Literary Thoughts: Raskolnikov

Literary Thoughts:
Raskolnikov

http://www.againwiththecomics.com/2007/08/batman-by-dostoyevsky.html

I recently finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and felt the need to expunge some word vomit. I have waited to read Crime and Punishment for truly the hippest of hipster reasons, that of course being that it is Dostoevsky’s most widely read book.  I instead wanted to read those less known works first, out of intellectual vanity. 

However Crime and Punishment did not disappoint at all. In fact I find myself sympathizing with Raskolnikov more than any of Dostoevsky’s character besides perhaps Ivan Karamazov. Many denounce this troubled soul as a villain, and use his story as a cautionary tale of the dangers of unrestrained progressive ideals. To some extent this is warranted.

Raskolnikov in my eyes is a man, neither hero nor villain. Dostoevsky does this well with his characters, all of whom are brutally flawed and often tragically beautiful. This, to me, best reflects life. There are no storybook princes or heroines, even the greatest men and women had intense character flaws; history has just done its best to gloss over them.  

  

Again I say I sympathize with the young scholar. He is morose and sullen and a bit of an ass, but truly in his heart there is great compassion. I know how it feels to wander the night in a feverish state without rest for hours on end. No matter how far you walk you can never get away from yourself. And so Raskolnikov finds that the only comfort he will find will be in confronting his crime. He takes responsibility for his actions, he does not shirk from the consequences, and indeed his honesty is startling in his confession.

He does not compromise his ideals (however misguided they may be) and still believes, even in Siberia that his murdering of the pawnbroker for the greater good was justified. There is a part of me that does not disagree with him, he realizes the consequences of his actions and in a way stays consistent with his original idea. 

Part of his essay “On Crime,” points out that society as a whole acts as the arbitrator for those “who are above it.” In this regard Raskolnikov faces the fact that he cannot live with himself and maintain his sanity within society and accepts the full consequences of his actions. In doing so he is admitting that he is not one that wants rise above society’s laws, this is not to say he cannot. His moral compass is shaped by his own reason and experience. He does not allow the cookie cutter mold of what he is told to make a deep impression, instead he constantly questions and reshapes his own values. In this way Raskolnikov is morally superior. 

The true reason for his change of heart is the character Svidrigailov. Svidrigailov shows the twisted and evil side of Raskolnikov’s idea: that those who are capable of overcoming and avoiding crime are morally allowed to be unrestricted. Dostoevsky loves to do this in his stories, The Brothers Karamazov has the twisted reflection of Ivan’s “everything is permitted philosophy” in Smerdyakov patricide; while The Possessed has the mirrored yet opposite ideologies of the elder Verkhovensky and his son. 

Svidrigailov lives his life committing atrocious crimes only for his own self-interested passion, and he is very good at getting away with them. In many ways he exemplifies Raskolnikov idea of the superior man, based on his intelligence and ability. Where he does not fit into Raskolnikov’s idea is that unlike the Napoleon’s, he is not serving mankind. 

When we contrast Svidrigailov with the character of Sonya, who prostitutes herself out for her family, essentially committing a grievous social crime, we see that she also is not acting for mankind. She is doing so out of love for her young step-siblings who would starve without her. She does it for her family and for God, and becomes a martyr in Raskolnikov’s eyes.

The contrast of these two characters that unknowingly live through Raskolnikov’s ideological crisis is what brings him to his knees. He sees that in some sense the idea is absolutely just (Sonya) and in another sense evil (Svidrigailov) this realization is absurd and inconsolable in his heart.  It is also what allows him to realize that his actions were not done, truly for humanity and the greater good, but for his own pride. 

And that suffering leads to his confession. Though he never relinquishes his pride, he allows Sonya’s love to finally give him peace. 

In my eyes Raskolnikov is a tragic hero. He brings about much of his own suffering, but has the courage to admit it; he willingly suffers for his mistakes and in doing so allows love into his heart.  

