Rational Philosophy

On work and self: Wesley Snipes, Tom Daley, Anna Quindlen, Rene Descartes

I’ve spent the past eleven years and ten months — more than half my working life — at the same firm. Today was my last day. I’m going to be writing more, and making more music, and probably a whole lot of things that I have no clue about just yet.

As I said goodbye to my colleagues this afternoon I was aware of how much the experience of working with them and doing what I’d been doing had changed me, how much I’d learned, how much I’d unlearned, and how much I’d grown and shifted. I was moving on, but not without taking the experience with me.

Actor Wesley Snipes, convicted on tax charges, has been sentenced to the maximum of three years in jail. As I read the story I was fascinated by the extent to which a movie star’s life must be affected by his or her sense of self as reflected by public opinion. Denzel Washington had written a letter of character reference to the court. I found myself sad for Snipes; excerpts from the letter seemed to describe the image of a man rather than the man himself.

Thirteen year old Tom Daley, a British diver who will compete in the Beijing Olympics, explained his approach to maintaining a balanced perspective like this: “I try and keep it all separate because when I’m not diving and doing media stuff I’m just a normal kid.”

And as I rode on the elevator in the office today, I saw this quote from Anna Quindlen:

“Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.”

It read like a personal message.

The philosophy of self is as old as the phenomenon of consciousness. It took several million years for this idea to be neatly framed and attributed to Descartes who coined the famous phrase: “Cogito ergo sum” trans. “I think therefore I am.”

To twist this idea into a framing of the concept of self we can say: “I am what I think.”

Some would immediately argue that we do many things without reflection, without thinking them through. Which is true. But the concept of “self” requires reflection. Once I have acted, my acts affect my sense of self according to the way that I process them.

I could have walked away from my job thinking that I was unchanged by it. Had I done so, my sense of self would have been quite different.

Actor Wesley Snipes (and others in the public eye) must process his immediate thoughts about himself as well as processing the opinions expressed by the world at large. Public opinion must place a tremendous strain on one’s ability to maintain a consistent and accurate sense of self.

Young diver Tom Daley demonstrates an admirable compartmentalization of private and public space. (It seems perhaps that children often have a greater aptitude for this than adults.) Daley prefigures Quindlen’s advice in years if not in time.

We can achieve great things. We can inspire great respect or admiration. We can, likewise, achieve little, or inspire no one. But we captain our sense of self over these waters as if it were the QE2, or a tug boat, or a kayak. We might never know or care that the QE2 is really a kayak, or vice versa.

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.

There is no certainty. Or, everything is certain.

Descartes compressed these two ideas into one when he declared “I think, therefore I am” (cognito, ergo sum). Our certainty is our awareness of our existence, and yet this certainty is based on something as elusive as our awareness.

This concept plays on my mind this evening. We live with uncertainty every day. We are frustrated by our lack of certainty, by the elusiveness of certainty. My wife and I are looking at purchasing a house. We place a bid. We want the house. We can even imagine ourselves living there. But we have no certainty that we will. This dream of living there is no more real than a dream I had two nights ago in which my unmarried friend told me that his wife was pregnant. The same friend who told me in an e-mail today, with a semblance of certainty “this will happen more and more.”

The philosophy of certainty is also elusive. Descartes with masterful ingenuity and perceptiveness, turned the target sideways on, and placed the emphasis of certainty on the perceiving “I,” rather than the perceived “it.”

Nothing other than the impression of perception is certain. And the impression of perception in a dream is no more real than the impression of perception in waking life…

But is this so? Can’t we distinguish a dream from waking life? Some have quibbled that we can’t be certain of the difference between the two. Some have been lured into the definitiveness of this perspective.

However, if we instead think about certainty as a spectrum, we can approach it differently. I expect that certain impressions will follow other impressions. The degree of predictability of these impressions can be estimated and compared to the actual progression. When I estimate a high degree of likelihood, I become more certain of the outcome.

For instance, I connect the impression of my hand upon the cold stone countertop with the impression of “coolness” against my hand. (I’m skipping the interim impressions of my hand.) It is possible that this connection, the next time I place my hand on the counter, won’t exist. However, I estimate that it will exist with a high degree of certainty, because it correlates so well to the way I’ve perceived that impressions follow other impressions.

If we follow this approach, we find that the world is not completely in focus, but neither is it completely a-jumble. We can use our perceptions and impressions to predict other impressions and predictions. On this rests the foundation for reason and logic.