Category Archives: Passages

The Mundane

I haven’t read much Chekov, but he certainly did make my reading list.

The notion that it is boredom that wears on us day, day in, day out: there is a kind of endurance that modern life requires, this interests me. It does, in a way, make us robot-like, starting work everyday at the same time, coming home, recharging after work with the things that make us feel like us again, our “happy place.” Going to bed at a certain hour. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the repetitious nature of it all, which is why the above quote is so appropriate.

On the topic, on boredom, which is a perfectly natural response to the everyday- seeming-like-every-other-day, David Foster Wallace (famed postmodern author of Infinite Jest) wrote a book called the Pale King, about an IRS agent and about the experience of boredom in our modern advanced capitalist society (which is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, more an exploration of the experience of living day-to-day). It’s been a while since I’ve read the book. But below is possibly my favorite passage:

His idea is to produce and perform a play that is about a tax examiner doing his job at a desk on a stage in front of people in real-time, until the very boredom of the scene wears them down and bothers them enough that they complain and leave. Very little dialogue, one character, no action. It’s just a play about boredom, which, on his view (the main character’s view), is very realistic, and true to his life as a tax examiner and much of life in general.

This is not to say I think all life is or has to be boring, but I think it has a lesson for us: life will involve some amount of it, as much as we might dislike it, and we can run from it, avoid it, distract ourselves from it, but it is still there: a natural byproduct of the way in which our society is structured. But also, we can find interesting things in the boring. The German word sitzfleisch is all about this: having the wherewithal to sit and power through the tough and the sometimes-boring to get to the good stuff, to learn about, do or accomplish something.

Still, maybe the boring tells us that something is not of-interest to us, does not have to do with our sense of our identity, or exploring some aspect of it, and is a marker telling us to explore elsewhere for signs of interest. That idea, I will have to explore more in another post.

But, and this is a big but, even if there is boredom in the world, we have each other, and in-between the boredom, we have the excitement of friendship (close or occasional friendship), love (even though real, true love, I think, also involves some occasional, endurable boredom) and music and books and tv and adventuring-trips. “Life must be lived forwards” as Kierkegaard said.

So, life can be boring sometimes, but we can also make it interesting if we try, and doing it with another or others, is a way to make it all the more memorable and fun.

Delayed Maturation

In humans, on Sapolsky’s view, the frontal cortex develops much later than the rest of the brain, and is less determined by genetics (and developmentally later than in comparatively complex other animals that also have a frontal cortex) to account for the complexity of human society and the rules it must learn and account for to survive.

Knowing

“Knowing” as a task does not entail being separate from the thing to be known in the world, as Plato or Descartes might state. According to Heidegger, knowing is just another task that implies that we are already involved in and engaging with our world. Knowing is still a *kind* of involvement which is different from a more active engagement or participation in an activity, but knowing also allows us to reflect on that activity as it relates to ourselves.

Living, Knowing, Caring

This whole passage in Being and Time is really interesting to me. Heidegger is talking about how we may have a way we take a stand on our being (live according to some ideal we have for ourselves) with or without knowing it. In another sense, the knowing of one’s Being is not necessarily the same as being familiar with it. We can be familiar without knowing something in an intellectual sense, as that is only one way in which to engage with our world. But being familiar is a more basic aspect that is always a part of us just living and being according to how we want to see ourselves in the world (taking a stand on our Being).

The Person

The person or the “I” is not, on one account, a single “thinglike being” but a “unity of experiences“ existing over time which does not necessarily follow or adhere to a discernible logic.

So, in some sense, when we refer to ourselves we are referring to a changing being, a changing consciousness unified by a body and name (and maybe a soul…if you believe in that…I do…although I don’t think Heidegger does).

On “Determined,” At First Glance

I think, in general, it is important to understand that which we take issue with. Especially if we seek to criticize it. Any critique must be based on a reasonably-complete understanding of the thing critiqued.

To that point, I’m starting a book called Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford Neurobiologist, and from the moment I heard of the concept, it rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I will slog through this book for as long as I can stand it.

