What’s it Like to Be a Table?

                                                                       photo: Wualex

Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger like to talk about intention. It’s what separates inanimate objects from animate objects (and in particular those animate objects which possess so called consciousness). A table doesn’t have a set of priorities with respect to the person sitting at it, while the person sitting at a table has lots of thoughts about the table—it’s height, its comfort, its state of cleanliness, it’s provenance—which create a picture in that person (or subject’s) mind. You have seen those biblical paintings where a sea of hands is raised to the heavens. Human existence is a chorus made up of willfulness and desire. Schopenhauer’s famous tome was the The World as Will and Representation. If you go down to the East or Hudson Rivers with their strong currents and murky waters, you’ll find an organic phenomenon which is a living metaphor for human consciousness. It takes the innocent bits of matter that come its way and sweeps them out to sea. Buddhists equate desire with suffering, but have you ever met a Buddhist who has so contained his or her will that they have achieved satori--a state in which they no longer inflict themselves on the innocent table, on which the server in his local vegan café has placed a platter of seitan? Which brings us back to the question of the world. There is the old conundrum about a leaf or branch falling in a forest with no one there to perceive it. How do we posit its existence?  But imagine a world without subjects. There has been talk about the conditions on the planets like Kepler-62 e and f, stars in the so-called Goldilocks area of the multiverse where conditions similar to those which created human life exist. However, there are portions of space/time where the chances of finding anything resembling consciousness or will may be lessened—take for example the event horizon of a black hole. In his famous essay “What’s is it like to be a bat?," Thomas Nagel deals with the questions of whether animals possess traits which we might define as a form of consciousness or self-reflexive awareness. However, there are likely whole galaxies in which rumblings of planets, meteors and supernovae occur like the leaf and the branch which go unobserved in the forest. Momentous events occur without being conceived of by beings who have wishes with respect to them—unless of course you believe in the mandate of the ultimate willful observer, God.

Is Love an Art or a Craft?

Irving Singer was a philosopher whose Times obit (“Irving Singer, M.I.T. Professor Who Wrote ‘The Nature of Love,’ Dies at 89," NYT, 2/15/15) describes how he had written a three volume work devoted to one of the most over used words in the English language, one whose definition has stymied and challenged thinkers throughout history. The Times obit quotes Singer thusly, “This, like so many philosophical works, began as an attempt to understand my own inadequacies. Everyone in my family persuaded me that I ought to be more loving, which troubled me. So like most philosophers, I dealt with the criticism by constructing a theory and a philosophy which enabled me to dismiss their ideas.” Singer who according to the Times taught for many years at M.I.T. seems have had a sensibility that in many respects was closer to that of humanistic psychologists like Erich Fromm who wrote The Art of Loving, who also had a philosophical background (as a product of the Frankfurt school). On the basis of the obit, Singer did not appear to be a utilitarian or consequentialist like Peter Singer or Derek Parfitt. He was not concerned with the kind of ethical problems that bugged trolleyologists like Philippa Foot and the description of his work in the obit with its emphasis on emotion doesn’t seem to tie it to language philosophers or the work of phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger. But the very inception of Singer’s project makes one think about how other great works of philosophy might have come into being. Did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason derive the fact that his family found him to be was unreasonable? Did Heidegger’s Being and Time result from the philosopher’s problems with lateness or in the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a great mind’s inability to deal with varying kinds of absence (God, money, an empty cupboard). Could Sartre’s existentialism and his obsession with nothingness have derived from the fact that when he was was a little boy, he frequently came home to an empty refrigerator?

Unheimlichkeit

Have you ever wondered where has everyone gone or found yourself waking up into what seems like an episode of The Twilight Zone, say "The After Hours" where the character gets off on the wrong, non-existent floor of the department store where the mannequins all come to life, only to discover that she herself is a mannequin on the lam. Unheimlichkeit is the feeling of estrangement or uncanniness referred to by both Heidegger and Freud and it literally means not feeling at home. You don’t have to be a character out of an episode of The Twilight Zone to feel it. Simply return to a favorite spot, say a small town in Vermont where you once vacationed on fall weekends when the kids were little or one of those old-fashioned railroad car diners, (there’s actually one called the Chelsea Royal in Brattleboro Vermont) and say you walk in to find a whole new cast of characters, say an upscale Relais and Chateau as opposed to the simple inn with the friendly room clerk with the green visor who once greeted you. Say the cozy little restaurant has been turned into an expensive outpost of some exotic new cuisine whose portions are so refined and microscopic that they’re lost in a sea of white china. Or let’s say you return to the 50^th high school reunion and you don’t recognize anyone, not even the girl or boyfriend, who sheepishly tugs at your sleeve, trepidatiously enunciating your name. Is this the creature you once undressed or undressed in front of? The house where you literally or figuratively grew up may still be standing, but it’s occupied by strangers. That old doorman in your parents apartment building is long dead and the new man blocks your way as you attempt to return to the past.

