writings, even though I happen to disagree with many of them, in order to establish my freedom to think and write as I see fit. I am not a slave. I am not a laboratory animal. My opinions cannot be falsified by intimidation or torture. I will read whatever interests me. However flawed or inadequate I may be, New Jersey's judges and prominent politicians are, usually, far worse human beings than I could ever be. You Jersey Boys owe me some explanations and a hell of a lot of money. This nightmare is on you. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
A friend who worked as an auto mechanic explained to me that a car is a totality. You can replace a generator or transmission. The same is true for the removal of an appendix in the human body or the replacement of a kidney. However, the rest of the car is still old, the parts are frayed and the total entity will continue to have problems. This seems like a good way to think about people and societies -- as totalities. "Wholeness is truth." This holism is one way of thinking of socialism.
What is this totality that the car "is" and that is not reducible to any one part or set of parts apart from their integrated functions? Perhaps some of us and our ideas are "only slightly ahead of our times." Think of evolution. Now think of revolution.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my friend was (and probably still is) a philosophical idealist with rationalistic tendencies.
I am afraid that things are even more complex, for we must think of this hypothetical car in relation to the roads on which it travels, climate, fuel and other factors. All of the car's functions, purposes and meanings (for us) will point to external meanings and functions, human intentionality, eventually leading to the totality or absolute set of meanings by which we live our lives. Communitarianism. Coherentism. Networks. Structures.
A car (like an organism) is a complex totality that includes relationships with environments. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
An organism, in fact, is an even more dynamic “thing” or entity than a static physical object. A living being is a miniature universe of his or her own. No one disputes that the “meaning” or explanation of a human being's actions -- why we do what we do, or why we have the brains that we do, for instance -- is only “determined” as part of a “story” or narrative of life unfolding by adapting to an environment with others. This adpating need not mean exclusively Darwinian reductivism.
An oil spill in the Gulf becomes even more worrisome as it drifts to the Mississippi Basin which is the source of the food supply for so many organisms.
A key transition from the physics of material bodies to biological evolution of organisms has an effect on our moral reasoning as well as upon social theory and aesthetics. It may help to account for the difference between Kant and Hegel, along with Hegel's philosophical progeny in Britain and on the European continent.
Let me clear about this, when it comes to our natural environments and history -- to our history as a species -- I am a Darwinist.
Human social reality, however, involves ambiguities and changes, uncertainties and complexities, a never-ending “dance” of a sort that is about meanings. Call it evolution with a human face. Lebenswelt. ("Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined.")
Perhaps the key insight of psychoanalysis is that, in this social dance, both partners -- the subject and the interpreted social environment -- are within the psyche, to the extent that they can be known at all. And yet the psyche is also, as phenomenologists insist, within a "lifeworld." In the lifeworld, navigation will require hermeneutic aptitude, a talent for interpretation. With regard to interpretations, actors, writers, painters and other artists will be highly useful to our efforts at "understanding' as well as "knowing" ourselves.
Who and what you are is not and cannot be reducible to your brain or your body, but has a lot to do with others and environments as well as, or in addition to, your brain and body. This social space -- which is partly cultural -- is an aspect of our mental realities, or minds. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and, again, "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
If this social space of meanings is integral to what human minds are and whether they function well or poorly, then surgical attempts to "remove" human emotional suffering will be doomed to fail.
To be sure some mental illness may have an organic cause. Much emotional illness will have ideational or social causes and explanations related to environments and all other persons for the sufferer. Drilling holes in a person's brain will not help with these maladies. Neither will inserting "errors" in essays such as this one. Much emotional illness is "communicative" and contagious in more ways than one. Altering the biochemistry of a person suffering from an emotional illness may result in making the victim much worse.
