Padd Solutions

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At the feet of the gods

Posted by moses @ 14:16 • , , , , • 0 comments




How much would divinity cost?

I think there's something to Roger Ebert's contention that video games are not art, which he seems to have stammered out like an uncomprehending seer. And there's something amusing about the Singapore salesman who helped to swindle the public of millions of dollars for a wealthy family. Both may have something similar in mind. Both of them provoke this thought: How do we value something subjective?

The value of art is subjective because its purpose is, ultimately, that of subjective expression. And subjective expression is all that is directly relevant to the artistic process. No matter what other motivations exist in the artist's head, which purpose the artwork ends up incarnating is what we appreciate—and in art we appreciate the purpose of subjective expression.

Perhaps we need an example to illustrate this point more vividly. Think of the Pagliacci paradigm. At any moment during a performer's performance, he may have a number of motivations. He may be performing to get the performance over and done with so he could go home. Or perhaps he is performing with a conscious desire to earn some money to feed his family. But these motivations are irrelevant to his art, and if he betrays them his performance would suffer. In the theatre, the purpose that we want to apprehend in a performer's act is that of expressing the character he is playing. And so it is with all art.

If the artistic process requires subjectivity, it is opposed by the objective. Objective ideas external to the individual pollute the artistry of an object that is intended to be an artwork. Imagine an artist who has a marketing team that gives their input to the creative process based on what they expect would sell in the market. We would find the artist engaged in a process that is less about artistic creation and more about product design. That is why video games tend to be far from being purely artistic—the commercial aspect permeates and corrupts the creative process.

For that matter, artworks that are created to be sold in the marketplace might face the same problem. After all, we can see the difference between a true work of art and a souvenir. The latter is more about craft, created as a pretty or impressive thing specifically to be sold for a sum of money. Thus, if the creator is clearly motivated to create something that has objective value, especially in monetary terms, the art becomes suspect. By this reasoning, amateur art is hence the most secure in terms of its artistry—we are most assured of its subjective quality, its brilliance notwithstanding.

We can see, therefore, a crucial difference between the work of man and the work of genius. Why, then, are we so keen on translating everything into the former?

Once we try to put an objective value to the subjective, we turn something that is incommensurably valuable into something of bounded value. And, at the same time, we enter into the realm of absurdity. As the charlatan of a salesman said, "How I value my history and heritage will be different from the way you value it"—hence his valuation of a museum contribution at fifteen million dollars while 'expert' valuations put it at less than two million. We start arguing and imposing arbitrary terms.

The result is a patently uninteresting universe. Our own imagination has filled our world with numbers and robbed us of the kind of imagination that paints it with colour. No wonder boredom is the modern affliction.

Why, seeing this, do we not complete it by fully converting the spiritual into worldly terms? Shouldn't we ask, "What price divinity?"

But perhaps we have—nature gave the pagans their gods; men in suits give us ours. On postcards there is the picture of an island of offices on a well-oiled sea. And to such a creature we yield our sacrifices. Our love's labour.

An unpessimistic pessimism

Posted by moses @ 20:56 • , , , • 0 comments


What has kept me going with a smile is philosophy.

In the face of the unknown, I find joy in discovering that the absurd man might be superman or overman. Vanity? No, reality.

And, in a way, I find myself agreeing the Hegelian sentiment here—while religion might have been the opium, philosophy offers the vision.

Let me explain what I mean. It begins like a story, "zeer-e gonbad'e kabood", or under the dark sky, as the Persian Shia tradition goes. One day, we wake up to discover that the world is an impersonal place. We find that it is unfamiliar to our reason and hostile to our plans. This is the moment of the absurd, as Camus describes it, the moment when we realise that our selves are subject to a universe whose laws are indifferent to our thoughts. We know then an irresistible force, but it isn't a living one; it does not know us. "Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood"—there was one, and there was no one.


But let us break away from lyricism. While Habermas, perhaps echoing Kierkegaard but from a less fatalistic perspective, says that secular reason is somewhat lost and "unenlightened about itself", Camus contends that the absurd man lives with the imperfection of reason and does not leap into what he considers the irrational—blind faith, or the obliteration of reason. The former, however, would reply that the banner of reason has only led, ironically, to a naive faith in science.