Ben Marcus’ s "The Dark Arts"

Dusseldorf

There is a brilliant moment in Ben Marcus New Yorker short story, “The Dark Arts,”  ( The New Yorker, May 20, 2013). Julien the central character has come to Dusseldorf for treatment for a chronic and unspecified illness. He is staying in a hostel called the Millerhaus and waiting for his volatile girlfriend, Hayley who never seems to be coming. “He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was suppose to feel…Perhaps he had been fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick. Perhaps this was just what it felt like to be alive…Did everyone else, he wondered, feel listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared—you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did other people just clench their jaws and endure it, without running to the doctor, as he did, again and again?” Then an etiology is uncovered involving the suspicion of a brain tumor. “If you tell me it’s all in my head now...you won’t be lying,” Julien quips to his German doctor. The ambiguity remains, but one almost wishes that Marcus hadn’t opened up the possibility of the tumor explaining everything. In our culture there is a tendency to take a pill for every ache and then the pill taking goes on even when the ache fades since there’s the aftermath, the wake left by the injustice of the discomfiture itself. People have lost the ability to tell whether they are in physical or mere psychic pain and they’re no longer sure which pain they’re medicating when they seek out painkillers. Both Freud and Heidegger wrote about the word Unheimlichkeit and if you hit the hyperlink you’ll read how one very eloquent Australian blogger writes about the term. The word literally means “not feeling at home,” but refers to the sense of estrangement and dislocation that Freud called the “uncanny” and may be the fate of the wandering cosmopolitan individual, metrosexuals and the like, uprooted from tradition and victims of a pleasure principal that makes the absence of pleasure feel like pain. It’s also a condition that conducive to the making of art. Marcus’s character Julien fits the bill. Another way to put this is that Julien is a latter day Hans Castorp only his Zauberberg is Dusseldorf.

It’s Not a Rehearsal

Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

“It’s not a rehearsal” has become a common saw, the laymen’s carpe diem, a term that’s become as popular as a piece of argot as “sounds like a plan.” We’re all familiar with the expression which is a barely disguised jeremiad urging us to live in the now, to live “a day at a time,” so as not to hold back from acting in the present, in the name of some unsung destiny. But actually the expression is a spiritual black hole. The underlying idea is if you’re going to die, you’d better live it up. The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa understood the ambiguity of intention in his movie Ikiru which translates as “to live.” Learning that he is dying of incurable cancer, his main character Watanabe, at first has his Faustian Walpurgisnacht in which he indulges the pleasures he’s deprived himself          of during his life as a bureaucrat. But indulgence is ultimately unfulfilling and the only way he can find happiness turns out to be through helping others (in his case through the creation of a park). Even Epicurus, a philosopher, whose name is associated with the senses, argued for the golden mean. So looking a life under the aspect of impending death, which is, according to Heidegger the only way to have an “authentic existence,” the individual is actually faced with a choice. If he or she is to live every day as his last, then he has to decide if his or her last day on earth, his or her last supper, as it were, will be an occasion to grab for as much as much material pleasure as he or she can get or an occasion to do something for others. What will characterize the final act of our lives? Gluttony, generosity or something in between?

