DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE UNSTABLE.

The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.

Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside it appears confident.

Once, as I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As we approached the property, long overgrown with trees and all kinds of magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE UNSTABLE. I said to my friend, “That’s a profound sutra [sacred scripture].” And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself that which is beyond death. Jesus called it “eternal life.”

- Eckhart Tolle

How is the formless in you beyond death?

the power of the present moment

All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present now not yesterday or tomorrow. Only Presence can undo the past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness.

What is spiritual realization? The belief that you are spirit? No, that’s a thought. A little closer to the truth than the thought that believes you are who your birth certificate says you are, but still a thought. Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The Buddha was probably the first human being to see this clearly, and so anata (no self) became one of the central points of his teaching. And when Jesus said, “Deny thyself,” what he meant was: Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self is truly who I am, it would be absurd to “deny” it.

What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness. The only thing that ultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times? To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? Can I sense my essential identity as consciousness itself? Or am I losing myself in what happens, losing myself in the mind, in the world?

- Eckhart Tolle

nature of consciousness

The seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes, regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, is famous for his dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” This was the answer he found to the question: is there anything I can know with absolute certainity. He realized that the fact that he was always thinking was beyond doubt, and so he equated thinking with Being, that is to say, identity—I am—with thinking. Instead of the ultimate truth, he had found the root of the ego, but he didn’t know that.

It took almost three hundred years before another famous philosopher saw something in that statement that Descartes, as well as everybody else, had overlooked. His name was Jean Sartre. He looked at Descartes’s statement “I think, therefore I am” very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.” What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says “I am.” If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind that continuously re-creates the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream. Another dimension of consciousness has come in.

The implication of Sartre’s insight is profound, but he himself was still too identified with thinking to realize the full significance of what he had discovered: an emerging new dimension of consciousness.

- Eckhart Tolle

suffering and contentment go hand in hand

Buddhist Way:

We know that life is suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we should discard the goods of life and practice abstinence.

Nietzsche's Way:

Fulfillment is to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that you harbor in your the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable...people for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences...almost as stupid as the will to abolish bad weather.

How does the New Testament console us for our difficulties? By suggesting that many of these are not difficulties at all but rather virtues:

If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out:
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)

If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil…your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22-3)

If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises:
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh…Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22)

If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)

There may be differences between such words and a drink but Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfillment:

The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became “goodness”, baseness “humility”, submission to people one hated “obedience” and, in Nietzsche”s phrase, “not-being-able-to-take-revenge” turned into “forgiveness”. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem “a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment”. Addicted to “the religion of comfortableness”, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.

Having a “Christian” perspective on difficulty is not limited to members of the Christian church; it is for Nietzsche a permanent psychological possibility. We all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health while the corners of our mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against what we have publicly renounced, firing shots over the parapet, sniping from the trees.

How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never. Put another way, to resist the temptation to denigrate and declare evil certain goods because they have proved hard to secure a pattern of behaviour of which Nietzsche’s own, infinitely tragic life offers us perhaps the best model.

- Alain de Botton

joseph campbell quotes

Life is without meaning.

You bring meaning to it.

The meaning of life is

whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

We must be willing to get rid of

the life we've planned, so as to have

the life that is waiting for us.

the self as social construction

Identity is based on: consciousness/present awareness, memory, and relationships with other people and their memory and consciousness. Without these things, you have no identity. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Can something exist without it being perceived? Without an objective transcendental God, no. Perception is dependent on the perceiver. If you lose your memory, your past identity disappears. Only because other people remember who you were, does a former remnant of your past identity remain. But take away those people and your previous identity disappears.

In one sense, then without your memory or consciousness, your relations with other people constitute your identity. Your personal identity is the composite of relational experiences that make up your personal history.

When near death, most people reminisce about the experiences of deep connections they had with others--family, friends, and colleagues. It is the empathetic moments in one's life that are the most powerful memories and the experiences that comfort and give a sense of connection, participation, and meaning to one's sojourn.

Is it no surprise then that over and over again in happiness research and throughout the teachings of every religion around the world, that happiness is said to be fundamentally centered around the quality of one's relations with other people, especially one's close friends and family. These people know you best, they are your link to this current life. They provide connection, meaning, and most importantly, existence.

When one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist.

Kant vs Schopenhauer on morality

Schopenhauer finds Kant’s idea that moral laws exist a priori and are knowable “independent of all inner and outer experience ‘resting simply on concepts of pure reason’” without any empirical basis. He pointed out that Kant rejected the very idea that morality might be bound up in consciousness and connected to natural feelings “peculiar to human nature, which would give morality an empirical grounding. Kant is very clear on this point. In the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes that moral law

must not be sought in man’s nature (the subjective) or in the circumstances of the world (tile objective)…here nothing whatever can be borrowed from knowledge relating to man, i.e., from anthropology...indeed we must not take it into our heads to try to derive the reality of our moral principle from the particular constitution of human nature.

What we are left with, argued Schopenhauer, is an ethics that exists a priori of human experience and which is “entirely abstract, wholly insubstantial, and likewise floating about entirely in air.”