Everyone has a Rock

Everyone has a Rock

            I have been told that I was a bit of a smart ass as a child. Too clever for my own good, thought about stuff too much, a bit of a weirdo, off; you know the kid. I asked questions that adults didn’t like. When I was 9, I remember asking several people “What is the meaning of life?” I don’t remember what prompted this type of inquiry, but I remember the utter failure in the responses I received. Some would just give me the “weird kid” eye and halfheartedly remark about me being a smart ass. Others would give me a traditional Judeo-Christian response; this answer seemed good natured and right, but I had known that Santa wasn’t real since four and it always smelled a bit like a fairy tale. Now my religious inadequacies aside no answer even came close to satisfying.

            My sister is four years older than me and we would always get into petty arguments over who knew more. She was ahead in school and so I had to rely on crafty trick questions to win such arguments. One such question was:

            “Well, what is the meaning of life then?”

            Every time this would stammer her, with responses like “No one can answer that,” or “to do Good and go to heaven.”  

            And I would always smirk and reply: “Trick question; there is no meaning.”

            What started as a curiosity and clever answer to a hard question, has stuck with me for fifteen years, at times driving me to sickness and psychosis.  I am an avid reader of those who struggle with this question. Religious texts, existentialist literature, atheist ideologies and philosophy, I gobble them up, hoping for a better answer.

            There is one book in particular that has helped (this may not be the best verb for how it has affected me) me immensely in my life. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus.

            I am not going to say that I recommend this book to the casual reader. It is neither fun to read nor easy. The primary base of the text addresses the issue of the absurd and its implications and reads (albeit more eloquently) as a philosophy text. Famously the text begins with the challenge that:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

            This hooked me. Camus struggles with the idea of the absurd in its relation to suicide. The absurd as he understands it is “the actor divorced from his setting.” In essence he concludes that man/woman’s rationality and reason can never fully make sense of the random chaos of the universe. There are only two options left after such an observation:

A)    Take a leap of faith- whether it is religious or philosophical. That is to say come to a conclusion that directly contradicts your reason.

B)     Conclude that life is meaningless.  

Like me, Camus has a fundamental handicap in the faith department. For him, faith goes against rationality and is akin to lying to oneself (at least for him, he makes no claim to others). There is a painful honesty in this, and leads him to confront the only other conclusion available- meaninglessness.

Much of Camus philosophy is an embittered battle against the nihilism he struggles with. Camus has to face his original question, if there is no point, why not off yourself? He rejects this notion and in doing so attempts to refute nihilism. He asserts that, truly the only way to live is to stare the absurd in the face. To never let the inherent contradiction of the human condition escape your attention. Suicide is much like a leap of faith; it removes the question instead of answering it. By facing the absurd one can live life with the fullest freedom and laugh when the entire world weeps. He maintains that this is a constant struggle and that it should be embraced as such.

So despite the meaninglessness of life, we raise our middle fingers to the universe and that we live with such purpose, we live our lives so hard, we live in constant contradiction to the world, that we are truly free.

Alright I know I am boring you with philosophy again. So let’s get to the good part. Camus embeds a story among all his philosophy to best convey its purpose: The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is ancient Greek hero considered the wisest of mortals who escapes death and scorns the gods. His mortality catches up with him and he is condemned to the terrible fate of pointless labor for eternity.

“He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

For me, this says much. Life is often hard and there is no standard measurement for acceptable misery. What this truly means to me is that the world is what I make of it and that even if my experience contains suffering, I can shape my reaction and indeed my outlook on it. You can be strengthened by your circumstance. Indeed the most beautiful people are often the most scarred (insert cliché alarm).

When I get really sick with UC, I have to read The Myth of Sisyphus. Because when throwing up blood and rolling around with the burning hot knife of pancreatic acid cramps, I can decide that I am stronger than my rock. It has facilitated my finding of creativity, determination and compassion while bedridden for months at a time. It has helped me to make fuel from shit, to drive me into an impassioned frenzy rather than a stagnant pit. And it has convinced me more than once that giving up is horseshit. So….

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

You should read the Story- http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/msysip.htm

Stream of Consciousness: Candlelight

Candlelight

There is something about it; that haze, the soft malaise of melancholy. It’s not especially painful, though it can be; really it’s more uncomfortable and paralyzing. It’s a slow creeping ailment, hidden in the background of your thoughts, a far off static. It’s just on the horizon of your view; an encroaching fog. Like a shadow it has never left me. There are times when I forget it exists, my attention focused instead on the joys and excitements of conscience experience. There are times that I yell, struggle and flail against it, dispelling the fog, drowning out the static, if only for an instant. Most of the time it’s there in the corner of my eye, in the background of my thoughts, slowly and patiently chipping away.