People who wish to eliminate considerations of mental state or mens rea in punishing criminal acts fail to realize that whether a behavior or event is a criminal act at all (or unethical) depends on the kind of actions committed or the meaning attached to behavior. This meaning will be a matter of interpreting the "intentionality" that governed the behavior. For opposing views, see H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), at pp. 1-28 and Kent Greenawalt, Conflicts of Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), at pp. 241-311.
An organism can only interpret "real" events by means of languages, all of which also have a history and are social. At this point Cassirer and Ricoeur are important, as is the recent work in ontology and metaphysics by Catholic thinker D.G. Leahy and philosopher Nicholas Rescher's writings. A brilliant essay by Professor Rescher dealing with the "philosophy of philosophy" was nearly read by me in the bookstore, sparing me the $17.95 demanded for this worthy title when I had only $10.50. This painful "gap" in funds is what Marxist philosophers call a "dilemma."
Let me return, briefly, to my automobile example. The idea of roads and movement on roads is essential to what a car "is," so that without the idea of persons using cars for travel on roads or movement, a car is incomprehensible.
Well, language (understood broadly) is like the roads or highways on which persons (human vehicles) are meant to move in relation to one another. What we are is "connected" to language and this capacity for movement in thought as well as expression towards others that we possess, uniquely, or differently from all other creatures, which makes no sense apart from our natural and necessary sociability. (Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Derrida, etc.)
The answer to the "nature versus nurture" debate may be that what is most important is how one interprets the environment in which one's nature must develop. Hermeneutics is essential. This brings us to Hegel, as I say, the Other, and the mystery of language. Language is organic and evolving. Language is something inherently communal. Mysteriously, language is always both individual and social, dynamic and shared, as are the things which language makes possible -- like identity.
If it is true that there can be no mind without a brain it is equally true that there can be no mind without language. The crucial human invention and capacity, making self-consciousness and social interaction possible is language, logos or the word. Hence, any form of reductivism that seeks to limit the person to cerebral functions must be inadequate. Professor Leahy's book should be read with great care by scientists and philosophers, then by lit-crit guys and gals. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?")
"Madness," as Michel Foucault points out, "is only possible in society." It can only be the result of conceptual or linguistic categories and judgments, for example, even when these judgments are applied to behavior linked to observable biological or neurochemical phenomena or processes. The mad speak a different "language" from the rest of us, a language which locks them into their own psyches. To reach them, you must learn their language. Criminals may be described in similar terms.
Joseph Campbell notes the affinity between schizophrenic and psychotic experiences linked to archetypes found in global mythology and art. Mythology is an externalization of states of mind that are nearly identical to the experience of severe psychotic episodes. Joseph Campbell, "Schizophrenia -- The Inward Journey," in Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 207-239 and "'The Prestige': A Movie Review."
Images in global art and mythology parallel imagery in deep psychosis and dream states of persons disconnected from reality -- but also to some degree this is true in all dreaming by anyone -- because dreaming re-connects persons to sometimes painful or poorly understood reality(ies).
The point is not that madness is a dream because dreaming is essential to everyone in human societies. Madness is a singular dream that (usually) cannot be shared because it is not understood. This dream always reflects an environment for the dreamer. To understand that singular dream -- and the dreaming subject -- civilization, cultural awareness, artistic sensitivity, humanity may be more important than scientific accomplishment or any external manipulation.
All dreams constitute and are expressive of a language. (See Jennifer Lopez in "The Cell.")
Madness is always an attempt to communicate. Madness is a language of primal imagery. Persons in all ages have dreamt the same dreams in reaction to comparable dilemmas. Indeed, collectivelly, we dream the same myths and archetypes -- religious stories -- to deal with life's transitions and death. Compare R.D. Laing, "The Mental Hospital," in Wisdom, Madness and Folly (Edingburgh: Cannongate Classic, 1985), pp. 120-135 and Adam Phillips, "The Soul of Man Under Psychoanalysis," in Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 89-115 with Michel Foucault, "The Means of Correct Training," in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 170-195. (Michael Caine's Oscar-worthy performance in "Quills" is highly recommended.)
