• About Me
  • About this Blog
  • Voice Over

flor san roman

~ Adventures and Abstractions

flor san roman

Tag Archives: philosophy

But WHY are we here?

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by Flor in Abstraction, belief

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

absurdism, faith, me, observations, philosophy

I was told a story of a 13 year old boy who is struggling now between a Bible-based view and a secular, if not atheistic, world view.  And about where he is now seems to be wondering what the point of life is, especially if the Bible isn’t objectively true.  Though young, he sees the alternative society offers up as consumer-driven and ultimately empty.

My first instinct was to feel a little sorry for him that he has to go through this trying time of determining what he believes in while people around him try to convince him to their way of thinking.  But I suppose I should also grant that he is smart enough to realize an acquisitive life is fairly meaningless and promises no satisfaction.  I’ve known too many people who’ve reached middle age and still haven’t figured that out.

The question of why we exist is one that philosophers, religious thinkers, and other intellectuals have struggled with for centuries.  And maybe that’s where I don’t measure up as an intellectual…because I don’t really care very much about the question.  Is it to give glory to God?  Is it to be free?  Is it to serve each other?  Or is it all one big colossal accident and there is no reason?  *shrug*  I dunno.

In Christianity there is the concept that humans cannot know the mind of God.  Whatever His plan is, it IS, and we cannot fathom it.  All we can do is have faith that it will take care of us, probably in some way we cannot understand.

That’s around where I start.  I don’t know if the plan is really detailed to every single life and material object and quark of dark matter or whatever.  Or maybe all of reality IS the plan.  The study of physics and chemistry, etc, is the corner of reality that we’ve been able to shed light on and get a feel for “well at least we understand that XX works like YY and effects us like ZZ under AA conditions.”  And while that allows me  to believe that we’ve worked out a tiny section of the plan, I also feel like we’ve had to simplify what we found in order to make it fit into our language and thereby our mental capacity.  This is very much akin to the simplification teachers have to give to Einstein’s theory of relativity just so us regular people can begin to grasp it.

And I recognize that the question isn’t meant to invoke the physics that got any particular person here, but I bring it up to explain that’s where my mind goes.  There is a vastness to any plane on which this question is tackled, to such a degree that I would never feel like I had enough solid information to go on.  The Bible does specifically say that God created us to glorify him, but what does that mean, really?  *shrug*  I dunno.

I hope no one came here actually hoping for some direction.  I don’t know that 13 year old kid above, I hope he’s okay and grows up solid in his critical thinking, and open to life and the world around him.

It’s just that I probably get the best instruction from the Absurdists (who had a strong tendency to atheists).  The idea that there is no meaning to life, that we’re here by accident is comfortable to me.  It’s freeing as I then feel that my choices to try to move myself and my society to somewhere better, somewhere more loving and more accepting, are truly my choices.  I don’t have to worry about trying to make myself be happy by checking boxes of acquiring any material possessions or even a particular social status – the pursuit of happiness being a completely separate endeavor from trying to live the way I’m supposed to.

The reason people ask the question Why always seems to have another component. Why questions don’t settle matters by themselves, they elucidate information that might answer a more basic question that can be difficult to articulate. And the asking of Why questions tends to reveal more about the questioner and the situation than questions of Who or What.  “Who ate the last doughnut?” is a very different circumstance than “Why did you eat the last doughnut?”   Even though there is a narrow difference between “What did you say?” and “Why did you say that?” there is still a difference.

Asking why we are here requests an answer that would satisfy a hundred Who/What/How questions.  If it’s to glorify God, we have now have a game plan for what to believe.  If it’s to be free, now we have an objective.  If it’s to serve each other now we have a methodology.

Without asking Why we may end up just wandering around, serving our basic needs, and having no idea what to do with the greater capacity we know we have.  We didn’t build cities, establish complex traditions, study our own histories, pursue scientific discovery, create epic poetry and end various diseases on accident – humans have always seen possibilities greater than themselves and sought them.

But the answer to Why questions sometimes feels too conclusive, even predestined.  That is, if the reason we are here is to serve God then all other options are not only sub-optimal, but perhaps morally wrong.  And if the Why of our existence is truly inevitable then there is no way NOT to serve God.  All actions, thoughts and words would be in line with service to Him.  This, of course, does not follow.  Not when the Bible gives a pretty firm code of conduct in terms that let us know it’s possible to break with, at the cost of breaking with fellowship with God.  Eg Anyone who ever took a cookie before dinner and then lied about it knows perfectly well that “Thou Shalt Not Lie” is pretty easy to break.  The Commandments, then, can only be expected to instill in us the scruples to behave in an honorable way.  They do not literally control us.