Then there are the moments of clarity. You could describe these instances, sometimes frequent, other times rare, as a delicate concoction of enlightenment and insanity.

These moments have a single underlying similarity, they are destructive. The feelings they bring can range from acute unbearable pain, to numb blinding apathy.

They can even make you happy; not the content amiable happiness of embracing an old friend, no. It’s the manic happiness of an addict getting their fix.

This lucidity occurs when you stare the sullen shade, the haunting whisper, in the face. It comes from the back of your mind, the outskirts of your vision, to the forefront.

Instead of being a barely audible whisper, it becomes a conversation.

And its voice is beautiful and persuasive.

I watch the candlelight, the flame tall and swaying with the little thoughts of its little life. It dances around the wick, without touching, but clearly entwined. The smallest of breezes breathes change into the tiny pyre. Moving, flickering, extending, and trying desperately to escape the comfort of the candle. Its own intensity growing, ignorant that it was the breeze that shaped its intent. Dimming as it returns to its consistent sway, I smile a sad smile, for its futility. The cracked window whistles with a warm rush of summer air. The tiny flame quivers and shrinks, wounded. Dominated by the gale it struggles to keep alive. I gently pull the window closed, keeping my eyes on the tiny flare of life. Dimming into the protection of its prison its vitality blinks in and out, like panicked breaths.

I watch with intimate focus as it slows and claws for stability. It becomes still, an experienced composure overtaking its previous erraticism. With slow, deliberate growth it rises. Steady, but bright it hovers at rest above its unresponsive habitat, never quite reaching its previous height. Despite its smaller stature, the flame bursts with illumination, casting shadows across the silence of the room.

I watch for a long time.

There is calmness to its life. There is a dignity in its subtle movement, and also sadness under its surface, the kind that comes with the acceptance of a painful truth.

And as I watch the flame, it shrinks slowly, but its brightness remains constant. It never dims, but acts with volition. Then, without warning, it is, gone. Its wick unchanged, the candle inanimate, a small life extinguished.

a part of me misses it and scorns it’s choice. but

with only the hint of smoke and the darkness of the room,

a soft compelling voice in my head tells me

that it is wisest life I ever will witness.

History Rant: A Human Being Worth Talking About

Vissarion Belinsky

Alright. So, you can join me once again in my continuous and forced effort to write some words on paper, or the internet, or whatever this is.

Today I am going to expound about Belinsky, a cool guy that most people don’t know too much about.  He comes from the far off land of vodka and commies, Russia. It’s the turbulent 19^th century and intellectualism is all the craze, especially in the world of Russian literature. He is best known as the father of Russian (arguably all of European) social literary criticism and for being the granddaddy of the radical Russian intelligentsia.

Alright, so he’s some old critic that nobody cares about anymore. Wrong, he’s a badass.

He was born poor, in the provinces and was sick with consumption (TB) his whole life. He was self-educated, got himself into university and then got himself expelled for a very badly written, overly political play. Did that get him down? Fuck no. He was described as being in a constant state of frenzy; the man was passionately obsessed with figuring out the Truth and fixing Russia. This overzealous nature literally destroyed him, and eventually worked himself to death.  He compensated being poorly educated by being insanely well read. So he started separating the literary bad shit from the good shit and old shit from the new shit and pretty much drew the battle lines of the Russian intellectual scene. He did this intuitively and concisely by writing tons of literary reviews and criticisms in a variety of journals. In doing so he discovered or solidified some of Russia’s greatest writers including: Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Herzen and Turgenev.

Alright I know I’m losing your attention. Its history class all over…. so let’s get into it in list form.

Why This Dude Is a Badass-

1.       Total outsider- He rose from an obscure backwater beginning to interact and scare the shit out of the leading thinkers, politicians, writers and nobles of the time. He was generally seen as quiet and sullen in social situations. He never tried to learn the social nuances of the dandy nobles’ and was seen as unclothe, awkward and inarticulate. Unlike the well-educated nobility that made up the rest of the intellectual community, Belinksy only knew Russian. He actually had to be taught Hegel by a friend, because he couldn’t read that shit himself. In a society dominated by a feudal power structure, this guy not only rose to the level of all the most influential people, he actually became their moral authority.