I came upon a woman yesterday who sat on the sidewalk, crying, and speaking into an imaginary phone. I offered her some money. She explained that she did not need money. I looked into her eyes and nodded, smiled. I would have sat next to her and spoken to her through an imaginary phone. I am sure that she would have responded. She stared into my eyes. I saw universes of pain in her eyes, even as she seemed to smile back at me. "I don't need money," she repeated. Did she also see universes of pain in me? I felt compassion and interest from her directed at me.
I experienced a shared moment of genuine communication or empathy. We shared a kind of "roadway" that is emotional communication. We traveled together, briefly. We acted in a scene together. This moment was the product of a willingness to be vulnerable in her eyes and also respectful. I hope that woman is safe and well today. I do not know the facts of her life. I understood something about her existential situation. Perhaps, she understood something about me and my life. In such an "I and Thou" encounter (Martin Buber), I always try to imagine what a great actor would do.
In every encounter that I have experienced with profoundly disturbed persons I have received a kind of "request" for compassion that is rarely expressed explicitly and yet is impossible to ignore or fail to understand, for it is a kind of reaching out in, or by way of, representation or art. I am sure that, at least one of the people inserting "errors" in these writings, is very disturbed. Curiously, one senses this same reaching out in a different way in the great works of creative artists, like Shakespeare or Rembrandt, Leonardo or Spinoza. I feel this, sometimes, desperate effort at deeper than conscious communication from all great actors and directors: "April is the cruelest month ..." ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
How would Kate Winslet respond to meeting this woman?
I suspect that Kate would improvise by speaking into an imaginary phone of her own. Although we encounter others all the time, shake hands, and say "hello" -- we rarely "meet" other persons anymore. (Meeting is a "fusion of horizons.")
When you go to the movies, try to "meet" the film on its own terms. Meanings come to you. You will not need to search for the most important meanings in your life.
I am about to review "The Prisoner," a wonderful AMC television series that looks like a highly literate British production. I am struck by the references to the writings of Michel Foucault, then to Ludwig Bingswanger's "ontological" view of human beings which leads to the "multiple subconscious" of our divided psyches, then to Frederic Jameson's "political subconscious." Jung and Adler float to the surface of consciousness as well. Robert Lidner and other psychologists of resistance and revolution will be needed. Marcuse and the "moronization" of persons in postmodernist culture comes in handy. Many other readings on the problem of evil may be set beside the growing literature concerning the metaphysics of quantum mechanics in our "revolving door" universe. This is a Continentalist twist on the analytical problem of "The Prisoner's Dilemma." Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 284-299. (I held this book during a photograph session for persons introduced to the Oscar award at the Time/Warner building.) http://www.oscar.com/ (February 25 through March 7.)
This three-day series ("The Prisoner") is John Milton's "Paradise Lost" meets Huxley and Orwell in our televisual culture with a complete political allegory evoking Abu Ghraib, the Twin Towers, the banalization of life and our discontents thrown into the mix. I have never seen Ian McKellen enjoying himself so much. Actors are always delighted to be given the chance to be absolutely evil. Perhaps they think of other actors?
Suppose a child is hurt by someone she trusts in a way that she does not understand. That moment of pain is a frozen "now" from which she cannot exit ("No Exit," as in the t.v. series "The Prisoner"), but she may be able to get out from this prison if she can make herself understood by someone who will, (through loving her), transform the space of agony into a garden of joy. The only way to do this is by sharing the pain, willingly, with her and shining the light of understanding into the darkness that makes the child's hurt "go away."
Love is the light that disperses the darkness. This "hurt" was the product of (or took place in) darkness, both literal and other kinds of darkness. This sharing in suffering is the only way to take away her pain. ("Pieta" then "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
To establish that a person is insane or crazy, is a social judgment that some identifiable behavior is unacceptable -- and thus, that it should be labeled as "crazy" -- which must be made by a "competent" authority. All behavior that is not understood will usually be called "crazy." No brain scan will reveal madness, as a value judgment, only the organic causes that, allegedly, produce behavior that we then label as mad. Insanity or madness is always culturally decided and a value judgment based on linguistic categories.
