Tag: Some Enchanted Evening

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 For example, “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread)” originally made famous by Frank Sinatra and later Elvis Presley, offers us the line “But wise men never fall in love / So how are they to know.”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.

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.

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.