So, if morality is not found in human nature but, rather, exists a priori and independent of human nature, what compels someone to be moral? Kant says one acts in a morally responsible way because of “[t]he feeling that it is incumbent on man to obey the moral law…from a sense of duty, not from voluntary inclination. Kant specifically dismisses feelings as a basis for morality.

Feelings of compassion and of tenderhearted sympathy would even be a nuisance to those thinking on the right lines, because they would throw into confusion their well-considered maxims and provoke the desire to be released from these, and to be subject only to legislative reason.

Schopenhauer finds Kant’s categorical imperative unpersuasive. Human beings simply don’t act in a disinterested, moral way, because of a duty to uphold an a priori moral code. Unless, that is, there is some reward or punishment attached. On a closer examination of Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer concluded that it sounded an awful lot like a theological ethics absent God’s presence. After all, the Abrahamic religions are based on God’s Ten Commandants, an a priori moral code handed down by God that exists independent of human nature but is expected to be obeyed because God wills it.

Schopenhauer argues that the moral code that accompanies theological consciousness is purely prescriptive. If human nature is “fallen,” as the Abrahaimic religions suggest, then there is no moral basis within an individual’s being that would predispose him to do the morally right thing. God’s commandments, therefore, are a prescriptive device telling human beings that this is the way they “ought” to behave if they are to be rewarded by God’s grace and not punished by his wrath. But if there is nothing in the biological nature of a human being that would predispose him to be morally good, then why would he choose to do so out of pure duty to some a priori existing moral code, as Kant suggest, especially when there is no reward for doing so or punishment for not.

What Schopenhauer is really saying here is that Kant is attempting to offer a moral defense for the Age of Reason using a prescriptive device borrowed from the Age of Faith. In the end, concludes Schopenhauer, Kant fails to show how reason alone, as an abstract idea, can be the basis of a moral ethic.

The question then becomes whether there is any other source within the human animal itself that might be the basis of morality. Can we describe some quality of human behavior that predisposes people to be moral so that we don’t run the risk of having to slip from what is to what ought to be famous is/ought gap? If we can’t find such a predisposition burrowed deep in the nature of human beings, then the only way to save morality is to journey back to an earlier theological consciousness and view morality as always prescriptive and never descriptive.

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behavior that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature—with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realized. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of our human nature. Here’s how he describes the phenomenon. In feeling compassion for another,

I suffer directly with him, I feel his woe just as I ordinarily feel only my own; and, likewise, I directly desire his weal in the same way I otherwise desire my own…At every moment we remain clearly conscious that he is the sufferer, not we; and it is precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the suffering, to our grief and sorrow. We suffer with him and hence him; we feel his pain as his, and do not imagine that it is ours.

In this single statement Schopenhauer becomes the first person in history to clearly define the empathic process. All that is missing is the term itself.

- Jeremy Rifkin

social construction of reality

In the embodied philosophical frame, truth lies elsewhere. The new philosophers would argue that if reality is something we make together out of our shared experiences, then truths are not objective autonomous phenomena but, rather, the explanations we make about the common experiences that we share with each other. When we say "we seek the ultimate truth," we are really saying that we seek to know the full extent of how all of our relationships fit together in the grand scheme. Our pursuit of the truth is the search for how we belong to the larger picture and why.

reality as fiction

Why is that we have emotional responses to fiction when we know what is happening isn't real?

Part of the problem is that we don't believe that what we are watching is true.

The point doesn’t seem to be that we don’t believe what is happening is real, but rather that the way the story is told (and now the special effects which influence the realness of the way the story is told) seems to be more influential over how we respond to the story.

Some of the new fictional media even threaten to blur the line between the real and fictional worlds that we experience--some of it may have even made that line irrelevant. That is, we have not come to any conclusions as to whether or not we are able, imaginatively, to enter into fictional spaces in the same way that Neo enters the Matrix. And as Neo is told repeatedly, “you can’t be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it yourself.” Neo has to choose the red pill in order to experience this very different reality for himself. This is similar to the fact that I will never have the same experience or emotional response when someone tells me about a movie or a novel as when I see it or experience it for myself. Is it even possible that we, as viewers, could have the same sort of access to our fictional spaces that Neo had while he was in the desert of the real? Kendall Walton suggests that we experience fictions psychologically, in similar ways as children do physically when they play their games of make-believe. That would imply, however, that we really are able to enter into a fictional space in a way that is relevantly similar to the way Neo enters the reality that is the Matrix. Although we do not physically enter into another space, being able to explain the resulting emotional effects by saying that it is a cognitively similar experience would relieve us of the burden of explaining why we respond to things we believe not to be “real.” That is, if the experiences are cognitively similar, a “belief in the reality of” or the clear distinction between “real” and “unreal” becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.

Don’t misunderstand however. It is clear that we do not have to believe what is going on in the film in order to be affected by it. In fact, we cannot believe what is happening if we are to have an emotionally appropriate (aesthetic) response. This is especially true when it comes to tragedy or horror. Generally, we are not amused by others’ tragic lives nor do we derive pleasure out of watching people chased, stalked, or murdered. But in the context of a fiction, we often enjoy these things. We can enjoy them, however, if only we do not believe they are happening. We can enjoy watching Neo fighting Morpheus, after Neo has learned through a programmed computer simulation of a combination of martial arts, only if we know that neither of them is really being hurt. This goes even further with the kinds of special effects that The Matrix employs since what the viewer sees is what it would be like if time slowed down or even stopped. Since we know that this can’t happen, or it at least isn’t part of our experience we can still allow it to influence our response to the movie. (The bounds of these situations are also being stretched by the media with a new genre of voyeuristic television shows like Surivivor, Real World, and Big Brother. We may even get to the point where we do want to know the presentation is “real” in order to derive aesthetic pleasure out of it.)

