Rational Philosophy

Dick Cavett’s folly, guns in parks.

The NY Times grants Dick Cavett considerable space to reflect in an entry called “À la Recherche de Youthful Folly.” Proust would roll in his grave. I’m not sure whose folly bears more of the responsibility for the piece making its way into the paper. Cavett wrote it, but the NY Times published it. Cavett reveals himself to be an unapologetic jerk. He talks about stringing newspapers across the road at night so that car drivers would get spooked and brake suddenly. He talks about deliberately tripping a fat guy who was chasing him after such a prank. He talks about ruthlessly picking on one of his peers. “Distasteful but [...] funny, which to me is always the important thing,” Cavett says.

Sure, these were things he did as a kid, but I think we all knew kids like that, and we knew then that they would always be jerks.

What’s the point of Cavett’s piece? Beyond self-indulgence, it’s hard to tell. But it does give us an example of immorality. Apart from a couple of throw away comments, Cavett displays a singular lack compassion for those who suffered at his hands. Yet his actions caused them unnecessary distress and put them in danger.

“Compassion,” Schopenhauer opined, “is the basis of all morality.”

Schopenhauer himself suffered greatly through the lack of compassion others showed him. When he submitted his essay “On The Basis of Morality” in response to a contest offered by Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, his was the only entry, but the society refused to award it the prize because they said he’d misunderstood the question.

The Royal Danish Society asked: “Are the source and foundation of morals to be looked for in an idea of morality lying immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in the analysis of other fundamental moral concepts springing from that idea, or are they to be looked for in a different ground of knowledge?”

Schopenhauer answered that morality arises out of our awareness that:

1. Living things strive to exist.

2. If we oppose the striving to exist of another living thing (i.e., cause it deliberate harm) we are acting immorally.

Compassion, in Schopenhauer’s moral system, is the awareness that another’s suffering is no different from our own.

Maybe the Royal Danish Society just didn’t like his answer…

The marvelous thing about Schopenhauer’s explanation for moral feeling is that it strips away all of the layers of artificial moral concepts that arise out of systems of thought (religious and social) and examines morality in a very raw and immediate form.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has proposed a rule change that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in some national parks (the ones where state laws permit carrying concealed weapons). What intrigued me most about this story was the way in which the proposed rule change had come about: Kempthorne “proposed the rule in response to letters from 51 United States senators — 42 Republicans and 9 Democrats — who asked that the current rule be changed.”

So either 51 senators up and decided that despite the absence of any alarming crime statistics this was an issue that warranted a letter to Dirk, or the NRA lobbied the senators to press the Interior Secretary on the matter.

Those who run the parks oppose the proposal, saying that the guns would create more problems than they would resolve.

Which brings me back to thinking that our society suffers from a lack of philosophical instruction and education. Shouldn’t our children learn about such things? Shouldn’t those who administer our government be able to see past and hold firm against transparent political manipulation?

Dick Cavett and others like him can perhaps convince themselves that because something is socially acceptable it is not immoral. Schopenhauer’s piercing injunction reveals how ill-founded is such thinking.
Schopenhauer also said: “Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity!”

(For those interested in the origin of moral and other feelings, my own book begins with the fundamental principles of space and time, arriving at some of the same general conclusions as Schopenhauer.)

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the function and power of creativity, and the particular value of music as an artistic medium.

Art Schop is a name I’ve been recording under for material that’s more spontaneous, philosophical and odd. This is the second year I’ve entered the RPM Challenge to record an album in the month of February. With a whole bunch going on this year and my wife pregnant (and therefore needing sleep when I wanted to record) I thought I wasn’t going to make it. But today, with her encouragement, I knuckled down and hid myself away and finished up. (This entailed writing or editing lyrics for several songs, recording vocals for nine of ten songs, and mixing all ten.)

Creativity is a funny thing. When you least expect it, something lovely happens. I wasn’t thrilled by much of what I had to work with this morning when I started, fragments of lyrics isolated from the music, and with the pressure of time thought that I’d perhaps get my album done, not much more. But in the course of a few short hours some beautiful moments (or so I hope) found their way out of my subconscious.

Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams had a house a couple of miles from where I live in Brooklyn. I saw Heath around a few times and our kids circled one another once at a local coffee shop. Apart from his talent and charisma, he seemed like a wonderful, warm, nice guy. I was very sad when he died. One of the songs I recorded today is in memory of Heath…

from here to there (song for Heath Ledger)

(A few of the other tunes are posted on my RPM profile.)

Where does the creative impulse originate? Why do people so love music, playing music and singing, listening to music, creating music?

When we create we translate a feeling or impression into some communicable form. Rationally then, the urge to create would seem to originate in the urge to communicate things that we feel otherwise unable to communicate fully. I could tell people I’m sorry that Heath Ledger died. But this wouldn’t quite capture the essence of my sorry, a whole mix of emotion and ideas. When I listen to the song, on the other hand, it expresses my feelings much more coherently, much more warmly, without the same archness or analysis that I’d wrap around them in conversation.

Art gets us closer to a raw form of communication, where the symbols of the art represent feelings that cannot otherwise be measured and processed for someone else to apprehend. It’s akin to a hug or a kiss or a touch.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about existence as having two aspects — our perception of it through our senses, which is an indirect representation, and the thing itself, which he called the “will.” Schopenhauer quite rightly stated that we can never directly apprehend the will. It will always and only be revealed to us through our immediate experience. For Schopenhauer, music came closer than anything else to revealing the nature of the will. Intuitively, Schopenhauer’s perspective on music has great weight. Just as music flows and never “is” so existence can’t ever be apprehended and stopped. Just as music follows forms and ideas, repeats patterns, so does existence.

