Archive for 'Philosophy' Category
Karaoke and Existentialism
11 January 2006If I have my way, this journal entry’s gonna exist in two parts: first, a recollection of real-life goings on; second, a waxing of philosophical varieties.
First of all, I went out this weekend. “Saw someone.” (The aforementioned Lisa.) Not sure if it constituted a date, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It was nice to be out, as in actually doing stuff… Ate dinner, then went to her family’s favored karaoke bar and watched everyone get drunk and sing. Ok, so I wasn’t myself doing much. :-P But I did sing a round: Turn the Page, the Metallica version. If more bar experiences were like this (read: fun), I could stand to try out the bar scene. Of course, I’d prefer not to have to drive to Camelback and 51st Ave. (approx. 45 minutes with zero traffic) to do so.
So yeah, I met with Lisa. She’s nice. We did have the occasional pang of awkwardness as is inevitable when I meet someone–tried to get through it by acknowledging it and shrugging it off, to mixed results. Ha, the funny thing is when we met up with her family later, I felt abnormally comfortable talking to her sister Naomi… I suppose because she wasn’t the one I was planning on meeting with. So… I need to find a way to trick myself into “accidentally” running into those people I’d like to meet, in order to avoid that awkwardness. But I somehow don’t think it works that way. (Naomi, and their brother Charles, were both also pretty fun folk.)
Other than that, not much is up. I’m enjoying my new job… I just came up with a very neat solution for dynamically templating school sites–it’d take much jargon to explain it, but suffice to say it’ll simplify the way we manage hundreds, and eventually thousands, of user accounts. Pretty cool accomplishment for one’s second-ish week on the job, if I may say so myself.
Ok, now for the philosophical stuff…
In my ongoing Firefly fanaticism, I’ve been reading a book called Finding Serenity. It’s a collection of essays regarding, well, just about anything related to the ‘verse, and one such essay is called “We’re All Just Floating in Space”. It’s about the existential inspirations behind Joss Whedon, Firefly, and the episode “Objects in Space”. I suppose if I wanted to be some literary-minded person, I should be reading Sartre or Camus, but moreso than those authors (Camus, at least), this essay has really allowed me to wrap my head around existentialism in ways I haven’t before.
Particularly, I realize my personal hangups with the widely established view of existentialism: I can very much agree with the notion that all things exist arbitrarily–in other words, that chance could have had them exist differently or not at all. However, I disagree with the notion that things exist with no meaning. No “absolute” meaning, perhaps, but the way I see it, perceived meaning–meaning assigned by people or especially groups of people–is every bit as valid and important as a supposed “absolute” meaning would be. Regardless of how God figures into all this, I do believe there’s a collective unconscious on some level, and that the system of meanings, morals, and ethics promoted by said unconscious exist for some good reason–if nothing else, for the stability of a culture. I also believe we’re all encoded with a set of intuitions–our own personal meanings for life and what not–and it’s probably in our best interests to obey those intuitions, unless common sense or hard life lessons teach us otherwise.
But arbitrariness of existence, that I can relate to.
There are a couple of excerpts I’d like to share, that actually have more to do with Sartre than with anything Firefly related:
First, there is the idea that everything is contingent. Anything that exists might not have… Moreover, if this is true of every individual object, it is true of the universe as a whole.
This… THIS is the scary thought I had running through my head in the fourth grade and never fully understood. For a long time, I thought I was simply overwhelmed by the concept of God, of the depths of eternity and infinity, and that was definitely part of it. But the really mortifying thought that kept me up at night (in the fourth grade! bummer, huh?) was what if eternity, infinity, God, or the universe simply didn’t exist? I tried to comprehend what it was like, imagining the whole universe imploding into a black nothingness (oddly, with fart-sounding special effects)… And part of me was even scared that, if I thought about it hard enough, it might come true.
Apparently, I’m not the first to feel this. Sartre’s character Roquentin–and presumably Sartre himself–felt it, too, and described this overwhelming feeling as “nausea”. Another nauseating observation is on the arbitrariness of choice. Though I do believe there are right and wrong choices, as I do believe in what meaning and order there is in life, I acknowledge that I have such freedom that I could choose to do the wrong thing.
This is disturbing–even frightening. Most of us don’t want our values to be arbitrary. In that case, it would seem, today helping others so that they flourish and are happy is “good,” but tomorrow, torturing them might be. This is why the realization of our complete freedom to make such choices can lead to feelings of disorientation. Sartre liked to compare it with the feeling of vertigo…
That I feel too, sometimes on an almost daily basis. You know that level of concern you have if you see a woman walking through a dimly lit parking lot, or a kid running around unattended in a public place? That concern that something bad could happen, that the woman could get mugged or that the child could get abducted? Take that to the next level… Imagine yourself being the mugger or the abductor. Think about how easily you could do ill, how completely some people put their lives or others’ lives in your hands, if only you were the type of person to choose to do the wrong thing.
Vertigo is an apt description of that feeling. Actually, nausea works for this too, as my reaction is usually twofold: disgust first for the stupid people putting themselves in precarious situations, and disgust for the people who actually DO those wrong things. Disgust because here I am, knowing that I always have the freedom of choice, and always choosing the good action, and yet I’m the one worrying about this crap while many, many of those people hide behind the excuse that they’re desperate or “have issues”. Yes, I know that there are people with serious mental problems, and others who commit crimes out of desperation, but I still believe there are considerably fewer people who actually own up to their accountability than those that could.
Well, I’ve gotten tangential, so I think I’ll wrap it up for now. I suspect most have tuned out by now anyhow, but I hope I’ve offered a few of my friends some food for thought regarding existentialism, and also hope I haven’t transferred over to them any of the negative baggage that comes with it. I’ll wrap with a quote from Neitzsche, which is always cool, right?
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.