The Matrix makes a number of clever and important references to Alice In Wonderland. Alice had many of the same problems in facing her strange new reality as did Neo. From the very beginning, Neo (still Thomas Anderson at that point, outside the rabbit hole) was told to follow the White Rabbit (tattoo), which ultimately led him to the reality. Once Neo arrived, Morpheus said to him, “I imagine right now you are feeling a bit like Alice--tumbling down the rabbit hole.” These explicit references make it clear that the kind of experiences the creators of the film were allowing Neo to have are parallel to the experiences that the viewers have of the film. As viewers, we watch and become increasingly more involved in the new reality that Neo experiences and we acclimate to the different reality at the same time Neo does. Since Alice in Wonderland is a fiction we are nearly all familiar with, we are taken (the viewers of the film and Neo at the same time) into a new wonderland of our own.

When we enter into a fictional world, or let the fictional world enter into our imaginations, we do not “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We cannot willingly decide to believe or disbelieve anything, any more than we can willingly believe it is snowing outside if all visual or sensory cues tell us otherwise. When engaging with fiction we do not suspend a critical faculty, hut rather exercise a creative faculty. We do not actively suspend disbelief, we actively create belief. As we learn to enter into fictional spaces (and I do believe this is something that we have to learn and that requires skills we must practice and develop) we desire more and more to experience the new space more fully. We want to immerse ourselves in the new world, just as Neo begins to immerse himself in the real world outside the Matrix. To do this we can focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our creative faculties to reinforce the reality of the experience, rather than to question it.

How does technologically sophisticated fiction, more and more like “real” events, produce emotive responses? Some argue that we have to understand the way emotions work in response to real events in order to understand how we respond emotively to fiction. This may not be the way to go, however, as it seems that the belief requirement that is missing from our interactions with fictional situations does not prohibit us from profoundly similar experiences physically and phenomenologically. If we feel the same and have relevantly similar emotional responses, why cannot the experience be said to be real? In many ways it can, but we are now getting into an area where fictional spaces and real spaces overlap and even unite. In the same way, the two worlds in The Matrix begin to overlap and unite. At one point, after Neo has been shaved and placed in his new digs, Morpheus takes him into an all white room. Neo is surprised to find that he is dressed the way that he would have been earlier. Morpheus explains to him that this is his “residual self-image” and that it is the “physical image of your digital self.” Neo’s old self-image crosses over from one world to the next. Similarly, Cypher can’t seem to give up the taste and texture of steak, even though he “knows” it isn’t real. Our knowledge of what is real and what isn’t real doesn’t necessarily change the way we behave or respond to these things. We may have to face the possibility that the line that divides appearance and reality (in the Matrix and in our own lives) is not as clear as we once thought it to be. We may even need to actively make that line disappear in order to make sense of our interactions with fictions.

In “reality,” we make judgments about people and situations without having full information all the time must do this just to be practical, since the time it would take to gather all the information we assume would he prohibitive to living our lives. We fill in the gaps of knowledge with guesses and prejudices of our own. Thus, reality may not be as “real” as we tend to think of it, since we do a fair amount of the construction on our own. We do the same with fiction, as we assume those we read about have had relevantly similar human lives, that they function as flesh and blood humans unless otherwise noted, and we assume that they live in a world that works physically in the same way as does ours. In both cases, in reality and with fiction, we are given a skeleton structure of what is happening, and we use our imaginations to fill in the details. With fiction, the structure is carefully constructed so we are given nearly all the relevant information. In reality, on the other hand, the information we use as a basis to construct a coherent understanding of a situation is not given to us in a carefully constructed way. Rather, we pick up certain details and make a comprehensible story of our own, using our own prejudices and biases, working necessarily from our own perspective, which is determined largely by our culture. If this is the case and we do have to create and fill in significant parts of our own realities, we are in a sense, making up our own stories these stories are our lives. Roger Schank explains in his book on narrative and intelligence that:

We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experience because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering . . . But telling a story isn’t rehearsal, it is creation. The act of creating is a memorable experience in itself.

We create meaning and memory through the hearing and telling of stories. Thus reality is more like fiction in terms of story creation than we originally thought, and the question of whether or not we must have a belief requirement in order to have a justified emotion seems now to be misguided.

Even if we do create our own stories to be reality (or our realities as stories) we still have a belief component missing from our assessment when we experience fictional simulations. If I believe that I am walking across the street, whether the cars are fictional or not, I am able to assess that I am in some mortal danger if I stay too long. If I make this assessment while playing a virtual reality game, I am not physically in any danger. Understanding how narrative undermines the distinction between reality and fiction does, however, make the paradox disappear in a certain sense. That is, the problem that we respond differently to fiction and reality no longer holds because the distinction between them has changed. If we put the fiction distinction aside and look to what it is that connects our understanding of both, namely how we comprehend narrative, we can begin to work with a more unified problem, one that will not always, ultimately, lead us to a paradox.