I agree with his initial point that the world is determined, and us as beings are determined by the social and biological history of the world, but I don’t think a determined world eliminates all possibility of a conditioned free will, as I posted early about. But his claim is that free will is an illusion entirely, which frankly, I think is an exaggerated claim he makes to sell more books.

Still, the question of free will is an important one, but I’m already disliking the definition he’s using of free will, which is overly reliant on a chemical/biological picture of things, a neurological explanation, rather than one grounded in our felt experience, which he hasn’t taken account of yet (perhaps he will later).

But this is why, I think, a neurobiologist should be careful about wading into philosophical waters. Just because we can explain what is happening with neurological explanations is not to say that there does not exist some way in which we are driving the event, even if we are not able to chemically or biologically map or identify that exact thing. Also, just because he cites certain philosophers doesn’t mean he’s covered enough philosophical territory to justify his claim, which is a high bar indeed, that no free will exists *at all.*

To this point, I am also reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (I am reading this book at the pace of about 3 pages per hour, given its extreme linguistic density). But he is much more focused on our felt experience, and he takes what is called a phenomenological approach (focusing on the phenomena of our felt experience and how it relates to how we think of ourselves in the world). He has a concept called ‘thrownness’ which I think is perfectly equipped for this kind of conversation.

Thrownness entails the state of being we find ourselves in when we are born. We are ‘thrown’ or born into a family with a particular culture with a specific biology at a precise moment in the history of the universe, all circumstances which certainly influence what we might be or could be, but this is not to say they determine us entirely.

Part of being a human being is working out, throughout our whole lives, what we are or who we could be. What our existence means to us in the context of a world we are thrown into. Things that have no definite or clear path. No determined way, even if they are circumscribed by our environment. Instead, in my opinion, the present is full of what Hannah Arendt (a student of Heidegger) calls the uncertainty of the present (the space between the past and the future which is still and always being built by us and plays a role in the construction of the future) which no complete accounting of the history of the universe could or would fully explain because the present is always the present and uncertain because it is not yet fully known (and may never be known fully).

If Sapolsky’s argument that free will did not exist were true, then all we would need to know is everything about the past and then the present and future would be determined and understandable (theoretically). And while we learn more everyday, this could never be. A complete understanding of everything has never been achieved, even when we thought we had it. As an example, Einstein’s ideas completely changed physics in a way that was totally unpredictable, even as physicists were of the opinion that they were reaching a point of a complete understanding of their discipline.

But also a final and full understanding of the world is also not possible because any human thought is limited by the fact that it is thought within the interpretive framework of a human world. There is no way to see the world from outside a human lens, or at least not completely. Even with Sapolsky, his discussion of free will is done within the world and language of human sciences, which are backed by evidence and experimentation but are also still from a human vantage point of interpretation. So to say he is discovering or unearthing some hidden scientific truth about the will or freedom in the context of the universe is to forget that he too is human, not some outside observer with a final or complete answer that nobody else has access to and ends the debate on free will for good (a debate that philosophers have been engaging in for centuries, I might add).

Moreover, no matter how many answers exist to address this question, the debate between Free Will and Determinism has raged for centuries, and will likely continue for as long as there are human beings to debate it, as long as there are new people who have new and novel ways of thinking about it, as there have been for so long.

Dasein, Being and Time

This passage gives you a flavor of Heidegger and his writing. His language is difficult to interpret, maybe in part because it is translated German, but also because he has a philosophical way of speaking that reflects a lot on language construction, and he even creates a number of neologisms himself. But also, as a professor of mine said once, the process of reading it challenges you, is an exercise in itself.

In this passage, he talks a little about what he thinks makes Dasein, human beings, unique. Dasein is distinctive because Being is an issue for it; that is, that we are, unlike other entities, concerned with our Being in our everydayness, whether expressly or indirectly through our actions, somehow concerned with what it means for us to be, what Being means to us as individuals or as a collective.

In reading these passages, I remember how much I’ve missed reading and studying philosophy…more to come…