French people, Meta Intelligence

Being at Home in the World/Universe

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided an introduction to the problem of being at home when he wrote:

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world’, or rather: “There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.”
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 369.

Remy C. Kwant, in his essay “Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology”, commented:

For, according to him, the original lies buried in a dimension of darkness in such a way that it cannot be brought to light. Our existence is interwoven with the world, is a dialogue with the world. This dialogue reaches its most profound point there where the first and most original meaning arises, a meaning that is pre-conscious and pre-personal. Whatever is in our consciousness, whatever comes to light, becomes lucid, originates also in this darkness. As we have seen, man is able to obtain a measure of knowledge regarding this dark depth. He is able to divine something about the mysterious dialogue between the body-subject and the world. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, an absolute illumination of the phenomenal field is in principle impossible. All man can do is to erect some pointers in a darkness which resists full illumination.
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 390-391.

We sense that the interaction between ourselves and the world at every level may not be explainable. Therefore, we seek emotional or psychological shelter. The three levels of shelter are:

hearth and home
a sense of belonging
gods

Think of the song, “A House Is Not a Home”, sung by Dionne Warwick. “A chair is still a chair / Even though there’s no one sitting there … But a room is not a house
/ And a house is not a home” depicts the human longing for shelter via hearth and home. The French philosopher Bruno Latour referred to this as a “parliament of things.”

Consider “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, as well as the novel (and later film) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both of these cover the deep issue of shelter.

Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (German: Bauen Wohnen Denken) states:

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:

What is it to dwell?

How does building belong to dwelling?

I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Albert Hofstadter), Harper & Row, 1975, pages 145-146.

Stuart Kauffman comes at this from a different angle:

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Did Neanderthal, Homo habilis, or Homo erectus ask? Around which fire in the past 3 million years of hominid evolution did these questions first arise? Who knows.

Somewhere along our path, paradise has been lost, lost to the Western mind, and in the spreading world civilization, lost to our collective mind. John Milton must have been the last superb poet of Western civilization who could have sought to justify the ways of God to man in those early years foreshadowing the modern era. Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science. Once, a scant few centuries ago, we of the West believed ourselves the chosen of God, made in his image, keeping his word in a creation wrought by his love for us. Now, only 400 years later, we find ourselves on a tiny planet, on the edge of a humdrum galaxy among billions like it scattered across vast megaparsecs, around the curvature of space-time back to the Big Bang. We are but accidents, we’re told. Purpose and value are ours alone to make. Without Satan and God, the universe now appears the neutral home of matter, dark and light, and is utterly indifferent. We bustle, but are no longer at home in the ancient sense.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, page 4.

Kauffman comes to grips with this problem with the final line above. He continues:

In this new view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, bricolage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing,” in Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which selection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on is head with his blind watchmaker.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 25-26.

Kauffman wants to complete the Darwinian revolution by adding self-organization and complexity to natural selection. In his vision, this will begin to produce a holistic picture of who we are. This will perhaps allow us to feel “We are all at home in the universe, poised to sanctify by our best, brief, only stay.” [page 30.]

Zooming out from this, we can see a meta-intelligent sense in which science believes it can convert mysteries into problems using math. In contrast to this, philosophers believe the opposite, that the problems are becoming more mysterious.

Wrestling with History: Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville, a brilliant French historian, wrote Democracy in America. This book is a supreme example of U.S.-watching.

Another book of his, Recollections, shows him wrestling with history itself. If we remember that Clio is the muse of history, then we might say that Recollections is the chronicle of de Tocqueville’s encounter with her.

The question of human history and what de Tocqueville called “the world’s destiny” are described as follows:

l wrote histories without taking part in public affairs, and politicians whose only concern was to control events without a thought of describing them. And I have invariably noticed that the former see general causes everywhere, whereas the latter, spending their lives amid the disconnected events of each day, freely attribute everything to particular incidents and think that all the little strings their hands are busy pulling daily are those that control the world’s destiny. Probably both of them are mistaken.