It's hard to say who's right. Yet I think Habermas has merely arrived at epistemic circularity, the practical fact that we need faith in our basic ways of perceiving and reasoning to make any sense of the world; he is probably also saying that reason doesn't tell us why we should have faith in those. And the absurd is more than admitting and living with these 'deficiencies'. It is the knowledge that what matters to each of us most in this world, the subjective self, does not square with the objective world.

This is the reality that I was talking about, a reality where the subjective individual is alienated and dominated by the objective. We live in a world that is, in truth, very far from enlightenment; and this gulf will remain as long as we live or die by the grace of money.

That is the reality that needs lyricism. But, above all, it needs thought.

And so we tune in again. Julian Young writes in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art that nausea, the reaction to the absurd existence, is almost a dignified condition. Down this path, he sees Nietzsche's overman as the world-affirming man, one who is willing to go through each and every experience in his life over and over, who regrets nothing. "Yes", the overman says, "the world is a hostile place—and so what?"

Is the overman, then, the absurd man? Have we been looking at the man in the red cape and never thought to look at any person that we might pass by in the street?

This perhaps is key: in the affirming of a harsh reality, the subjective self reveals its strength and is affirmed. While in the most agonising moments, we like critical patients might need some morphine to go on, it would not solve the problem of existence. In times, I imagine, when even your faith abandons you, you choose to live or die; and in choosing the former, what we always know as the human spirit refuses to submit itself to be obliterated.

The lyricism and the introspection, then, are not vanities. They remind us of the problem of existence. They might be our lifeblood when we lie wounded.

And in the spirit of storytelling and reflection, I've realised something else: the mourning Mother Courage, the mother of slain children who is able to stop clinging to her wares to go on is the tragic heroine of the working class.

In the end, revolutionaries might be the sons of a better age, but they should not forget themselves—lest they forget to pass over a petty careless existence.

April's fool

Posted by moses @ 08:07 • , • 0 comments


When it comes to faith, I doubt.

But it doesn't stop there. Yes, we do have reasonable beliefs; religious faith too can be reasonable. In fact, if epistemic circularity is unavoidable, then every aspect of our life involves some kind of faith.

Still, this doesn't mean we shouldn't doubt our beliefs. More precisely, we should doubt our understanding of the world from which our beliefs arise.

Invariably, there are times when I doubt what I know, doubt that I can be certain about anything but the simplest things. During those times, like the experience the eponymous philosopher of the Bible describes, the good things in life just don't feel as good. Without certainty, one becomes anxious.

Fortunately, I find that the anxiety soon passes, and what I have instead is a refreshing sense of peace. It's a feeling that is akin to floating along a flowing river rather than struggling and going under—it's something that you could only feel if you're willing to ease up on the struggle to maintain certainty.

Indeed, I think perpetual anxiety is our lot if we are so desperate to remain certain. Or, if we never admit it, we would merely be living in an illusory shell. Faith requires lies in order to exist freely and indefinitely without doubt creeping in. And doubt that is not embraced, that is not allowed to come into opposition with our certainties, can only give us anxiety.

Openness of mind, then, is the only real cure to the discomfort that doubt brings.

To be sure, as physical beings, we have physical needs that give rise to a need for some physical and material security. And I think this is a legitimate general need, the satisfaction of which is a worthwhile social goal—hence my support for socialism.

Beyond a certain albeit (granting the possibility that specific needs are subject to change) non-specific point, however, we should probably be more comfortable with uncertainty. And in learning and thinking, we could achieve this by having an open mind, a disposition that does not hold on too tightly to the certainties that we think our understanding gives us.

I suspect that we have been conditioned to loathe uncertainty in most aspects of life. We need to know, we want predictions and projections. Living in society has taught us that this is the way to live. It has become like an instinct, something that drives us mechanically.

And instead of living, in a richer sense of the word, we are letting our shoddily-constructed faiths and mice-and-men plans dictate our lives. I think we become something less than what we could be.

It seems apt, therefore, to quote the words that Nietzsche put in Zarathustra's mouth:
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over.
Only doubt is certain; what we do know is that we might not know. And that might not be a bad thing. For one, it might give us a key to overcoming our petty troubles.