Are the mad less or more free than the rest of us? Great philosophers, scientists, artists -- all have been described as "crazy," just before their insights are absorbed by a culture. People who cut themselves are communicating pain. A person injuring others (and herself) in highly specific ways, repeatedly, may be telling us what was done to her.
Can you translate the language of madness into the ordinary forms of communication for us boring so-called "normal" people? Yes. Always. When the message is translated, when her "movie" or story has been understood, she will no longer need to tell it. Today, her movie is very well understood. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")
In reading Leahy's book, I suggest a return to George Santayana's "doctrine of essence," also to Father Munson's book on Santayana. American psychologists are woefully ignorant of Santayana's psychology in his multi-volume The Life of Reason. The story that explains my aptitudes and capacities, possibly my “freedom” or consciousness, in other words, is not a material object that is causally determined nor is it a “force” exactly, but more like a kind of "ecology of mind" -- to use Gregory Bateson's term -- emerging from the interaction between organism and social as well as natural environments, entanglements, where all are evolving together, as I say, with each reacting to the others. The philosophy of Henri Bergson may be invoked at this point. I expect these ideas to be plagiarized. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")
Think of this interaction (nature and nurture) as an elaborate dance between partners who exchange roles, sometimes one and then the other "leads" in this dance, masculine and feminine roles are shared. Whitehead and Neo-Thomism will come in very handy in understanding these matters. I just discovered a film, P.S. -- featuring an outstanding performance by Laura Linney -- touching on some of these themes, especially the interrelation between "time and narrative." (Paul Ricouer) Each of those concepts, time and narrative, implies the other, like the time-space continuum.
"These experiments are a magnificent affront to our conventional notions of space and time. Something that takes place long after after and far away from something else nevertheless is vital to our description of that something else. By any classical -- commonsense -- reckoning, that's, well, crazy. Of course, that's the point: classical reckoning is the wrong kind of reckoning to use in a quantum universe."
Brian Greene, "Time and the Quantum," in The Fabric of the Cosmos, P. 199.
For an interesting twist to the "selection of pasts and futures" problem, see Richard Feldman, "Freedom and Contextualism," in J.K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke, & D. Shier, eds., Freedom and Determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), p. 255. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.")
Time is not an inert reality that lies "out there." There is no stepping outside the language in which we seize our concepts of time to examine time itself, uncontaminated by languages. We also cannot easily place our languages -- especially mathematics -- "in" time, apart from our experiences of both time and language. This is not to deprive us of truth or reality. Truths and realities are also "in" time and our languages. There is a mirror-like relation at work. We must step through the "looking-glass." Identities are never external or static among or between human beings.
Roads and cars, masculine and feminine, rich and poor, raw and cooked, sane and insane. Meanings require totalities. Please read F.H. Bradley on "relations" and the "Absolute." ("Is this atheism's moment?") However, totalities may become complex by allowing for "a thousand flowers to bloom." (Mao) ("Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'")
Among the languages of time is the image-based discourse of cinema which parallels the archetypes in the collective subconscious of humanity. This is true whatever existence these concepts may have apart from our linguistic understandings of time and narrative in thought-structures or intellectual-orders. (Once more: "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
If freedom may be thought of as explicable in terms of something like the “plot” or "plots" of the story that the individual organism or human species "creates," within an environment (ecosystem), then this can not be captured in simplistic causal or determinate explanations, especially when it is far from clear to anyone what is meant by saying that a cause "determines" an effect.
Donald Davidson's distinction between belief and desire in agency may be useful. It may also help to recall my frequent discussion of the tendency of characters to rebel and create their own plot twists in literature. My analogy refers to social freedom for individuals. Perhaps species have the same tendency, especially when the occasional "duck tailed platypus" shows up in our evolutionary saga. Why do actors say: "My character would not do that"? Perhaps Homo sapiens was a successful improvisation in the "Actor's Studio" of evolution.