I am not suggesting that fiction and reality are the same or even that they are at times indistinguishable. There is a clear distinction between the epistemologcal (knowing what is real) and the ontological (the existence of things as they are) that will forever differentiate those for us. But what I am suggesting is a much stronger emphasis on how we make sense of both--that is, through narrative and story-telling. The way the story is told, or how it is that we create the story and make sense of it is similar for both fiction and reality. If it is the narrative that we are ultimately responding to, then it does not matter how we construe the emotions to work in response to real experiences and fictional ones--this is a false dichotomy that will continue to leave us in a paradox.

Further, if it is the narrative that we respond to, and the narratives are getting better or at least more vivid through technological developments, then it would make sense that we have increasingly stronger affective responses even though we “know” what we see or experience is not “real.” With the current state of the technology, especially with the kinds of special effects The Matrix provides, we are able to more fully experience both worlds and respond emotively to both. By moving the focus of the debate away from the belief requirement needed for “justified” emotions and understanding the role of stories more fully we can connect the divergent spaces of the real and the representational. We can further see how it is that we function in similar ways to the characters in The Matrix. Neo experiences a new reality as we experience it along with him in parallel ways we never before imagined.

- Sarah Worth

authenticity brings freedom, but not comfort

Inauthenticity is the norm. Most people are inauthentic, if not all.

The true nature of reality is not necessarily something humans want to see.

Death, suffering, and meaninglessness are three aspects of existence that people have a hard time accepting. Existentialists assert that inauthenticity is pervasive because most people do not want to know the hard truths of existence. Instead, people want to comfort themselves with a vast array of lies about life. These lies range in size from major metaphysical fibs to the tiny tales we tell ourselves, but they are all lies we want to hear.

Given what has been said about authenticity, it’s hard to see why anyone would want to achieve it. As the existentialists admit, achieving authenticity entails not only accepting that the world has no intrinsic order or purpose, but also that we are fragile and finite creatures who bear complete responsibility for ourselves and the meanings we create. Given the burden of this awareness and the feelings of estrangement and insanity it can cause, it is easy to see why individuals prefer to remain ignorant of the nature of the human condition and insulated from the truth.

Though inauthenticity does seem to have some notable advantages over authenticity, the latter is still preferable. There are several reasons for this. First, while living inauthentically does alleviate anxiety, it does not eradicate it. For existentialists such as Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, anxiety issues from the nature of our being. Thus, the only possible way to eradicate anxiety is to annihilate ourselves. This hardly seems a desirable option. After all, if death marks our end, then we will not be around to appreciate the eradication of anxiety that it brings. According to Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, anxiety is an inescapable aspect of our being. It is part of our being because humans all have a sense of their constitution, a visceral concern for being that is rooted in an intuitive awareness of their true nature. Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger believe that we all have a sense of the fragility and dependency of our nature that fosters feelings of anxiety. Existentialists recognize that we can disguise or deny awareness, but they assert that we cannot eradicate it. Inauthenticity is precisely this attempt to disguise or repress what we know in our gut but do not want to admit to our mind. When one lives inauthentically one covers over the true cause of one’s ontological insecurity and attributes this feeling instead to some mundane cause. For example, instead of attributing the generalized anxiety we experience to existence itself, we instead tend to attribute it to some localized source, like work, another person, or the lack of a particular object or status. We do this largely because attributing ontological insecurity to a mundane source gives us the impression that this insecurity can be controlled or even eradicated. We figure if we get the job, or get the right car, our insecurities and dissatisfactions will be eliminated. However, since inauthenticity represents a “light ... from [oneself]” and we cannot escape what we are, an inauthentic life is characterized by a certain desperate fervency and perpetual effort. Whether we want to admit it or not, most of us are familiar with this insidious cycle. Sadly, because of its internal dynamic, inauthentic individuals exist on the run from their being while at the same refusing to acknowledge the actual cause of their flight.

In addition to failing to eradicate anxiety and necessitating a sort of “life on the run,” living inauthentically also has the negative consequence of limiting an individual’s freedom. As existententialists explain, when one lives inauthentically one covers over not only the true nature of the world, but also the true nature of the individual. For existentialists, though humans find themselves in a situation they did not choose, they are free to determine themselves within that situation. Because this freedom is frightening, individuals often seek to deny it. Individuals who live inauthentically live in denial of their freedom. Consequently, they live without a genuine awareness of their own possibility. Individuals who are inauthentic do not admit the true extent of their choice. For example, instead of embracing the opportunity they have to create themselves, they instead adopt predetermined identities. They slip into roles that were dictated to them rather than crafted by them. Ultimately, inauthentic individuals cannot make genuinely informed or autonomous choices because they refuse to be honest about the actual state of affairs and because they make choices that are in keeping with their determined roles, rather than choosing for themselves. By removing responsibility, living inauthentically gives individuals some comfort. However, it does so at the expense of individual autonomy.

