Thoughts on Freedom

Freedom is a topic we have covered before, and with no desire to tread upon already trodden ground, will offer a brief synopsis of our previous conclusions in relation to freedom. Freedom is the greatest responsibility that one can have, as to us the notion put forth by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we are condemned to be free for once we are free we are wholly responsible for everything that we do.

Sartre, was one of the greatest philosophers in putting forth and studying the notions of what it means to be free. However, one must note that Sartre’s philosophy has a certain degree of self-justification. When mentioning his name to ladies whom I know, those who know of him, often react with disgust. This disgust is not directed at his work, he is a sublime philosopher, novelists, and playwright, but at him as a person. Not understanding, I dismissed their concerns as irrelevant. Later, reading the memoirs of the women in Sartre’s life I finally (duh!) began to understand. Sartre’s freedom was built upon the enslavement of others. For example, Sartre was in an open relationship with the great philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. This meant that they could have dalliances with anyone but would have to come running when the other called. de Beauvoir sums it up in her novel, She Came to Stay, about how Sartre seduced her student and had a relationship with her in front of de Beauvoir. Yet, when de Beauvoir wanted to go away for a time with the novelist Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side), Sartre grew jealous and ended cancelled her plans. Likewise, other women in his life had to act as he dictated- they must be at a certain café at a certain time and only eat certain food. If they tried to overstep their bounds, Sartre threatened to cut them out. This, as you may imagine, caused serious problems for them in later life. Sartre was not alone of the so-called existentialist philosophers to use their philosophy to justify their lives and beliefs. The Algerian philosopher Albert Camus noted that it took a certain amount of spiritual snobbery to think one could be happy without money and then died in a car crash as he crashed his sportscar.      

One of the greatest existentialists was the Russian author Dostoyevsky. In his book The Brothers Karamazov he states that if there are no higher laws then one is free to do as one chooses. Dusty, a man with a gambling addiction, understood better than most what freedom entailed and yet succumbed to addictions. Addiction is not a matter of willpower, it is medical, however, to a certain extent choice is made and Dusty, as can we all, can be accused of living up to the social-psychologist Erich Fromm’s notion of one being afraid of freedom.

 Freedom is the greatest responsibility as once one is free, one is wholly responsible for who they are, what they do, what they think etc. There are few people through history (maybe the Buddha), who have fully embraced this and tried, to use Leonard Cohen’s words, “in [their] way to be free”, because freedom is hard. There is not a single person who has tried for freedom or who has seriously studied freedom who has not warned against it. To be free is to be alone. To be free is to be scared, isolated and leave us all like Hamlet fretting between action and inaction, between acceptance and revolt, between life and death which is why, if one comes along and says what you are thinking or offering a degree of comfort, one quickly, unconsciously, falls in with them. The great thing about this is often you can find someone who thinks as you do or as they convince you that you want to. Don’t like vaccinations? There’s a person for that. Think Israel is wholly responsible, you can now agree with that without identifying yourself as anti-Semitic (Hitler, it seems, was a man ahead of his times…now he would be a US Democrat of a UK Labour Party leader). Oscar Wilde once noted that,

‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation’     

for what I interpret Mr Wilde of meaning is that people hasten to fit within society as it is safe and warm, the protection of the herd, and once within the loving arms of the group one is freed of the greatest danger, the danger that leads to the terrifying state for those within and without the group, and that is, in my opinion, the greatest right of all, without which we are all slaves, and that is, simply, thinking for yourself. If someone comes to you and says ‘I think X or Y’ and they have a solid reasoning behind it, then fine, we are free to believe and think what we want, but if one comes to you and their words are the parody of another, one can rarely reason with them, for as the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard noted, ‘People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use’   

‘till next time

Fear of Knowledge

The other day I saw the something very odd. The United States Senator, Matt Gaetz (the one who looks like a Pez dispenser), whilst having it explained to him that people don’t like being discriminated against,  accused the person explaining it to him (a Democratic member of Congress) of being ‘Woke’. ‘Woke’ is one of those words, such as ‘Cancel Culture’ (yes, I know that is two words…), which is reported upon and used frequently on American news channels. As with most hip things on the internet and in society, I remain blissfully ignorant of them, but this one caught my attention.

Over the last few years people have spoken up more than usual and, for once, people seem to be listening. People then have been changing their opinions and behaviours based on this new information. For those of you, like me, who are allergic to popular culture and tries to avoid most of the news as one is bored of Brexit, Trump and the pandemic, I’ll give you a brief summary of some of the new revelations over the last 5 years:

1. Women and men don’t like to be sexually assaulted
2. Black people don’t like being killed for being black
3. Asians don’t like being attacked and blamed for pandemics
4. Bullying is not cool
5. People like being able to vote, exercising their democratic rights
6. People are afraid of pandemics and want to protect themselves from getting sick
7. Racial stereotypes are lazy and offensive

Let’s have a quick look at these:

 1) when it emerged that rich and famous people sexually assaulted men and women, the response was that everyone already knew about it and it was ok. To try to hold them to account gained some support but then quickly people hit back. They accused the victims and those defending them of trying to ‘cancel’ the person committing illegal acts by stripping them of benefits that their fame attributes to them.