For my part I hate all those absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate and thus succeed, so to speak, in banishing men from the history of the human race. Their boasted breadth seems to me narrow, and their mathematical exactness false. I believe, pace the writers who find these sublime theories to feed their vanity and lighten their labours, that many important historical facts can be explained only by accidental circumstances, while many others are inexplicable. Finally, that chance, or rather the concatenation of secondary causes, which we call by that name because we can’t sort them all out, is a very important element in all that we see taking place in the world’s theatre. But I am firmly convinced that chance can do nothing unless the ground has been prepared in advance. Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turns of mind and the state of mores are the materials from which chance composes those impromptu events that surprise and terrify us.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, 1893, Anchor Books, page 78.

De Tocqueville warns us that the world’s destiny is always murky and what he calls a labyrinth and a whirlwind. He says:

Mentally I reviewed the history of our last sixty years and smiled bitterly to myself as I thought of the illusions cherished at the end of each phase of this long revolution; the theories feeding these illusions; our historians’ learned daydreams, and all the ingenious false systems by which men sought to explain a present still unclearly seen and to foresee the unseen future.
Recollections, page 83.

He continues:

Shall we reach, as other prophets as vain perhaps as their predecessors assure us, a more complete and profound social transformation than our fathers ever foresaw or desired, and which we ourselves cannot yet conceive; or may we not simply end up in that intermittent anarchy which is well known to be the chronic incurable disease of old peoples? I cannot tell, and do not know when this long voyage will end; I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the bank. And I often wonder whether that solid land we have sought for so long actually exists, and whether it is not our fate the rove the seas forever!
Recollections, pages 83-84.

And yet, with all that profound uncertainty, he offers a very sweeping interpretation of French history from the French Revolution (1789) to the French Revolution of 1848. The famous painting by Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple), commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, falls in between.

Despite de Tocqueville’s warnings about the slipperiness of historical judgement, he arrives at an extremely precise interpretation of his own:

Seen as a whole from a distance, our history from 1789 to 1830 appears to be forty-one years of deadly struggle between the Ancien Régime with its traditions, memories, hopes and men (i.e. the aristocrats), and the new France led by the middle class. 1830 would seem to have ended the first period of our revolutions, or rather, of our revolution, for it was always one and the same, through its various fortunes and passions, whose beginning our fathers saw and whose end we shall in all probability not see. All that remained of the Ancien Régime was destroyed forever. In 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive and so complete that the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie encompassed all political powers, franchises, prerogatives, indeed the whole government, to the exclusion, in law, of all beneath it and, in fact, of all that had once been above it. Thus the bourgeoisie became not only the sole director of society, but also, one might say, its cultivator. It settled into every office, prodigiously increased the number of offices, and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry.
Recollections, page 5.

Reviewing the first sentence from the quote above, one can see a deep characterization of an era, with the conclusion “in 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive…” Notice the profound paradox that on one hand de Tocqueville spoke of the elusiveness of history despite providing the definite description of this period. Contrast “seen as a whole from a distance” with one of the themes of his recollections, that it is not given to us to understand history.

Kierkegaard and Existence

There are various striking intuitions about human existence. For example, in his brilliant memoirs, Speak, Memory, Nabokov begins with the deep reflection where human existence is compared to a baby in a cradle, rocking, completely vulnerable and uncertain. All of this is bracketed by two episodes of infinite darkness. The first episode took place before you were born and the second takes place after you’re gone. Your existence is a temporary flame, like that of a lit match.

A MetaIntelligent comment on this would be that the profound ingenuity of the 19th century mathematicians analyzing the size and nature of infinity (e.g., Richard Dedekind or Georg Cantor) cannot in the last analysis wrestle down human existence into mathematics.

The modern progenitor of this kind of human existence-watching is the Danish genius Søren Kierkegaard. In one of his masterpieces, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), he makes the claim that knowledge, theory, speculative thinking and infinity-watching à la Dedekind and Cantor, cannot possibly explain human existence, because it subsumes all of these.

In 2025, this would mean that the Kierkegaard sense of things would tell you that neuroscience can never really explain how existence is sensed by a living person.

