Rational Philosophy

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.

On causality, with specific reference to the hatred of Hillary Clinton, and muscle fatigue.

When I first read Stanley Fish’s pieces about those who love or live to despise Hillary Clinton — All You Need Is Hate, and A Calumny A Day To Keep Hillary Away — I resisted the temptation to respond to Fish’s comments. After all, wasn’t he standing up for rationalism and logic? Wasn’t he speaking out against the rude jibes of the senseless masses? And didn’t Hillary deserve his defense?

But in the end I came to realize that I should respond. Again, I found in Fish’s purportedly rational column an absence of thoughtful inquiry. Couched in the language of rationalism, his analysis bashed the Hillary bashers without offering up a viable explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps by understanding the reason for the hatred we can better counter it. “Perhaps nothing accounts for it,” Fish says, and again I feel myself confronting the same kind of lazy thinking that brought Fish to claim that the humanities as a field of study serves no purpose.

Does rootless ill-will toward Hillary engender the bashing, engendering more bashing? Or does the ill-will result from some other cause, with a side-effect being the bashing?

Research toward the causes of enlarged hearts has yielded interesting information about the way in which muscles fatigue. Scientists have found that when we use our muscles to the point of fatigue, they leak calcium. The calcium leaks cause weakness and stimulate an enzyme that eats away at the muscle fiber. When given a substance that blocks the calcium leaks, mice can swim and run further without experiencing muscle fatigue.

In considering whether there could be value in blocking calcium leaks to enhance athletic performance, Dr. Ligget, a heart-failure researcher says, “We have to ask whether it would be prudent to be circumventing this mechanism.”

Hear, hear. If we give evolution any credit we would have to think that creatures with muscles, ourselves included, experience muscle fatigue for good reason. The cause of muscle fatigue is not calcium leaks, it is the valuable feedback mechanism that has evolved to prevent us from pushing ourselves beyond exhaustion. (Being a person whose muscles tend to fatigue quickly, on the other hand, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of those mice pills…)

Back to Hillary Clinton. Why didn’t Fish want to explore the possibility that the Hillary bashing is an end result of some other phenomenon? Clearly, this would bring him onto thin ice. He would need to confront the idea that perhaps there was a cause for it, whether it was rational or not, defensible or not. Effects must have a cause, after all.

Fear and anger cause hatred. With Hillary Clinton, I think the likely cause is fear, whereas with George Bush (Fish’s counter-foil) the cause is anger.

Why would we fear Hillary Clinton? Here are three reasons.
1. She has demonstrated ruthlessness.

2. She doesn’t hide her sense of superiority well.

3. She strives but fails to demonstrate that she is not ideologically rigid.

We find it difficult to express these fears rationally, in part because each of them has a perfectly acceptable and reasonable corollary — commitment, brilliance, and consistency. But we do fear the ruthless, those who hold themselves up as superior, and those who are rigid.
For good measure, here is why we would be angry with Bush.

1. He’s lazy when he has work to do.

2. He makes life and death decisions based on an arbitrary will to exert his power.

3. He’s ignorant but touts his sway over us.

What’s not to be angry at?

Sure, Hillary Clinton is committed, brilliant, and consistent. And Bush is a life loving, god fearing everyman. But, when we’re talking about the country’s highest office, we have good reason to fear the former and be angry with the latter.

Every effect begins with a cause. Just as our muscles fatigue to prevent us from overtaxing our bodies, so, too, we lash out with seemingly irrational hatred and bias when we fear or resent a greater ill. And, just as it would be good to spare our bodies the fatigue and wasting that comes from calcium leaks, so, too, it would be good to spare society the vitriol of hateful criticism by recognizing the onset of symptoms and directing our feelings of fear and anger toward a more constructive end.

“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

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Whenever emotion overpowers my reason, I realize anew just how deep and powerful our emotional selves can be. Last night I blew up at my mother-in-law, convinced that I had reason on my side, completely unapologetic. And this morning when I woke up I felt the shame of hurting her feelings, and bewilderment at my irrational overreaction to what had upset me.

Emotion like reason, has its roots in our evolution as a species. Emotion came prior to reason. It developed out of the key, immediate survival responses of the human organism. Fear (and the fight or flight response), anger, sadness, happiness, disgust. As we have evolved reason we have naturally retained these valuable emotional responses, although we often use reason to suppress or override our emotional impulses.

Psychotherapy and similar therapeutic methods aim to help us smooth out the bumps in our emotional responses. It’s still OK to be angry or afraid, of course, but when our responses follow a particular pattern, or seem systematically extreme, we can try to figure out why and work on the underlying cause of these overreactions.

Emotion and reason sit side by side. We can reconcile them (sometimes) and we can better understand our emotions resulting in a happier cohabitation. But since emotion is an automatic response to a stimulus (like the reflex jerk when the doctor taps our knee with his mallet) the emotional response, however valuable in the moment, should never be used as the basis for a conceptual framework.

What do I mean by this?

To take first the example of my disagreement with my mother-in-law, I used my emotional response, my anger, as the foundation of my side of the disagreement. I slathered my rationale on top like icing on a dry cup-cake.

To take a more important example, the furore around abortion laws is an emotional furore. Reason rarely enters into the equation. People’s perspectives on abortion tend to polarize around their emotional response to the matter. The same is true of capital punishment. There are many other examples.

Likewise racists create a false rational framework founded on emotions of fear and hatred. There are countless other examples.
We can’t eradicate or expunge our emotions. But as individuals and as a society we would be well served to beware of using emotion as a starting point for reason.