So then Why we are here ought to tell us a “preferred” way to live, or a philosophy to aspire to.  In other words, the answer satisfies the question, “Now that we find ourselves alive on Earth, what are we to do?”  Enough people over the millennia of human existence have found themselves lost in the wake of this query that I have no doubt as to the great value of a satisfactory answer.  I don’t look down on people who ask it.  I just wonder why I’m not one of them.

I believe in God, but as for what God is, I don’t know.  I believe my human mind cannot fathom God in the same way it cannot fathom the vastness and intricate workings of the universe.  But neither God nor the universe need my mind to grasp them in order to exist.

I don’t have any solution to Why, just an axiomatic idea. The meaning of life is to live.albert-camus-quotes-2

Advertisement

Question Meme: An Exchange

10 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Flor in Abstraction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

meme, philosophy, theory of knowledge

 If the watchword/phrase for the 1960s was “Question authority” maybe the watch phrase for 2010s & social media ought to be “Question meme.” Because every single one of us – yes, YOU too – really, really should.

I wrote the above at the beginning of September and after it came a really fascinating conversation with my high school English & Theory of Knowledge teacher, Mr Ted Kopacki. I soon realized I wanted to put the conversation up here…so that it took me until now to get to it tells you something about how quickly I move on my ideas. Anyhow, it was a really interesting exchange for me, hopefully someone out there finds it intriguing too.

(I’m always up for more education and interesting conversations, so feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments. If I did make any mistakes, please keep it civil.)

So, then the comments below my original post:

Me: Question 1. What is a meme?

Me: Hint: it’s not a pic with with clever text over it. That’s an image macro.

Kopacki: I read it and I still don’t have a clear idea of what it is.

[Mr Kopacki meant the Wikipedia article, presumably on image macros.]

Me: I’m not sure if you read the article on meme. I describe it as a cultural virus, bits of ideas that are transferred among people in the same social sphere that carry a linguistic currency on their own. For example, “mainstream media” or the idea that President Obama is a secret Muslim or (I know this goes back a few decades) the impression that Asian cars were worthless. It’s not exactly the idea in and of itself, but the context behind the idea that is spread.

Me: It’s a structure that lets ideas get used like a linguistic mechanism, but the meaning is only mutually understood when we have the same social insights. IE kids today who are used to the Honda Prius and other very fine cars might not know that in 1970s and 80s Hondas were considered lemons or just low value vehicles. In fact “Honda” was often invoked as a joke for something that was low class…

Continue reading →

[FICTION] Wishing for a Squirrel

18 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Flor in fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

fiction, philosophy

*FICTION*

Wishing for a Squirrel

I was reviewing proposals for final papers. Although in reality I was staring at the tree outside my window praying that a squirrel that had been playing on it last week would come back and distract me again. I guess I was already distracted. Michelle wafted in, clear voice a half step ahead of her long skirt.

“Just look at what they’ve done, Andrea! Can you believe it?!” She shoved a sky blue blouse in my face.

It took me a moment to adjust to just what the hell she was talking about. My brain had just been marinading in British Empiricism, juxtaposed by the wish that one of Mother Nature’s whimsies would take me away from all of this and now there was a discolored sleeve held up before me in offense. I looked at Michelle, hoping for just a little more assistance in orienting myself to this new circumstance.

“The dry cleaner! Look what they did! Ugh!” Michelle ran her fingers over the discolored spot.

Reassurances that everything is going to be okay are not my specialty, especially when the person who seems to need reassuring is not done losing her shit.

“I should sue them, don’t you think?” Michelle slammed the blouse down on the desk, hard enough to make the flowers in a narrow vase next to my laptop shift and the water swish somewhat worryingly.

“Uhm…” was as far as I got before I heard a knocking on my door. A student. A student with something on his mind, if the agitated rhythm was anything to go by. Another faculty member would have knocked twice and called my name before coming in. Or like Michelle, simply made herself known upon entering my office.

The agitated knock repeated itself and then the knob was tried. When found unlocked the door was opened. It was a young man from Western Enlightenment. Anthony– Anthony, something.

“I’m sorry, Dr Falconer, I know you have your office hours right now and I don’t have an appointment but I was hoping I could talk with you for a little bit. It’s just that I have a proposal for my paper but I’m not sure how to review it. I mean, here it is,” his verbal cascade not slowing one bit as he thrust a stapled set of printed papers at me, “and I have a conclusion on it and everything, but I just think that I don’t know if I have everything summed up just right because I feel like I could keep on going deeper and I’m not sure how to stop, you know?”