The insights that authenticity brings are only unbearable as long as we resist them. Though existence may not be everything we want, it is only overwhelming if we insist that it be something other than it is. If one lets go of these expectations, one can see things as they are. Only at this point can one fully appreciate and make use of the remarkable gift of existence. While authenticity may not conform to our conventional definition of bliss, living authentically affords individuals a unique serenity because it ends the maddening run from our being that characterizes inauthenticity. It represents an opening up to ourselves and an acceptance of what is. Though the truth of existence may be sobering, it is all we have and all we are. Regardless of its attraction, if Heidegger is right and our being is time and our time is finite, then it would be madness to waste one’s time--and thus one’s being--living inauthentically.

- Jennifer McMahon

football field of life

Reason is the slave of the passions.

Our passions motivate us, determine what is worthwhile and what is not in our lives.

We generate purpose in our lives by committing to goals that we find worthwhile and meaningful. The degree to which one is successful in achieving these goals will often determine one's general state of satisfaction and contentment with life.

Imagine a large field of grass. The empty field represents our existence. Now imagine that someone has imprinted a football field using chalk on this field of grass. The football field represents one particular framework of meaning, let's take religion for example. Religion generates the rules and milestones that one follows and lives by in this field of "life". Through this framework of meaning, one is given the purpose for our existence--to get to the end-zone and make a touchdown--and if you apply it to our religion example, to become saved, live a religious life, and go to the heaven in the end. Now, imagine that it started to rain and the chalk was washed away and now we're left with a field of empty grass again. The rain represents modernity--our realization that this particular framework of meaning that worked so well for so long now has become weakened as a result of competing frameworks of meaning brought on by science, globalization, and capitalism. We humans cannot be truly content without a framework of meaning that gives our lives direction, value, and purpose. We need to imprint another "football field" on this field of grass so we can start playing the game of life again.

The modern age is unique in that we don't have to accept the framework of meaning that we get when we're born into a certain family, religion, and culture. We can find and accept new frameworks of meaning, each with their own particular set of goals, values, and status hierarchies. I think in the end, it's a reflexive process where we guide and are guided by, to a framework of meaning that we end up accepting.

The football field is imprinted with chalk because these frameworks of meaning are ultimately based on faith. There are by no means permanent, unchanging, and most importantly, true. Faith makes it true...to us, but not to everyone. Nevertheless, faith is essential. Without faith, meaning is not possible. The idea that reason is superior to faith is nonsense. Faith is the master of reason--because faith determines what we consider valuable and true. Reason only after, gives us the rationale for what faith has already decided.

Why then you ask, do most of us desire and want the same things: money, power, status, success, love...if we all have different systems of meaning? Each family, nation, religion, and culture has a different system of meaning, however small or large the differences between them. The reason why most of us want the same things is because we humans, all share the same biology. Our biology in my opinion determines most of what we desire in life, that is: pleasure, power, status, success, love. But we have the power to override our biological urges. We have consciousness and culture. That's where things start to get complicated.

perspectives, not truth

There are no facts. Only interpretations.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

when is something meaningful?

An experience is meaningful when it is related positively to a person's goals. Life has meaning when we have a purpose that justifies our strivings, and when experience is ordered.

relativism in mad men

For Nietzsche, creativity is only possible within nihilism. It is out of the absence of all and any value that the Nietzschian Uhermensch creates new value. Unlike the "herd," who believe that values are universal, objective, and real, the Nietzschian overman sees the values against the background of nihilism and knows them to he human inventions. For Nietzsche, the role of creating value in society was in the hands of what he called the Uberrneflsch, the "overman," aka the "superman," who out of a tragic and nihilistic consciousness affirmed life and human existence by creating values where none had existed before. These values eventually are experienced by culture as integral and necessary to its existence, defining what it means to be human, setting the standards for what is morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and epistemically true. Don Draper asks Rachel Menken, the wealthy Fifth Avenue department store proprietor, why she is not married. Her reply is that she has never been in love. Draper retorts, "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons" ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,¡" episode 101). If what Draper says is true, love, which many regard as the deepest and most real of human emotions, turns out to be a construct invented by the advertising industry to sell clothing. Rachel maintains that love is not just a slogan. She means that it is not just a word, but that there is a thing, an objective reality, to which the word corresponds. Rachel believes that if there were no word love, the thing, love, would nevertheless be something that people would feel; it would still exist without the word. Draper, though, says that the reason she has not felt it is because it does not exist.

The common belief is that love unites people, creates community, and binds together lovers, families, and marriages. Instead, Draper says that we are "born alone and die alone." The rules of society, that is, its customs, taboos, and values, are designed, according to Draper, to make us forget our solitary existence. He, on the other hand, "never forgets it," and lives as if there is no tomorrow . . . since," as he claims, "there is not one."

Draper believes love is a social construct. It is not a social construct. Love and affection are biological and psychological needs inherent in human beings. It is not a cultural construct but first, a biological construct on which culture builds upon and validates. Love may not exist objectively, but the need for love and affection exists in the physical wiring of humans. Ultimately if you're human, you need love, so we need to aspire for love even if it doesn't objectively exist.

Anti-foundationalism is the position that there is no unchanging and universal basis of value. Draper's life embodies anti-foundationalism, in which stable social institutions like marriage and family are fleeting and evanescent.