The Caretaker at BAM

photo: Shane Reid

If we forget chronology than the first line of Waiting For Godot, (l949) “Nothing to be done,” is proleptic in that it anticipates the question which constitutes one of the last lines of The Caretaker (1960), “What am I going to do?” Rain is hitting the skylight or dripping in to a pail from a leak in the roof or there is the Doppler effect as trains depart the current phenomenology themed production of Pinter’s play at BAM. There are also menacing sounding footsteps coming up to or descending the stairs from the disheveled room in which the action takes place. Actually that room as conceived by Christopher Morahan with set design by Eileen Diss is less an example of the absurdism with which Pinter is sometimes associated than pure naturalism. Architectural Digest could do a piece on the décor with its piles of tied up newspapers, its Buddha,which is eventually shattered, and its two cots. It’s also Empire of the Sun’s warehouse of plundered colonial antiques on a more personal scale. You are familiar with this room even though it’s supposed to be the end of the world. “The name I’m going under now is not my real name,” Davies, Pinter's prime mover, says at one point. “It’s assumed.” Nothing is authentic and that’s the point made by Jonathan Pryce in his arch and urgent interpretation of the role. Davies aka Jenkins is hired to be the caretaker. He only knows that caretaking requires implements. He is also hired to be an interior and exterior designer, but when confronted with the job description he pleads ignorance and then admits to being an imposter. Heidegger said that human beings live an inauthentic existence to the extent that they are not aware of death. Can we assume that this absence may explain the disarray? Is this the absence explains the faulty connections: the fact that there is no time in the room, that brown shoelaces are offered for black shoes, that the elder of two brothers Aston (Alan Cox), who inhabits the room, renders a whole soliloquy about a stay in a mental institution that's supposedly not listened to though it’s reiterated practically verbatim by Davies--a character who also groans in the night, but doesn’t dream, a character who is given somebody else’s piece of luggage when his is taken by accident?

Shame

The devil lies in the details, but also in two long sequences in Steve McQueen’s Shame. The details are the facts of the film’s central character’s existence. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lives in nameless high rise, one of those glass boxes that populate the tonier parts of Manhattan. It could be Chelsea or Noho or Soho; in this case the address is 9 West 31^St.  Brandon gets off at the 28^th Street stop of the R. He also listens to vinyl, has a volume of collected excerpts from Henry James on his otherwise spare bookshelves and comes home to find his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) naked in the shower.  Brandon works in a modern office and has problems with his computer which is infected with all kinds of porn. He also likes fleeting encounters, has problems with relationships and has to push his sister out of bed, though she doesn’t exhibit any conscious desire to consummate their relationship. The two long sequences take place on a train where he exchanges meaningful glances with a young woman and in a bar where the camera focuses on Sissy singing “New York, New York”.  Back in l969 Rip Torn starred in a film called Coming Apart  that was remarkably similar to Shame, taking place in a l969 version of the high rise apartment Brandon occupies (in the later case the  locale was Kips Bay) which was also the site of compulsive and often hostile couplings. Fassbender is reminiscent of the young Rip Torn in the seductiveness of his sullenness and violence. Shame  has been trumpeted as a film about compulsive sex, but it's really about solitude. It’s a 21^st century version of  Strindberg in which relationships are absent and violence is simply unleashed on the self. Brandon steps into his existence like an alien, a creature from outer space landing on earth or an earthling landing on a strange planet. There's a temptation to look at the source of Brandon’s problem as incest or sex sites, but these are really just symptoms. Ironically though the film is full of sex and has an NC-17 rating, you would be better off employing an existentialist than a Freudian in looking for answers to what makes this Sammy run. Drive is unleashed to quench uncomfortable affects and yet the character seems to be suffering from a sense of what Heidegger defined as Unheimlichkeit The word literally means not-being-at-home, what common folk call alienation. Freud actually used Unheimlichkeit to refer to a sense of the uncanny which he associated with anxiety, but it’s an anxiety at being that Shame portrays rather than the kind of anxiety that has its root in some permutation of the Oedipus Complex.

Paris Journal: Being and Nothingness

Walking in the rain in Paris after being pickpocketed in the Metro brings to mind the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous  L’Etre et Le Neant, which was the bible of existentialism. You have come away with your being intact, having been artfully dispossessed of your wallet and yet you have nothing. None of the creature comforts are available. You can’t buy or eat anything and since your bank card has also been stolen there is no money to be obtained from the ATM’s which now become a taunting presence, as your stomach starts to growl. Since you now have no dinner reservation to worry about it’s interesting to think about Sartre in comparison to another philosopher Martin Heidegger whose Being and Time was the bible of phenomenology. It’s curious to ponder the fact that Sartre and Heidegger were both concerned with the same thing, being. You don’t have to have to read either of these formidable tomes to think about them, especially considering the fact that you haven’t eaten. Sartre was obviously talking about being as it manifests itself in a universe where there is nothing, ie no God, no intrinsic order, no parameters in which to contain chaos and Heidegger was thinking about being too,  but, if you believe you can tell a book by its cover then Heidegger was interested in considering being under the aspect of time. And what happens over time? Death. You are walking the rainy streets, hoping for some miracle by which your wallet will pop up out of nowhere with your affluence consequently and miraculously restored when you remember reading that Heidegger believed we live an inauthentic existence unless we are aware of the imminence of death.