"If a man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted to his own vanity rather than the truth. " -VB

2.       Brutally honest- Belinsky was OBSEESSED with the capital T-truth.  He saw that in Russia the only way that any moral discourse could be done under the oppressive regime was in the form of art. While he was a writer himself, most of his work was mediocre at best. His greatest strength was to see the truth or falsehood of the matter in others works and to point it out, even when it was especially dangerous to do so. He was criticized for being “wishy-washy” because his opinion’s changed so drastically over his life. His response? Laugh in your face and tell you how much he’s bled for his convictions. Belinsky would go to extreme lengths to understand any position, to discover the truth. He would put himself in another’s writer’s shoes to such extremes that if he was convinced of something, he would tear down all of his previous pre-conceptions and rebuild with only the truth. This type of massive conscience based overhaul would make him sick for years at a time, and also earned him the title (from both sides of the aisle) as the “Conscience of the Russian Intelligentsia.” The man was so authentically obsessed with finding the moral truth even the great conservative Russian censor Goncharov (who censored tons of his writing) “spoke of him as the best man he had ever known.”

"He abandoned no view, however eccentric, until he had tried it out on himself as it were, until he had 'lived himself' through it, and paid the price in nervous waste and a sense of inadequacy, and sometimes total failure."

3.       He Kept it Real- Alright so you know how I said he was inarticulate and unclothe and shit? This was true and under most circumstances an understatement. He was often prey to the 19^th century noble dandy’s sharp tongue, and often was cut to pieces by witticisms. Since he wasn’t a member of the aristocracy he didn’t have their social graces and never bothered to learn the rules of high society. Normally this guy couldn’t argue himself out of a wet paper bag; that is unless you offended his conscience. His friends would see this happening and take an “Oh Fuck,” step back. Herzen (a pretty important dude), said “when his dearest convictions were touched ... he would fling himself at his victim like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him ridiculous, make him pitiful.” But seriously, you didn’t want to try and defend serfdom or religious corporal punishment or wife rape in front of this guy, because he would scream at you until his throat bleed, and then keep screaming, probably until you had wet yourself and contracted TB. Again highlighting that I am serious, he actually did this, several times. While this kind of behavior might be a social faux pas today, in the 19^th century it was the equivalent of tearing off your clothes shitting in your hand and screaming “COME AT ME BRO!”

4.       Fearless- Alright when I say he was fearless I don’t mean he was incapable of feeling fear. I mean he was probably afraid of spiders or people with unnaturally large foreheads (that’s normal right?) or urinating in public or whatever.  But when it came down to telling the truth, this guy was ballsy. I mean normally you can get around the whole truth thing by just not responding to falsehood or by omitting a bit of information. Not Belinsky, he spoke the truth (as he saw it) all the time. It got him expelled, it lost him jobs, it made him no friends and it would have got him executed, if he wasn’t a baller. The guy died at 37 the night before his arrest. He could have fled the country and published abroad like most of the critics of his time, but he decided to that would take too much time and would detract from his fixing his home country. So he decided to just work himself to death rather than run like the rest of those pansy aristocrats. Belinsky was ready to tell anybody they were wrong, it didn’t matter if you were his friend, his family, the Tsar, God, or his greatest hero. Nikolai Gogol was one such hero. Belinsky helped make the guys career and declared him the “head of Russian Literature,” emphasizing his critical realist view that showed the gritty truth of Russian society. So when Gogol published a book that essentially said: ignore that other shit I said and instead fall in line with the church and the tsar cause that’s what good pious Russian’s have always done, Belinsky had a shit fit. “Letter to Gogol” is a personal letter that is not only what Belinsky is most remembered for, but also one of the most widely read documents in Russia in the 19^th century. The way I see Belinsky writing the letter follows, he screamed at a piece of paper and then used the blood splatter to transcribe said rant.  The letter itself is not only a scathing criticism of Gogol’s hypocrisy but also points out in a concise angry voice Russia’s greatest ills. Seriously though it was joked about that every school teacher in Russia had a copy of the letter and it became a bible for the revolutionary. Fun fact, the reason Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia was for reading aloud in the Petrashevsky Circle (essentially a revolutionary book club) the “Letter to Gogol.”

"Proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and Stygian darkness, panegyrist of Tartar morals – what are you about!"- Letter to Gogol

Alright I have probably bored you to death. But you have to admit Belinsky was a pretty badass guy. Not because he was particularly brilliant or a literary genius, not because he developed new ideas or masterminded political action. In fact he really didn’t/wasn’t any of these things.

The guy was just honest and committed.  Instead of his conscience being the background noise of his life like it is for most people, it was his life. Instead of shying away from ugly truth and utter personal failure he stared it straight in the face. All he wanted was to do the right thing according to the undiluted ugly truth of the world.

And it Killed him. 

Read the Letter if your interested-

http://faculty.unlv.edu/pwerth/WebReader-422.pdf

Citations-

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/belinsk.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vissarion_Belinsky

Isaiah Berlin, Russian thinkers, (170-211)

Creative Tidbits

So here are a couple of things I have been working on. A piece of flash fiction, a poem and a bit of creative non-fiction. There far from polished, just some little things I have been tinkering with. Enjoy! (?)

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Lie

Her eyes widened with surprise, and perhaps anger. He watched her mouth move in repetitious patterns, wet lips contracting and breathing, with meaning.

“What do you want me to say? What? What can I say?”

 He himself did not know how this started. A frozen blank expression was all he could muster. The Truth? Was that what he wanted? He might prefer a well-crafted lie. Nothing preserves a person’s feelings like a good lie.

Her brow fixed her face into a stern expression. “I swear you’re making mountains out of mole hills. You know this can’t be healthy for our relationship. How can you love me and not trust me?” Cocking her head and folding her arms she locked eyes with him, demanding an answer; his paralysis proved to be a partial one, as he stammered out a response.

“I know….” He struggled to control the shaking in his hands and voice. A rehearsed speech comes in bits and pieces to his mind. She doesn't even blink.

Her words cut apart his stammering accusation. “What do you know....? That I was out with Tom last night? Tom LIKES men.” Something popped in his mind. This might be plausible. Suddenly he felt like he needed to apologize, to make this better. A panic swept over him. “You always do this!” Her words were confident and assured and fanned the growing fires of his fears. 

“Wait. Just wait. I’m sorry, I just… Its…” His voice was noticeably shaky. This is all wrong. Wasn't he the one who had been wronged? Just run away, run and pretend this never happened. Pathetic.

“He needed someone to talk too, and I didn't want you to tell you because I knew you’d get like this.” Her face was flushed red. Her lips seemed to move faster and faster. “I think I need some time to myself to think about things.” She started to turn.

He grabbed her hand. What could keep her here? “Please… Just wait. I didn't know where you were. I was worried; your roommate said you were at his place, I just… I’m sorry.” A lie. He was wrong, he was always wrong.  The trembling had left his voice, but was replaced by a clumsy pleading tone.

She turned. For an instant he saw surprise, maybe even panic on her face, and then it passed. Those lips were angrily pursed, her eyes stern and disappointed. “Let me go. Maybe we can talk about it later.”

He needed to say something. Anything to make this stop, how can he fix this?  What does she want to hear? Desperation filled his heart. “I can’t lose you. I was stupid, I’m sorry.” And then it dawned on him. Just tell the truth. Just own up. “I went through your texts. I’m sorry, he just sounded like he had a thing for you. I didn't mean too, your phone was just out and I… it…”

A silent glare stabbed into him. “I’ll call you later.” He let go. Then she was gone. He sunk. The curb is a comfort to a man dashed in the road. Cold asphalt did not loosen the knot in his gut.

 This didn't go according to plan.  How could he fix this?

What happened?

Was a lie what he really wanted to here?

Was the truth more consoling?

Why couldn't he tell the difference?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Glance

Across a room. 

                Magnetic,

A course assumes,

                between eyes.

Apologetic,

                A beholder gazed.

Stunned and undisguised,

too long, and abased,

                he withdrew from her'

Fierce and Beautiful

                Eyes. 

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Toy Soldiers and Boy Generals

                Standing with complete confidence over-viewing the miniaturized world laid out, my hand strokes unkempt facial hair.