Anthony took a moment to catch his breath and look between Michelle and me. He inclined his head to Michelle, “Dr. Klein.”

She smiled but Anthony took a deep breath and continued on before she could greet him. “So I’m just trying to figure out how to really give this paper some scope. I thought investigating natural rights versus human rights would be a good place to start but I keep thinking about the Declaration and how we can’t pin down ‘inalienable rights’ from the natural world when the natural world didn’t come with any language. And if that’s the case then it also carries forward that the concept of ‘American’ is invented, and if that’s so then isn’t it arbitrary when our laws would apply, and do they apply to someone who is in the country but not an American and/or should they apply to someone who is American but not in the country? For instance, if I travel to France and break into a store and rob them, theft is against the law, but why would it only apply if I rob an American or American holdings? And why wouldn’t America’s laws that benefit us, like Freedom of Speech, benefit people in America who aren’t citizens? And if I drill down into that idea I find that country borders are also invented. After all, isn’t a border only what is held by concensus and physical might? I mean, the Native Americans weren’t unified and thinking this is ‘their land’ but once it was taken away then they recognized that, and even we’ve recognized that we ‘took’ the land from them and that means that there was a sense of possession in there somehow, and if I drill down into that it means that the whole concept of possession is also invented. Like that computer on your desk is yours and if I took off with it that would be theft, but we only have that idea if we have the idea of possession, but isn’t annexing basically taking something away from someone else and claiming it for yourself and being able to hold onto it? It’s like jumping a claim in the Old West and then shooting anyone who comes to take back and then, therefore, it was just accepted that now it was yours. So how can we say that owning something means anything, or claiming identity is anything but assuming an invented label? Why can’t I say that I’m Irish, then, when I feel a lot of affinity for the Irish people but I have no genetic relationship to them and I’ve never even been to Ireland. I mean who can say that deep down inside I’m enough like an Irish person that forbidding me from claiming that identity doesn’t become a cruel limitation to my self-identity. What am I taking away from anyone else? What impact does it have on the world if I include this affinity in my self-identity?”

Through his speech Anthony had gripped the chair opposite my desk with a tighter and tighter fist, knuckles losing all color. The color evidently went to his face, as his words had come faster, more frantically, his nose and cheeks had become pink and then red and now a burnished rust was spreading to his chin and outward over his ears. Arms were stiff and shaking, and when Anthony paused to suck in another breath I could see his legs were about to buckle. My guess was the boy hadn’t slept in at least two days. It was anyone’s guess as to how long it had been since he had a proper conversation with anyone.

“It’s just that, that,” he sounded frustrated. “There isn’t a natural trend toward justice or morality, is there? We didn’t naturally come to human rights, to equal rights, we came to them from out of some human invention and recognition for their need. So how can it be that we were endowed with them? And even if we look at it through the assumption that there is no God then aren’t we in even more trouble when we try to justify the reality of a moral universe, a just world that requires equal regard for every man, woman and child? Even if we skip that part and just begin with the premise that everyone can grasp treating each other with dignity and therefore we understand the possibility of refusing to do so as a failure of character, whether or not we call it a sin or a crime, even if we do that, today we have expanding human rights in our country for gay people but narrowing of the same in other countries. And yet we can’t say we understand humanity better when we have corporate personhood, particularly when corporations are allowed the benefits of the Bill of Rights but suffer none of the limitations, the way an *actual* human would. So if we say that a corporation can be a person, but not a human, why is it that human American is limited but a corporate American is not? Is that Jefferson meant? And even if it wasn’t, does that matter? I mean, never mind jurisprudence, isn’t a corporation an invention, just like a country’s border? I was born, as any human was. Doesn’t that mean something for whatever is inalienable to me? I mean… I mean…”

And there Anthony’s left leg wavered and he fell to a knee. A hand on the carpet, he coughed and spit. His breath gone, his voice continued in a soft wheeze, “I’m not sure they get it out there, Dr Falconer, money is something that has value only because we say it does. It isn’t real. It’s the same for countries. It’s the same for laws. In the end might is the only thing that really makes any difference but I would hate to live in a world where that was true. Don’t you think so, Dr Falconer?” His voice shook terribly. “Dr…?”

Michelle tried to smile sympathetically and glanced at me.

I sighed and called over my shoulder, “Katie! Katie, could you come in here, please.”

After a moment the side door in my office opened and my assistant came in. At the sight of the distressed student she put a hand on her hip and clucked her tongue. “Not another one.”