Marriage is a social construct and ultimately its value is relative. It is not an end, be all. But, marriage is a social construct developed over thousands of years and it has persisted in all cultures around the world, regardless the level of economic development, because usually the benefits of being in marriage outweigh the benefits of alternative lifestyles. Now, does one always need marriage? No. It is a social construct.

How necessary is nihilism for the creativity required to advance culture-transforming technologies? Nietzsche, in “The Metamorphoses of the Spirit,” a chapter from Thus Spake Zarathustra, describes the genesis of the creative spirit in three stages: the camel, the lion, and the child. The first (the camel) is the load-bearing spirit that bears the weight of the taboos of society. The lion represents the power that kills the dragon of the sacred Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots—the permission and prohibition of society. The third stage of the spirit is the child, which Nietzsche calls “a new beginning” and a “self-propelled wheel,” where human consciousness is no longer burdened by the norms of society. It is able to create out of forgetting, innocence, and spontaneity. Creation and destruction are never far apart.

While developing the ad campaign for a cigarette company threatened by reports that smoking causes cancer, Don. falls asleep. Describing the essence of the creative process, Draper once advised Peggy, “Just think about it deeply, and forget it, and an idea will jump in your face”. He comes to the meeting with the Lucky Strike executives empty-handed. After an embarrassing silence, the executives begin to leave. Suddenly Draper, appearing inspired, comes up with the slogan “It’s toasted.” He does not challenge or debate the report that cigarettes are poisonous, which he earlier drops in the trash and calls “perverse.” He diverts attention toward what sounds completely affirmative. His slogan addresses the subliminal associations that surround the connotations of words. Advertising is designed, he claims, to make people feel good about themselves. It gives them the reassurance that “Whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay”. This is not deception, not lying, but the power of words to create reality. For Draper it is a reality without a past and without a future.

The report that cigarette-smoking causes cancer is only relevant if one cares about one’s health. But if you care more about feeling good, then that’s all that matters for you, with or without the cancer report. There is no Truth, only interpretations.

Cigarettes kill. So what? They’re nice and toasted.

The absence of values, other than the ones that we create, is the nihilism of Nietzsche. This is, of course, hard to accept for those who believe in truth. Roy again critiques Don: “You make the lie. . . you invent want.” Roy is assuming that there is a difference between truth and “the lie,” between natural wants and those that are artificial. Don responds by saying, “There is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent” (“The Hobo Code,” episode 108).

In Don’s life, this indifference negates a myriad of values such as loyalty, honesty, reliability; and, in this case, truth. There is nothing in the nature of things that would serve as a way of differentiating true from false, right from wrong, honest from dishonest. Don does not show the slightest qualm in telling Betty that he is leaving for work when he is on his way to spend the night with his daughter’s elementary school teacher. He lies to Betty without the apparent sense that he is violating her trust. He tells her, “Betts, I have no choice,” to which she replies dutifully, “I see how hard you’re working” (“The Color Blue”). Betty is assuming the role of the supportive wife, and clearly Don often does not have values beyond the utility of the moment.

The supreme and absolute value in technological culture is efficiency. Efficiency as an end in itself. Means trump ends. An exclusively instrumental system of values does not ask what is it all for, what end or ultimate goal is being served. Without something that has intrinsic value (that is, something valuable in itself and not as a means to an end), there is no foundation to provide a lasting support for value judgments. As Joan says to Peggy, “If you are even thinking of passing judgment, you are in the wrong business” (“5G,” episode 105). This is the ethical mantra of exclusively technological consciousness.

Don’s responsibility is to create an advertising campaign that will sell cigarettes. To consider consequences is, in Don’s words, “perverse” (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”). The concern for final ends and foundations is ignored, provided that a means is found to solve the problem at hand. Roger Sterling praises Don for his moment of inspiration. Peter Campbell says, “I was telling them how amazing you were. I am still tingling” (“Shoot,” episode 109). Neither middle nor upper management at Sterling Cooper ever considers the morality of their actions. Why should they? The universe is indifferent and you are part of the universe.

When Peter tells Bert Cooper that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman and accuses Draper of being a “fraud, a liar, and a criminal even,” Cooper replies, like someone speaking to the moral innocence of a child, “Who cares?” Cooper draws attention back to the immediacy of the moment, telling Campbell, “A man is whatever room he is in,” adding “At this moment, Donald Draper is in this room” (“Nixon vs. Kennedy,” episode 112). So Donald Draper is no other than Donald Draper at this point in time and space. He may have been Dick Whitman in the past, and he may become someone else in the future, but he is Donald Draper here and now. Appearance is reality. Saying so makes it so. There are no meanings other than the ones we construct. This is the positive side of the claim “the universe is indifferent.” It gives us the freedom to create our own identities.

- George Teschner

freedom or community?

Don has chosen freedom, and continues to do so with abandon. This is why he objects so vehemently to signing a contract with Sterling Cooper, even after Conrad Hilton makes it a condition of further business dealings. If Don keeps his future open, he can always re-create himself again. Freedom from the past is Don's blessing as well as well as his curse.