Four, twenty-something-year-old boys, stand around a table playing with toy soldiers. The dirty basement littered with paint, plastic and garbage fade from our perception as we contemplate the game at hand.  Between us is a carefully crafted table, green flock intermingles with sand to form a mock terrain of grass and dirt. The image is completed with the scattering of meticulously miniature ruins, forests, craters and trenches to create the illusion of a grand battlefield.  Paint fumes fumigate from a corner where one of these grown children works with dedication on coloring a freshly built model tank.

                My focus concentrates on one point of the table, a battle line arrayed with similar completed tanks, surrounded by individual model soldiers, each built, painted and customized with care. Reaching for a tape-measure, I move the pieces the allocated distance with the precision of a general.  Satisfied with the movement of my troops I flip through one of the dozens of rule books involved in this gratuitously over-complicated game of chess. My opponent gathers together a handful of dice and carefully rolls them in a clear region of the battlefield.  With the odds in his favor I grimly remove several of my own models who have just died in a well-placed explosion. Cotton patches, painted to appear as smoke and fire replace a model tank with another well rolled bunch of dice. All goes according to plan. Odds determine the winner of this game, every time a dice is rolled it is supposed to simulate another battlefield action. A solider throwing a grenade, a man sprinting, a tank breaking down, the courage of man standing alone as his comrades are killed, all are taken into account with hundreds of pages of rules. The amount of time it takes to learn this game keeps its enthusiast to an eccentric and dedicated few.

                The battle has reached a critical point, tensely, the mock generals convene. Murmurings are passed from ally to ally; subtle pointing to rules on page and table areas keep concealed the plans from the enemy. As a consensus is reached troops are boldly re-positioned  I look over to a comrade to gauge his reaction, nodding reassuringly. Resting my hand on the fuzz of the fake grass, I try and blot out the noise of my family upstairs. Analyzing the odds of our success, I order an unexpected counter attack moving from cover into flanking positions. With the rolling of the dice, my opponent’s squirm in the angst of anticipation. The risks paid off as my men storm into position.

                Complete concentration is shattered as my phone sounds from across the clutter of the unfinished basement. With the flipping open of the phone and a quick glance at the caller, work, responsibility and reality flood back into my awareness. No longer the general of the grand army before him, I realize I will likely be late to work if I am to finish this 3 hour game.

                But victory is so close at hand….

And I close the phone, and with it the rest of the real world; At least for the next hour.

Really Real Reality?

Image by: http://deathbytrolley.wordpress.com

                I remember seeing The Matrix when I was eleven or so and being blown away by the idea that this could all be an illusion.  That possibility seems laughable and easily discarded in the light of our own personal experiences, science, common sense and all sorts of other seemingly concrete facets of life.  While I still think the possibility that we are all trapped in some computer program is laughable, the nature of reality itself to me is on much more shaky grounds.

                When I was sixteen I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. This first person narrative written in present tense has a nonlinear timetable, jumping from flashback to future back to the scene at hand within the space of a few pages. This style leads the reader, first by the hand, and then by the scruff of the neck down the rabbit hole of personal insanity. For those who don’t know the story, the psychological twist is hiding in plain sight but invisible for so long. I remember thinking that possessed insanity would be very hard to recognize.

A few years later I read Philip K Dick’s VALIS and then again my view on the nature of thought was flipped around. The story essentially follows Horselover Fat who is a schizophrenic version of Philip K Dick himself, as he tries to rationalize his own situation in the universe.

                “Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, [one] ... slipped by degrees into madness.” - Philip K Dick’s VALIS

                What have these types of stories taught us? Well nothing really. There isn't any reliable way to verify how the nature of reality is to specific people. That’s the point though. There are several preexisting premises in which much of humanities collective knowledge rest, that really are quite unstable.

                Now indulge me as I delve into a little philosophy. Going back all the way to Aristotle, western philosophy has moved in such a way to try and understand the world in an objective sense. That is to say “Yes” to the question “If a tree fell in the woods would it make a sound?”  Today most people would say: “Of course it does!” the physics behind the crash are the same, so there would likely be a large crash.