Kierkegaard writes, “in my view the misfortune of the age was precisely that it had too much knowledge, had forgotten what existence means, and what inwardness signifies.” He continues, “for a knowledge-seeker, when he has finished studying China he can take up Persia; when he has studied French he can begin Italian; and then go on to astronomy, the veterinary sciences, and so forth, and always be sure of a reputation as a tremendous fellow.”

By way of contrast, “inwardness in love does not consist in consummating seven marriages with Danish maidens, then cutting loose on the French, the Italian, and so forth, but consists in loving one and the same woman, and yet being constantly renewed in the same love, making it always new in the luxuriant flowering of the mood.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, page 232.)

Kierkegaard’s kind of existence-watching can be understood as a turning-upside-down of the famous phrase from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” For Kierkegaard, “I am, therefore I think.” Notice that “I think” is an epistemological statement or knowledge-watching. “I am” is an ontological statement.

This existentialist tradition of putting ontology before epistemology finds its culmination in Heidegger. As he says in his opus, Being and Time (1927), “human being is ultimately the being for whom being itself is an issue.”

Movies as a Part of Remedial Education

It’s almost “un-American” to be honest about the nightmare side of life when you cannot “walk on the sunny side of the street” and operate under all those facile Americanisms about “I’ve got the world on a string…” in all the songs and movie lines.

Film noir is supposed to be an antidote to this “false sunniness” and there’s one classic example that exemplifies this undiscussable nightmare side of life, namely, Detour (1945), directed by Edgar Ulmer.

Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish–Moravian, Austrian–American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet “The King of PRC,” due to his extremely prolific output on the said Poverty Row studio.
Wikipedia

As a refugee/expat, he understood that life isn’t always “a bowl of cherries” and set out to show this in his films.

In this underrated Ulmer masterpiece, Tom Neal plays a musician, Al Roberts, who gets into a labyrinthian mess via bad luck and some mindless impulsiveness combined. Detour is a kind of “road movie” in hell. With life and the world a kind of hellish school, the protagonist Al Roberts captures the enforced money-madness in everything:

“Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it.”

To this nightmarishness, there’s to be added the irrationality of fate or destiny or karma or luck:

“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”
— Al Roberts, Detour

He adds:

“But one thing I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

[as narrator] “Until then I had done things my way, but from then on something stepped in and shunted me off to a different destination than the one I’d picked for myself.”

Vera comments:

“Life’s like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it’s the ninth inning.”

Hitchhiking, say, is often hellish and not romantic and usually not a Jack Kerouac On the Road poetic or rhapsodic adventure at all, as Al Roberts explains:

“Ever done any hitchhiking? It’s not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it’s an education, and how you get to meet a lot of people, and all that. But me, from now on I’ll take my education in college, or in PS-62, or I’ll send $1.98 in stamps for ten easy lessons.”

Nightclubs too are not always heavenly escapes:

[voiceover] “It wasn’t much of a club, really. You know the kind. A joint where you could have a sandwich and a few drinks and run interference for your girl on the dance floor.”
— Al Roberts, Detour

Women might not be the salvation you were told to expect in songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.

“Vera was just as rotten in the morning as she’d been the night before.”
— Al Roberts, Detour

There’s a genre of American films called “lowlife stories” such as The Hustler with Paul Newman.

Ulmer’s Detour is not exactly a “lowlife movie” but rather an undiscussed dark side to life movie, nor is it “stylishly pessimistic” (like the French “poetical pessimism” movies) but rather a truth-telling exercise that shows stability and permanence and happiness as “living” on thin ice. American “cock-eyed optimism” isn’t always appropriate.

In that sense, Detour is a part of remedial education.

Movies As Education: Books and Selves

La Notte (English: The Night) is a 1961 Italian drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti (with Umberto Eco, the novelist, appearing in a cameo).

Filmed on location in Milan, the film depicts a day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their deteriorating relationship.

In 1961, La Notte received the Golden Bear (at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first for an Italian film) and the David di Donatello Award for Best Director.