One view is that our pasts and our identities including our cultures, traditions, religion and relationships are what make our choices significant and meaningful to us. They give us the measuring stick to determine the value of each particular choice we make. They determine whether our accomplishments are genuine or not. Without this connection to the past, Don is on his path toward nihilism. Successful in our eyes, but without his own internal measuring stick, Don doesn't know whether his life is valuable or not. In a crucial point in Don't story, when he chooses not to travel with the wealthy, cosmopolitan "nomads" he meets in California and instead he returns to his first wife, Anna, he is reestablishing himself through his past. Don doesn't want more freedom. He wants integration, meaning. He needs the validation that only his past can give him. Only by bringing his past and present together into some new whole can Don begin to approach happiness.

The central question here is: are we going through life, creating values as we choose and act, making meaning for ourselves, or are our values primarily as a product of a history, background, culture, and community?

meaning of life: balance between work, play, love

In the absence of the threat of absurdity and nihilism, issues regarding the meaning of life arise when the three realms of love, work, and play conflict. For example, couples with young children often experience severe conflicts between love and work, when the intense needs of children compete for time and energy with the demands of career development. Young adults need to figure out how to render compatible the delights of playful pastimes such as sports and music with the imperative to get a job and support themselves. One of the few advantages of growing older is that the reduction of family responsibilities and the satisfaction or diminishing of career goals can make conflicts between the realms of love, work, and play much more manageable.

- Paul Thagard

a lot of philosophy is a waste of time

The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them to scientific findings, is called naturalism. Many philosophers since Plato have scorned naturalism, arguing that science cannot provide answers to the deepest philosophical questions, especially ones that concern not just how the world is but how it ought to be. They think that philosophy should reach conclusions that are true a priori, which means that they are prior to sensory experiences and can be gained by reason alone. Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to find any undisputed a priori truths. The absence of generally accepted a priori principles shows that the distinguished Platonic philosophical tradition of looking for them has failed. Wisdom must be sought more modestly.

Sometimes, however, philosophy gets too modest. The highly influential Austrian/British philosopher Wittgenstein asserted that philosophy is unlike science in that all it should aim for is conceptual clarification. In his early writings, he looked to formal logic to provide the appropriate tools, and in his later work he emphasized attention to ordinary language. He claimed that philosophy "leaves everything as it is." Much of twentieth-century philosophy in English devoted itself to the modest goal of merely clarifying existing concepts. But no one has learned much from analyzing the logic or the ordinary use of the words "wise" and "wisdom." We need a theory of wisdom that can tell us what is important and why it is important. Such theorizing requires introducing new concepts and rejecting or modifying old ones.

- Paul Thagard

what is reality?

Skepticism is the view that we have no knowledge at all, so that any talk of the nature of reality is pointless. Some ancient Greek philosophers advocated an extreme form of skepticism according to which neither sensation nor opinion could give us any grounds for separating truth from falsehood. An influential current form of skepticism is found in postmodernist philosophers and literary theorists who view the world as a text open to many kinds of interpretations, none of them demonstrably better than the others. In fields such as history, anthropology, and cultural studies, it has become fashionable to claim that reality is just a social construction, so that the idea of objective knowledge is only a myth.

Empiricism tries to avoid skeptical problems by restricting knowledge to what can be perceived by the senses. From early modern philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume to later thinkers such as Rudolf Carnap and Bas van Fraassen, the restriction of knowledge to sense experience has had strong appeal. I will show, however, that strict empiricism is incompatible both with the neuropsychology of perception and with the practice of science. Our brain processes are, fortunately, capable of reliably taking us well beyond what is presented to us by our senses.

Another approach to understanding knowledge of reality is idealism, which views reality as dependent on or even constituted by minds. This view is more compatible than is empiricism with the constructive nature of perception and inference, but grossly overestimates the contributions that minds make to the world. It leaps from the insight that there is no knowledge of things without construction of mental representations of them to the conclusion that entities are mental constructions. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that he had accomplished a kind of Copernican revolution by placing mind at the center of knowledge and reality. But idealism is actually attempting a kind of Ptolemaic counterrevolution, as implausible as reactionary attempts to return the earth to the center of the solar system or to deny human evolution.

There is an old baseball story about three umpires calling balls and strikes. One says, "I call them as I see them." The second says, "I call them as they are." The third insists, "They ain't nothing until I call them." These attitudes correspond to the philosophical positions of empiricism, realism, and idealism. For neuroscience to support realism about objects, I need to show that the structures and processes used by the brain enable it to represent things in the world as they are, at least approximately.

How do I know this reality exists?

First, I do not have to rely exclusively on a single sense. I see the color and shape of the loaf of bread, but I can cross-check the shape using my sense of touch, confirming that it feels the same way that it looks. I can also use hearing to investigate the bread by banging the loaf against a pot and hearing the ding. Further, the bread produces pleasurable stimulation of my senses of taste and smell. The brain has different sensory systems but can combine them to form unified perceptions. In contrast to hallucinations and dreams, which are hard to control, systematic experiments are possible: I can generate integrated and coherent sensations of the bread for example, by simultaneously looking at it, scratching it, and eating it. Because I can make the bread cause these experiences, and because there is no evidence to support alternative hypotheses (e.g., I am hallucinating or dreaming), it is reasonable to conclude that the bread exists. Its reality is the best explanation of my diverse experience of it.