When it comes to discerning meanings as distinct from truth for organisms that are endowed with consciousness -- in other words, us -- causal or instrumental rationality will be less helpful than INTERPRETIVE rationality, as applied to art and religions, or even persons. Regrettably, cultural awareness and literary sensitivity are sadly lacking in today's "therapists." See Paul Roubiczek, Thinking in Opposites: An Investigation Into the Nature of Man as Revealed by the Nature of Thinking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), pp. 65-136 and John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), pp. 313-318, then Nick Herbert, "Four Quantum Realities," in Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (New York: Anchor, 1985), pp. 157-175. (Our social realities and identities may need reverse engineering in order to be understood.)
Albert Einstein explained: "I want to know how God created this world." Towards the end of his life Einstein was troubled to realize that the final word in this sentence must be plural ("worlds"), even as philosophers devoted the same century to pondering the word to "know." Religious persons would concentrate on "God." (Herbert, p. 177.) Were they approaching the same complex truth?
Every good professional actor will be brilliant at interpreting human meanings. Hence, every professional actor is a psychologist. I do not believe that it is possible to be a great actor unless you are fascinated by people. One theme of Fowles' great novel and the film written by Harold Pinter is this inextricable connection between narrative and temporality. Harold Pinter, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screenplays (London; Methuen, 1982).
This suggests that Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom is a philosophical position that is also a description of the universe after the quantum revolution. Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004), the logical conclusion is Paul de Man, ed. & Timothy Bahti, trans from German, Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), pp. 139-189. (Horizon of expectation? Or aesthetics of reception?)
Professor Goswami's efforts would have benefitted from references to the dialectical-critical-realism of Roy Bashkar, whose work is (I believe) unknown to this physicist. Bashkar advances Goswami's argument before it existed and beyond its present location at several crucial stages:
"I propose that the universe exists as formless potentia in myriad possible branches in the transcendent domain and becomes manifest only when observed by conscious beings. To be sure, there is the same circularity here that gives rise to the self-reference discussed in chapter 6. It is these self-referential observations that plot the universe's causal history, rejecting the myriad parallel alternatives that never find their way to material reality." (Goswami, p. 141.)
Now Bashkar:
"I shall later show how regarding people as material entities with emergent powers [mind, consciousness] resolves the mind-body problem and allows us to sustain, through the notion of intentional causality [instantiation] the concept of reasons as causes. [dialectics, idealism] ... transcendental arguments [are used] to develop transcendental realist accounts of causal laws and scientific explanation, which inevitably function as transcendental refutations of irrealist positions and metacritically allow the exposure of their effects." (Kant, Hegel)
Roy Bashkar, "Explanations and the Laws of Nature," in Plato, Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 35-39. (Dialectical Critical Realism meets Scientific Hermeneutics.)
Gadamer on the "fusion of horizons" wouldn't hurt quantum physicists.
The meaning of my actions and my freedom depends on the narrative of my "life-story" that I tell myself. I will not allow others -- especially not consultants of one sort or another, even less lawyers or government functionaries -- to deprive me of that narrative, nor to reshape it in accordance with their political and value choices, much less to suit the interests of the State. I will not allow others, especially not hired torturers, to decide which persons are important or what I am permitted to feel for those persons. My life must consist of MY freely chosen "meanings." Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Los Angeles: University of California, 1987), pp. 76-89.
Your version of "Gone With the Wind" is as real as any other, which is not to deny the concept of truth, objectivity or universality of MEANINGS. There is no authority that can prescribe your interpretation of that film.
"Psychoanalysis stands as close as possible ... to that critical function which, as we have seen, exists within all the human sciences. In setting itself the task of making the discourse of the unconscious speak [madness as a language] through consciousness, psychoanalysis is advancing the direction of that fundamental region in which the relations of representation and finitude come into play." (Dreyfus, "introduction," in Id., at p. xvii.)