She didn’t wait for instruction, she simply stepped forward and hauled the sophomore to his feet. “Come on, let’s go get some coffee and talk it out.” She practically dragged him out to her office where there was a coffeemaker and small refrigerator.

Door closed Michelle blinked at me. “Does that happen often?”

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly. From the clock on my computer screen I still had 45 minutes left to my office hour. “Every semester there’s at least one.”

————————————————-

Author’s note: This is what people who haven’t studied Kant or Hume sound like to me.

[essay] The Tiger Behind the Fence: Introduction

03 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Flor in Abstraction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

essay, narrative, philosophy

You’re out in the yard and movement past the fence catches your eye. Something is on the other side, you tell yourself. An animal, large, fur rippling in jagged orange and black patterns. You can only see it through the interstices between the slats so you can either see a leg and paw, or musclebound torso, or a section of tail. You start to think it could be a tiger. Bengal. You’d know for sure if you saw its face. And you think with a start that you do not want to see the face of an adult Bengal tiger staring back at you between the slats of a wooden backyard fence.

But even if you see the face you haven’t seen the whole tiger. You have put together the parts you’ve seen and filled in the gaps with educated guesswork and constructed a theory for a tiger. Think about that. There are parts you haven’t seen – fangs, claws, a killer instinct – but you are certain they are there. You don’t even think of them separately, they are part and parcel of the thing we call tiger. There’s no such thing as a tiger without fangs and claws, right? So if that creature really is a tiger you have to assume it comes fully equipped.

Basically, you believe in things unseen because they fill in the gaps between the things you can see. That which we perceive must necessarily be filtered through what we think we know and how we see the world. It’s how we identify animals, it’s how a mess of vocalizations becomes speech, it’s how we recognize patterns even when sections are slightly modified or missing entirely. Sure, sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes what we thought was a real tiger was just an amazing throw rug recent from the wash and left hanging outside to dry.

Continue reading →

Encountering Surrealism

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by Flor in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

absurdism, art, dramaturgy, existentialism, philosophy, surrealism, theatre

I’ve wanted to write for the last month but straightforward expression has been failing me a little bit.  Dadaism gives me so little to work with I really don’t like turning to it for a mode of expression, even artistic.  But I’ve been on such a tear about surrealism, expressionism and the absurd lately that complete sentences with the standard subject-verb-object format feels stilted if not inadequate.  I’ll try to make this make sense, but no promises.

Admittedly, the dramaturgy project was many weeks ago and formally ended at the top of this month.  But I still have several fascinating books I checked out from the library and I’m rushing to read them before I have to return them next week.  Because it’s for my own interest now I returned nearly all the books on Algeria and kept a handful on Genet and related books on arts and drama.  It’s the wonder of that era that people like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre are notable both for philosophy and their literary works.  They were tied in to the creative world so thoroughly that it’s difficult to draw a clear distinction between the theories of existentialism and the modes of art that inspired them and were inspired by them, from Husserl’s phenomenology through Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and inclusive of Derrida’s deconstruction.  But, because I’ve approached this round as a dramaturg, I don’t have to hold my investigation to a scientific philosophic inquiry of dates and schools and interaction (though, trust me, a healthy dose of that always helps), and instead I can look for the guiding sense, essence the artists were reaching for.  Basically, why paint in a surrealist style?  Why muck up a perfectly serviceable language?  Why load up scenes with intense insanity, noise, pointlessness, humorous tragedy and filth?

For me, the greatest image that expresses it all so perfectly that talking about becomes a sort of painful superficiality – I can’t tell you anything that the painting doesn’t say for itself, and better – is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.  (If somehow you’ve read this far and you’re not sure which painting that is, by all means, look it up.  Right now.)  Its anguish is undeniable and immediately it gives a sense of crowding horrors.  Noise, chaos and violence have become so de rigueur that bothering to comment on them becomes a sort of absurd act.  The pain and misery is so great that it has to be cut up, given edges, boundaries.  The madness of it all has led to coping that consists of being able to identify objects and situations – woman, baby, cow, bomb – but not a cohesive comment that rises above the statement of madness itself.

My favorite painter is Frida Kahlo.  I’m tempted to say something obnoxious like I was into her before it became fashionable, but in truth I’m glad she’s popular now because it’s easier for me to get to see her works in person.  And furthermore, she’s become well known enough to anchor a fantastic exhibit at LACMA, called In Wonderland.