2)  with a high-profile protest, a symbolic gesture and a murder trial, people could see that black people were upset about being killed for being black. Blah blah, people then said that it was attacking the rights of those who kill them to hold them responsible.

I could go on but as you can guess, all 7 end in the same way- people raise legitimate concerns, people then try to take action, those taking action are accused of having just woken up (woke) to these problems, those who are the perpetrators are protected by their tribes and painted as the victim.

Let’s simplify the argument. Person A treats women badly. Person B tells person A that (shockingly) women don’t like being treated badly (who’d have thought it?). Person A, with this new information, decides to try to help women. Person C sees that person A no longer thinks and acts like him based on new information and accuses person A of acting in bad faith for having realised that he was wrong and attempting to rectify his actions. Or to put it in Biblical terms: Saul is on the way to Damascus to kill some people for believing something different to him; he is confronted by someone saying, ‘Saul, people shouldn’t be killed for believing different things’; Saul changes his name to Paul and sets out to make amendments by helping those he hurt before.

Let’s now consider the story from a modern perspective: Saul is doing his God given duty of killing people for believing things different to him; Saul is confronted with the truth; Saul becomes ‘Woke’ as God employs ‘Cancel Culture’ to cancel Saul and those who think and act like him; Saul, who now identifies as Paul, faces heaps of abuse on social media by his former friends and others who think like he used to.   

Humans are often not interested in truth or facts, rather, as the insecure species that we are, we look for things to try to either a) drag others down into the holes that we are in or b) protect ourselves from realising that we may not be the illusion that we think ourselves to be, that our phantasy self is not our true self, rather it is a distortion created to hide from the truth. The attack on those who realise that they are wrong and attempt to correct their errors is seen as bad because this makes people question their own selves and often, we find, in comparison to those who are kinder, gentler or better than us we fall short.

‘till next time  

Living in the Moment: Part 4: Imagination

Imagination is something which I have written about before, and I see no need to tread worn paths. This time we will look at a more nuanced notion of imagination within the context of the current series on Living in the Moment.

Imagination is also known as the producer of fantasies and phantasies. It is sometimes thought that the ph spelling is an archaic form of the word, however, there is a distinct difference between the two (other than the letters). Fantasy refers to the likes of fairy tales, fantastical stories of heroes and villains and magic. They do not need to be set in an enchanted kingdom to be a fantasy, indeed the literature you can find at your local library falls, mostly, under this heading. The other form of phantasy is psychological creation which one calls to as an attempt to deal with or understand reality. One might argue that literature by the likes of Dostoyevsky, Proust et al, show a melding of both forms of fantasy/phantasy. You’ll note that, although the differences, both offer escapism.

But what has this to do with living in the moment? Last time we spoke about memory and the reason why my brain made the connection and demanded a fourth instalment is thus; In our memory, as we touched on prior, we are not necessarily who we are, (I is another). Indeed, it is possible that we have created a fantasy world in which we are the hero and that the bad people who are mean and hurt us are actual villains. This is problematic for two reasons 1) not being able to face up to the reality of one’s past creates a disconnect from who we are and who we dream we were and, 2) we cease to see the other as an individual human and see them as a villain. By doing so we neglect their humanity and instead of trying to understand them we cast them off as a Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (she gave me recurring nightmares as a child), evil and void of humanity. This is not as selfless as it may appear on the surface. By removing the monster from the fantasy we can glean and understanding of them as a human and as the quotation says (attributed to Tolstoy, The Buddha, French and Russian proverbs etc.) ‘to understand everything is to forgive everything’, and once we have understood and forgiven, we can rid ourselves of the burden of the other as an active emotional aspect in our being- in memory, imagination or in daily life. (note: both memory and imagination play a role in daily life).

The second form of phantasy is when one creates an unrealistic notion of what is actual reality. Whilst the former form of fantasy comes from the imagination and is a desire to create basic archetypes to turn the entirety of a person into a black and white figure, the later is when one believes that what they create is real or is possible. One might say that, if I buy a scratch card, I will win the lottery and become a millionaire and resign from my horrible job and never have to worry again. One then imagines the process of buying the ticket, of winning, the looks on people’s faces when they say, ‘you can shove you job, I quit’, the new house with too many bedrooms etc. This, whilst there may be an outside possibility of it coming true, is exceptionally unlikely. The subsequent actions, which, as with fantasy, are idealised to the point of being absurd as a) they may not take into account the reality of who we are, and b) it posits cliched responses to actions of which we have no other frame of reference.        