                Now when a whistle blows at 40,000 Hz. and the dog starts squealing does the whistle make a sound? The dog certainly thinks so. But us lame humans wouldn't hear jack shit. I know, I know. You’re just rolling your eyes and saying “But that’s just semantics!” Well fuck sometimes semantics are important. If you quantify sound as the perceptual experience than all those mechanical wavelengths traveling through matter that we can’t hear aren't sound. Now what about people that can hear more sounds than others? Wait this is getting stupid. Right?

                But just stay with me for a bit longer. Thomas Nagel (every materialist in the room groans) is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University who wrote an essay called “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” The essay itself talks a lot about Qualia: the “what its like-ness.” On the level of biology and physics we can very accurately understand how a bats echolocation works, even down to very minute details. However, there is still a type of knowledge that is completely out of our grasp in the equation, that of Qualia. We have absolutely no idea, not even an inkling of how it would Feel, or what it would be Like.

Image by: 9GAG

                Alright, so maybe we can’t KNOW what a bat feels Like. So the fuck what?

                What if I told you that when I look at a box of dildos and you look at a box of dildos we are likely not experiencing the exact same perception (besides maybe the smell…). Well it’s true; so far we have been very unsuccessful with matching Surface Spectral Reflectance’s (SSRs) with accurate color matching. This phenomenon, called metamerism, has baffled many reductionist color scientists.

Image by: http://www.gigwise.com

 I am not trying to make the argument that when I see red, you see blue (that argument has met with little success). The point is that our perceptions are NOT in fact very accurate and NOT homogeneous  And that it seems very unlikely that, just like the Bat, I will ever know what it is Like, to see through your eyes.

                Now where has all this rambling been going? Well, right back to the good grey mushy sack of ideas sloshing around in your skull. If the sound wave isn't the same thing as feeling of sound and the SSR isn't the same thing as the perception of color, what about the neurochemical synapse and the thought? An old French guy named Descartes said they most certainly weren't the same stuff, that Mind and Matter were completely different shit and that our thoughts were in some immaterial, untouchable, float-y spot above your heads or some crap (I’m paraphrasing a little). But there’s no real evidence, and the apparent connection with the brain and mind seem a little too convincing. This is referred to as the mind-body problem, and there are a lot of angry philosophers yelling at each other about it somewhere right now.

                Two schools of thought dominate the approach to this problem: materialism and dualism. Dualism maintains that mind is distinct from the physical world essentially that “no mental state is a material state, no mental state is entirely constituted by material states, no mental state has only material states as parts.” (Carroll and Markosian) Materialism, in contrast, affirms that there are only material states and that when one refers to a mental state they are just referring to a material state.

                Materialism has been very unsuccessful in dealing with our subjective experience; it can’t deal with what its likeness. It seems very difficult to say that all my hopes, dreams, free will, experiences and memories are just neurochemical activities which exist only in the casually closed physical domain. To do so strengthens the claims to determinism (free will is an illusion) and nihilism (everything is meaningless).  

On the other hand dualism has the trouble of butting against our empiricism by relying on completely untestable claims. Just so you know those who try to make reasonable logical arguments against empiricism have a very poor track record.

Without boring you more than I already have the problem, as I see it, boils down to this.

Our scientific society tries to boil everything down to an objective level. However everything we do is filtered through a flawed subjective lens (i.e. our experience).  There is an inherent contradiction in this. I am not saying “WHOA IS ME! SCIENCE HAS FAILED!!!!” No in fact this type of problem should make the hard sciences strive all the harder.

The general trend has been to ignore these types of problems and when someone like Steven Hawking declares that “Philosophy is dead,” I have to scratch my head.

Just some word vomit.

                 
Readings:

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/teaching/niseminar4/Nagel_WhatIsItLikeToBeABat.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Metaphysics-Cambridge-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/0521533686
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Meditations-Philosophy-Selections-Objections/dp/0521558182/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104709&sr=1-3&keywords=Descartes
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Ontology-Science-Life-Mind/dp/0262513757/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104816&sr=1-1&keywords=color+ontology+and+color+science
http://www.amazon.com/VALIS-Philip-K-Dick/dp/0547572417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104851&sr=1-1&keywords=VALIS
http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Club-Novel-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0393327345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104872&sr=1-1&keywords=Fight+club