Incidentally, "id" is the citation form for an immediately preceding source in the so-called "Blue Book," or law school citator, that I love to trash. Ironic, huh?
These freely-chosen personal meanings will interlock with the meanings of others, producing ever-larger networks of meanings. What would you call the totality of such meanings, personal and scientific, mythical or artistic, economic and legal-political which must fit together? Ying/Yang.
I hoped to include an essay on Paul Ricoeur's work today. A virus and government-protected hackers makes that impossible, even as more vandalism of this text is expected. Those interested in the application of these ideas to culture and mythology, should see my published essay dealing with Ricoeur's philosophy cited above. ("How Censorship Works in America.")
Charles Darwin was certainly a great storyteller. This narrative capacity was a result of Darwin's interpretations of observational-data derived from experiments. Darwin was a great scientist, also not a bad artist. Darwin may be the first scientific-hermeneutic thinker. Gregory Bateson states:
"[There is] a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and a difference can be a cause) and the world of non-living billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the 'causes' of events). These are the two worlds that Jung (following the Gnostics) calls 'creatura' (the living) and 'pleroma' (the non-living). [There is] a difference between the physical world of pleroma, where forces and impacts provide a sufficient basis of explanation, and the creatura, where nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions can be invoked."
Mind and Nature, pp. 7-8.
With regard to the ambiguities of human motivation, artists -- this is especially the case with the greatest of them all, William Shakespeare -- have taught us that the “self is an image fragmented in a hall of mirrors.” (Sartre)
Does any single character see the full truth of his or her identity in any of Shakespeare's great plays? I doubt it. Not even Rosalind in "As You Like It" is omniscient. This does not mean that there is no truth to be seen. Likewise, none of us sees the whole truth in (or of) our lives or selves. This does not prove that there is no truth to be seen. "Look in thy glass ..." ("Master and Commander.")
Paul Ricoeur (I'm still pissed off about the virus that destroyed that essay) has written of "emplotment" as the process by which the paradox that says "stories are recounted whereas life is lived" is resolved in terms of a unity between recounting and living, where recounting is living.
Living a free life and understanding that life's meaning(s) amounts to a kind of "recounting" or narrating of that life's story. This recounting is a process in which relationships and memory will be important. This should make clear the evil in denying a person his or her memories (by withholding vital documents and facts, perhaps), or in destroying healing relationships only made possible by memory that are expressed in creative work. ("What is memory? and "Brian Greene and the Science of Memory.")
Perhaps, in the human social realm, entropy can work in reverse.
Nothing is as malignant as the effort -- which you are witnessing -- to destroy another person's life-narrative and capacity for narrativity, or his/her thinking and creativity. I am baffled and so sad to find an "error" reinserted in this essay. I can only hope that I have made all necessary corrections, until next time. ("The Allegory of the Cave" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")
One vital lesson I have learned from studying Shakespeare and seeing actors bringing the great parts to life is that all persons need to make themselves known. Persons are communicators by nature, as Shakespeare realized, inviting or seducing you into their worlds of joy and pain. This includes the Iagos of this world. Monologues. The most poignant monologues are not verbal. Maybe the person inserting "errors" in this essay is telling us that she is in pain. This is my answer to the "Finkler Question." Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2010), at pp. 30-31. ("What Julian did was go and read romantic novels and listen to nineteenth-century operas instead.") ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "What you will ...")
Suppose the child I mentioned is hurt in very specific ways that she "enacts" for others, by doing the same to someone that she loves -- hurting him exactly as she was hurt -- in order that he will understand "where" she is, in the darkness, this way he can help her to get out of the darkness and into the light. He must show her the freedom that becomes love and disperses the darkness.
Love cannot be safe or always "sensible." Love must always be willing to accept the pain of bringing to birth the desired other's best self. ("Martha Nussbaum on the Vindication of Love.")
We are far more reluctant about entering the worlds of others than persons were in Shakespeare's day. We are FRIGHTENED of subjectivity. We seek to escape our humanity in ways that would have seemed strange to the Bard. Now examine Kate Winslet's performance in "Holy Smoke" and you will understand what I mean about courage of self-revelation. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and, again, "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
To keep apart persons who need each other is to deny them the dignity of their self-chosen meanings in life. Forced separation amounts to an attempt at the murder of a person's identity through destruction of necessary meanings and communities for that person and all others. Such separation may amount to the theft of victims' possible futures. It is to destroy a person's world of meanings that is offered to others in order to impose a straight-jacket-like "conformity" to a false normality. Even prison inmates and mentally-ill persons have the right to be loved and included, as human beings, in a community's dialogue on ultimate matters, whether these matters are spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic or political. All persons have the right to "be" and express their ways of being with others. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
It may also be the case that the best way to understand freedom is in such literary/cinematic terms, as a form of narrative creation within the constraints provided by empirical reality, as revealed by science within other cultural constraints. Think of this cognitive challenge as a hermeneutic understanding of freedom. This sounds like a very Hegelian-Kantian solution after all. The key philosopher at this point, again, is Paul Ricoeur. Hans Georg Gadamer should also be mentioned. Neither of these thinkers is listed in Goswami's bibliography, neither is Roy Bashkar or scientist Rupert Sheldrake. I detected logical errors and missing footnotes in Professor Goswami's book. Nevertheless, I am sure Goswami's thinking is insightful, important and true, as well as ahead of its time. Not bad for a physicist. (Nevertheless, Kate Winslet and Melanie Griffith are smarter than world-famous scientist, Amir Goswami, and so much smarter than I will ever be.)
The greatest aspect of cinema and all arts is the invitational quality of the experience ("let's play!"), which is always a request for your interpretations and completion of the text.
If only it were possible to bring this open-ended quality to political or diplomatic, legal, or philosophical-scientific work that becomes a communal project, I believe that great progress would be made against diseases and other challenges facing humanity. Most actors and directors seem genuinely thrilled to listen to diverse interpretations of their works. Philosophers can learn from this quality of "play" in the arts. ("The Art of Robert Downey, Jr." and "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
I recently enjoyed a performance of "Loves Labour's Lost" by the Globe Shakespeare Company which featured a stage without a curtain. This must be like Shakespeare's Globe. The boundaries between actors and audience were transgressed all the time. The actors walked among us in sixteenth century costumes. This is a postmodern gesture of "enframing" the play to make us characters in it. Shakespeare would have been thrilled by this device, especially in this play that is filled with metaphysical speculation. The alignment of actors on stage; the use of bows and arrows as semiotic devices; the stag (like the "characters") on stage, also "used" as a "sign" -- all of this suggests the revelations offered to audiences members that are in keeping with the meaning of this holiday season of endings and renewals. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")
Stephen Hawking's essays are philosophically important and inexcusably neglected by philosophers. The most fascinating issues, for us, will concern the coming together of living and non-living, of organisms with their products or creations -- not simply works of art, but even machines which are increasingly invested with subjectivity. A crucial phenomenon developing in postmodernist cultural spaces -- non-Western literatures will be helpful with these realities -- is the increasing animation of our technological-communal spaces and advertising-commercial spaces. In fact, these territories and others are overlapping, with exploding vocabularies of image-associations that are commercial-therapeutic-aesthetic-political. The "Disneyfication" of American society is well underway. (See Spielberg's masterpiece, "A.I.")
Will there come a point when interpretive rationality will become necessary in order to figure out the "mood" of my computer or automobile? Who knows? Some day we may go out on dates with our television sets. Some men do so already, with their cars.
Time to pop the "Matrix" into the DVD player, again. "Whoa ..."