La Notte is the central film of a trilogy, beginning with L’Avventura (1960) and ending with L’Eclisse (1962).

The movie follows Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), a distinguished writer, and his beautiful wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) as they visit their dying friend Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) who is hospitalized in Milan. Giovanni’s new book, La stagione (The Season), has just been published, and Tommaso praises his friend’s work.

La Notte reflects the director’s intuition that “you are what you read,” and books create a kind of thread through the story.

The dying, hospitalized patient has recently published an article on the famous philosophical writer Theodor Adorno. At the party the couple drifts into, the works of the Austrian–Jewish writer, Hermann Broch, are mentioned. Essentially, in a depressing glitzy world of lost and semi-lost souls, reading and books constitute a kind of emotional life raft or direction-finding compass, at least potentially. Antonioni frequently uses this motif.

We find this kind of reading and books-centered view of people interpreting their (bewildering) worlds in the works of the French thinker Charles Péguy (who died in battle during World War I in 1914):

“The Jew,” he declares in a passage that has become famous, “is a man who has always read, the Protestant has read for three hundred years, the Catholic for only two generations.”
(quoted in Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes, Vintage Books, paperback, 1958, page 355)

Charles Péguy is also central to Louis Malle’s classic French film Au revoir les enfants (English: “Goodbye, Children”).

If we “zoom out” and look for a meta-intelligent lesson, we can say that reading, writing, and arithmetic, the three basics mentioned in the phrase we all know, are very deeply entwined with who we are. Stories explain us to ourselves, and stories involve books and reading in our “Gutenberg world.”

The replacement of these by various (post-Gutenberg) screens and games may or may not be thought of as a variant since they constitute a kind of “pseudo-participation” and not participation based on perusal.

Is the Concept of “People-Class” Illuminating?

Abram Leon was a tragic Belgian/Polish Jewish sociologist who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. He fused the concept of people (e.g., the French people, or the Japanese people) with the concept of class (e.g. “the working class”) to make a hybridized concept of people–class.

Can we say that the Rwandan genocide in 1994, say, was the murder of a people–class (i.e., the Tutsi)?

Were the Armenian victims in 1915 an analogous phenomenon for the Ottoman Empire?

One immediately thinks of the Jews of Europe in WWII and the Chinese in 1965 Indonesia. (Think of the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson, which gives some “atmospherics” for this time in Indonesia.)

Is the Abram Leon notion of a people–class helpful in understanding these modern genocidal phenomena as an ensemble?

Meta intelligence is defined as working towards a “Composite Understanding of Education,” as you see in the masthead for this site.

Is people–class such a composite?

The Captive Mind Book and Intellectual Danger

The Captive Mind, by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, is a classic work in the domain of “mental freedom” and resistance to propaganda and every kind of brainwashing. Every nation state is to some extent a “lie factory” and a “deception machine.” A person has to “fend off” this manipulative or ideological power grab.

This very handbook of mini-essays, “Meta Intelligence,” is itself partly a defense of the non-captive mind, in the tradition of the Miłosz book. On the other hand, there’s a danger here “on the other side” since there’s a “free floating intellectual” temptation to take a sneering attitude towards all belief systems and to look down on the average person. There are dangers on all sides of this “non-captivity” of the mind. By embracing globalized and cosmopolitan education and by looking for knowledge connections in lectures, fields, universities, we look for a mental stance which is non-captive but not dismissive of believers. The French have a saying for this sense of intellectual superiority, “de haut en bas,” talking from “high to low,” from top to bottom.

Our purpose is to promote educational understanding, re-enchantment and “homemade” exercises in holism and not to promote superiority attitudes. Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the only survivor in Moby-Dick is tolerant and cosmopolitan and not exclusionary or monomaniacal like Ahab or Starbuck. Ishmael’s receptivity to things is a good model for such improved education, whether by life, whaling ships, academe.

The Captive Mind (Polish: Zniewolony umysł) is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.

It was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author’s defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind, Miłosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written “under great inner conflict.”

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born: June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania
Died: August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature