Tag: philosophy

Realms and Domains: Levels and Confusion

Are we governed by words or numbers? Martin Heidegger’s star pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, points a penetrating flashlight at this question of words vs. numbers when he writes, “It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of human civilization.”

According to Gadamer, our primary way of being is interpretative rather than computative. Our fundamental function is to cope, not to theorize. He argues, we can never finally step outside the traditions and practices of our culture. As one critic stated, “the metaphysical aid of a view from nowhere is seen by Gadamer as a questionable illusion that can have damaging consequences for a culture. It is not that scientific methods are mistaken—he thinks that science is involved an unstoppable dynamic which cannot be halted by philosophical or other objections…Gadamer gives a central role to art in questioning the dominance of the methods of the natural sciences. The artwork is not something to be determined by concepts, but something which ‘happens’ via its reception in real social contexts…”

Think about the interaction between words and numbers in the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Vintage Books, 1989, page 19.

Note how Nabokov describes our existence above. Think about the word “eternities”? It brings to mind infinity. For example, in algebra, 1/x goes to infinity as 1 approaches zero. Nabokov also states that man is doing all this infinity-watching which he describes in heartbeats per hour.

Another issue in this realm and domain confusion is provided by Gabriel Marcel, when he writes, “We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable.” Marcel continues:

A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as “a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity”. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence. The problem of evil, as the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly instructive example of this degradation.

Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have “heard talked about” but which I refuse as only “being for other people”; and that in virtue of an illusion which these “others” are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.

We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it— an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being thus reflected in them.

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 260-261.

A final profound confusion is the body as a physical item vs. a means of expression. Picture Fred Astaire dancing opposite Ginger Rogers. You have both the movements of his dance and what he conveys through body language. In order to dance, you have the biochemical fuel (food) to enable the biomechanical movement of the dance. The courtship expressed through his movements is something different. Marcel describes it thus:

We should recall, at this point, what we said in an earlier lecture about the body; the latter is not merely an instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it, my body, is also my way of being in the world.

Gabriel Marcel, page 257.

See also “Existence and the Problem of Separability”, “Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?” and “Arguments Without End: A Few Simple Examples” which also reference Marcel.

Arguments Without End: A Few Simple Examples

In the previous essay (“Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?”), we just encountered Geyl’s phrase, “arguments without end.” Here we cover a few simple examples.

Language and the Mind

The twentieth century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, tells us that his purpose is “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Where the fly is, of course, ourselves. He then tells us, that perhaps the main reason is that one is unable to free oneself from bewitchment of the mind by “language games.”

In the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles, there’s the line, “‘We are all just prisoners here / Of our own device.’” In this context, “device” could be interpreted as a bad decision.

My Body and Myself

The American philosophy professor, Samuel Todes, in his book Body and World, analyzes the human body, not as a meat-machine, but more like the silent partner of a person navigating their life. You can get a sense of this from Gabriel Marcel, when he writes:

Is my body my body, for instance, in the same sense in which I would say that my dog belongs to me? The question, let us first of all notice, of how the dog originally came into my hands is quite irrelevant here. Perhaps I found it wandering wretchedly about the streets, perhaps I bought it in a shop; I can say it is mine if nobody else puts in a claim for it—though this is still quite a negative condition of ownership. For the dog to be really, not merely nominally, mine there must exist between us a more positive set of relations. He must live, either with me, or as I, and I alone, have decided he shall live—lodged, perhaps, with a servant or a farmer; whether or not I look after him personally, I must assume the responsibility for his being looked after. And this implies something reciprocal in our relations. It is only it the dog recognizes me, obeys me, expresses by his behaviour towards me some feeling which I can interpret as affection or, at the very least, as wholesome fear, that he is really mine; I would become a laughingstock if I persisted in calling an animal that completely ignored me, that took no notice of me at all, my dog. And the mockery to which I would be exposed in such an instance is very significant. It is linked to a very positive idea of how things must be between my dog and me, before I can really say, ‘This dog is mine’.

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 117.

Marcel goes on to explain:

We should recall, at this point, what we said in an earlier lecture about the body; the latter is not merely an instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it, my body, is also my way of being in the world.

Marcel, page 257.

Marcel elaborates:

When I try to make clear to myself the nature of my bond with my body, it appears to me chiefly as something of which I have the use (as one has the use of a piano, a saw, or a razor); but all these uses are extensions of the initial use, which is simply the use of the body. I have real priority to my body when it is a question of active use, but none whatever when it is a question of knowledge. The use is only possible on the basis of a certain felt community. But the community is indivisible; I cannot validly say ‘I and my body.’ The difficulty arises from the fact that I think of my relation with my body on the analogy of my relation with my instruments—whereas in fact the latter presupposes the former.

Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 14.

The connections between the trio of “me, myself and I” and the body is very elusive (as you may sense from your own introspection). This is another “argument without end.”

Psychology and National Moods

The great historian, George Rudé, in his book, Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, tries to give a believable and multifactorial explanation of the French Revolution. Based on Ernest Labrousse’s studies of the French economy during that period, Rudé gives a thoughtful and subtle analysis of how wages, prices and other factors correlated to unrest. Interestingly, he concludes on a note of French national mood:

But, of course, it needed more than economic hardship, social discontent, and the frustration of political and social ambitions to make a revolution. To give cohesion to the discontents and aspirations of widely varying social classes there had to be some unifying body of ideas, a common vocabulary, of hope and protest, something, in short, like a common “revolutionary psychology”. In the revolutions of our day, this ideological preparation has been the concern of political parties; but there were no such parties in eighteenth-century France.

George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, Wiley, 1964, page 74.

Rudé uses the phrase, “revolutionary psychology.” Apply this to our time and ask yourself, did a demagogue like Donald Trump create a revolutionary psychology, or did it cough up Trump? Notice that in the recent political tract, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank makes the point that people’s sense of grievance involves not only economics, but also other psychological factors, just as Rudé does with the French Revolution.

Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?

The famous Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, in his Napoleon, for and against (Dutch, Napoleon: voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving) teaches us that there are “arguments without end.” One example is the question surrounding the concept of detachment. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, proposes “eudaimonia,” a Greek word literally translating to the state or condition of good spirit coming from imperturbability. This sense of things is all over the Western tradition. Think of the line from the British poet, Alexander Pope, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” (An Essay on Criticism, 1711). You see from this that fools lack detachment and act on impulse.

We get a confirmation of Geyl’s arguments without end when we remember that almost every love song recommends the opposite. For example, “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread)” originally made famous by Frank Sinatra and later Elvis Presley, offers us the line “But wise men never fall in love / So how are they to know.” From this, we can interpret that wise men can be foolish and foolish people can be wise. You may also have in the back of your mind Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” It is not wise to be careful always.

We get a twist on this in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Think of “Some Enchanted Evening”:

Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons—
Wise men never try.

Fools give you reasons because they think everything can be explained, where wise men realize this is not always true. The larger point, from existential thinker Gabriel Marcel, is that all the phenomena of life that are explainable are themselves wrapped up in a larger mystery. He discusses the question of detachment in Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, which we covered in “Existence and the Problem of Separability” and “Is the World Broken?”.

Marcel says:

March 8th [1929]

I am more and more struck by the difference between the two modes of detachment: the one is that of the spectator, the other of the saint. The detachment of the saint springs, as one might say, from the very core of reality; it completely excludes curiosity about the universe. This detachment is the highest form of participation. The detachment of the spectator is just the opposite, it is desertion, not only in thought but in act. Herein, I think, lies the kind of fatality which seems to weigh on all ancient philosophy—it is essentially the philosophy of the spectator.

But one thing must be noted: the belief that one can escape pure spectatorship by devotion to a practical science, which cannot quite clearly formulate it as yet. I should express it by saying that the modifications which such a science imposes on reality have no other result (metaphysically of course than of making that science in some sense a stranger to reality. The word ‘alienation’ exactly expresses what I mean. ‘I am not watching a show’—I will repeat these words to myself every day. A fundamental spiritual fact.

The interdependence of spiritual destinies, the plan of salvation; for me, that is the sublime and unique feature of Catholicism.

I was just thinking a moment ago that the spectator-attitude corresponds to a form of lust; and more than that, it corresponds to the act by which the subject appropriates the world for himself. And I now perceive the deep truth of Bérulle’s theocentrism. We are here to serve; yes, the idea of service, in every sense, must be thoroughly examined.

Also perceived this morning, but still in a confused way, that there is profane knowledge and sacred knowledge (whereas previously I have wrongly tended to assert that all knowledge was pro-fane. It isn’t true, profane is a supremely informative word). Inquire on what conditions knowledge ceases to be profane.

Incredible how thronged these days are spiritually! My life is being illuminated right into the depths of the past, and not my life only.

Every time we give way to ourselves we may unawares be laying an additional limitation on ourselves, forging our own chain. That is the metaphysical justification for asceticism. I never understood that till now.

Reality as mystery, intelligible solely as mystery. This also applies to myself.

Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, pages 20-21.

Notice this discussion starts by analyzing modes of detachment and concludes with Marcel talking about reality and himself as mystery. This brings us full circle to Geyl and his concept of arguments without end because trying to define pros and cons of detachment and what is a mystery is ultimately undecidable. This may remind you of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that finding a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.

Existence and the Problem of Separability

In contracts and legal documents, there is a concept of “separability” which means that clause A is connected to clause B in a way that cannot be undone.

The great twentieth century French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, has a profound non-separability analysis of existence itself. Marcel wrote:

…We cannot really separate:—

  1. Existence
  2. Consciousness of self as existing
  3. Consciousness of self as bound to a body, as incarnate.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 10.

This leads to saying things that are very deep aspects of existential thinking governed by the points above. For example, Marcel wrote, “As I have said elsewhere, the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific knowledge, I banish myself to infinity.” Consider the end of the previous phrase. The very notion that someone, within themselves could go down a route to “banish themselves” in this way, shows you a door into very deep psychological problems. In other words, Marcel is telling you that some psychological problems could have a philosophical or existential root cause and are a type of blunder.

This is not to say that one should avoid scientific thought. Taking a drop of your blood and viewing it under a microscope is not a blunder. However, if you take this to the extreme of trying to analyze everything scientifically, to the exclusion of philosophy in daily life, this is Marcel’s warning.

Marcel’s context for this thinking is given here:

Notes for a Paper to the Philosophical Society

Undated, written in 1927 or 19281

When I affirm that something exists, I always mean that I consider this something as connected with my body, as able to be put in contact with it, however indirect this contact may be. But note must be taken that the priority I thus ascribe to my body depends on the fact that my body is given to me in a way that is not exclusively objective, i.e. on the fact that it is my body. This character, at once mysterious and intimate, of the bond between me and my body (I purposely avoid the word relation) does in fact colour all existential judgments.


What it comes to is this. We cannot really separate:—

  1. Existence
  2. Consciousness of self as existing
  3. Consciousness of self as bound to a body, as incarnate.

From this several important conclusions would seem to follow:

  1. In the first place, the existential point of view about reality cannot, it seems, be other than that of an incarnate personality. In so far as we can imagine a pure understanding, there is, for such an understanding, no possibility of considering things as existent or non-existent.
  2. On the one hand, the problem of the existence of the external world is now changed and perhaps even loses its meaning; I cannot in fact without contradiction think of my body as non-existent, since it is in connection with it (in so far as it is my body) that every existing thing is defined and placed. On the other hand, we ought to ask whether there are valid reasons for giving my body a privileged metaphysical status in comparison with other things.
  3. If this is so, it is permissible to ask whether the union of the soul and body is, in essence, really different from the union between the soul and other existing things. In other words, does not a certain experience of the self, as tied up with the universe, underlie all affirmation of existence?
  4. Inquire whether such an interpretation of the existential leads towards subjectivism.
  5. Shew how idealism tends inevitably to eliminate all existential considerations in view of the fundamental unintelligibility of existence. Idealism versus metaphysics. Values detached from existence: too real to exist.

Existential and personalist interests closely linked. The problem of the immortality of the soul is the pivot of metaphysic.

Every existent is thought of like an obstacle by which we take our bearings—like something we could collide with in certain circumstances—resistent, impenetrable. We think of this impenetrability, no doubt, but we think of it as not completely thinkable.2 Just as my body is thought of in so far as it is a body, but my thought collides with the fact that it is my body.

To say that something exists is not only to say that it belongs to the same system as my body (that it is bound to it by certain connections which reason can define), it is also to say that it is in some way united to me as my body is.

Incarnation—the central ‘given’ of metaphysic. Incarnation is the situation of a being who appears to himself to be, as it were, bound to a body. This ‘given’ is opaque to itself: opposition to the cogito. Of this body, I can neither say that it is I, nor that it is not I, nor that it is for me (object). The opposition of subject and object is found to be transcended from the start. Inversely, if I start from the opposition, treating it as fundamental, I shall find no trick of logical sleight of hand which lets me get back to the original experience, which will inevitably be either eluded or (which comes to the same thing) refused. We are not to object that this experience shews a contingent character: in point of fact, all metaphysical enquiry requires a starting-point of this kind. It can only start from a situation which is mirrored but cannot be understood.

Inquire if incarnation is a fact; it does not seem so to me, it is the ‘given’ starting from which a fact is possible (which is not true of the cogito).

A fundamental predicament which cannot be in a strict sense mastered or analysed. It is exactly this impossibility which is being stated when I declare, confusedly, that I am my body; i.e. I cannot quite treat myself as a term distinct from my body, a term which would be in a definable connection with it. As I have said else-where, the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific know-ledge, I banish myself to infinity.

This is the reason why I cannot think of my death, but only of the standstill of that machine (illam, not banc). It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I cannot anticipate my death, that is, I cannot ask myself what will become of me when the machine is no longer working.3

[1] This paper was never delivered.

[2] It is thought of, but it is never resolved. The opacity of the world is in a certain sense insoluble. The link between opacity and Meinbeit. My idea is opaque to me personally in so far as it is mine. We think of it as an adherence. (Note written Feb. 24th, 1929.)

[3] ‘To be involved.’ (idée d’un engagement) Try to shew in what sense this implies the impossibility (or absolute non-validity of my representing my death. In trying to think of my death I break the rules of the game. But it is radically illegitimate to convert this impossibility into a dogmatic negation. (Note written Feb. 24th, 1929.)

It is evident that this whole train of thought is at the root of le Gouvernail: the first notes on the theme of le Gouvernail were composed a few days after these. (Note written April 13th, 1934.)

Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, pages 10-12

The reader should not be afraid of converting this level of discussion to everyday life and everyday slang. For example, when Marcel uses phrases like, “I banish myself to infinity” that should resonate with phrases like “flipping out.”

Take this example from Kierkegaard. There’s a book-seller in Copenhagen and he greets a customer who has just entered his shop. The book-seller turns to his wife and says, “It is I who am speaking, isn’t it?” Kierkegaard’s book-seller seems to have “banished himself” and cannot return.

Problems of Perspective, Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was one of the leading French philosophers of the 20th century. Often considered a postmodernist, he did not believe there was a final perspective that human knowledge could achieve. This immediately contrasts with the outlook of leading physicists like Stephen Hawking. In his 1988 classic, A Brief History of Time, Hawking concludes the book by saying, once science has achieved a theory of everything, which is not far off, we will “know the mind of god.”

In his 1966 key work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (French: Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines), Foucault argued that the so-called order of things is invented, not discovered, by us. This is contrary to scientific thought.

Foucault sets up this limit in his surprising interpretation of the Diego Velázquez masterpiece painting, Las Meninas (Spanish: The Ladies-in-waiting). The painting is deliberately elusive in its use of perspective.

The great German thinker, Jürgen Habermas, explained this Foucault/Velázquez perspective difficulty:

This picture portrays the painter in front of a canvas not visible to the spectator; the painter is evidently looking, as are the two ladies-in-waiting next to him, in the direction of his two models, King Philip IV and his spouse. These two personages standing as models are found outside the frame of the picture; they can be identified by the spectator only with the help of a mirror pictured in the background. The point that Velázquez apparently had in mind is a confusing circumstance of which the spectator becomes aware by inference: The spectator cannot avoid assuming the place and the direction of the gaze of the counterfeit but absent royal pair — toward which the painter captured in the picture gazes — as well as the place and the perspective of Velázquez himself, which is to say, of the .painter who actually produced this picture. For Foucault, in turn, the real point lies in the fact that the classical picture frame is too limited to permit the representation of the act of representing as such — it is this that Velázquez makes clear by showing the gaps within the classical picture frame. left by the lack of reflection on the process of representing itself.29

29. Foucault constructs two different series of absences. On the one hand, the painter in the picture lacks his model, the royal couple standing outside the frame of the picture; the latter are in turn unable to see the picture of themselves that is being painted — they only see the canvas from behind; finally, the spec­tator is missing the center of the scene, that is, the couple standing as models, to which the gaze of the painter and of the courtesans merely directs us. Still more revealing than the absence of the objects being represented is, on the other hand, that of the subjects doing the representing, which is to say, the triple absence of the painter, the model, and the spectator who, located in front of the picture, takes in perspectives of the two others. The painter, Velázquez, actually enters into the picture, but he is not presented exactly in the act of painting — one sees him during a pause and realizes that he will disappear behind the canvas as soon as he takes up his labors again. The faces of the two models can actually be recognized unclearly in a mirror reflection, but they are not to be observed directly during the act of their portrayal. Finally, the act of the spectator is equally unrepresented — the spectator depicted entering into the picture from the right cannot take over this function. (See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 3-16, 307-311.)

Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Michael Kelly, editor, MIT Press, 1994, pages 67, 77 [archived PDF].

Let us conclude by saying one way of specifying the disagreement between scientists and these thinkers is that sciences see themselves as “objective” while the thinkers feel science lacks objectivity because of the human observer. Kant, centuries ago, argued that concepts like causality, space and time are imposed by the human mind on the world. Similarly, Heisenberg, in Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, similarly said that science does not finally answer questions about an objective reality, but can only answer questions posed by us.

Heidegger vs. Marx as World Watchers

Marx (1818-1883) implies that the foundation of human reality is econo-technical, and on that basis society creates thoughts and philosophies, art and poems. This explanation seems appealing when we think of the economic development of China in our time, for example, or the rise of computers and software.

In a way, Heidegger (1889-1976) turns this upside down. At the basis of world history is society producing culture. You can make a simple “cartoon” and say that for Marx, economics shapes everything, and for Heidegger culture replaces economics.

For example, in his book, What Is Called Thinking? (English translation, 1968, Harper & Row), Heidegger argues the foundation of all Western thinking and culture comes from axioms such as logos [Ancient Greek: λόγος] (from which we have logic, cosmology, psychology, epistemology, etc.), as well as legein (the Greek verb λέγειν, “to speak”).

Heidegger states (on page 204), “Without the λέγειν of that logic, modern man would have to make do without his automobile. There would be no airplanes, no turbines, no Atomic Energy Commission.”

Our MI comment on this is that any monocausal explanation of how mankind went from Neanderthal to the Manhattan skyline is completely inadequate. You must create a “double-helix” of Marx and Heidegger, adding the dimensions of surprise and unintended consequences. Without the physics concepts of emergence and complexity, we have no possibility of understanding how we got to now. In the site tagline, we use the word “composite” as a reference to this kind of deeper understanding.

Looking Around Is Educational

Julian Fellowes (the writer who gave us Downton Abbey) followed up with a 2018 movie called The Chaperone about a girl named Louise Brooks who became a global superstar, especially in Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany:

Louise Brooks is a rebellious 15-year-old schoolgirl who dreams of fame and fortune in the early 1920s. She soon gets her chance when she travels to New York to study with a leading dance troupe for the summer—accompanied by a watchful chaperone.

Louise Brooks starts as a would-be dancer, “inducted” into an avant-garde dance school. This is the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts (founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California), which helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.

Upon Louise’s “induction” into the school, one of the founders says to the girls, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you.”

The listener wonders: What could this possibly mean?

The answer is this: In one sense you have a body, but in another, you are your body. The first body is the “thing” you weigh on the bathroom scale. This is your interaction with gravity, as measured in conventions like pounds. On the other hand, you are also “somebody” (i.e., some body). To have and to be are entwined here. In philosophy, say in the writings of Gabriel Marcel during the fifties, the body you weigh is “corporeal” and the body you are is “existential.”

Very roughly, the first body is objectively weighed, the second subjectively sensed as your experience of yourself.

Physics and Dance (by Emily Coates and Sarah Demers), a recent book from Yale University Press, gives you the dancing body as a biomechanical problem. Dancing itself is the expression through biomechanics and movement based on physics, but apart from this, it’s also an art form.

The student will see that a moment in a movie—in this case The Chaperone—can open a door to a whole set of domains, realms and phenomena. Education at its best comes from learning how to go from such instantaneous accidents on the street or screen to a larger canvas.

Thus the declaration, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you” explains that biomechanics is an infrastructure, while the artistry of the dance is an art form (i.e., a kind of “communicative action,” to use a Habermas phrase).

Education and Spontaneous Learning

We give you examples of being receptive to the world around you and learning to see and hear as a form of education:

There is a show on PBS called Stories from the Stage. People come forward to a microphone on a stage and tell personal stories from their past, stories that they consider important, informative, educational (in the widest sense), and usable by the listener. One of the early “people at the mic” on stage is a teenage girl who says something, in a plaintive sorrowful voice, like: “I have been waiting far too long…to wait for someone…to see me.”

This perplexed girl is unwittingly raising the question of a deep human hunger: the hunger for “personhood.” At a young age, this primordial hunger expresses itself as somebody befriending me (i.e., the speaker needs a real friend) so that the befriended person comes into clearer focus to themselves, achieving personhood.

Very intelligent philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas of France have spent their entire lives trying to understand the connections between countenances (how a person “wears a face”), personhood, interactive life, etc.

In his book, The Face of the Other (the girl wants somebody to notice her and her face and like her and “smile upon her”) Levinas has a deep analysis of all these human yearnings and self-definitional journeys and quests:

“The Face of the Other” is an evocative phrase used by Emmanuel Levinas, an important twentieth-century philosopher.

  • “Other” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) usually translates the French word autrui, which means “the other person” or “someone else” (other than oneself). It is thus the personal other, the other person, whoever it is, that each of us encounters directly, or experiences the traces of, every day. Of course, we encounter a multiplicity of others, but Levinas more often uses the singular “other” to emphasize that we encounter others one at a time, face to face.
  • By “face,” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is the living presence of another person.

Thus, when we come “face to face” with another person, the experience is a social and ethical one (rather than intellectual, aesthetic, or merely physical). “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me—that is, is vulnerably present—and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head.

This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise reveals the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power).

The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.

Thus, a student could be channel surfing on TV, observe this young girl saying these things on Stories from the Stage, and expand one’s understanding of this entire set of hungers and self-identity efforts and go (say) from the moment of TV watching to reading Levinas.

This is a simple example from the current world of TV where a certain particular “cri de coeur” (French: “cry from the heart”) of a girl you don’t know at all could deepen and widen your understanding by following the thread to Levinas and other profound people. The girl’s plaint where she’s “waiting for someone to see me” becomes much deeper and can be understood on a larger canvas which is exactly what we want.

Many experiences from daily life, from walking around, from moments on TV, from tiny incidents, can be pathways to higher understanding and learning if you can see and hear “with the third eye and the third ear.” (Theodore Reik talks about “listening with the third ear.”)

Education is a kind of “applied awareness.”

Songs as an Informal University

We have already seen in “Songs as Another Kind of Parallel University” that trying to revive or rescue enchantment in a “disenchanted world” (Max Weber, “Entzauberung”) is a kind of philosophical “move” in love songs which has much to do with the impact on the West of the medieval troubadours.

Take this masterpiece song from the fifties musical My Fair Lady. Notice the explicit introduction of “enchantment” into the lyrics:

“On the Street Where You Live”

I have often walked
Down the street before,
But the pavement always stayed
Beneath my feet before
All at once am I
Several stories high,
Knowing I’m on the street where you live

Are there lilac trees
In the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour
Out of every door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live

And oh, the towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear

People stop and stare
They don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on earth
That I would rather be

Let the time go by,
I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live

People stop and stare
They don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on earth
That I would rather be
Let the time go by
I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live,
Can be here on the street where you live,
Can be here on the street where you live

The enchantment of love is also at the center of the song by Seals & Crofts, “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” from decades ago. In the same way that Jim Morrison and the Doors capture life’s basic randomized “thrownness” (Heidegger, “Geworfenheit”), Seals & Crofts capture life’s one-time ephemerality, as the title signals immediately:

“We May Never Pass This Way (Again)”

Life
So they say
Is but a game and they’d let it slip away
Love
Like the autumn sun
Should be dyin’
But it’s only just begun

Like the twilight in the road up ahead
They don’t see just where we’re goin’
And all the secrets in the universe
Whisper in our ears
All the years will come and go
Take us up
Always up

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

Dreams
So they say
Are for the fools and they let ’em drift away
Peace
Like the silent dove
Should be flyin’
But it’s only just begun

Like Columbus in the olden days
We must gather all our courage
Sail our ships out on the open seas
Cast away our fears
And all the years will come and go
Take us up
Always up

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

So
I wanna laugh while the laughin’ is easy
I wanna cry if makes it worthwhile
I may never pass this way again
That’s why I want it with you

’Cause
You make me feel like I’m more than a friend
Like I’m the journey and you’re the journey’s end
I may never pass this way again
That’s why I want it with you
Baby

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

After deeply drinking in this and other songs, you could become more “attuned” to academic philosophy which would become less of an abstract and insipid blur. Pre-awareness and pre-understanding give you the receptivity you need and you get these from movies and songs and private life. The trick is to use meta-intelligence to straddle the campus and the off-campus worlds.

Songs as Another Kind of Parallel University

Meta Intelligence is a heterodox view of education where formal education (courses, diplomas, universities, fields) are incomplete and limited without adding informal education which is part of your life such as movies, songs, conversations and images (paintings, posters, etc). Your “lifeworld” (Edmund Husserl’s apt coinage) fuses all the kinds of education where the word education means thought-provoking and illuminating. Even personal experience counts such as illnesses or bad marriages! Only via this Meta Intelligence will you achieve a glimpsed “holism.” (Meta Intelligence is that meta-field outside fields, borders and boundaries.)

Take songs.

Think back to Jim Morrison’s classic tune, “Riders on the Storm” which begins:

“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house, we’re born
Into this world, we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm”

This song (by the Doors), expresses in a simple way Heidegger’s notion of human existence as partly governed by “Geworfenheit” which derives from “werfen,” to throw. “Geworfenheit” means “thrownness.” Jim Morrison and his band the Doors are song–philosophers without (probably) being Heidegger’s acolytes. Max Weber, one of the fathers of modern sociology, uses the word “disenchantment” to describe the modern world, “Entzauberung” in German, where “zauber” means “magicality” and “ent” means “removal of,” and “ung” means “condition of being.” The magic here does not mean something like a card trick but rather sacred mysteries, perhaps like the feeling a medieval European felt on entering a cathedral.

Enchantment in the West survived in our notions of romantic love and was associated with the songs and outlook of the medieval troubadours. Such romantic enchantment which is fading from our culture in favor of sex is still celebrated in the classic Rogers and Hammerstein song, “Some Enchanted Evening” from the forties musical and fifties movie, South Pacific.

The song lyrics give you the philosophy of romantic love as the last stand of enchantment:

“Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger,
You may see a stranger across a crowded room,
And somehow you know, you know even then,
That somehow you’ll see here again and again.
Some enchanted evening, someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing across a crowded room,
And night after night, as strange as it seems,
The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams.

“Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.

“Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,
When you hear her call you across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side and make her your own,
Or all through your life you may dream all alone.

“Once you have found her, never let her go,
Once you have found her, never let her go.”

Notice that “chant” is a component of enchantment.

One could say that conventional enchantment has been transferred to the world of science and mathematics where a deep beauty is intuited. Professor Frank Wilczek of MIT (Nobel Prize) wrote several books on this intersection of science and the quest for beauty whereas Sabine Hossenfelder of Germany has argued, per contra, that this will be a “bum steer.”

You should sense that like movies, songs give you a “side window” or back door into thinking and knowledge, which should be center stage and not depreciated.