Goodness, I can’t say enough about this exhibit.  It took me well over three hours to wander through and the last hour was slightly rushed as my feet ached and nature called.  I want to go back.  Overwhelmingly I hadn’t heard of most of the artists on display.  And it’s a damn shame because no one should have to wait until the age of 35 to be exposed to Remedios Varo or Bridget Tichenor.

Here’s where language really falls apart.  Because I’m still very much under the throes of trying to come up with something that comprehensively expresses all of my thoughts, I want to say something about the exhibit but I have no idea where to start or how to hold to an outline.  It’s hard to talk about any one thing without it become something else, bleeding over into a new scene, invading the space of another idea, alluding to another theme, borrowing the colors of a completely different experience.  The essence of 20th century surrealism, maybe.  Also really sloppy reportage.  But really, you have no idea how many times I’ve tried to write this out and had to delete it all because it just chases its own tail.

I wanted to camp out/lay down at the foot of Las dos fridas and stare up at it forever.  I wanted to read every piece of ephemera, including Artaud’s Spanish-language article on Maria Izquierdo.  I wanted to commit the magic in Leonora Carrington’s Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess.  I was so struck by a piece of text by Julien Levy on Surrealism I had to write it down:  “[it] attempts to discover and explore the more real than real world behind the real; meaning which is expansive behind the contractile fact.”  And, my God, Dorothea Tanning.

The ideas! That women were their very own muses! That down in Wonderland, long past the rabbit hole, women found themselves bewildered by their own lives! That they didn’t need the madness and belligerent whims of the world at large to see where the disconnects came about! That mystery and identity are facets every woman has for exploring, too sublime to be reliable tools but powerful forces all the same.

Maybe this is what Rationalism has wrought, surrealism, existentialism, et al.  When the situation is deprived of its narrative (John killed Bob because Bob murdered John’s parents) and one is only left with the hard facts (Bob is dead; John shot him) the whole thing is senseless violence.  The human mind can’t really take that, there has to be some sense in it in order to live with the situation.  Even turning away and deciding not to think about it is an option.  But we’re hardwired to see if this-then-that in everything.  When that falls apart because expectations get foiled again and again (on the way to getting revenge for his parents, John is given governorship over a region far away and he laments his misfortune which inspires Mary, a maid besotted with him, to attempt the revenge herself which fails because Bob falls in love with her first and proposes marriage and when war breaks out a famous ballad makes its way to John’s ears about poor Mary whose betrothed was killed during the war and how she never got what she wanted and John determines that his vengeance will not be foiled if he kills Mary…) we are truly numbed to the present goings on, so goes the praxis in certain plays by Beckett and Ionesco, and put ourselves in a sort of holding pattern, waiting for this nonsensical story to play itself out and for “normal” to return.  But the funny thing about life, and reality, is it is no play, it has no narrative, and there is no “normal.”

Maybe the advance of rationalism has been handily or conveniently assisted by globalism and intercultural realities.  The more we let go of expecting a certain course of events and allow for alternatives as a measure of our tolerance for other customs, perhaps the less we find our own customs instinctual.  We’ve learned to question our customs – to question authority.  We’ve raced around the globe and crashed into ourselves on the other side.  Recognizing ourselves once again, after all of that can be disorienting and we may never be the people we once were.  (As a woman I can’t help but be glad about that.)  There’s a new normal hanging around.  It doesn’t make any sense but it’s not like you should get used to it.

In closing, if there is any way you can, hie yourself to LACMA’s In Wonderland.  In until May 6 2012, but you should go now.  NOW.  Go, go, go, go!

Intentionally Outward Facing

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by Flor in Background

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

admin, communication, faith, me, philosophy, theatre

Hello World!

I like that coding sample. I don’t know much about coding but I know that, and I like it. This entry is mainly to test out the word editor. (And it’s already crashed on me once, inauspicious, WordPress, inauspicious.)  So behind the cut, I think goes more detail about me.  But I won’t toggle to full screen.  I’ve learned my lesson. Continue reading →

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 782 other subscribers

Monthly Archives

Tags

absurdism acting admin aging america anxiety art books brain hack burbank class work communication communion depression dramaturgy Einstürzende Neubauten essay existentialism experimental experimental music expressionism faith family fears fiction friends future holiday home life improv industrial music Industrial Records japanese me meme music narrative nerdery news observations opposition performing philosophy politics reading recent history rehearsal SITI social networking society SOSE surrealism suzuki theatre theory of knowledge Throbbing Gristle travel USC video gaming viewpoints voice wine work

Categories

Abstraction Background belief context-ual fiction Japanese Politica Theatrical Uncategorized Vino Voice Over

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • flor san roman
    • Join 45 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • flor san roman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...