The danger of both forms of f/phantasy is that they remove us from who we are and instead of being who we are in this moment, we imagine ourselves in a form which we never were or never can be and thusly the grasp we have on the moment in which we inhabit becomes deluded and our lives are spent living a dream in which we die.

‘till next time  

Living in the Moment: Part 3: Memory

Whilst thinking of part 1 in this mini-series, Golden Ages, I realised that I needed to write part 2, a look at the feasibility of ‘living in the moment’. Whilst writing p2 I realised that I still had more aspects to cover, and thusly, with your indulgence, I will add two parts to this series, one on imagination and this one, on memory.

Memory is a strange thing. The likes of Jack Kerouac (known by his friends as Memory Babe) and Marcel Proust we known to have incredible memories and were very trusting of them. Then we have someone like psychologist Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise. The man who, in conjunction with his friend Amos Tversky laid the foundations of what Richard Thaler would call Behavioural Economics) to whom his memory was not to be trusted.   

The genius of the Proust is thus; when, aged 37, he decided to look back at his life up until that moment, and perform a psychological, philosophical, sociological etc. analysis of how he became who he was by creating a fictional character to have lived a life like his. The book went through many rewrites and ended up in 7 volumes (makes you realise my 4 parts aren’t too much, eh?) tracing and analysing the life of a fictional Marcel Proust. Science has shown that the moments which transfer from short-term to long term memory are these which have the biggest impact upon us- context, emotion etc. I maintain my belief that we do not forget anything, just find it harder to trace the neural pathways to find each memory, until the taste and smell of a pastry brings it all back. The important thing to note here is that In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)  is a fiction, based in reality. From this we can deduce that the moments which Proust covers (autobiographical or other) are the moments which had the most impact upon him, fitted together through fiction and/or old memories being brought back to light as he finds the neural pathways associated with them. We do not know what Proust thought of ISOLT, whether is was just something he wrote as a study, or if he thought it was the journey which had shaped who he was, at the age of 37, in the moment he began to write one of the greatest books ever committed to memory.

When considering Proust, we have to ask, is the significance of each memory actual, or is it imagined in hindsight? What do I mean by that? I’m so glad you asked! In his autobiography, the pioneering psychologist, Carl Jung recounts dreams that he had and how they shaped who he was when he wrote the book, decades removed from most dreams. One dream as a child was when he first heard of God and then started dreaming of a secret underground kingdom with a red room and what he later realised to be a penis sat on a throne. I mention this story in particular as I found it utterly hilarious and want to share it, (note: my deduction of this shows a conflict in the young Jung (tee hee) between the concept of God and conflict therein of being human), but it does raise an interesting point. As we saw with Proust, these stories are being told removed from the events which formed them. Whether or not the young Proust embracing his hawthorn bushes as a child, reassuring them that he was not leaving Combray because of them, was a real event is unknown. Assuming, for a moment, that it was, can the young Proust have known the, if any, significance of the action and the event and his response determining the action? Again, we can only speculate, but can also build upon it and say that events in time, our lives and the history of the world, are often only considered significance in hindsight. Whether or not they bear the significance we later put upon them is unknown but it seems likely that to live in the moment is to be devoid, not only of the past and future, but also of meaning as we do not know what will happen tomorrow, thusly any ‘real’ significance on the grand level is either a fiction created in hindsight or utterly unknown to us.

The notion that, as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote, ‘Je est un autre: ‘I’ is another’ suggests that when speaking of one’s self one cannot speak of their true nature, only a perception. Bob Dylan, a man known for his ‘reinventions’ of self (note: he shows different sides to his personality at different times, as we all do), embraced this with Volume one of his autobiography, Chronicles,a book which after the critics stopped salivating over was hit the inevitable backlash- is this real? Did these events actually take place? Did he lift passages from other writers? And blah blah black sheep- leading to the notion that even memory cannot be always real, maybe Dylan used lines from Proust as Proust expressed that which he could not? Who knows, but we have to assume that, fiction or not, Chronicles is how Dylan saw himself in the moment of writing it, with a past that may be fiction, a future unknown, and a present where I, myself, am another.

The word nostalgia literally translates as ‘past sadness’, and with this is mind, one must consider the validity of looking to the past versions of ourselves in relation to who we are now, partially because we change over time, and as Muhammed Ali said, ‘The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.’. As with the past, we learn from it and move on, so must we with memory for memory is often an idealised paradise or tragedy and has little to no bearing on the reality of our lives, now, in this moment.

Come back for Part 4, The imagination.

‘till next time