(And we must remember that music originates from human perception via the subconscious. So any mirroring of the will in music is a mirroring of our perception of the will.)

People so enjoy art because it communicates to us on a non-verbal, emotional level; it is release and relief from our insularity of experience. And music has a particularly powerful aspect — it is immediate and transient, it flows. It cannot be frozen and held up to the eye. It forces us to submit to immediate, unstudied perception.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Perhaps it is ironic to write about the philosophy of love on the eve of Valentine’s day. Why? Because love knows no time nor calendar, as Shakespeare probably once wrote and swiftly deleted. The predictability and premeditation of the modern Valentine’s day ritual conjures up something other than love — we buy flowers and make special efforts either because we don’t want to disappoint our loved one, or because we know we’ll be in the dog house if we don’t. The only other reason would be to deceive by kindly gestures. In other words, to increase our chances of winning affection.

Wikipedia suggests that Valentine’s day might have its roots in an ancient festival (predating the Valentine martyrs); a festival that Plutarch described as “noble youths running up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.” This sounds like a lot more fun than a limp red rose and a bag of Hershey’s kisses.

But I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, so don’t listen to me.

Then again, no lesser curmudgeon than Arthur Schopenhauer regarded love as

“more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.“

“What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation”

He is, of course, exactly right about the evolutionary role of romantic love. Romantic love has evolved as a powerful mechanism that attracts people sexually and psychologically so that they will perhaps reproduce.

I’m not sure I’d agree that it is more important than all other aims in a man’s life. Successfully reproducing and protecting and raising one’s offspring are undoubtedly at least as important as falling in love. But the point is well taken, it’s far from a frivolous pursuit. But we treat love frivolously, often, and seem to regard it generally as a mystery that shouldn’t be too deeply analyzed or questioned.

The psychological theory of love, and much of the therapy we pay for, rests on the notion that we’re attracted to certain people so that we can replay problematic relationships from our childhood; these fatal romantic attachments allow us to try to address those unresolved issues. But we could also surmise that we would find a way to replay our deep-seated childhood issues in any relationship.

If we accept that love has evolved through natural selection as a way of ensuring propagation of the human race, can we evaluate love rationally? Or are the ways of love too subtle and obscure to submit to rational analysis?

The answer seems to be that love cannot be reasoned into being, nor reasoned away. But with reason we can understand its place and respect its role.

Romeo, loving Juliet, could have reasoned that nature was giving him a strong hint about the genetic favorability of his coupling with this Capulet, but could have also understood that there were unfavorable aspects to the union. Armed with an understanding of love’s rational role in life, he might have concluded that a trip with the boys to the Amalfi coast would be just the ticket to resettle his hormones and avoid a tragedy.

And, conversely, avoiding love because it doesn’t seem appropriate or convenient can be a mistake in the other direction. If we ignore nature’s hint, we aren’t living up to our nature as human beings.

Understanding love doesn’t diminish its hold on us, but it may help us put love’s clutches into context.

(Or, the beauty of non-conformism.)

In one of the many magnificent set pieces of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Yossarian, a Second World War B52 bombadier, proposes to another character (Doc Daneeka, I think) that he should be allowed to return home. “Where would we be if everyone thought that way?” he is asked, “Then I’d be crazy not to,” Yossarian replies. A valid point.

In the world of science, examples of unorthodox thought that ultimately sweeps away a whole body of ill-formed ideas abound, as do examples of the hard road that the non-conformist must often trek — Galileo Galilei, for instance, found himself under indefinite house arrest for supporting Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. These days, a proposal that the sun revolves around the earth would be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t even draw ridicule, never mind the attention of the Inquisition.

In a lovely, scathing testament to his burning disdain for orthodoxy, Arthur Schopenhauer subtitled his essay On The Basis of Morality “not awarded a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies.” (His was the only entry to the competition.)

And just yesterday, MIT sued Frank Gehry’s architecture firm claiming design and construction failures in its Stata Center which has developed cracks, leaks and other problems. “These things are complicated,” Gehry said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

Many at MIT are happy with Gehry’s construction, as the NY Times reports: “It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”

But it seems that Gehry is no stranger to disgruntled clients. Sometimes the very isolation of the lone voice speaks to the depth of its insight.

There’s an important philosophical aspect of non-conformism that I think we do well as a society and as individuals to remember. Human understanding works through three important processes:

1. Direct, immediate understanding. (A baby knows instinctively to reach for its mother’s nipple when hungry.)

2. Received understanding.  (What we know or think we know from being told or from reading or otherwise learning about how things work.)

3. Deduced, rational understanding. (What we piece together rationally from what we observe.)

The rational non-conformist then works from the third kind of understanding to debunk flawed examples of the second kind. Galileo used scientific observation to unseat the non-scientific theories of the geocentric worldview. When someone speaks out against an established understanding, then, we should ask ourselves whether that established understanding is something that we have simply accepted as fact, or whether we have arrived at it ourselves through a process of rational examination. If our answer is that we have no reason to believe it other than that everyone else seems to believe it, we should consider giving the non-conformist view our diligent attention.

This is, I think, what the Buddha had in mind when he said the following:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” — Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.

It’s perhaps not immediately obvious how this applies to Gehry; but I think it does. Implicit in Gehry’s architecture is the debunking of our expected ideas of what a building should look like. Apart from some very creative and aesthetically adventurous designs, his work says, “you don’t need to start with four walls at right angles.”

The wonderful thing about non-conformists of course is that they break the mold not just for themselves but for all future generations. We’ll never go back to believing that the sun revolves around the earth (well, most of us won’t). And, post-Gehry, innovative architects will never be afraid to make buildings look like we don’t expect them to look.