Second, evidence for the reality of objects does not have to rely only on my own specific sensory experiences of them, as I can also often rely on the testimony of others. Any doubts I have about the bread’s causing my experiences can be reduced if I share it with other people, who will generally report similar experiences. You may not like this whole-grain bread as much as I do, but I would be very surprised if your reports of its color, shape, texture, smell, and taste turned out to he much different from mine. We can make a party of it and have a bread tasting in which we all compare our sensory experiences. I predict that reports of the sight, feel, taste, smell, and sound of the bread will be remarkably convergent. The best explanation of this convergence across the sensory experiences of multiple people is that there really is a loaf of bread that is causing all of our brains to generate similar experiences. The reports of similar experiences by me and other people all result from a combination of physical mechanisms by which the bread affects our senses and neural mechanisms by which our brains interpret sensory inputs.

But should we rely on the testimony of other people as part of our inference to the best explanation of sensory reports? After all, they might be lying or joking, rather than actually reporting their experience of the bread. Once again, our assessment of the truth of what people say to us is a matter of inference to the best explanation. You are justified in believing that someone is telling the truth if that is the best available explanation of all the available evidence. People are usually motivated to describe things as they think they are, so you are justified in taking what they say as relevant evidence, as long as there isn’t evidence supporting alternative hypothesis such as deception or hallucination. Testimony justified by inference to the best explanation allows me to reasonably believe many things observed by others. I have never been to Mount Everest myself but do not doubt its existence, because the observational reports of many others are better explained by the hypothesis that the mountain exists than by alternative hypotheses such as mass deception.

But how do we know that the experiences reported by other people are at all the same as ours? Maybe when you say you are experiencing brown, chewy bread, you are really having the same experience I have when I experience white, soggy bread. There are two reasons for doubting that there is sufficient variability in experience to undermine the usefulness of testimony First, the general pattern of experiences that people usually report has a great deal of overall coherence with my pattern of experience, which makes it implausible that we differ in just one kind of experience such as brown or chewy. Second, there is much evidence from anatomy and brainscanning experiments to suggest that people’s brains are very similar for sensory processing. Hence there is good reason to take the testimonial reports of other people at face value, in the absence of evidence that they are lying or demented.

In addition to multisensory coherence and the testimony of other people, there is a third reason for inferring that our perceptions of objects are approximately true: we can often corroborate them with measurements taken by instruments. People don’t usually subject a loaf of bread to instrumental inspection, but a physicist could use calipers to measure its height and width, a spectrometer to measure the color reflectance of the loaf, an artificial odor detector to measure molecules near the loaf, and so on. Such measurements carried out by people or possibly even by robots provide further evidence best explained by the supposition that the loaf of bread exists. Similar arguments support inference to the existence of many other kinds of objects, from lions to mountains. Contrary to empiricism, scientific knowledge does not come just from our senses, but goes beyond them via a multitude of reliable instruments from telescopes and microscopes to Geiger counters (used to measure radiation) and particle colliders (used to detect the behavior of subatomic particles). The efficacy of scientific instruments is incompatible with idealism, because their measurements do not depend on mental activity, but it fits well with constructive realism.

You might think that even if pieces of bread are real, their properties (color, taste, smell, and texture) are not, because these are so heavily dependent on our minds. Many philosophers have thought that nothing in the external world corresponds to people’s experiences of colors, eliminating them as real. Their arguments rely on the fact that there is no simple mapping between the space of colors that people experience and the properties of objects that affect how they reflect light of different wavelengths. Paul Churchland has found, however, a way of construing the physical properties of objects that reveals a correspondence between their reflectance efficiencies and people’s experiences of colors like red, green, and blue. He describes how the human visual system successfully tracks approximations of the reflectance profiles of objects at a low level of resolution, so that colors can be viewed as objectively real properties of objects even if color vision is highly context sensitive.

The correspondence between reflection properties and color experience makes sense given current theories of how the brain processes color information, from stimulation of cells in the retina that code for specific wavelengths of light to interpretations generated in the visual cortex. I like the conclusion that colors are real properties of objects, and it does seem to fit with the best available understanding of how the brain interacts with objects. But realism about objects could be true even if realism about colors is not, as long as we have good reason to believe that objects and at least some of their properties exist independently of mental representations of them.

I have tried to show in this section that the best explanation of the convergence of experiences from the multiple senses of many people and instruments is that there really are physical objects that cause these experiences. Moreover, the observable properties of these objects are much as we perceive them to be. Of course, they have other nonobservable properties, such as their atomic structure, that we can learn about only from scientific theorizing.
In sum, attention to how the brain functions in perception supports constructive realism over empiricism and idealism. The constructive nature of perception with both top-down and bottom-up processing shows the implausibility of a narrow empiricism that ties knowledge too closely to sensory input. On the other hand, the robustness of sensory inputs of different kinds counts by inference to the best explanation against the idealist view that the existence of objects is mind dependent. Our perceptual knowledge is both constructed and about real things. Such constructive realism is also the best approach to theoretical knowledge that uses concepts and hypotheses to go well beyond perception.

- Paul Thagard